President Donald Trump’s peace plan passed its first reading in the Israeli Knesset with no votes against, despite a boycott over the inclusion of language referencing Palestinian statehood.
Though the vote was 39 votes in favor and zero against, this represents just under one-third of support in the 120-seat Knesset. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boycotted the motion along with nearly all ruling coalition lawmakers, while the few who did attend did not vote. The vote on Trump’s 20-point peace plan was brought forward by the opposition, and its leader, Yair Lapid, celebrated its successful adoption.
“The Knesset overwhelmingly approved my proposal to endorse and adopt President Trump’s 20 point plan on Gaza with a vote of 39 in favor and 0 against,” Lapid said in a post on X, thanking Trump alongside a picture of him shaking hands with the president. “Israel now officially endorses and adopts President Trump’s plan.”
The opposition leader spoke on the Knesset floor, during which he took direct aim at Netanyahu.
“This is the first opportunity we have been given as a Knesset to tell President Trump, to tell the world, to tell ourselves, that we are uniting around a common goal. Netanyahu chose to boycott the vote and not come here. It’s a shame,” he said, adding that the prime minister’s absence left him “surprised and disappointed.”
Lapid was liberal in his thanking of Trump, positioning himself as an ally of the president in saying the vote gave the Knesset an opportunity to “show its gratitude to President Trump for this plan, and for what it has achieved: the return of the hostages, the end of the war, a return to life.”
With the successful vote, the bill will go to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, then head back to the floor for a second and third reading.
The ruling coalition’s boycott stems from the 19th point of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which reads: “While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”
The language is vague enough not to commit to Palestinian statehood outright, but it still sparked outrage from many within Israel’s right wing.
Netanyahu has vehemently opposed Palestinian statehood throughout his political career and continued to vow throughout the war that there would never be a Palestinian state.
The 20-point peace plan says that authority in Gaza will be handed over to a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” and a multinational peacekeeping force.
After withholding most major criticisms against Netanyahu and the ruling right-wing coalition government in a show of national unity over the war in Gaza, Lapid has opened the floodgates of criticism after news of the Gaza peace deal broke. Before the deal was even officiated, he penned a scathing piece against Netanyahu and the ruling government in Foreign Affairs on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks by Hamas.
In the essay, Lapid blamed the government for trashing Israel’s diplomatic position in the world, harming its relationship with the United States, failing to combat rising antisemitism, harming Israel’s democratic foundations, failing to respond to Hamas’s surprise attack properly, and more.
“The crisis is the result of an extremist and failed government, led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is implicated in criminal cases and has lost the support of the Israeli public,” Lapid wrote. “His years in power have corrupted him and those around him. This government is openly contemptuous of the principle of a democratic State of Israel committed to Western liberal values. In its place, it seeks to install a theocratic and illiberal regime, one that is exempt from media scrutiny and free of the nuisance of concepts such as the rule of law and the constant threat of free and fair elections.”
The Gaza ceasefire has held so far despite attacks from Israel and Hamas. Both sides have accused the other of repeated violations.
