Peace Before Justice: An Israeli Case Against Maximalism

Adam Penkin, an international Jew who made his home in Israel, argues that the Israel-Palestinian conflict isn’t really a contest between Arabs and Jews. The deeper divide, he writes, separates people who put justice first from those who put peace first. And he says the instinct to demand justice before anything else is exactly what keeps both sides locked in place.

Two Claims, Two Histories

Penkin lays out the competing narratives without flattening either. On the Arab side, he says, the claim draws on the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, the designation of the land as Waqf, or eternally Islamic, and a history of Arab residency and integration with populations that came before. Many Arabs, he writes, see their struggle as opposition to Western colonialism and believe the British promised them the land. After losing control over most of the land in 1948, he says, Arabs regarded the Waqf land as Dar al-Harb, the abode of war or infidelity, and Islamic law calls for its return to an Islamic state.

The Jewish narrative rests on the Torah’s account of God’s promise of the land and a continuous Jewish presence that predates Islam and the Arab conquests. Penkin cites the Merneptah Stele in Egypt, which he says mentions Israel as a distinct people as early as the 13th century BCE, and the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE. Jews, he writes, regard Israel as holy and view Islamic imperialism as a force that subjugates minorities. He lists Copts, Druze, Kurds and Berbers as examples of minorities who live under oppression or low-intensity conflict where Islam reigns. Israel, in his telling, is the region’s only successful de-colonial project, and Zionism is a de-colonial land-back movement.

Both sides claim indigeneity. Both see the other as the oppressor. Both consider their cause just. The same events yield opposite conclusions. Penkin notes that Islamic Jerusalem and Jewish Jerusalem aren’t separate places: the Dome of the Rock stands atop the Temple Mount.

Who Refuses to Share

Penkin names the groups that claim all the land. On one side, he points to Israel’s settler movement and what he calls the current far-right, anti-peace government. On the other, he cites Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, whose commitment to destroy Israel he describes, and says they supported and engaged in the October 7th invasion.

He describes the peace camp as standing against both. It opposes Netanyahu’s government, which he says sends young soldiers to their deaths. It also opposes Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which he says recruit children and pay stipends to fund attacks against Jews as preliminary steps toward a second Holocaust.

The demand for justice, he argues, can keep both sides opposed to compromise, quiet and peace, because compromise leaves nobody with everything they want. He links that mindset to debates over reparations and which side deserves victory, and says it joins figures as different as Yigal Amir and Yahya Sinwar in believing there can be “no peace without justice.”

A Practical Alternative

Penkin’s answer is what he calls “mutually acceptable reasons,” an appeal to what both populations share: a desire to live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. He borrows the term “public reason,” defined as “a moral ideal requiring that political decisions be reasonably justifiable or acceptable from each individual’s viewpoint.” The approach recognizes different narratives without demanding they reconcile, and respects the desire to live without violence. He stresses that it isn’t a call to divide people further or turn peace advocates against those seeking what they regard as justice.

He argues that chasing justice through more violence is unlikely to end satisfactorily. Peace comes first, he says, in a practical rather than hierarchical sense. If Arabs had accepted partition in 1948 while rejecting its moral validity, he writes, the dispute could have run for 70 years through debate at the United Nations rather than bloodshed. Outside perspectives and discussion could build toward broader fairness, though he concedes a view from nowhere may not be possible.

His closing point is blunt. Some see an Arab state carved from the Jewish homeland as an affront to God; others see Jewish sovereignty over an Islamic Waqf as an abomination. Most people, he argues, would rather live disappointed than die chasing a maximalist ideal. The real divide, he concludes, is ideology versus pragmatism, maximalism versus sharing, justice versus peace.

The piece is a personal essay. Penkin, who studied philosophy at Cambridge, says the views are his own, and the biography quotes Amos Oz on essays written by someone living through events rather than by a scholar or expert.

Why This Matters: The essay lands in a conflict where one side’s maximalism has been written into charters and acted on with violence, and where that violence has repeatedly followed offers of compromise. Penkin’s argument that partition accepted in 1948 could have spared decades of bloodshed sits uneasily beside leaders who still pay stipends to attackers. From a security standpoint, a framework built on shared safety rather than competing moral verdicts is at least testable. Whether Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, as Penkin describes them, would sign on to it is the open question, and nobody serious on Israel’s side can wave that away.