The Decline of the Israeli Left

By Helena Cobban, Boston Review. Posted July 20, 2009.

Second, the value that Jewish Israelis place on being able to build good relations with their Palestinian neighbors and the rest of the Muslim world has greatly diminished. Recall that in the heady days of the (largely nonviolent) first intifada, 1989-93, and during the early years of the post-Oslo period, Israel and the occupied territories were awash in handsomely funded "getting to know you" projects. Israelis and Palestinians who had previously known each other only as enemies or--prior to 1989--in the context of extremely unequal employment relationships came to see their once-feared neighbors in a much more multi-layered way. Many Israeli participants in these projects, who for decades had felt cut off from and shunned by their neighbors in the Middle East, were hopeful that building good relations with the Palestinians would win them wider acceptance by, and integration into, the region in which they lived.

That excitement receded over time, especially in the wake of the suicide bombings that Hamas and other Palestinian rejectionist groups undertook against civilian Israelis in the mid-1990s. The outbreak of the much more violent second intifada in September 2000--and the Barak pronunciamento that followed hard on its heels--destroyed just about all the excitement that remained. Soon after Ariel Sharon took office in 2001, he announced his plan for a barrier that would simply "wall off" the whole Palestinian problem from the daily lives of Israelis.

Since then the wall's effectiveness has been subject to debate. Most Israelis judge it to be very successful, while a few point out that it is still incomplete and that by using homemade mortars or rockets, Palestinians in the West Bank--as in Gaza--could, if they chose, pop projectiles over the top of it into Israel. Indeed, for many years now Gaza has been far more completely walled off from Israel than the West Bank, so the existence of the wall cannot, on its own, account for the lack of attacks from the West Bank. While the wall has played some part in preventing attacks, the operations the IDF has continued to mount against hostile networks even deep inside the West Bank have also made a large contribution, as have the parallel actions of the U.S.-trained Ramallah security forces. Neither of those factors is present in Gaza. (Both have, however, deeply affected political attitudes among West Bankers. Palestinian pollsters report that support for Hamas has risen in the West Bank in recent months, and now unambiguously outpaces support for Fatah, once the clear political leader there.)

Despite those arguments, most Israelis deeply believe in the wall's efficacy, not least because it embodies the desire many of them have to simply turn their backs on their Palestinian neighbors--and on the whole of the Arab and Muslim world beyond.

One day in March, I had lunch with Yossi Alpher in a café in Herzliya, one of the string of opulent suburbs that spread north from Tel Aviv. The affable, U.S.-born Alpher is a former Mossad agent who 25 years ago turned into a moderate, realpolitik-motivated peacenik. For the past few years he has been co-editor of Bitter Lemons, a web-based forum for the exchange of ideas among Israelis and Palestinians. "After what happened at Camp David in 2000, the notion of a 'warm peace' doesn't have much incentive for Israelis," he said.

Look, Israelis have become much more focused on Europe and the U.S. in recent years. Large numbers of Israelis nowadays commute on a weekly basis to jobs or businesses in London or Copenhagen. Then, there are all those whose parents or grandparents came here earlier from Eastern Europe--from Poland or Romania or wherever. Now those countries have become part of the E.U., and their passports have become much more valuable. So anyone who can has been going back to re-register their citizenship rights in those countries and get their passports. Those are the kinds of foreign connections that Israelis now value. Why on earth should they bother with the Palestinians or that other troublesome entity known as the 'Arab world'?

Sitting with Alpher on the airy, bougainvillea-shaded terrace of Herzliya's Café Cazé, it was easier to imagine ourselves in one of the sun-washed cities of France's Côte d'Azur than in one of the stressed communities of the West Bank, less than ten miles away. Elsewhere, veteran peacenik Moshe Ma'oz told me dourly: "The majority of Israelis who favor a two-state solution do so because they hate Palestinians, not because they love them."

The third factor in the peace movement's demise was the reframing of its own demographic argument. In its simplest form, this argument advocates separate states because "one day soon" Palestinians will outnumber Jews in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. In fact, this may have happened already. For many Israeli peaceniks, the demographic argument lent urgency to their call for a peace agreement that would withdraw Israeli control from many heavily populated parts of the West Bank.

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Helena Cobban is a Friend in Washington for the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

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