People Want Peace

"People Want Peace" originated when Paul McCartney was playing a concert in Tel Aviv, Israel but he didn't want it to look like he was ignoring Palestine. So he made arrangements to show solidarity with the Palestinian people by visiting a music school there, meeting the students and listening to them playing music. The trip was successful and when McCartney returned to Israel he met some members of a political group called OneVoice. Macca and his band ended up wearing their badges during their Israeli show, so he felt his visit had become a peace mission. McCartney explained in a in a YouTube video that the young Israeli and Palestinian adults said: "All we want to do is live in peace, raise our families, get on with our lives." This tied in with a question that McCartney would ask his father when he was a kid: "We're seeing all these wars.... do people want peace or do they just like to fight?" And Macca's dad would reply quietly: "No, no, son. People want peace. It's the politicians and the leaders who get into wars." "That," he concluded, "had always struck him as a great phrase."

The song's message about people wanting peace, not war, has been visited by McCartney several times before, including his first true solo UK #1 "Pipes Of Peace."