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<h1>Against The War: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name In
Israel</h1>
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<div class="cat-date-line"><big><big><span class="cat-date-line2"><a
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/" title="View
all posts in Educate!" rel="category tag">Educate!</a></span>
<span class="cat-date-line3"> <a
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/gaza/"
rel="tag">Gaza</a>, <a
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/israel/"
rel="tag">Israel</a>, <a
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/palestine/"
rel="tag">Palestine</a>, <a
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/peace/"
rel="tag">Peace</a>, <a
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rel="tag">Protest</a> </span> <br>
<span class="cat-date-line4">By Giles Fraser, <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/06/gaza-israel-movement-that-dare-not-speak-its-name"
target="_blank">www.theguardian.com</a><br>
August 8th, 2014</span><br>
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<div id="article-body-blocks"><big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big><em>Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv to
protest against attacks on Gaza, 26 July 2014.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty</em></big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Gideon Levy doesn’t want to meet in a coffee bar in
Tel Aviv. He is fed up with being hassled in public and
spat at, with people not willing to share the table next
to him in restaurants. And now he is fed up with the
constant presence of his bodyguards, not least because
they too have started giving him a hard time about his
political views. So he doesn’t go out much any more and we
sit in the calm of his living room, a few hundred yards
from the Yitzhak Rabin Centre. Rabin’s assassination by a
rightwing Orthodox Jew in 1995 is itself a sobering
reminder of the personal cost of peacemaking in <a
title="More from the Guardian on Israel"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/israel">Israel</a>.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>In his column in Haaretz, Levy has long since
banged the drum for greater Israeli empathy towards the
suffering of the Palestinians. He is a well-known
commentator on the left, and one of the few prepared to
stick his head above the parapet. Consequently, he is no
stranger to opposition from the right. But this time it is
different. Yariv Levin, coalition chairman of the
Likud-Beytenu faction in the Knesset, recently called for
him to be put on trial for treason – a crime which, during
wartime, is punishable by death.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>“It is time we stop regarding despicable phenomena
like this with tolerance,” Levin said of Levy. Soon after
that interview, Eldad Yaniv, a former political adviser to
ex-prime minister Ehud Barack, wrote on his Facebook page:
“The late Gideon Levy. Get used to it.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Levy’s unpardonable crime is vocal opposition to
the war and to the bombing of <a title="More from the
Guardian on Gaza"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza">Gaza</a>.
According to recent polls, support for the military
operation in Gaza among the Jewish Israeli public stands
somewhere between 87% (Channel 10 News) and 95% (Israel
Democracy Institute). Even those who are secretly against
the war are cautious about voicing their opinion openly.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big><span class="inline"><em> <img scale="0"
class="alignleft"
src="cid:part20.01000900.02070606@comcast.net"
alt="Gideon Levy" data-pin-description="Gideon Levy.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod" height="310" width="220">
</em><span class="caption" style="width: 220px;"><em>
Gideon Levy. Photograph: Murdo Macleod</em> </span>
</span></big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Thus public opinion went ballistic when Levy
attacked those who were bombing Gaza by inverting the
well-known Hebrew phrase “<em>Hatovim La tayyis</em>” –
which means: the best ones go to the air force – by
writing “<em>Haraim La tayyis</em>“: the worst ones go to
the air force. Even in a time of peace this would be seen
as a provocative statement, a heresy against what Levy
sees as Israel’s real religion: military security. But in
its current mood, this is not the sort of thing that you
can easily say out loud.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Even Peace Now, the backbone of the Israeli peace
movement, has been remarkably guarded, carefully avoiding
official participation in public demonstrations. Peace Now
was founded in 1978 by former members of the military who
came out strongly in favour of peace with Egypt. It helped
mobilise 10% of the Israeli public – some 400,000 people –
to turn out against the 1982 war in Lebanon. But this time
it is a shadow of its former self.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>“What is different this time is the anti-democratic
spirit. Zero tolerance of any kind of criticism,
opposition to any kind of sympathy with the Palestinians,”
says Levy. “You shouldn’t be surprised that the 95% [are
in favour of the war], you should be surprised at the 5%.
This is almost a miracle. The media has an enormous role.
Given the decades of demonisation of the Palestinians, the
incitement and hatred, don’t be surprised the Israeli
people are where they are.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>“So what’s the point of a peace movement if it
refuses to condemn a war like this?” I ask Mossi Raz,
former general secretary of Peace Now. Some people have
demonstrated, he assures me; 6,000 came out on the streets
the Saturday before last (and were taunted as “dirty
Israelis” by the rightwing counter demonstration). And in
the circumstances, 6,000 feels like quite an achievement.
But he admits that the mainstream protest movements and
parties of the left all fall pretty silent when the sirens
start to wail.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>“People tend to demonstrate only after the war is
over,” Raz explains. And he expects the same to happen
again this time. During the early part of the 1982 war,
before the large turnouts, polls gave military action 86%
support. But during a time of war, opposition is seen as
disloyalty, as siding with the enemy. People will protest
at the government, but not the military. I raise an
eyebrow about the idea of protesting against a war only
when it is over. He nods with a certain exasperation and
asks me, as a joke: “So, shall we go out now and protest
the Falklands war?”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Amos Oz, Israel’s great literary conscience,
explains to me that the peace movement was dealt a harsh
blow eight years ago when Ariel Sharon pulled the army and
the settlers out of Gaza only for the situation to get
worse. “Since then there have been 10,000 rockets fired
from the Gaza strip.” Middle-of-the-road Israelis have
lost faith in the idea that you could swap land for peace.
For him, the current military operation is “excessive but
justified” and he is scornful of the high-minded European
reaction. “That’s the problem with Europeans. They launch
a petition and then go and sleep and feel good about
themselves” – something he explains with reference to
European history. I feel he is having a go at me. And I
know he is laid up in bed with a bad knee. So I don’t rise
to the bait.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>He continues: “The history of warfare in the 20th
century has made Europeans see things in black and white,
like a Hollywood movie, with good guys and bad guys. But
it’s more complicated than that.” Yes, he condemns the
Netanyahu government and the catalogue of inaction and
missed opportunities. Yes, the operation in Gaza has been
disproportionate. “From one perspective it looks like a
David and Goliath story, with Israel being the ruthless
Goliath and the Palestinians being the poor little David.
But if you see the conflict as between Israel and the
whole of the rest of the Arab world, who then is David and
who is Goliath?”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>I attempt to shift Oz off this well-trodden ground
by talking about Israeli poetry, trying to come at things
sideways. I tell him I have always loved the Yehuda
Amichai poem “From the place where we are right, flowers
will not grow in the spring.” He agrees. It’s a wonderful
poem. “All married couples should have that poem above
their bed,” he says. And then he says something that feels
to me like a real shift in his position. Previously he has
described the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a Sophoclean
tragedy over land in which both sides have a claim to
right on their side; as a battle, as he put it of “right
versus right”. But now, he says, this is a battle of
“wrong versus wrong”. No one is in the right any more. It
is a very statesmanlike form of opposition. But it is
hardly emphatic.</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>“Amos Oz is not yet in a position to admit entire
Israeli guilt,” Levy explains. “He is a real man of peace,
but he grew up in a different generation, the generation
before me. He grew up in this weak state, struggling to
survive, created out of nothing. This is his background.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>This sort of self-critical vigilance is rare but
understandable given the sort of reporting that goes on in
themainstream media in Israel. Most newspapers and TV
channels are simply cheerleaders for the government line,
offering a constant diet of fear and fallen heroes, with
little evidence of any of the atrocities going on in Gaza.
The problem is, ordinary Israelis have little idea what
has been going on. I know so much more about what is
happening in Gaza when I’m sitting in London than I do in
Tel Aviv. Under this level of information manipulation,
how can ordinary Israelis be expected to be critical?</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>Later I go for a drink at a friend’s flat in Tel
Aviv with a group of broadly leftwing activists in their
late 20s and early 30s, NGO types that I was expecting
would share my exasperation. And I make a mistake,
assuming too much common ground. I ask whether their fear
of rockets is properly calibrated to reality, given that
people are so much more likely to die in a car accident in
Israel than at the hands of Hamas. And there is an awkward
reaction. The question was insensitive. They have loved
ones in uniform in Gaza. And I really do understand that.
But suddenly I feel like an outsider. I haven’t
appreciated that this threat is existential, they say.
“People leave their liberalism at the green line [the 1967
border],” Levy had warned me earlier. “The young people
are the worst. More ignorant. More brainwashed. They have
never met a Palestinian in their lives.”</big></big></p>
<big><big>
</big></big>
<p><big><big>That is emphatically not true of this group. But
even here, the mood for social justice does not seem to
connect poverty in Israel with the vast financial cost of
occupation, let alone allow empathy with the Palestinian
predicament. If I’m not with them, I’m against them. I am
made to feel a little like an apologist for Hamas. A
thought dawns in my head: perhaps I too ought to shut up
and keep the evening sweet. Of all the things seen on my
trip, this was the most depressing conversation of them
all.</big></big></p>
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