Just World News with Helena Cobban

… 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.)