… is now up on the Boston Review website, here.
I found it a really tragic article to work on. I have admired the Israeli peace movement since its inception. I still think its finest hour was when it mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets of their cities in September 1982, to protest the role Defense Minister Sharon and the IDF had played in orchestrating the massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
From the late 1980s through 1993 I worked pretty closely with Naomi Chazan and other leaders in the movement, particularly in organizing and facilitating some of the early contacts with various Palestinians and Arab-state nationals in which these women and men started hammering out the details of what a viable two-state solution might look like and how it could be achieved.
Naomi is one of the smartest, most dedicated, as well as most fair-minded (un-chauvinistic) Jewish Israelis whom I have ever had the privilege of knowing.
The Jewish-Israeli peace movement still has many extremely inspiring and dedicated people in it. I have written about some of them here at JWN over the years. But the political and social weight of the movement within Israeli society has declined very steeply since 1982.
In the BR article I pinpoint the singular role that I think Ehud Barak played in deflating the movement– to be precise, with the fatwa he issued in December 2000, in which this man, who had been elected 18 months earlier on an explicitly pro-peace platform, ruled that he now judged that Israel had “no Palestinian partner for peace.”
But I also describe four long-term reasons for the movement’s decline:
- 1. The diminution or elimination, post-Oslo, of the “cost” argument for leaving the occupied territories;
2. The fact that so many Jewish Israelis have simply turned their backs on the Arab world over the past 10-15 years, and no longer partcularly seek or value good relations with it, seeing themselves as “westerners” or even quasi-Europeans, instead;
3. The appropriation of the “demographic” argument the peace movement often used to use, by the forces of Israel’s newly emergent ethnonationalist rightwing; and
4. The apparent effectiveness of the “Hamastan” argument inside Israeli society.
One factor I was not able to explore in the article– which got cut very heavily along the way– was the fact that over recent years a lot of pro-peace Israelis have actually moved away from the country. It’s not just Amos Oz and the late Amos Elon moving to Tuscany, or wherever. It’s the whole cohort of younger pro-peace Israelis who are now turning up in the US (and Europe), including many who now blog from here in “the west.”
I guess I can understand (and sympathize with) why they make this choice to emigrate from Israel. But their emigration does have the effect of leaving Israeli society even more heavily under the influence of the ethno-nats and the religio-nats than it would otherwise have been.
One thing the BR editors cut out of my piece was the observation I had made that though, at the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza last December, the (once proudly pro-peace) Meretz Party in Israel for a crucial few days gave its support to the war effort, the US branch of the Meretz publicly expressed its opposition to the war from the get-go.
(I think Meretz USA later tried to fudge the fact of that disagreement with the “mother party” in Israel.)
For me, this points to an interesting broader change in the dynamics between Jewish-Israeli society and Jewish-American society. Until very recently, the pro-peace movement in Israel was always a far broader and weightier presence in Jewish-Israeli society than the pro-peace movement in the US has been in Jewish-American society. A huge chunk of Jewish American society was– probably since the 1960s, if not earlier– what Phil Weiss and others have described as “PEP”, “progressive, except on Palestine.”
Throughout those long decades, you would frequently hear from Jewish Americans some version of this argument: “Though I might well have concerns about some aspects of the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, still, it’s the Israelis who are on the front-lines, and therefore we Jewish Americans can’t undercut them by expressing our concerns openly.”
… And meantime, in Israel, the pro-peace activists were frequently out on the streets protesting their government’s policy. They were founding organizations like Peace Now, B’tselem or Yesh Din, or the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions that threw great energy into documenting, publicizing, and organizing against Israeli abuses in the occupied territories. Those Israeli movements were (and still are) crucial voices of conscience; and for many long years they really made a difference.
Okay, perhaps not enough of a difference… But a difference, all the same.
And now? They are still a voice of conscience– a function that, as Quakers know, is never to be under-estimated. But they have nothing like the social and political weight in Israeli society that they once did.
But meantime, Jewish-American society is now more willing than ever before to adopt political positions that are in direct contradiction to those of the government of Israel; and important voices in Jewish-American society are more willing than ever before to criticize the Israeli government’s policies openly.
This is certainly true regarding the settlements issue; and I hope it proves true regarding other issues on the peacemaking agenda, too.
There is one further wrinkle in this new dynamic. Though Jewish-American critics of the actions of (this) government in Israel are a much larger force within Jewish-American society than they have been for many decades, the mainstream US media remains, in general, much less hospitable to views critical of Israeli government government policies than the mainstream Israeli media are.
However, the rise of the blogosphere has certainly “evened out the playing field” of the US political discourse on matters Israeli and Palestinian. So yes, while there are all kinds of staunchly pro-Netanyahu commentators out there in the US (and Israeli) blogosphere, there are also numerous strong voices– Jewish and non-Jewish– in the US blogosphere that are highly critical of Netanyahu and vocal in calling for a fair and durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
So anyway, do go and read my BR piece. I see you can comment on it there… But you can also comment on it here. Your choice!
(After a few days maybe I’ll see which discussion looks more interesting; and I might close the JWN one down at that point.)
Helena:
FYI.
http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/israeli-thought-police-declare-all-out-war-on-the-web/
The Essence of the Regime
This week President Barack Obama issued a public and unequivocal prohibition on any Israeli military attack on Iran.
This from Uri Avnery in parentheses during a burlesque of the Netanyahu regime.
I have to wonder if Uri Avnery hasn’t drunk the Obama Kool-Aid himself.
Or can someone point out to me Obama’s “public and unequivocal prohibition on any Israeli military attack on Iran”?
Speaking as a former peace activist (or at least fellow traveller), you’ve left out one crucial point in the demise of the movement: the fact that we felt that we had been euchred by Arafat and the PLO. Just as a reminder, over 500 Israelis were killed in the first years of the Intifada – the vast majority of them civilians, particularly the very young and the very old. Those two factors had more to do with the demise of the movement than did, I believe, those that you mentioned.
Just FYI, Amos Oz is still in Israel as are David Grossmand and A.B. Yehoshua and a whole lot of other peace advocates. We’re just not organized in a movement. (Once bitten; Twice shy.)
I have to wonder if Uri Avnery hasn’t drunk the Obama Kool-Aid himself.
Avnery has not only drunk “the Obama Kool-Aid” himself, he is completely “in” Obama, so to speak.
He doesn’t mention Obama too often nowadays, but if he mentions him, it is in most cases as a kind of Moral Authority, to whom everyone should listen. And this is the kind of stuff he wrote about Obama during the presidential campaign (this is from a piece from October 2008):
“Obama has a rare combination of traits, making him an almost perfect candidate. He is new. He is untouched by corruption. He is a great speaker, convincing in every word. He never makes a gaffe, not even under heavy pressure. His views are considered and balanced. He does not get excited. His private life seems without flaw. He radiates tranquility. He lives modestly. He showed personal and moral courage when he opposed the Iraq war from the first moment. (How many people in Israel opposed the first and second Lebanon Wars from the first day?) His message unites, it does not divide. He doesn’t revel in controversy. He has no “killer instinct”. He brought with him a message of hope, an altogether positive message, a message that allows him to find his way even into the hearts of his opponents.
And on top of everything else – and that must not be underestimated – he is good-looking.
Such people do not grow on trees. But such an almost impossible combination of characteristics is essential for a task that looks almost impossible. Mahatma Gandhi was like that. And perhaps Jesus. And Rabbi Hillel (“the Old”). And perhaps Henri IV, king of France. But in their day there was no TV. Such a thing can happen suddenly, without prior notice, and conquer a nation in one stroke.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1228046555.
Error in link to Avnery’s article. But this one works:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1228046555
JES, thanks for your informative contribution here.
Your analysis is admirable and deeply informative. One minor omission is the devastating impact on Labor and the Israeli left wrought by their center-right American political consultants led by Stanley Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg is one of the world’s most well-connected political consultants with partnerships with Phillip Gould in the UK and James Carville and several others in the US. Greenberg has driven many parties and candidates to the right in Europe, Latin America and the USA. Greenberg justifies his right-leaning advice with polls that routinely record support for policies that prove to be unpopular with the people who vote on election day. Greenberg has been advising the Israeli Labor Party during its period of deep decline — and he may still be in their employ as they crumble into a generic right-wing rump.
Talking of JES’s liberalism, this remark above is what I always thought of him:
Speaking as a former peace activist (or at least fellow traveller), you’ve left out one crucial point in the demise of the movement: the fact that we felt that we had been euchred by Arafat and the PLO.
I don’t understand Helena’s approval, other than that JES used to be a realist. Now, he admits openly that he is not.
He is a typical Zionist, and colonialist. As long as the Palestinians remain quiet and submissive, one can be a peace activist. If they rebel, however, it is justified to slap them down.
Not much of a peace activist, to my mind, not a single proposal of peace, which necessitates negotiation.
I remember in 2001 my son was sharing a house in London with a young Israeli chef. This young man had been an idealistic, peacenik Meretz suppporter. He left Israel because of the suicide bombings and took advantage of his dual French citzenship (his mother was French) to work in London. His trigger to leave was Sharon coming to power and he did not want to have to serve in another war.
He used to talk for hours about Israel with my son. He was now adamant there was no “peace” to be had with the Palestinians. He said things like “it turns out it was all about religion. The Muslims will never accept the jews having a state there”.
Within a couple of years he had returned to Israel and was last heard of running a bar in Jerusalem. I guess he served (quite willingly) in the Lebanon war of 2006 and in Gaza earlier this year.
To me, that’s the Israeli peace movement in microcosm. Palestinian religious extremeism/rejectionism gave the Left more than enough reason to believe their existence as citizens of their own state was at stake.
Just FYI, Amos Oz is still in Israel as are David Grossmand and A.B. Yehoshua and a whole lot of other peace advocates.
Peace advocates? Warmongers would be a better description, I think.
Here’s what Uri Avnery wrote about them (he may be naieve about Obama, but his criticism on Israeli politics and society is still as relevant as ever):
“And then something happened to them, the same thing that happened to them the last time. A war broke out, and Meretz supported it enthusiastically. Their three literary musketeers – Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman – went out of their way to call for the war and laud it, each one in his turn. Exactly as they had done in Lebanon War II.
True, after some days the three – together with Meretz and Peace Now – called for the end of the attack. That call was not accompanied by an apology for the preceding one. This showed a lot of Chutzpa. After helping in breaking the dam, they thought that they could stop the flow with their fingers. But after they had legitimized the war of atrocities, no one listened to them anymore. Every woman and child who was killed in that war, up to the very last day, should weigh on their conscience.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1234043355
And also of interest is the open letter by Gideon Levy to A.B. Yehoshua in Haaretz of Jan. 18 2009. From that letter:
“You, too, esteemed author, have fallen prey to the wretched wave that has inundated, stupefied, blinded and brainwashed us. You’re actually justifying the most brutal war Israel has ever fought and in so doing are complacent in the fraud that the “occupation of Gaza is over” and justifying mass killings by evoking the alibi that Hamas “deliberately mingles between its fighters and the civilian population.” You are judging a helpless people denied a government and army – which includes a fundamentalist movement using improper means to fight for a just cause, namely the end of the occupation – in the same way you judge a regional power, which considers itself humanitarian and democratic but which has shown itself to be a brutal and cruel conqueror. As an Israeli, I cannot admonish their leaders while our hands are covered in blood, nor do I want to judge Israel and the Palestinians the same way you have.”
continued here
Helena,
Excellent report, as usual, but this time it hits really close to home… I’m one of those pro-Peace Israelis that have left and are now blogging from the US. I left in August 2000, just a few weeks before the big explosion of the intifada. I felt this urgent need to leave, not because I was politically involved or anything like that, just a vague feeling that everything is fake and that the country is destined to be torn between two stupid peoples. My stay in the US have made me consider things from a perspective that I believe was impossible for me had I stayed in Israel, and this is I think key to the position of many lefty ex-Israelis.
I too feel that it’s too late to the two-state solution, but also the one-state solution will not be reached without bloody war. In the end, we’ll reach a confessional system similar to Lebanon. Non-religious Jews will be a rarity.
Menno, thanks so much for your helpful contributions.
Yossi, hi! I am so glad to see you here! Richard Silverstein did in fact direct me to your blog and I keep meaning to post something here about it. I loved the honesty and vividness of your reportage from your recent trip to Israel and Golan. Next time you go to Golan maybe we should go together and go hang out with some people in Majdal Shams as well as some of the Israeli settlements there.
Helena – I too have seen the long slow demise of the peace movement in Israel. I first went to Israel in 1956 for my bar mitzvah, courtesy of my Irgun grandfather. I lived there awhile in the 80’s and have been an annual or semi-annual visitor ever since. I remember the great controversy over giving up the Sinai for peace with Egypt. Begin was problably the only PM who could have pulled that off. I had relatives living in Yamit at the time, and the agony they felt was painful. It was almost like that was as much as Israel could bite off and the thought of further compromises for peace was impossible.
Relying on my memory, from 1978 on there was not any interest in peace with the Palestinians until the first infitada broke out in 1987. During that 9 year period I remember many peaceful protests by the Palestinians for some sort of autonomy or statehood -anything but the occupation. The people and media in Israel totally ignored the Palestinians and their demands.
After the flames of the first infitada were doused, the feeble beginnings of an Israeli peace movement started. I remember going to several meetings but the names have been lost to the dustbins of memory. The 1991 Madrid Conference and Olso really woke up the peace movement and their was great optomism. Frankly, the peace movement got sick with Rabin’s assasination and died in 1998 at Wye River. I can remember listening to talks by Sari Nusseibeh and some of his students right after Wye River was signed about Netanyahu and Sharon’s call to “take the hilltops, for whatever we don’t take now, will be theirs”. Ten of my relatives took their advice and became part of the hilltop youth.
The peace movement has been on a downhill slide ever since propelled along by the Infitada II, the rise of Hamas and Hezballah and the Gaza fiasco. It has long been my dream that once my business career was done to make aliyah and work for a permanent peace. I felt I could be more effective living in Israel than from the US. At TPM you can read about this agonizing decision where it became apparent to me, I was naive in believing I could make a difference in the Israel today.
Like Yossi, I fear the time for a two state solution is passing. G-d help us all in a future of continued occupation. I honestly believe Israel is losing it’s soul as a result of this conflict. When I go to shul with my niece in Kiryat Arba, it’s not a country or religion I any longer recognize.
I was never a member of any peace group. (I’m just not much of a joiner). But I too held out a lot of hope that the Oslo accord would bring about peace with a two-state solution. Like some of your other commenters, that hope died with the second intifada. I also don’t see that Israel has a partner for peace. The future isn’t going to be two-states or one-state, it’s going to be separation. Once the wall is complete Israel will withdraw. The Palestinians will just get more mired in poverty, while Israel stays a modern state.
And the problem will stay the same on sites like this. No one will recognize that the Palestinians had any role in this. It will always be that Israel didn’t do enough, no concession was big enough. They didn’t give enough support to Abbas. Their withdrawal from Gaza was unilateral.
About almost everything else on the planet I’m an optimist, but not where peace between Palestinians and Israel is concerned.
Let me see if I have this straight. It is the Palestinians’ fault that Israel has illegally confiscated and colonized land in the Occupied Territories, and instead of relinquishing the stolen property Israel continues its illegal confiscate and colonization of the land because the Palestinians won’t do the right thing.
Oh – and those of us who put the burden on the thief to return the stolen property and not on the victims of the theft are just plain wrong.
Oh yeah – and O.J. Simpson was the real victim in his relationship with Nicole, and the battered wife is really the one responsible for the fact that her husband beats her, and it’s the rape victim, not the rapist who bears responsibility for the rape – after all, did you see how she was dressed? – and the father would not keep beating the children if only they would not provoke him, and on and on and on and on.
SURE we want peace – as long as you let us have whatever we want.
Oh, and jdledell, pardon me for not sympathizing with the agony of your Yamit-dwelling relatives for being forced to give up their stolen property. They also ought to have been forced to pay fair market value to Egypt for the use of the property, not to mention that someone should have paid Egypt back for Israel’s illegal exploitation of Egypt’s oil resources.
And then there’s the Golan heights…
Helena,
Thanks for the compliment and I’d love to take you up on your offer!
I remember in 2001 my son was sharing a house in London with a young Israeli
bb,
You don’t need your son to go to London and learn what the story is.
The Israel state” Jewish state” started on religious believes and propaganda well before your son knew its Muslim problem.
the fact is they started on religious ground and Muslim as the Jew believes in their term of Holy land and their responsibility to govern that land.
So dont make the victimisation goes one way with your Son.
Jledell, with all due respect, I think that you’ve got several things wrong.
First, there was definitely an Israeli peace movement between 1978 and the start of the first Intifada in 1987. As Helena has pointed out, this movement reached a high point in 1982 with the Lebanon War, during which time over a quarter of a million Israelis rallied to stop the war and for Sharon and Begin to resign. (This was when the Peace Now movement was founded.)
This movement went back to the beginning of the occupation with the founding of Matzpen and, later, with the creation of Moked in 1973.
I also think that your memory is faulty on another matter, which is the “many peaceful protests by the Palestinians for some sort of autonomy or statehood” that you recall during the period 1978 through 1987. In fact, with the exception of Sari Nusseiba, I think that you would be hard pressed to name even a half a dozen Palestinians who openly advocate a two-state solution on terms that both sides can accept.
One more thought. There is one other point I should have noted in the demise of the Israeli peace movement: The correlation with the decline in the Kibbutz movement. I then tried to identify when it was that I first started questioning my belief that peace was possible, and I definitely think that it back in 2002 with the murder on Kibbutz Metzer of Revital, Noam and Matan Ohayon by Sirhan Sirhan. I found this article while searching the Internet.
Dear Helena
I hope that you are not using this article to support a 2 state solution. The only progressive solution to restore ALL of Palestine to the Palestinians and resettle Israelis elswhere in the world. Pls clarify
Tx
Right Phil. Perhaps you’d like all 5.5 million of us to come and resettle right next door to you?
Shirin and others,
I will repeat my comment “And the problem will stay the same on sites like this. No one will recognize that the Palestinians had any role in this. It will always be that Israel didn’t do enough, no concession was big enough. They didn’t give enough support to Abbas. Their withdrawal from Gaza was unilateral.”
Since when did “No one will recognize that the Palestinians had any role in this”, mean that only the Palestinians are to blame. In your response however you do state the opposite that it is all Israel’s fault. No acknowledgement what so ever that the unrestrianed violence of the second intifada could have any role in the Israeli attitude. The lack of condemation, the lack of an attempt to arrest bombers, the lawless take over of Gaza by Hamas. Nope, none of that had any influence.
Like I said, I’m generally an optimist, but not on an Israeli-Palestinain peace.
David,
So, do you also hold that a robbery victim has a responsibility for the robbery, the rape victim a responsibility for the rape, the abused child a responsibility for the abuse, the battered spouse a responsibility for the battery, the murder victim a responsibility for the murder?
Keep on holding the victim responsible for the crime if you like, David. I, for one, will not play that game.
Oh – and how about at least not repeating the nonsense about the “withdrawal” from Gaza, huh? I think even you know what bull**** that is.
PS David, it is not Israel that does not have a peace partner, it is the Palestinians. After all, it is not the Palestinians who occupy Israeli land, and it is not the Palestinians who have talked peace out of one side of their mouths while continuing without pause to exploit the natural resources of, confiscate, and colonize Israeli land. It is not the Palestinians who accompany talk of peace with escalation of resource exploitation and colonization activity. It is not the Palestinians who have put the Israeli people “on a diet”.
If Israel were sincerely interested in a peaceful resolution they would, at the very least, cease their all colonization activity, stop illegally exploiting the resources of occupied territory, and prepare to return the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sheb`a Farms to their rightful owners. On the contrary, they have consistently done the exact opposite.
Israel is not now and has never been serious about peace.
JES – I was living in Israel in 1982 and I am very much aware of the anti-war movement that was a result of the Lebanon invasion. What I was trying to point out is that there was not a similar outcry for peace with the Palestinians. That’s what my memory tells me – your mileage might vary.
Obviously Shirin and others who would share his opinion that the analogy to the Israelis and Palestinians is the rapist and rape victim and I are not going to find much common ground for discussion. And that’s to a great extent what this original post was about “What happened to the Israeli peace movement?” Israel is a modern country, it has a strong economy, it has museums, arts, an independent press and judiciary and a strong educational system whose universities rank among the best in the world. Palestinians have none of that. Several years ago Thomas Friedman of the NYT did a column where he looked for a speech by Arafat that outlined his vision for the educational system in any state of Palestine that might be created. Friedman couldn’t find any. In the Oslo accord Israel thought it was negocating for a modern state of Palestine alongside Israel. The barbarity during the take over by Hamas of Gaza scares Israelis. In one story I read, don’t know if it was really true, hope it wasn’t, they broke Fatah members out of jail to throw them off a roof top.
Keep your analogy of rapist to rape victim but Israel isn’t going to permit a state that thinks of itself as a rape victim just waiting to take revenge on the rapist.