But the election of 1977 put the nation in the hands of what many in the Labor Zionist camp regarded as the “Other Israel,” the more religious and traditional Sephardim and the religious and non-socialist among the Ashkenazim. This rendered many in the Labor ranks open to a revaluation of the persistence of the Arab siege as not a rejection of the New Jew who was to have made Israel a normal state with a normal people, but a rejection of the Old Jew represented by Likud. It rendered them more open to arguments by the Peace Movement that if only power could be wrested back from Likud and won by those willing to return all the territories then peace would follow.
This was the rhetorical stance of the Peace Movement from 1977 to 1992, when Likud either dominated or was an equal partner in Israeli governments, and the position won more and more adherents from the ranks of Labor’s constituency.
The growth of the Peace Movement was accompanied by the evolution of two auxiliary camps. The so-called New History entailed a largely bogus rewriting of the history of the state with the aim of demonstrating Jewish culpability; the corollary of such claims was that Arab grievances were legitimate and if Israelis only recognized their sins, properly reformed themselves, and became sufficiently accommodating, then peace would follow.
Adherents of the second movement, post-Zionism, argued that Zionist dogma stood in the way of peace and that if the state would strip itself of its Jewish accouterments, such as the Law of Return, Hatikvah and a flag with the star of David, another obstacle to peace would be removed.
The Peace Movement’s stance in fact was as divorced from reality as had been German Jews’ blaming of Polish Jews for anti-Semitism, or secular European Jews’ blaming of the religious, or socialist Jews’ blaming of the Jewish bourgeoisie. But proponents of the Movement, cowed by the persistence of the siege and desperate to see its end, chose to delude themselves. They grasped at any seemingly positive statement coming from an Arab political figure and ignored all the countervailing evidence.
For example, the PLO’s proxy representative in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, declared in 1992, “We have not conceded and will not surrender any of the … commitments that have existed for more than 70 years… We have within our Palestinian and united Arab society the ability to deal with divided Israeli society… We must force Israeli society to cooperate… with our Arab society and eventually to gradually dissolve the ‘Zionist entity.'” He made other statements in the same vein.
Yet Husseini was a Peace Movement favorite. Mordechai Bar-On, a founder of Peace Now and author of the most definitive history of the Peace Movement, wrote of the period before Oslo, the time of the Husseini quote, “A new generation of Palestinian leaders was emerging… Younger people like… Faisal Husseini… Most of the peace groups on the Israeli side maintained contacts with these new leaders and tried to persuade Israelis that these Palestinians could be partners in negotiations.”
Labor, under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabi, ran and won in the 1992 election on a platform of standard Labor positions with regard to the territories. But, under pressure from the growing ranks of the Peace Movement, drawn largely from constituents of his own party, Rabin soon capitulated to a “peace process” along the lines dictated by the Peace Movement. As noted, even the subsequent blatant promotion of terror by Arafat and his subordinates, and the horrendous acts of terror that soon wracked Israel, did not deter the Labor-Meretz coalition from its disastrous course.
