The Battered Israeli Anti-War Movement

As the latest war between
Israel and Hamas continues to rage on and rising Palestinian
civilian body counts leave Israel further isolated from the
international community, one wonders: What happened to Israel’s
anti-war movement?

Despite being at war for nearly its entire existence, there has
always been a robust peace movement in Israel. But this time
around, the doves are the fringe in Israeli society. Last Saturday
in Tel Aviv, the largest anti-war protest since the latest battle
began was attended by a few thousand people (estimates vary from
1,000 to 5,000) and a recent poll shows 87 percent of Jewish

Israelis support continuing the siege on Gaza.

In a small nation with compulsory military service, where every
single miltary casualty is national news, and the country’s
political class is willing to
trade thousands of Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli
soldier (and sometimes
for the bodies of fallen soldiers), it is no small thing to
loudly advocate against war. Accusations ranging from dangerous
naivite to being a self-hating Jew to aiding the enemy are
common.

As Marina Strinkovsky wrote in the
New Statesman: 

Protest is one thing, but the angry recriminations of loved
ones—that is something I admit is beyond the scope of my bravery.
In my life, I have faced potatoes lobbed at me from upper floors by
small children on demonstrations and anguished accusations of
indifference to my family’s safety. I know which hurt more.

Harriet Sherwood of
The Guardian adds:

It is a big contrast with the 400,000 people—then almost a tenth
of the country’s population – who took to the streets in 1986 to
protest about Israel’s war in Lebanon. In 1995, 100,000 people
attended the rally in support of the Oslo accords at which prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. And in 2009 several
thousand people joined peace marches during Operation Cast
Lead, Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza….

The reasons for the decline of Israel’s peace movement are,
inevitably, complex and interrelated. They include the failures of
the Oslo accords and of successive attempts to forge a peace deal;
the growing voice of the extreme right in Israeli politics; the
“normalisation” of the 47-year-long occupation; and the relative
marginalisation of the Palestinian cause both in Israel and
internationally.

Added to that mix is weariness and hopelessness. “I think the
peace movement became frustrated that nothing changes,” said Maayan
Dak of the Women’s Coalition for Peace. “Things just repeat. People
feel there is no point.”

Beyond failed diplomacy and a generations-long occupation, the
collapse of the Israeli anti-war movement can also be attributed to
the dread felt by Israelis over rockets that have reached further
into their cities than ever before and the discovery of
sophisticated tunnels that go deep into their country. If the polls
are to believed and the sparsely attended protests are any
indication, the Israeli populace is far more concerned with
temporary security than permanent peace.

Few would argue against Israel’s right to defend itself against
attacks from Hamas, whose unwillingness
to ever recognize Israel is well documented, but talk of a
lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians pretty much died
last month (along with John Kerry’s
Nobel Peace Prize ambitions), when Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters he
would never allow for a fully soveriegn Palestinian state in the
West Bank. While not explicitly rejecting a two-state solution,
Netanyahu reiterated the popular opinion among Israelis that the
country’s unilateral 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip created
the conditions that led to the current war with Hamas and that he
would never allow for such a security vacuum to exist in the West
Bank. 

Israel’s security concerns aside, no one in the Palestinian
political camp, even Israel’s on-again, off-again negotiating
partner, Fatah, would ever agree to Israeli police and military
patrolling inside a nominally sovereign Palestinian state. Thus,
the status quo of Israeli occupation over the West Bank, a
near-total blockade of the Gaza Strip, and brief wars every few
years that leave both sides further hardended, will be kept in
place.

When the latest fighting goes into “cease-fire” mode (not to be
confused with peace) Israelis will once again be at a crossroads.
Will they have made their point by destroying a few dozen tunnels
and leveling much of Gaza’s infrastructure? Will they follow the
lead of their late ex-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (no dove by any
stretch of the imagination) and make tough concessions including
dismantling illegal settlments and negotiating directly with the
people they’ve fought for decades?

The answer is unlikely, unless a lasting peace is as much of a
priority as temporary security.