Pressure of War Splinters Israel's Left
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
JERUSALEM, Nov. 10 — For more than 20 years, a name with a plain message has animated the broadest Israeli movement to end the conflict with Palestinians: Peace Now.
But now, it seems, was then, or perhaps peace was a dream. Out of realism or despair, and with a darkened sense of humor, the mainstays of the Peace Now movement are casting about for alternatives. They talk about a "Deal Now" or even an "Arrangement Now."
" 'Peace' implies the idea of a warm peace with Palestinians, which went up in flames," said Janet Aviad, a leader of the movement for many years.
It is a commonplace to say that the Israeli public has shifted to the right over the last year, as violence swamped negotiations and carried away a peace that had seemed within reach. But now, those who believed most in a warm peace — one in which settlers played jazz in Palestinian Ramallah and Palestinians danced in the nightclubs of Tel Aviv — have taken a hard look at their own assumptions about relations between the two peoples.
The result is that the left has not moved right so much as it has splintered. Some doves have become hawks, while others have settled for yearning after a cold, negotiated peace and eventual reconciliation. A few have thought about leaving the country. Still others, searching for fresh solutions, are talking about withdrawing unilaterally behind stout new fences. Almost all are angry at Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. Most are also frightened, and increasingly nationalistic.
Dan Meridor, a leader of Israel's Center Party and a minister in the coalition government, sees the tumult in the Israeli left as the mirror image of the right's crisis in the early 1990's. Then, the Oslo peace talks forced hawks, including Mr. Meridor, to surrender their dream of retaining forever the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands Israel conquered in 1967 and to which many Jews feel a biblical tie. "It was the awakening from a sweet dream," he said, "and awakening is always painful."
Now that the left's approach has also failed, he said, Israelis are confused about how to end the conflict. This helps explain a seeming contradiction in polling here: By wide margins Israelis support both forceful measures against Palestinians and hard compromises, should they lead to real peace. It also explains the popularity of the unity government of Israel's leading hawk, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and its leading dove, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. "We're all in the same boat, in a very strong sea," Mr. Meridor said. "It's not very clear how to reach the shore. But we know we need to stick together."
Micha Odenheimer, who is 43, grew up in Los Angeles and immigrated to Israel 13 years ago. He will not leave — he was shocked at the suggestion — because, he said, this is where he feels most alive. But the future looks so dim now that he worries about his 13-year- old son, who will have to enter the army in five years. "It's worse to have the hope and to lose it," he said, "than never to have had it."
Mr. Odenheimer, a rabbi and writer, is a man of ideas, and it was grappling with ideas behind the conflict that turned him from a believer in imminent peace to a skeptic. For Mr. Odenheimer, as for many leftists, hope began to fade when Mr. Arafat rejected an Israeli peace proposal made at Camp David in July 2000. Palestinians regard the proposal as miserly and unfair, but Israeli Jews, including many on the left, consider it, if anything, too generous.
Like other leftists, Mr. Odenheimer was shocked to discover that Mr. Arafat insisted upon a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees of the many wars here. The Israelis offered the Palestinians their own state; why would they still demand a right to live in Israel, he worried, unless they wanted to achieve through demography what they could not gain through force of arms? Could it be that the Palestinians still did not accept Israel's existence?
As he looked into the debate, he came across another notion that alarmed him. He discovered that some Palestinian leaders had suggested that the ancient temples of the Jews never stood on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which is also the third-holiest site in Islam and probably the most contested plot of land on earth.
"If they don't accept that there's a Jewish history in the land, then I don't think there's any chance of peace here," he said. "Once I wasn't too concerned about the psychological or even mythical issues. Now I think they're at the root of the whole thing." That realization led him deeper into a subject that even Israeli left-wingers now raise time and again: Arab anti-Semitism, which Mr. Odenheimer once dismissed but now sees as a real threat.
His study ultimately left him with a gnawing feeling of isolation as an Israeli. A leader in the effort to integrate Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society, Mr. Odenheimer is a proud leftist who lectures about the connection of Judaism to social justice. That is why the most painful realization for him has been a growing sense that many fellow leftists outside Israel also harbored anti-Semitism. Why else, he wondered, would they focus so obsessively on Israeli injustices, rather than injustice elsewhere, like the oppression of women and minorities in Arab nations? Why were they so sensitive to the imbalance of power between Israel and Palestinians, and so cavalier about the danger from Israel's neighbors?
The son of a refugee from Nazi Germany, he became afraid for the first time that anti-Semitism retained its power as a threat to Israel. "I grew up with this hopeful feeling that this was not going to be a major issue in my lifetime," he said sadly.
Mr. Odenheimer believes that Israelis cannot retreat into victimhood. He still wants negotiations toward peace and still believes that most Palestinians want the same thing. But his personal odyssey has made him if not supportive, then accepting of a prime minister he once opposed as the bane of the left.
"If someone had said, `Sharon is going to be the prime minister in three years,' I would have thought, `disaster,' " Mr. Odenheimer said with a smile. "And I didn't think `disaster' when he was elected in the middle of the intifada. I thought, `That's what the P.L.O. wanted, that's what the P.L.O. got.' "
It was the violence of this intifada that led Edna Shabtai, a novelist and the widow of the Israeli writer Yaacov Shabtai, to reconsider silently her support for the prompt creation of a Palestinian state. The months-long process began for her on Sept. 30, 2000 — a Sabbath, the Jewish New Year, and her birthday. She heard on the radio that fighting had blocked the route to the kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley where she grew up and her mother still lived.
Mrs. Shabtai was born in 1936, during another Arab uprising. Her kibbutz followed the common practice of raising children away from their families in a "children's house," and the one she grew up in was like a fortress. The Arabs, she said, "were a sort of enemy."
But she rejected that view. "I wanted to change it," she said. During the first intifada, which began in 1989, Mrs. Shabtai felt ashamed: "I didn't want to be part of this conquering nation, this oppressive nation."
But this new intifada was different. The heightened violence, after the standoff at Camp David, awakened the fears of her youth. Her process of self-examination ended after a Friday night at the beginning of June, when a Palestinian blew himself up outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing 21 young Israelis. The nightclub, the Dolphinarium, is not far from Mrs. Shabtai's apartment. She spent two sleepless nights afterward, she said, unable to "find peace in my soul."
On Monday morning, Mrs. Shabtai wrote a letter to a hawkish friend saying that she had been wrong. In the letter, subsequently published in the newspaper Maariv, she wrote that Israel must "act with its full power in a declaration that this is a state of war."
During almost two hours of conversation about her conversion, as she sifted through pictures of the kibbutz in its hardscrabble days, Mrs. Shabtai repeatedly cited the results of a 1999 survey reporting that most Arabs, including Palestinians, supported violence against Israelis. "They're supporting the murder of children," she said.
Didi Remez, who is 31, is at the other end of the spectrum from Mrs. Shabtai. He still believes in peace now, or soonest. "The alternative is just too horrible to contemplate," he said.
Mr. Remez served six years in the Israeli Army, rising to become a captain of the paratroopers. His great-grandfather signed the Israeli declaration of independence, and his grandfather created the air force. True to his family roots, Mr. Remez, an activist with Peace Now, supports peace and a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza partly because he sees that as the best way to ensure Israel's future as a democratic, Jewish state. Without it, he explained, "there won't be a Jewish state that any Jew will be proud of, and there won't be a Palestinian state that any Palestinian will want to be a member of."
As he finished a conversation in a coffee shop in Tel Aviv recently, Mr. Remez bounded outside into a crowd gathering to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, killed by a right-wing Israeli because of his pursuit of peace. "If it's less than 100,000, it's a failure," Mr. Remez said over his shoulder.
Generous estimates of the crowd put it at 80,000. And some longtime peace activists found the rally so bland, so cautiously centrist, that they left early in disgust. Ms. Aviad, one who lingered, said, "There's not a message, except sadness and longing."
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