POLITICS-ISRAEL: Israel’s Peace Groups Struggle To Cross The Line

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Deborah Horan

JERUSALEM, May 20 1998 (IPS) - For a split second, Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist, flashes a satisfied smile.

The European Union’s execitive Commission had just announced its plan to deny special trade preferences to export goods made in factories in Jewish settlements and Israeli-owned industrial parks in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights.

The Commission decision is not yet final, and Israel’s foreign ministry is lobbying hard to stop its implementation.

But Avnery is pleased at the progress so far. The EU Commission’s plan echoes a campaign begun eight months ago by his NGO, Gush Shalom (Peace Block), which called on Israelis not to buy products made by firms on a list of 127 based on settlements or in dustrial centres in the still-occupied territories.

“I’m very happy about this decision,” says Avnery, “It will deter investors from going there.” He is a thin, greyhaired, lively man with specific opinions, one of which is that most of the 160,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza are “a bunch of p arasites”.

But this month has not been all good for the 74-year-old veteran of the Israeli political left.

On Monday, Ehud Barak, the leader of the centre-left opposition Labour Party visited a West Bank settlement and told the settlers there that their homes will not be uprooted in any final peace agreement with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

The visit upset many members of Labour, a party whose platform allows for a Palestinian state but does not say which settlements, if any, would be allowed to stay or be forced to dismantle.

Barak’s visit and Avnery’s boycott underscore just how divided the Left has become.

Since the election of right-wing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu two years ago this month, Israel’s would-be peacemakers have not had an easy time. They tend to alternate between despair and indecision and in constant discord over what they are trying to do and how to go about doing it.

Faced with a prime minister bent on halting peace agreements signed with the Palestinians even as they are implemented, they cannot agree on how to confront him or to convince Israel’s centrist majority of Netanyahu’s real intentions.

“There’s a problem for the Left in that Netanyahu hasn’t torn up all the cards,” says David Horovitz, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Report, Israel’s leading political magazine.

“If he made it clear that he has no intention to continue (with the peace process), most people in the country would be furious abut it,” he adds. “But he hasn’t done that and he says he’s trying to implement the Oslo agreements.”

Opinion polls consistently show a majority of Israelis favoring a continuation of the peace negotiations with the Palestinians. A majority even accepts the eventuality of a Palestinian state, although most do not welcome the thought.

But the polls belie the fact that many Israelis are profoundly ambivalent on the details: they want peace, but they don’t know exactly what they want to give up to get it.

And two-and-a-half years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an extremist Jew, many are still asking themselves whether making peace with the Palestinians is worth the internal strife the prospect of ceding land creates.

Avnery’s Gush Shalom has no qualms trading land for peace. It stands firmly against settlements and in favor of the creation of a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

And its members are willing to take concrete and often radical steps to achieve this.

Besides the boycott of goods from the settlements, Gush Shalom members — “dozens at the core, a few thousand who support us,” he says — plan to paint ‘green lines’ on all the roads leading into the West Bank, re-marking the invisible and almost forgo tten boundary separating Israel from the West Bank.

They’ve also produced a radio jingle telling listeners that each settler costs Israeli taxpayers half a million shekels (about 135,000 dollars) to house for one year. The jingle has yet to air and the issue is currently tied up in the courts.

And they publish a detailed list of what they say are Israeli violations of agreements signed with the Palestinians.

But not all of Gush Shalom’s tactics go over well with Israelis, even among many on the left, who see them as extreme measures that only alienate the centre.

“I don’t buy products made in settlements,” said 32-year-old Mossi Raz of Peace Now, Israel’s main peace organisation. “But I don’t support pushing for these kinds of official sanctions. I think it should be a personal choice.”

And while Peace Now, closely aligned with Labour, supports a Palestinian state, it is less forthcoming about the borders or the future of the settlements.

Last week, Raz found himself in the uncomfortable position of defending Barak’s trip to Beit Il, a move most analysts agree was designed to capture the political centre.

The ambiguity seems to affect the peace camp’s ability to rally support, although Raz disputes this. In 1978, Peace Now splashed onto the Israeli political scene as a grass-roots demand for peace with Egypt.

It reached its pinnacle in 1982, when it lead 400,000 demonstrators into the streets of Tel Aviv to protest against Israel’s involvement in the war in Lebanon.

By 1996, when deadly riots broke out between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protesters and police, Peace Now was still able to mobilize 100,000 protesters.

Two weeks ago, less than 1,000 showed up at Har Homa, the east Jerusalem hilltop that Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghneim, the site of a controversial Jewish housing project that plunged peacemaking into an abyss when Netanyahu began building there in Mar ch 1996.

It is telling that Israel’s newest and most vibrant peace movement, Dor Shalem Doresh Shalom (An Entire Generation Demands Peace), is also the fuzziest on the details of peace.

Called simply Dor Shalom, or Peace Generation, the group was created by ten friends on the night of Rabin’s murder and is headed by Rabin’s son, Yuval. Today it boasts 30,000 members, mostly young people in their teens and twenties.

Its aim is to heal the rifts created by the assassination through social programs that bring different segments of Israeli society together.

“We realize that the change has to come from within,” says Jodi Joseph, the organization’s director of development. “We believe that you have to have social progress to have peace.”

But in order to foster the healing process, it has shied away from taking a firm political stand vis-a-vis the Palestinians.

Instead, it’s members say vaguely that they want to continue “the Rabin way”. At demonstrations, young people sing songs about peace, but have so far refused to work with Peace Now.

“We thought Dor Shalom would be the link between the peace groups and the Israeli centre,” says a disappointed Raz, of Peace Now.

“Peace Now represents the leftist one-fourth of Israeli society. There’s a need to reach out to the other one-fourth on the left. Unfortunately, this is not (the role of) Dor Shalom.”

In the short term, the Left’s lack of direction can only help Netanyahu until, says Raz, some cataclysmic event compels people to take action. “Unfortunately, this is the way of life,” he says. “People need something huge to shock them.”