Israeli Peace Movement Finds Goal No Longer Clear-Cut

Naama Rokem was still a preschooler when her leftist Israeli parents began taking her along to demonstrate against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

At 14, the dark-haired young girl started protesting on her own, standing each Friday on a Jerusalem street corner, holding signs that urged a succession of Israeli governments to make peace with the Palestinians.

These days, as Israelis and Palestinians confront one another with rocks and rubber bullets and the Middle East peace process teeters perilously close to collapse, Rokem, now 20 and still leftist, stays home.

“It seems futile to demonstrate,” says the young woman, a second-year student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “It’s not clear to me now that the [peace] agreements Israel signed were good. It’s very confusing.”

Less than a year after Israelis elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forge a new, more secure brand of peace with the Palestinians, political contacts between the two sides are all but severed. Violent clashes between Palestinians and Israelis have resumed, along with Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

But the Israeli peace movement, far from being inspired to dramatic action, has responded with relative silence to the crisis that many here see as the gravest threat to the progress made since Israel and the Palestinians chose to end their historic enmity four years ago.

“The peace camp is a sad story these days,” laments Uri Avnery, an Israeli writer and veteran activist. “It’s as if everyone has gone to sleep.”

The signs are numerous. Peace Now--the oldest, largest Israeli peace group, which once drew tens of thousands to rallies against Israel’s combat in Lebanon--could muster only about 200 people for each of two recent protests at the site of a controversial Israeli housing project in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem. The construction has caused the impasse in the talks.

A “Save the Peace” rally in Tel Aviv’s Yitzhak Rabin Square, timed to coincide with Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in early April, drew a crowd smaller than the 20,000 protesters predicted by organizers; the group was far smaller than required to fill the sprawling plaza. The mood was flat, almost tired.

Leaders of the group that organized the rally shy away even from calling themselves peace activists.

“We’re not a peace movement--we’re a social movement,” says Tal Silberstein, executive director of Dor Shalom, or Peace Generation. “We do not see peace as a target but as a means to a better life.”

According to activists and sympathizers on the Israeli left, there are many reasons for the movement’s muddled state, ranging from its complacency under the previous, Labor-led government to the confusion created by Netanyahu’s zigzag political path since he took office last June.

But faced with the new political realities, the peace movement has also failed to articulate a clear response, keeping natural sympathizers like Rokem at bay.

In September, many peace activists despaired when Netanyahu’s rightist government opened a new entrance to a tourist tunnel in Jerusalem, sparking Palestinian rioting that left at least 75 people dead. But in January, peace groups praised his decision to follow through on an agreement by the previous government to turn most of the West Bank city of Hebron over to Palestinian control.

“The view of Netanyahu has changed every few months,” said Mossi Raz, executive director of Peace Now. “I think it’s been hard for many people to tell whether he was making peace or not.”

Other factors have contributed, including a simmering competition between some of the more established peace groups and their newer rivals, like Dor Shalom.

But the main reason for the movement’s malaise, many said, is that at the heart of the current crisis in the negotiations with the Palestinians lies the issue of Jerusalem, an emotionally wrenching subject even for leftist Israelis.

“It’s very difficult to think about being for peace and then to think about Jerusalem and what a pro-peace position may mean,” Yaniv Michaeli, 26, a Hebrew University graduate student, said slowly. “You end up feeling very confused.”

Peace talks have been deadlocked since Israel broke ground March 18 for 6,000 Jewish homes on a forested hilltop known in Hebrew as Har Homa and in Arabic as Jabal Abu Ghneim.

The project would complete a circle of Jewish neighborhoods around the traditionally Arab side of the city, which Palestinians view as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Under the Oslo accords, which laid out the framework for the current negotiations, the most sensitive disputes between the Palestinians and Israelis--including Jerusalem, refugees and borders--were to be discussed in talks near the anticipated end of the process.

*

Palestinians say the housing development is an attempt to create “facts on the ground” that will preempt talks.

Israel, in turn, says that nothing in the interim agreements bars it from building within the boundaries of Jerusalem.

To complicate matters, the Labor government, which signed peace accords with the Palestinians in 1993 and 1995, initiated the plans for the housing project. But it never started any building, fearing that the move would disrupt the negotiations.

Thus, when the bulldozers began clearing ground, Labor leaders responded with a message that was anything but clear. In the end, most said they supported the project but criticized Netanyahu for starting construction at a time of deep distrust between Israel and the Palestinians.

The major peace groups, most of which are aligned with the left, have been unable to agree on a unified position. Peace Now opposes the project, but Dor Shalom has opted against taking a position at all.

“The timing was very bad, but we are not against the building itself,” said Silberstein, whose organization was founded in response to the 1995 assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The mixed messages have left many of the movement’s likely sympathizers, including Rokem and several friends, uncertain of how to proceed.

Seated around a table recently in an airy cafeteria at Hebrew University, the young women said they all felt strongly that the peace process was in danger but were unsure whether demonstrations would do any good.

“Bibi has shown himself to be a man who knows what he wants,” said Kate Stephens, 20, referring to the prime minister by his nickname. “You find yourself saying, ‘What can we do to stop him?’ ”

Her friends nodded. “Even if I did go demonstrate on Har Homa, I would have a hard time finding a slogan to say,” noted Rokem, a philosophy and English major. “How do you shout about the timing?”

Meanwhile, Palestinians, including several involved in the talks, say they are bewildered that Israeli leftists have not responded more dramatically, say, by lying down before bulldozers or holding bigger or more frequent protests.

“I think that the majority of Israelis do realize that [Netanyahu] is working against their interests,” said Saeb Erekat, who heads the Palestinian negotiating team. “It’s very hard to explain why we don’t see 300,000 people demonstrating in Tel Aviv. Maybe they know it’s a lost battle.”

Peace Now was founded in 1978 by reserve army officers to urge Israeli leaders to make peace with Egypt. After the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, the group organized demonstrations that filled the streets of downtown Tel Aviv with thousands opposed to that military involvement. Later, the group became a vocal opponent of government actions to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But with the election of Rabin in 1992 and subsequent peace agreements with the Palestinians and with Jordan, “we thought we’d more or less finished the job,” said Tsali Reshef, a Peace Now founder. Even Syria had come to the bargaining table, and there was a sense that peace throughout the Middle East might finally be at hand.

*

Avnery, whose far-left Peace Bloc numbers a few dozen activists, said the movement grew complacent during the government of Rabin and his successor, fellow Labor leader Shimon Peres.

But last May, the camp was shocked by the victory of Netanyahu.

Nearly a year later, activists are still struggling to redefine their mission amid growing indications that Netanyahu’s right-religious coalition will oppose any further concessions to the Palestinians. Meanwhile, peace with Syria is an increasingly distant dream.

There still are signs of life, though. Peace Now is tentatively planning a large demonstration in Tel Aviv this month to mark the first anniversary of Netanyahu’s election and to voice opposition to his policies.

Many activists said they hoped that the dire state of the Palestinian negotiations would finally reverberate among their members and beyond to the broader Israeli public, resulting in a revitalized peace movement.