The decline of the Israeli political left?

Helena Cobban of the Boston Review recently published an article charting the decline of the political left in Israel, and examined how this affects the peace process.

Cobban claims that Ehud Barak shoulders much of the responsibility for the waning credibility and support of the political left, and that his decision to join the Netanyahu government only worsened the situation:

Barak's decision caused further tensions inside Labor, pounding yet another nail into the coffin of the party that until 1977 dominated the country's political scene. But even before he joined Netanyahu's conservative government, Barak stood accused by leaders of Israel's peace movement of bearing considerable responsibility for the movement's decline. In their telling, the betrayal started in early October 2000, when Barak emerged from the ruins of the last-minute peace talks at Camp David and announced that Yasser Arafat had quite gratuitously turned down Israel's "generous offer." Israel, he reported, had "no partner for peace."

Within weeks of those Camp David negotiations, other participants pointed out that the take-it-or-leave-it offer Barak had made to Arafat was far from generous-and that Arafat's response was far from a flat-out rejection. But the damage had been done. The broadly anti-peace trends that Barak unleashed with his October declaration have dominated Israeli politics ever since.

However, all blame cannot be attributed to Barak, other factors have contributed to the decline of the Israeli left as well:

First, many peaceniks used to argue that the costs to Israel (financial and otherwise) of maintaining sole control over the occupied territories would be unsustainable over the long or even medium term.

But the establishment of the Oslo-derived Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994 significantly changed that calculus. Nearly all of the occupation's administrative costs and a good portion of security-related costs are now met through European aid donations to the PA. And since Israel controls the shipment of all goods into and out of both the West Bank and Gaza and can use the territories as a captive market, many economists and aid experts argue that the money now flows in the opposite direction.

Second, the value that Jewish Israelis place on being able to build good relations with their Palestinian neighbors and the rest of the Muslim world has greatly diminished. Recall that in the heady days of the (largely nonviolent) first intifada, 1989-93, and during the early years of the post-Oslo period, Israel and the occupied territories were awash in handsomely funded "getting to know you" projects. Israelis and Palestinians who had previously known each other only as enemies or-prior to 1989-in the context of extremely unequal employment relationships came to see their once-feared neighbors in a much more multi-layered way.

But these efforts were halted in response to the suicide bombings of Palestinian rejectionist groups in the 1990s, and Ariel Sharon's decision, upon taking office in 2001, to construct a physical wall between Palestinians and Israelis. The list continues:

The third factor in the peace movement's demise was the reframing of its own demographic argument. In its simplest form, this argument advocates separate states because "one day soon" Palestinians will outnumber Jews in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Zionists have traditionally described demography-altering proposals as "transfer," but the rest of the world typically calls this ethnic cleansing. Few in Israel still speak crudely, as they once did, about rounding up Palestinians in trucks and sending them across the border. Nonetheless, during the recent election, Lieberman expressed support for establishing a truncated Palestinian state that would incorporate some of the Palestinian-populated areas of Israel that abut it. Palestinians in those areas would summarily lose their Israeli citizenship, and thus be "transferred" administratively, if not physically.

Finally, the argument that an independent Palestinian state would immediately become a "Hamastan"-either chaotic and ungovernable, and therefore a source of continuing violence- has eroded support for a peace agreement.

Hamas's continued capacity for violent resistance and its refusal to adopt Abbas's compliant, warm-and-fuzzy approach to peacemaking have made the idea of a Hamas-ruled state a hard one for many Jewish Israelis to accept. But within Israeli society (if not the political leadership), there is considerable realism in attitudes regarding Hamas. For some years now, a small majority of Israelis have even favored government talks with Hamas, though the influential poll regularly conducted by Hebrew University's Truman Institute showed that this percentage dropped between December and March from 55 percent to 50 percent. In March 69 percent of Israelis still supported the idea of their government dealing with a Hamas-Fatah unity government.

The question is, just how far has the peace movement fallen from the political mainstream?

One benchmark for comparison is the war that Sharon and former Prime Minister Menachem Begin launched against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. In September of that year, Lebanese Falangists, operating (as Ari Folman's brilliant film Waltz with Bashir reminds us) with extensive support from the Israeli military, undertook a two-day massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis-as much as 20 percent of the population at the time-took to the streets in outrage, forcing the government to establish the Kahan Commission, which recommended serious sanctions for Sharon.

By contrast, pollsters found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the recent war in Gaza. Veteran peace activist Daphna Golan, who teaches human rights law at Hebrew University, recalled the anguish and isolation she felt during the Gaza war, especially in the face of widespread pro-war activism among Hebrew University students. Golan said university authorities did not respond to her complaints about posters she described as "extremely racist" hung at the entrance of the Givat Ram campus.

Even the Meretz Party, launched successfully in 1992 on an explicitly pro-peace platform, supported the Gaza war in its early days-as did the writers David Grossman and Amos Oz, icons of the peace movement. By the fifth day of war, all agreed that Israel had "done enough" and should stop the assault. But their initial support legitimated the whole war in the eyes of admirers at home and abroad.

However, new organizations, outside the realm of politics, have arisen in an effort to resuscitate the peace movement:  

A relatively new organization called Zochrot ("Memory," in its feminine form) takes another approach, doing "Nakba education" among Jewish Israelis. The Nakba-"Catastrophe"-is what Palestinians call the events of the war that accompanied the founding of the State of Israel in 1948: the expulsion of more than 70 percent of its Palestinian residents; Israel's refusal to allow those refugees to return after the war, despite UN resolutions demanding it do so; and Israel's subsequent expropriation or destruction of property the refugees left behind. For Palestinians everywhere, the Nakba remains an essential reference point of shared peoplehood.

Today, the majority of Israelis have little knowledge of, or interest in, what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.

Seven or eight times a year, Zochrot organizes a field trip for interested Jewish Israelis to a different site of Palestinian displacement. At each location, experts, who may be Jewish or Palestinian Israelis, share what they know about the village's life before its depopulation, what happened to its people in 1948, and the cycles of destruction and expropriation the village suffered thereafter.

Initiatives like these are signs of hope for the future-but as of yet, they are far from constituting a mass movement.

But transferring public support for the peace process into political action on the peace process is a difficult task:

On the Palestinian side, there is only one political movement that is both able and-currently-willing to do this: Hamas. When Hamas entered the elections for the PA's legislative council in 2005, it signalled its adherence to many of the principles of the two-state outcome.

As for Fatah, the large amount of U.S.-mobilized aid that has been poured into that party's coffers since 2006 with the intention of strengthening it vis-à-vis Hamas has instead merely accelerated the trend toward corruption and clientelism that the movement has long harbored.

In Israel the situation is more complex. Kadima, the ill-defined "centrist" party founded by Sharon and Olmert in 2005, is currently in opposition-though with 28 seats, it is actually the largest single party in the Knesset. Kadima's leader, Tzipi Livni, refused to join Netanyahu's government precisely because of his opposition to the two-state goal, which has since been tempered slightly. (Her decision made the entry of Labor into the coalition even more anomalous. These two parties may now engage in a broad ideological do-si-do, with Labor moving to the right and Kadima to the left.)

Kadima and Labor's organizational turbulence is but one element of a larger change in Israeli politics over recent years: the growth and consolidation of the right and the significant weakening of the older Zionist left

However, some in Israel have resigned themselves to the idea that the moment for a two-state solution has passed:

These people-political scientist and politician Meron Benvenisti, historian Ilan Pappé, and others, including numerous Palestinian Israelis-are now calling more forcefully than ever for a unitary, binational state in the area of Mandate Palestine that would be equally a home for all its citizens, Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking.

Will it come to that? It may. The collapse of Israel's once-powerful peace movement makes a workable two-state outcome much harder to achieve. That goal-which guarantees Israel's survival as a specifically Jewish state-might still, just, be within reach. But its attainment might ultimately owe more to Hamas's support for the project than to the legacy of Israel's pro-peace forces.