Is there a peace camp in Israel?

By Thomas Vescovi

As the Israeli army increases crimes in the Palestinian Territories, few voices in Israel are ready to call for a ceasefire. Added to the obvious trauma of October 7, 2023 are the contradictions that already crossed the Israeli peace camp during the “Oslo years” and which have not disappeared. A part of the left still prefers to exonerate itself from any responsibility in the current situation.

Every Saturday evening, anger intersects in the streets of Tel Aviv, as evidenced by the program of mobilizations for more than a month: gathering against the war in the early evening, then demonstration against the government and in favor of new elections, to finally end on the Place des Otages alongside the families of the captives. The latter are mobilizing to demand the reopening of negotiations in order to obtain the return of their loved ones still detained in the Gaza Strip, the number of whom is believed to be 136. They have multiplied symbolic actions, such as the November 18 march starting from Tel Aviv to arrive in Jerusalem, or more recently the irruption in the middle of a Knesset session.

At the same time as this movement, the protest against Netanyahu and his government has resumed, with demonstrations numbering several tens of thousands of people. However, as exciting as the multiplication of citizen actions blocking the path to fascist power may be, seeing a peace camp in reformation seems very risky. On Thursday, January 18, the largest demonstration to demand a ceasefire brought together two thousand people, at most. The fact remains that if the number seems insignificant, the dynamic has the merit of existing.

Who to call for a “ceasefire”?

At the origin of the January 18 march, the feminist and pacifist organization Women Wage Peace, as well as the organization Standing Together. Alongside them, around thirty civil society organizations united under the same slogan: “Only peace can bring security”. Initially scheduled for January 11, the demonstration was banned by the Ministry of National Security. A few days earlier, Haaretz highlighted Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood, the co-directors of Standing Together, presenting them as the figures of a potential new Israeli peace camp. Founded on an Arab-Jewish partnership in Israel, Omdim Beyahad – Naqif Ma'an (names in Hebrew and Arabic) advocates for an egalitarian society, based on social justice, but also the convergence of Israeli and Palestinian interests around of a peace agreement. Since its creation in 2015, the organization had not experienced growth equivalent to the last three months with a doubling of its members – from 2,500 to 5,000, and its branches in Israeli universities.

After October 7, Standing Together set out to increase calls and actions to preserve the link between Palestinian Arabs and Jews in Israel. At his initiative, several evenings took place where a few hundred Israeli citizens, Palestinian Arabs and Jews alike, came to express their resentments: some about their loved ones affected by the Hamas attack, others to talk about the loss of relatives. in the bombings on the Gaza Strip. However, Standing Together faces criticism from part of the radical left, for example for not having, for several weeks, called for a ceasefire.

Itamar Avneri, one of the co-founders of the organization, demonstrates the constant concern to be heard by Israelis. If since October 7 he has expressed, without ambiguity, the need to oppose the war in Gaza, he wants to take into account the trauma of his fellow citizens. Firstly, the fact that a call for a ceasefire, according to him, would not resolve the problem of Hamas and the insecurity that the Islamist organization poses for Israelis living near the strip. Gaza: “It is not a crime in itself to want to fight Hamas,” he explains, “but you need a vision to achieve it, but the government has only proposed one thing: revenge and murder. » He wants to “convince people” to adopt a “lexicon they can hear” and to work to “change reality, not just condemn it”.

A complex strategy such as the military campaign, whose objective is allegedly to dismantle Hamas and its capacity for action, remains widely supported within Israeli society. Palestinian civilians constitute, in the Israeli media, only collateral damage in an “existential war” and used as “human shields” by Hamas. How can we envisage the emergence of a peace camp when the leading figure of the opposition to Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, sits in the war cabinet? The protest movement against the government does not call into question the practices of the army, but rather the continued power of a maligned and reviled Prime Minister.

Furthermore, if calls to relaunch colonization in the Gaza Strip or organize the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza come from far-right ministers, these slogans constitute the aspirations of a significant part of the Israeli political field. Thus, on November 13, MP Ram Ben-Barak, from the opposition party Yesh Atid (centrist), led by Yaïr Lapid, co-signed an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with Likud MP Danny Danon to call on Western states to welcome the population of Gaza. A proposal supported by nearly 83% of Israeli Jews, according to a survey relayed by the Channel 14 television channel. Presented as a “secularist” and an opponent of religious people in Israel, Lapid nevertheless does not hesitate to affirm, on November 5 2023 on LCI, that there are no settlements in the West Bank, since the Jews live on their “biblical land”.

It is obvious that the shock of October 7 facilitated the diffusion and acceptance of radical ideas within Israeli society, at the expense of a vocabulary respectful of human rights and peaceful. Some left-wing activists say they have been shaken in their convictions. A phenomenon which manifests itself through the use of expressions like hitpak'khout (become aware) or hitorerut (wake up, enlighten), in the sense of a brutal awakening after an alleged naivety which they would have demonstrated towards the Palestinians. Yaïr Golan, one of the rising forces of the Zionist left, particularly acclaimed after having distinguished himself on October 7 by his commitment to the rescue of civilians, did not hesitate to plead for starving the Palestinians of Gaza as well as the hostages would not be released. However, he still sat in the Knesset in 2022 in the ranks of Meretz, a party of the Zionist left which was the main political emanation of the peace camp.

A few weeks later, Golan was more nuanced in Haaretz, supporting obtaining an agreement to free the hostages and resolve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but without ever mentioning a ceasefire or peace with the Palestinians. It proposes a military campaign inspired by Operation Rampart launched in 2002 by Ariel Sharon to liquidate the Second Intifada - at the cost of several thousand Palestinian victims. He expresses no compassion for the civilians killed and asserts that Israel gave the inhabitants of Gaza the opportunity to "live in peace" after the 2005 disengagement, ignoring the blockade and the three military campaigns in ten years carried out in the area. 'enclave. In other words, the Palestinians would be responsible for their own fate.

Colonialist and pacifist?

The postulate of the victims' responsibility for their tragedy is fully in line with the Israeli colonial mentality, tirelessly seeking to refute all accusations against them or culpability in the fate of the Palestinians. From its appearance in the mid-1970s, the peace camp had schematically two tendencies, which the activist Uri Avnery characterized by a so-called “sentimental” wing and another “political”. The first, largely in the majority and coming from the Zionist left, was committed, according to Avnery, to moral questions and to preserving the image given to Israel. The Palestinians served as “objects of display” and not as equal partners. The political wing, in line with the anti-occupation left, started from taking into account the aspirations and hopes of the Palestinians to lead towards “mutual understanding”, the only “basis for coexistence”.

Such a duality still seems prevalent within the Israeli left and in circles that could lead to the renewal of a peace camp. Empathy cannot be shared, suffering is one-way: listening to the feelings, the feelings of the Palestinians, is not on the agenda. Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy explained in an interview on December 30 the extent to which Palestinians have been dehumanized in Israel to normalize the occupation and apartheid. A dehumanization symbolized by these countless videos of Israeli soldiers, broadcast on social networks, looting homes, humiliating civilians or raving about the scale of the destruction in Gaza, without this leading to disapproval by their society.

After the Hamas attack, it was not until October 28 that the first rally appeared in Tel Aviv demanding a ceasefire, bringing together only a few dozen people. Originally, Hagush Hadirakali (the radical bloc), a coalition of heterogeneous groups from the radical and non-Zionist left, but most of which are found in the anti-occupation movement, such as Mistaklim LaKiboush BaEynayim (Let's Look occupation in their eyes)… They were already present, and in greater numbers, every Saturday during the protest against the judicial reform of the Netanyahu government within the Gush Neged HaKibush (anti-occupation bloc) whose ambition was to recall to the demonstrators that democracy is not linked to a regime of apartheid, occupation and colonization.

If the radical bloc now has around a hundred demonstrators, its influence on social networks has increased since its members decided to adopt the term “genocide” in their militant practice to characterize the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip. , suffering sometimes violent repression by the police supposed to supervise them: signs torn down, banners banned... A strategy that is the opposite of that of Standing Together, namely that for them it is not a question of using vocabulary that can please their fellow citizens, but to use the terms used by the Palestinians, even if it means shocking the morals of an Israeli society which cannot imagine itself being genocidal, any more than being part of an apartheid regime. Nevertheless, the militant dialectic of the radical bloc risks forcing it to remain a small group force.

How can we bring together all these angers that seem separate to revive a peace camp that is up to the challenges of the future? This is the ambition of Shirakat Al Salam / Shutfut HaShalom (Partnership for Peace), which brings together around forty political organizations, including Hadash, NGOs and local associations. On January 21, this coalition brought together several hundred demonstrators in Haifa on a political basis established in five points: immediate ceasefire; negotiation for the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners; political solution to end the conflict; stopping the racist persecution carried out by the Netanyahu government against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship; egalitarian society.

All these initiatives should not be seen as a division of an already very limited pacifist camp, but more as militant circles looking for the best way to pool forces. The boundaries between each of these groups remain porous: Standing Together was present in large numbers on January 21 in Haifa, without being at the origin of the call. In the same way, certain activists from the radical bloc or Hadash actively participate in Standing Together's actions. Moreover, more broadly, this non-Zionist field also involves the protest against Netanyahu or the movement of the families of the hostages. Standing Together leader Alon-Lee Green, like Hadash, calls on their activists to mobilize at every action, assuming that they are both against the government and for an agreement to free the hostages.

In 2001, in the middle of the Second Intifada, the Israeli intellectual Yitzhak Laor wrote in a text entitled "The Tears of Zion" that the dividing line in Israel is not between the left and the right, between those who call themselves pacifists and those who advocate war, but between those capable of opposing the war that has been going on since day one, and those who can express their distress at the tragedy, but end up sounding the trumpet to signal their support. In other words, the status of “pacifist” is not based on declarations, but on political actions and principles. Namely, for this new generation that is emerging, the vital need to bring together Arab and Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian interests.

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