In the 1970s, when much of the world was singing the John Lennon chant “all we are saying, is give peace a chance,” the reggae star Peter Tosh produced a song in response, with the refrain, “I don’t want no peace. I, man, need equal right and justice.”

Indeed, in the U.S. “No justice, no peace!” has been the unequivocal call of Black Americans for decades.

Who would dare tell them that first must come peace, and only then justice?

And yet the calls for a cease-fire in Gaza demand just that. An end to conflict without any resolution of the injustice behind it all, guaranteeing only that it will happen again.

Americans in particular look at the conflict as if through a straw — and that is the straw of exceptionalism. The struggle of Palestinians is national liberation struggle, which is why the Palestine Liberation organization was named as such. The PLO and its early left-wing parties were completely aligned with the liberation struggles that broke out everywhere after the World War II, including in Northern Ireland with the IRA.

But Americans and Israelis too, it seems, refuse to see that Israel is a strong nation state with an advanced military, an almost legendary national security apparatus, and don’t forget, nuclear weapons.

The state of Israel is not going anywhere, and to go on that its very existence is threatened by Hamas or anyone else is nonsense and, ultimately, a ruse to keep the world’s eyes fixed on it, and not the Palestinians, whose very survival in Gaza is now in doubt.

For careful students of the conflict, it has long been known in Israel and elsewhere that the single greatest impediment to a “two-state solution” is Israel itself. And the greatest danger peace threatens is not an end to Israel, but a civil war between Jews. That is the existential threat hanging over Israel after 75 years of experiments.

The settler movement, and its radical, mostly American Gush Emunin extremists, long ago made it clear they would kill other Jews if forced to abandon their settlements in the West Bank. They assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he got to close to a peace deal that would do just that. 

If anything threatens Israel’s existence, it is this danger of civil war between religious settlers and the more civil society associated with Tel Aviv. This has been true since the 1980s when the first right-wing government under Menachim Begin officially ended the socialist, secular, settler experiment of the early kibbutzim. It was he who opened the West Bank to settlers to establish “facts on the ground.”

Facts, as opposed to the ideas of justice and peace. And it was under Begin the first atrocities began with the slaughter at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.

Furthermore, the “russification” of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu for the last dozen years — increasing homophobia, racism, the threat of a theocracy replacing democracy as he hobnobs with antisemites like Victor Orban in Hungary — has left almost no space in Israel for a policy of peace with justice for Palestinians, let alone gay or secular Israelis.

Now Israel does not even have a policy for pacification as peace.

The careful destruction of Gaza through bombings and deliberate demolition is clearly meant to either make the land uninhabitable for a generation, or to, once again, leave Gazans with no life but to rebuild — and this time their entire civilization was destroyed.

And American Zionists and our government are equally obstacles to any peace with justice.

The notion that the slogan “from the river to the sea” is a direct threat of genocide to Israelis is another canard Americans love to jump on, mostly to muddy the waters against peace with justice. As a guerrilla group that began as a national liberation struggle, “from the river to the sea” is the slogan of all past liberation struggles.

The Irish Republican Army also had its version of from the river to the sea, and for about 300 years longer than the Palestinians or Hamas. But as we have seen repeatedly, once the shooting and bombings stop, the belligerents actually get down to deciding who gets what.

A cease-fire is the demand of those who no longer want to bear the weight of their own responsibility in the ongoing, endless violence in Palestine. A careful reading of op-eds from The New York Times to our own Gazette, in the early days of the war, showed a kind of exhaustion in the face of those terrifying images of gunmen flying into a rave.

They say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. Well, many Israeli supporters seemed to have felt mugged by those images as they dropped any previous notion of equanimity between the two sides and fell in with the early cry for vengeance.

Now they have fallen silent as the inevitable Israeli response goes wildly out of proportion and now teeters on the edge of ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide.

So, to be clear, Palestinians don’t want no peace, they want equal rights and justice.

And if you still say you also do, then there is only one way to go: Organize and bombard President Joe Biden with the demand that the U.S. join the European Union and the U.N. Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state existing in their pre-1967 borders.

That is the only option: The peace with justice train must finally leave the station, and if that means Israel must run to catch up, all the better. The only way to get peace with justice is to make Israel understand they are not the arbiters of that process. They are late arrivals and better hustle before that train leaves them behind.

Joe Gannon, teacher and novelist, lives in Easthampton.