Israeli peace camp
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Arab–Israeli conflict have existed since the inception of Zionism, and especially since the 1948 formation of the state of Israel, and the 1967 Six-Day War. The mainstream peace movement in Israel is Peace Now (Shalom Akhshav), whose supporters tend to vote for the Labour Party or Meretz.
Peace Now was founded in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem, when many people felt that the chance for peace might be missed. PM Begin acknowledged that the Peace Now rally in Tel Aviv at the eve of his departure for the Camp David Summit with Presidents Sadat and Carter—drawing a crowd of 100,000, the largest peace rally in Israel until then—had a part in his decision to withdraw from Sinai and dismantle Israeli settlements there. Peace Now supported Begin for a time, and hailed him as a peace-maker, but turned against him when withdrawal from Sinai was accompanied by an accelerated campaign of land confiscation and settlement building in the West Bank.
Peace Now advocates a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. Originally this was worded vaguely, with no definition of who "the Palestinians" are and who represents them. Peace Now was quite tardy in joining the dialogue with the PLO, started by such groups as the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and the Hadash communist party. Only in 1988 did Peace Now accept that the PLO is the body regarded by the Palestinians themselves as their representative.
During the first Intifada, Peace Now held numerous protests and rallies to protest the Israeli army and call for a negotiated withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. At the time Peace Now strongly targeted then for Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his order to "break the bones of Palestinian stone-throwers". However, after Rabin became Prime Minister, signed the Oslo Agreement and shook Yasser Arafat's hand on the White House lawn, Peace Now strongly supported him and mobilized public support for him. Peace Now had a central role in the November 4, 1995 rally after which Rabin was assassinated.
Since then the annual Rabin memorial rallies, held every year at the beginning of November, have become the main event of the Israeli Peace Movement. While officially organized by the Rabin Family Foundation, Peace Now presence in these annual rallies is always conspicuous. Nowadays, Peace Now is especially known for its struggle against the expansion of settlement outposts on the West Bank.
Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc, is a radical movement to the left of Peace Now. In its present name and structure, Gush Shalom grew out of the Jewish-Arab Committee Against Deportations, which protested the deportation without trial of 415 Palestinian Islamic activists to Lebanon in December 1992, and erected a protest tent in front of the prime minister's office in Jerusalem for two months—until the government consented to let the deportees return. Members then decided to continue as a general peace movement with a program strongly opposing the occupation and advocating the creation of an independent Palestine side-by-side with Israel in its pre-1967 borders ("The Green Line") and with an undivided Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states.
While existing under the name Gush Shalom only since 1992, this movement is in fact the lineal descendant of various groups, movements and action committees that espoused much the same program since 1967, and that occupied the same space on the political scene. In particular, Gush Shalom is the descendant of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP), which was founded in 1975. The ICIPP founders included: a group of dissidents from the Israeli establishment, among them were Major-General Mattityahu Peled, who was member of the IDF General Staff during the 1967 Six Day War and after being discharged from the army in 1969 turned increasingly in the direction of the left; Dr. Ya'akov Arnon, a well-known economist who headed the Zionist Federation in the Netherlands before coming to Israel in 1948, and was for many years director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Finance and afterwards chaired the Board of Directors of the Israeli Electricity Company; and Aryeh Eliav, who was secretary-general of the Labour Party until he broke with the then PM Golda Meir over the issue of whether or not a Palestinian People existed and had national rights.
These three and some two hundred more people became radicalised and came to the conclusion that "arrogance was a threat to Israel's future and that dialogue with the Palestinians must be opened." They came together with a group of younger, grassroots peace activists who had been active against Israeli occupation since 1967. The bridge between the two groups was Uri Avnery, a well known muckraking journalist who had been member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) between 1965 and 1973, at the head of his own radical one-man party.
The main achievement of the ICIPP was the opening of dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with the aim of convincing the Israelis of the need to talk and reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, and conversely making Palestinians aware of the need to talk to and eventually reach a deal with Israel.
At present, Gush Shalom activists are mainly involved in daily struggle at Palestinian villages that have their land confiscated by the West Bank barrier, erected to stop suicide bombers. Gush activists are to be found, together with those of other Israeli movements like Ta'ayush and Anarchists Against the Wall, joining the Palestinian villagers of Bil'in in the weekly protest marches held to protest confiscation of more than half of the village lands.
Although Gush Shalom earned itself respect among peace-seeking Israelis as well as in the United States and Europe, it is regarded by mainstream Israelis as a purely pro-Palestinian movement.
After the Gaza War in 2014, a group of Israeli women founded the Women Wage Peace movement with the goal of reaching a "bilaterally acceptable" political peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. While based mainly in Israel, the movement has worked to build connections with Palestinians, reaching out to women and men of many different religions and political backgrounds. The group's activities have included a collective hunger strike outside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's formal residence and a protest march from Northern Israel to Jerusalum. As of May 2017, Women Wage Peace had over 20,000 members and supporters associated with it.
