The Decline of the Israeli Left

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

It is also important to note that Israeli opinion polls (like Palestinian polls) still show marked, though slowly declining, support for a two-state outcome. The problem is that the big political movements that once mobilized this support in national politics are all in various states of decline.

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How far has the peace movement fallen? One benchmark for comparison is the war that Sharon and former Prime Minister Menachem Begin launched against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. In September of that year, Lebanese Falangists, operating (as Ari Folman's brilliant film Waltz with Bashir reminds us) with extensive support from the Israeli military, undertook a two-day massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis--as much as 20 percent of the population at the time--took to the streets in outrage, forcing the government to establish the Kahan Commission, which recommended serious sanctions for Sharon.

By contrast, pollsters found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the recent war in Gaza. Veteran peace activist Daphna Golan, who teaches human rights law at Hebrew University, recalled the anguish and isolation she felt during the Gaza war, especially in the face of widespread pro-war activism among Hebrew University students. Golan said university authorities did not respond to her complaints about posters she described as "extremely racist" hung at the entrance of the Givat Ram campus.

Even the Meretz Party, launched successfully in 1992 on an explicitly pro-peace platform, supported the Gaza war in its early days--as did the writers David Grossman and Amos Oz, icons of the peace movement. By the fifth day of war, all agreed that Israel had "done enough" and should stop the assault. But their initial support legitimated the whole war in the eyes of admirers at home and abroad.

Chazan told me that Meretz's "lack of clarity" on the Gaza war was one of the proximate causes of its poor showing in the February polls. "But that's not the deep cause," she argued.

The deep cause is that the idea that there is 'no partner for peace' remains powerful here in Israel. And deep down, not many people here have been prepared to consider changing the kinds of flawed basic parameters on which the whole post-Oslo peace process has been built.

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Israel's once-impressive national peace movement may now lie in ruins, but a variety of smaller pro-peace initiatives grow like shoots of hope for the future. Some are perennials, like Uri Avnery's venerable "Gush Shalom" movement, which continues to publish weekly the clear-sighted political analyses of its 85-year-old founder, a former Knesset member and long before that an Irgun fighter.

Other Jewish Israelis--and Palestinian citizens of Israel--are making new efforts at nationwide pro-peace organizing, and many of them are approaching the task in ways that do not directly engage the ongoing "high politics" of war and peace. They work in the numerous excellent organizations devoted to human and/or civil rights, such as B'tselem and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. Nearly all these activists have a rich understanding of the link between the rights work they do on the ground and a broader peace agenda.

A relatively new organization called Zochrot ("Memory," in its feminine form) takes another approach, doing "Nakba education" among Jewish Israelis. The Nakba--"Catastrophe"--is what Palestinians call the events of the war that accompanied the founding of the State of Israel in 1948: the expulsion of more than 70 percent of its Palestinian residents; Israel's refusal to allow those refugees to return after the war, despite UN resolutions demanding it do so; and Israel's subsequent expropriation or destruction of property the refugees left behind. For Palestinians everywhere, the Nakba remains an essential reference point of shared peoplehood.

Israel's hard-line Jewish ethno-nationalists are profoundly troubled by any mention of the Nakba. At the end of May, Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would criminalize the holding of any public events to mark the annual commemoration of the Nakba. After the proposal received some backing from the government, Eitan Bronstein, the Israel-born executive director of Zochrot, argued that the proposal "reflects growing trepidation in Israel about the inevitable encounter with the Palestinian Nakba and the understanding that the Nakba is a foundational part of Israeli identity."

Most Jewish Israelis who can remember 1948 associate it primarily with the exultation they felt over the establishment of their state. Many find it hard to acknowledge publicly the great harm that development inflicted on others. Today, the majority of Israelis--who were born after 1948, or who immigrated to the country after that date--have little knowledge of, or interest in, what happened to the Palestinians that year. Bronstein is convinced that Israelis need to take responsibility for repairing as much of the harm as possible--including by embracing the Palestinian refugees' right of return. But first, he says, Jewish Israelis need to gain a much broader understanding of what happened to Palestinians that year.

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

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