Galia Golan Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Tell us now what the Peace Now movement is, and your involvement in its founding -- you were one of the founders, you were a spokesperson. What did it represent in Israeli politics from the time of its birth through the present?
Peace Now is actually quite unique in Israeli history. There had been left-wing peace groups, and I'd been involved on the fringes of a peace group that had started in the university intellectuals. The Communist Party always had some peace movement and there were even very, very tiny extreme left-wing peace groups. None of them ever really caught on, including the intellectuals'. The unique thing about Peace Now, and I think the reason that it caught on, is that while I was involved from the beginning, the people who founded the movement were a group of young reserve officers and soldiers. Many of them were our students, and that's how we knew about it.
They wrote an open letter to the prime minister, which I published during the talks over the Israeli/Egyptian peace agreement, when the talks were breaking down. They were very similar, in a way, to the movement that started recently called the Courage to Refuse, and what these young men said in their letter -- and there was young woman, Yuli Tamir, who's Minister of Education today -- what they said in their letter was that "We're loyal, we fight, we're in combat units, some volunteer units, but we will have a problem continuing to serve if we feel that the government isn't doing enough or will let this opportunity for peace now fall through its fingers."
This is what struck a chord, I think, with the Israeli public, that is it came out of the heart of Israel: fighters, young men who (it was very machoistic) are security conscious, protecting Israel, willing to do much for Israel. It was that. Certainly, nobody could call disloyal. As a result, the movement became a mass movement. It's the only time a peace movement, or any movement, really, in Israel, has become a mass movement and has held all these years. I think it's because it appeals to not just the left, but the center or the left of center. It's a movement that tries to be only a little bit ahead of the public, as distinct from what I would call the radical left which is out there way ahead of the public, and they don't care if they're small.
Peace Now has always had the idea that our strength is in our numbers. If we can get a demonstration of 100,000, 200,000 -- we've had the big one, of course, during the first Lebanon war, 400,000 -- that's our strength, that's why people pay attention to us, that's why politicians pay attention to us. We try not to be too far ahead of the public so that we can keep that public coming out. Now it has its problems, and the problem occurred just now in the Lebanon war this summer.
What is that problem? The movement has never really entered the government in the way the Greens did in Germany.
That's true, nor the way the settlers did. The settlers tended to get certain politicians and virtually the religious party, the National Religious Party. No, we faced that a number of times. Every election somebody says we should become a party, but then we'd wind up having maybe two seats, if that much. That was never our idea. Some of our people did go on to be Knesset members, either from Labour or from the Social Democratic Party, Meritz, where I'm also in the executive.
We [in Peace Now] felt that we wanted to cover the center all the way to the left. We didn't want to be identified with a political party. Not only that, political parties and politicians have a negative image and we did not want to be part of that. We're an extra-parliamentary movement which could speak to a broad spectrum of people, and that's where we decided we wanted to stay, even if individuals built themselves through the movement and then went on to party politics.
What has been the reaction of the movement to the second Lebanon war? Was the sense of the existential threat so great in this war that it was impossible to mobilize on the issue of peace? Clearly, there was mobilization on the issue of the management and competence of the leadership of the country.
The war was very problematic for the peace movement, first of all because the majority of the public, 80% to 90% of the public, saw this as what was called a "just war" and a war for existence, which I find frankly extraordinary. The sense in the movement, in the leadership of the movement, was certainly that Israel had a right to respond. We were attacked, it was unprovoked.
The question was, how do you respond and do you escalate into full-scale war? Do you bomb infrastructure and civilian targets? Our [first] problem was that you start with this justification, that is to say, everybody in the country, virtually, or certainly the Jewish public, felt that we were justified in the sense that we had a right to respond -- so I said, the issue was how you respond. But our second problem was that the vast majority of the public, including our public, supported the war because our civilians were being bombed. The population in the north of the country had to -- well, was not evacuated, left of their own accord, went south. Civilians were being bombed in Haifa, and villages and towns. So, the public felt threatened, and we could not have begun to get out numbers.
There was a division within the movement itself. Myself and a number of other people felt that in any case there are times when you come out, even if you're small. You can't hold a mass demonstration, that's for sure, but at least to come out in opposition. But there were those who said that if we are too far ahead of the public at this point, we'll lose them, and then when we need them [they won't be there].
Part of the argument was that we as a movement, and the peace camp in general, have long fought for the idea of withdrawing from the occupied territories, withdrawing to a recognized border, and then you have all the legitimacy in the world. Well, here we had the situation of having withdrawn from Lebanon, an internationally recognized border, truly no provocation by Israel, and we're attacked. If we're going to hold by this argument, that Israel should withdraw, then we can defend our borders, how can we argue against this defense of our border now? I don't adhere to this logic, but this was the logic.
I can tell you very frankly that it wasn't a question of a few people. Later, when I appeared with others in the media and so forth, people were very clear left-wing supporters of Peace Now. That's how they felt, that you could not oppose this war.
I have to add another thing. The Israeli public, for the most part, didn't see what we were doing in Lebanon, unless you watched the BBC, or CNN, or Sky. What we saw ...
You mean, once the war started?
Once the war started. What you saw on television was houses, civilian houses, homes, being hit by missiles and Katyusha rockets. That's what we saw. So, if you talked about what we were doing, the lack of proportionality in what we were doing in Lebanon, they'd say, "Yeah, but they're bombing our factories." So, it was a very, very hard sell.
After the war, as you mentioned, the protest movement, which we have not joined, basically is saying we didn't do enough, that the government made mistakes, it didn't let the army use more force to do what the army knows how to do. That's not where we are. What we came out with, and have come out very strongly with this, we shouldn't be talking about how better to prepare for war but how to prevent the next war. And we've actually started a campaign to speak with Syria, for example, to initiate a new peace process and to get out of the territories.
One gets the sense, looking at Israel from the outside, that all these problems are intertwined, and there is an incapacity other than in movements like Peace Now to confront the issues. You clearly have Israeli settlers who think that the occupied land is theirs because it was given by God. This leads to an occupation which does not work, nor does unilateral disengagement from a particular area, and this in turn leads to a focus on terrorism and a misidentification of the adversary. How does one untangle all of this? It seems the occupation is corrupting Israel, but at a certain point one can't separate your adversaries, and you want to lump the Iranians in with Hamas, in with Hizbollah.
Well, certainly the government is lumping them all together. Even in this past war, once the Americans got on board, it suddenly became a war against terrorism. Hizbollah is not exactly a terrorist organization. It's a militia that basically attacks the army. In that sense I guess you could call them guerilla, but they are [different from] Hamas. Hamas does engage, and did engage, in terrorism -- suicide bombings of civilians and so forth. So, it does get very, very complicated.
We tackle it from a number of angles, there's no question about it. The settlers are not popular. The majority of Israelis today -- and it's been this way for over ten years -- are ready to give up virtually all the territory. There's no longer talk of needing this territory for security reasons. "Strategic depth" and so forth has no meaning militarily anymore. So, you don't hear that argument.
It's the settlers who want to hold on to the territory, and the settlers fortunately are not popular, as we saw with the Gaza withdrawal. They launched an enormous campaign, and an emotional campaign, and they didn't succeed. People don't care and do not support the settlers. In that sense the population is ready to get out. Most of the population feel that holding onto the territories is actually a liability. The question is how to get out, and because of the failure of the Oslo Accords, the breakdown of the Camp David talks, the second Intifada which was very, very bad for Israel -- very bad. I can't say that strongly enough.
In what sense? In the loss of life, or [as an] attack on Israel's core sense of its ... ?
Loss of life. It's the first time Israelis were scared. We've had terrorism before, but you have this big macho, "We're fine." That didn't happen in this Intifada. We were scared, because every other day there was a terrorist attack, you never knew where it was coming from. It was very serious and coming on the heels of the failure of the peace process led to this idea that there's no partner. This is basically the attitude on both sides, by the way. The Palestinians were terribly disillusioned with Oslo and the "negotiations." And so, you get this radicalization on both sides.
How do we handle it? First of all, a major campaign for years about the settlements so that people continuously know how much more land we're taking and what it means for the Israeli public. The second thing is simply to say that clearly the conflict isn't serving Israel, the occupation is harming Israel, and going at it, I must say, very much from a self-interest idea, because it's very hard today to persuade Israelis that the Palestinians are gentle and want peace.
We tried through dialogue and appearing with Palestinians to say, "Look, for pragmatic reasons, they have agreed long ago [to a] two-state solution. The population on both sides support two-state solution." We simply try to make the argument that holding on to the territories and continuing with the settlements perpetuates the conflict, and that it's the occupation that is causing the trouble and bringing us insecurity. It's not an easy argument, as I say, because people feel on both sides that there's no partner. But the other thing is that today, if you're going to blow up the issue of Iran and radical Islam, then it should be obvious that the Arab/Israeli conflict, specifically the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, merely serves the militants on the other side. It's a vehicle for them to whip up mobilized support.
So, even taking it from that angle, if you want to put it tactically, it happens to be true. The Lebanon war strengthened the militants around the Middle East and inside the Palestinian community because they saw this standing up to this Israeli war machine. That does not serve our interests. You can talk in very pragmatic terms, but the basic problem is the that the majority of Israelis and the majority of Palestinians are ready for the two-state solution. The real problem is this unilateralism, this idea that there's no partner.
Ultimately, the major issue today is getting our own government to say, okay, we know what these solutions are out there, there are lots of solutions out there, let's do it.
I think the United States has a role here. This issue of talking with Syria -- we could have peace with Syria. I'm convinced of it. The Syrians have been trying for over two years to open negotiations because of their own domestic problems. We've had a number of prime ministers, including right-wing prime ministers, who have been willing to give up the Golan Heights, which is obviously the price we have to pay for peace. The issue, when there were negotiations, was over a very small area of land that was disputed in a corner of the Sea of Galilee. We could reach a peace. Asad said just recently that in six months we could have an agreement. It's the United States that is opposed to talks between Israel and Syria, because the United States has its own problems with Syria.
I've been advocating, and in the movement we're advocating, some kind of package deal. Let the Americans get into this and make a deal with the Syrians over Iraq and various issues. But at the moment it's the Americans who are holding us back. There are many members of the present government in Israel who are interested in negotiating with Syria, but Olmert, the [acting] prime minister, has said repeatedly he will not do it, and I'm convinced that it's because of the United States.
Next page: The Lebanon War
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