The Decline of the Israeli Left

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

Kadima and Labor's organizational turbulence is but one element of a larger change in Israeli politics over recent years: the growth and consolidation of the right and the significant weakening of the older Zionist left. It remains to be seen whether even such an accomplished peacemaker as George Mitchell can pluck success out of this rancorous context. Building a strong constituency for peace within the U.S. political system will give him a good start. Several signs suggest this might be possible. President Obama is still popular; he, Mitchell, and Clinton command considerable respect nationwide. New pro-peace organizations have emerged within the U.S. Jewish community and have become increasingly effective. The war against Gaza last December may have been popular in Israel, but in the United States it provoked more and speedier criticism--even among Jewish Americans--than any previous Israeli war of choice.

But Obama and his team will need to move fast. Currently, there is not even any pretense of a peace process. Even Mahmoud Abbas, a most pliant man, has refused to resume the talks he broke off with Olmert at the beginning of the war in Gaza--until Israel promises to freeze settlement activity. Netanyahu, a lifelong supporter of the settlers' project, shows no sign of bowing to that demand.

The settlements continue to grow, even in the ever-combustible streets of downtown East Jerusalem. For this and related reasons, a small but growing number of peaceniks in Israel judge that it is already too late to win a two-state outcome. These people--political scientist and politician Meron Benvenisti, historian Ilan Pappé, and others, including numerous Palestinian Israelis--are now calling more forcefully than ever for a unitary, binational state in the area of Mandate Palestine that would be equally a home for all its citizens, Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking.

Will it come to that? It may. The collapse of Israel's once-powerful peace movement makes a workable two-state outcome much harder to achieve. That goal--which guarantees Israel's survival as a specifically Jewish state--might still, just, be within reach. But its attainment might ultimately owe more to Hamas's support for the project than to the legacy of Israel's pro-peace forces.

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

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