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WHAT ON EARTH HAS HAPPENED TO THE ISRAELI PEACE MOVEMENT?  
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Eric Alterman
May 22, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Some groups are trying to draw attention to the carnage in Gaza.
But after October 7, most Israelis don’t want to be bothered. It is
difficult if not delusional to speak anymore of a peace camp on the
Israeli left. _

Israeli Peace Now movement, founded 1978.,

 

It’s not hard to find Israelis opposed to the manner in which Bibi
Netanyahu’s government is conducting its war in Gaza. Tens of
thousands of people march against it every Saturday evening in Tel
Aviv and elsewhere in the country. Families of people believed to be
held hostage by Hamas protest outside Netanyahu’s Jerusalem
residence and even his vacation home in Cesaria. Members of his
coalition and war Cabinet are threatening to leave the government over
his stiff-necked refusal to even consider a postwar plan for Gaza
(thereby leaving open not only the likelihood of endless war but also
a new Israeli occupation of Gaza). Other opponents call attention to
Israel’s diplomatic isolation, the price the country is paying
economically, and the mass displacement of citizens from towns and
villages on both its southern and northern borders.

What barely rises above a whisper, however, is the issue that is
causing so much anger and anguish in most of the world, in the United
States, on college campuses, and among wide swathes of American Jews:
the horrific humanitarian costs of the manner in which Israel has
chosen to wage this war and the innocent lives that are being
destroyed as a result; the very reasons that the International
Criminal Court just went ahead with its warrants for the arrest of
Benjamin Netanyahu
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together with the leaders of Hamas, for war crimes and crimes against
humanity in the conduct of the current war.

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed and 80,000 wounded in
response to the terrorist attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis and
resulted in the kidnapping of perhaps 120 more. It’s not just the
numbers, though these are maddeningly high. It’s no exaggeration to
say that virtually every day, we read of some new horrific story of
hundreds of innocents killed in carelessly targeted bombing raids,
shot on the basis of faulty intelligence, of families forced to
evacuate one no-man’s land to another, lacking not only food but
medicine and potable water. These supplies, donated from the United
States and Europe, are routinely refused passage by the Israel Defense
Forces at checkpoints. And when they are not, more than a few blind
eyes are turned as Israeli right-wing thugs
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them with apparent impunity.

In search of explanations for this apparent silence, I contacted a
number of friends and colleagues in Israel whom I knew to have devoted
much of their lives to the cause of peace with the Palestinians to ask
about the apparent disappearance of the peace movement just when its
influence is most intensely needed.

After all, once upon a time there was a strong and vibrant Israeli
peace movement; one strong enough to help elect prime ministers and
Knesset majorities. True, it has spent most of its time in opposition
since Likud started winning elections in 1977, but it still got things
done. In 1982, a massive protest of 400,000 people in Tel Aviv, some
one in 10 Jewish Israelis at the time, flooded into a protest meeting
following the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, which led to a
commission of inquiry, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s resignation,
and the massive growth of the soldier-led Peace Now movement. Decades
later, the Four Mothers movement helped sway public opinion in support
of a unilateral military withdrawal from southern Lebanon: a remnant
of that same, disastrous Israeli invasion.

But that was a different Israel. As the Israeli American pollster and
political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin explains it, the number of Israeli
Jews who defined themselves as members of the left fell by 50 percent,
from 30 percent to just 15 percent in the early 2000s, the other half
immediately shifting to the self-defined center, as the right wing’s
popularity began to climb, reaching 60 percent of Jewish Israelis by
2019.

There are multiple factors contributing to this transformation. As
Scheindlin sees it, “Some of this shift can be explained by
demographics, mainly the growth of the religious Jewish population,
who are characterized by stalwart right-wing attitudes toward the
conflict. But historical events were just as crucial in reshaping
Israeli views, specifically, the violence during the Oslo peace
process in the 1990s and during the second Intifada in the early
2000s, followed by a series of escalations with Hamas in Gaza in the
next decade and the fact that the peace process had vanished. By the
next decade, Netanyahu’s long rule via ultranationalist right-wing
governments had moved society decisively to the right, and most young
people had no memory even of the hope for peace.”

Meanwhile the Israeli left that proved so important to Yitzhak
Rabin’s willingness to embrace the Oslo process (and far more
reluctantly, the hated leader of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, Yassir Arafat), dwindled to close to just 10 percent of
Israelis. The so-called “separation wall,” the West Bank barrier
built by Israel in the early 2000s, put an end to the terrorist threat
from the West Bank and took everyday Israelis’ minds off the fact
that an occupation existed at all. Most saw no need to concern
themselves with the lives of the people who wanted to take their land
away from them and were not altogether opposed to treatment that the
increasingly lawless settlers and the IDF meted out to them. In the
five consecutive elections conducted over just four years ending in
2022, it was almost impossible to get a mainstream candidate to
mention the Palestinians at all. The only two parties to address even
a completely hypothetical two-state solution to the conflict did not
call for any specific concessions on the part of Israel, and one of
them, Meretz, did not even reach the 3.5 percent threshold needed to
gain a single seat in the Knesset.

So it was a decidedly dispirited and divided remnant of the peace camp
that found itself responding to what has accurately been called the
worst attack on Jews anywhere since the Holocaust. All of my
correspondents pointed to a similar set of circumstances that explain
their fellow citizens’ refusal to question the manner in which their
army is fighting this war, regardless of the price it exacts from the
Palestinian citizens of Gaza, together with their relative silence in
the face of the campaign of violence currently underway on the West
Bank, carried out by increasingly radicalized settlers
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supported, oftentimes, by both the government and the IDF.

Today, as Yoav Frommer, who teaches politics and history at Tel Aviv
University, accurately notes, “it is difficult if not delusional to
speak anymore of a peace camp on the Israeli left. Yes, there is a
very small minority of Jews and Arabs who, admirably one should say,
remain committed to this painfully anachronistic ideal, but in all
practical terms that ship has sailed years ago, with any remaining
lifeboats from it sinking on October 7.”

Yael Sternhell, also a historian at Tel Aviv and board member of the
New Israel Fund, an organization that promotes and advances liberal
democracy in Israel, notes—like everyone with whom I wrote or
spoke—that “the mainstream Israeli media, with the exception _of
Haaretz,_ is hiding the truth from the public. It’s bad for
ratings, and it’s an opening for a fight with right-wing
politicians. Israeli Jews who consume only mainstream media simply
have no idea what’s happening down there.” No less important was
the factor that she—and again, everyone with whom I wrote or
spoke—described as the Israelis’ “deep-seated hatred and
suspicion of Palestinians, [which] has been greatly exacerbated by
October 7. Many are simply incapable of making the distinction between
Hamas and ordinary Palestinians. All are considered either terrorists
or potential terrorists. Other Israelis are oblivious. They don’t
support starvation or the denial of humanitarian aid, but they also
don’t care enough to do anything about it, and the fact that the
Israeli media intentionally avoids showing images of human suffering
in Gaza enables their callous avoidance of reality.”

Hillel Schenker, who co-edits the excellent Palestine-Israel Journal
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Ziad AbuZayyad, also notes a specific focus among Israelis on “the
hostages, the young soldiers who are dying almost daily, and the over
150,000 people from the kibbutzim and villages near the Gaza Strip and
near the Lebanese border who are displaced from their homes. The
average Israeli doesn’t see, the mainstream electronic media
doesn’t show it, or doesn’t want to see, the humanitarian
catastrophe that is happening in Gaza.”

Haggai Matar, executive director at the left-wing _+972
Mag__azine,_ adds that “there are some protests taking place with a
focus on what Israel is doing to Gazans, but these get no more than a
few hundred participants each, a couple of thousand at the very
best.” Owing to October 7, “Israelis feel afraid, their sense of
security shattered, seeing not only what Hamas did, but how poor the
army’s response was. Considering statements by some in Hamas saying
that this was just the first round, and we will be seeing more like
it, people see Hamas as an existential threat and buy into the
narrative that it can and should be utterly destroyed if we are to
live in peace one day.” The result, Mattar observes, is that “even
people who still support a two-state solution on the Zionist left”
have proven willing to see the army “starve Gazans to death if
that’s what it takes to win the war.” These Israelis, in
Frommer’s estimation, see the war as “as an existential struggle
for survival.”

All of my correspondents wanted to make sure I understood that there
are those among Jewish (and Palestinian) Israelis who have not given
up on the values that inspired them in the first place, even if news
of their efforts does not usually reach the wider world (again, except
people who read _Haaretz_). This past Memorial Day, for
instance, Combatants for Peace [[link removed]], an
organization of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants and
the Parents Circle-Families Forum,
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group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families who work together
for reconciliation, organized a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial
service
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It had to be recorded in advance and held online because the
government would not allow any Palestinians to attend.

Standing Together
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its website describes as a movement dedicated to “mobilizing Jewish
and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and
social and climate justice
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claims 5,000 dues-paying members. Sternhell tells me the group “has
embarked on a massive campaign on choosing life.” They are also in
the process of organizing a group of Jewish Israelis to try to protect
food and medicine shipments to Gaza from settler/terrorists who have
been attacking them of late and dumping the food and
medicine—something one would have expected the IDF to be doing.
Other organizations Sternhell notes are also working in this space
include Zazim, a community action organization comprised of “Jewish
and Arab Israelis working together for democracy and equality,”
which is sending food trucks to the border. The New Israel Fund has
also raised money for José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen. And
then Breaking the Silence and B’Teselem are doing the work of
documenting and exposing human rights offenses by Israeli soldiers.

One cannot but admire both the bravery and tenacity of these people,
whom so many Israelis treat as traitors, somehow sympathetic to Hamas.
Some have been physically beaten by both police and West Bank
settler/terrorists. They show up at demonstrations to bring the
hostages home, to resist Netanyahu’s judicial coup, and to call for
new elections—positions endorsed by a majority of Israelis—but are
generally ignored at best by those who in the past would have been
allies. But will they make a difference? Will their voices even echo
beyond their still small numbers at their meetings and demonstrations?

According to Hillel Schenker, the overarching problem is that “we
have two highly traumatized societies, both the Israelis and the
Palestinians, each immersed in their own pain, with little emotional
energy to have empathy for the other side.” He signs off by quoting
the Israeli standup comic and peace activist Noam Shuster Eliasi
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sea/We all need therapy.”

 
_[ERIC ALTERMAN is a CUNY distinguished professor of English at
Brooklyn College and the author of We Are Not One: A History of
America’s Fight Over Israel
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* Israel
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* Israeli peace movement
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* Israeli left
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* Israeli politics
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* zionism
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* West Bank
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* Occupied Territories
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* Jewish settlements
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Oct. 7
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* Hostages
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* Hamas
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* apartheid
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* Genocide
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* Standing Together
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