[THS] Gideon Levy: There Has Never Been an Israeli Peace Camp

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24934.htm

There Has Never Been an Israeli Peace Camp

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent

March 07, 2010 "Haaretz " -- The Israeli peace camp didn't die. It was never born in
the first place. While it's true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and
brave political groups have been working against the occupation - all worthy of
recognition - a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.

It's true that after the Yom Kippur War, after the first Lebanon War and during the
giddy days of Oslo (oh, how giddy those days were), citizens took to the streets,
generally when the weather was nice and when the best of Israeli music was being
performed at rallies, but few people really said anything decisive or courageous, and
fewer still were willing to pay a personal price for their activities. After the
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, people lit candles in the square and
sang Aviv Geffen songs, but this certainly isn't what one would call a peace camp.

It is also true that the stance advocated by the so-called Matzpen movement
immediately after the Six-Day War has now more or less become the Israeli
consensus position - but it is mere words, devoid of content. Nothing meaningful has
been done so far to put it into practice. One would have expected more, a lot more,
from a democratic society in whose backyard such a prolonged and cruel occupation
has existed and whose government has primarily invoked the language of fear,
threats and violence.

There have been societies in the past in whose name frightful injustice has been
committed, but at least within some of them, genuine, angry and determined left-
wing protest took place - of the sort that requires personal risk and courage, and
which is not limited to action within the cozy consensus. An occupying society whose
town square has been empty for years, with the exception of hollow memorial rallies
and poorly attended protests, cannot wash its hands of the situation. Neither
democracy nor the peace camp can.

If people didn't take to the streets in large numbers during Israel's Operation Cast
Lead in Gaza, then there isn't a genuine peace camp. If people don't flood the
streets now - when dangers lie in wait and opportunity is wasted time after time, and
democracy sustains blow after blow on a daily basis and there are no longer sufficient
resources to properly defend it, and when the right wing controls the political map
and settlers amass more and more power - then there is no genuine left wing.

There is nothing like the debate over the future of the Meretz party to demonstrate
the sorry state of the left. This comes in the wake of the strange and ridiculous report
last week about the party's poor showing in the last election, and which gives every
possible recommendation. Meretz disappeared because the party fell silent; you don't
need a commission to find that out. But even during its relatively better days, Meretz
was not a real peace camp. When Meretz applauded Oslo, it deliberately ignored the
fact that the champions of the "historic" peace accords never intended to evacuate
even a single settlement over the course of the great "breakthrough" that earned its
promoters Nobel peace, yes, peace prizes. This camp also overlooked Israel's
violations of the agreements, its illusions of peace.

Above all, however, the problem was rooted in the left's impossible adherence to
Zionism in its historical sense. In precisely the way there cannot be a democratic and
Jewish state in one breath, one has to first define what comes before what - there
cannot be a left wing committed to the old-fashioned Zionism that built the state but
has run its course. This illusory left wing never managed to ultimately understand the
Palestinian problem - which was created in 1948, not 1967 - never understanding
that it can't be solved while ignoring the injustice caused from the beginning. A left
wing unwilling to dare to deal with 1948 is not a genuine left wing.

The illusory left never understood the most important point: For the Palestinians,
consenting to the 1967 borders along with a solution to the refugee problem,
including at least the return of a symbolic number of refugees themselves, are
painful concessions. They also represent the only just compromise, without which
peace will not be established; but there's no sense in accusing the Palestinians of
wasting an opportunity. Such a proposal, even including the "far-reaching" proposals
of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, has never been made to them.

Meretz will surely find some kind of organizational arrangement and will again get
half a dozen members elected to the Knesset, on a good day maybe even a dozen.
This doesn't mean much, however. The other left-wing groups, both Jewish and
Arab, remain excluded. No one has any use for them, no one thinks about including
them, and they are too small to have any influence. So let's call the child by its real
name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby.