[Peace-discuss] Against The War: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name In Israel

Sat Aug 9 09:05:56 EDT 2014

  Against The War: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name In Israel

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Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Gaza 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/gaza/>, Israel 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/israel/>, Palestine 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/palestine/>, Peace 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/peace/>, Protest 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/protest-2/>
By Giles Fraser, www.theguardian.com 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/06/gaza-israel-movement-that-dare-not-speak-its-name>
August 8th, 2014
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/Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv to protest against attacks on 
Gaza, 26 July 2014. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty/

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 Israel 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/israel>.

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.

"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."

Levy's unpardonable crime is vocal opposition to the war and to the 
bombing of Gaza <http://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza>. 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.

/Gideon Levy //Gideon Levy. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/

Thus public opinion went ballistic when Levy attacked those who were 
bombing Gaza by inverting the well-known Hebrew phrase "/Hatovim La 
tayyis/" -- which means: the best ones go to the air force -- by writing 
"/Haraim La tayyis/": 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.

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.

"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."

"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.

"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?"

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.

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?"

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.

"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."

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?

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."

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.

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