Two interesting articles in Monday’s HaAretz. This one is headed Rightists target mainstream to fight concessions at Annapolis, and tells us the following:
- On the eve of the Annapolis peace summit, right-wing activists are being forced to contend with defeatism as well as internal disputes in their efforts to block territorial concessions to the Palestinians.
The first hurdle in the paths of organizations like the New Yesha Council and One Jerusalem is the disillusionment in right-wing circles in the wake of the disengagement. Having failed to prevent the pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005, right-wing activists and supporters are apparently less willing to come out and protest – as demonstrated in internal polls commissioned by right-wing parties…
There is a lot more interesting material in there, too, including some consideration of what looks like a generational clash within the settler movement. Older leaders are more reported as focused on trying to keep/win the “hearts and minds” of the non-settlers who make up the vast majority of Israel’s population, while the younger settlers have maintained an active posture of battling with the police in various spots throughout the occupied West Bank. (This has been woefully under-reported in the US MSM.)
I guess I had been wondering in my own mind what effect the heavily “dramatized” events of the summer of 2005– when thousands of settler activists from the West Bank rushed to the Gaza settlements and staged some very determined– and yes, nonviolent– mass actions to try to “resist” being evicted from those settlements as per Sharon’s plan of that year. (You can read some of the contemporary discussion of those events on JWN from mid-August 2005, here— also, in many other posts in August and July 2005.)
You could also say that part of Sharon’s plan then had been precisely to see and then broadly publicize those emotional scenes, as he had done earlier with the 1982 evacuation of the settlements in northern Sinai, as a way of “showing” to the world how difficult or perhaps impossible a later evacuation of the West Bank settlements would be…
But how very interesting if the lesson some of the settler leaders took from that whole episode was that even with all the efforts they undertook in 2005, they still failed to sway Israel’s non-settler public opinion in their favor.
(I would note, too, that though it is evidently significant that during the Gaza events, the settlers were overwhelmingly nonviolent, that still does not in itself make their cause just. They were, after all, trying to hang onto settlements that were illegal under international law, all along.)
And the second HaAretz piece I found really interesting was this little article, headlined Study: Israelis’ confidence in IDF, security services at 7-year low.
So I guess public-opinion researchers from two Israeli universities, who have used a measure of their compatriots’ confidence in some public institutions since 2001, have found that the IDF in general got 3.27 points out of a possible 5.00 in this year’s survey, down from 3.56 in 2001. The Mossad and Shin Bet (foreign and domestic security services) meanwhile had a combined score of 3.53 this year, down from 3.81 in 2003.
I am still not sure whether these kinds of findings are generally good the broader cause of peace, or not. I would certainly hope that– especially after the events of summer 2006 demonstrated quite clearly that no amount of technical military superiority can on its own enable Israel to win significant strategic gains against a determined and smart opponent— the fact that Israelis currently have a lowered confidence in their military and security services would incline them more towards finding a negotiated peace with all their neighbors.
However, it is also possible that an embattled Israeli military and political leadership– which both of them are at this point, politically, at home– might seek to “break out of” their sense of being besieged by launching yet another doomed but extremely harmful military adventure.
However, the momentum, for now, is in the direction of peacemaking. That is excellent! Let it be for real! And let Israel’s 7 million people now– finally– increase their understanding that finding a sustainable, respectful peace with all their neighbors is a far, far better way to assure their security than all their 60 years’-worth of reliance on brute force, militarization, nuclear weapons, oppression, and intimidation.