Israelis Protest Against Gaza Action
http://www.truthout.org/011209E
Jerusalem - Israel's once-mighty peace camp has been mostly silent
during its country's military assault on the Hamas organization in
Gaza - at least until Saturday night. Then, as the Jewish Sabbath
ended, more than 1,000 Israelis protested against the Gaza attacks in
front of the Ministry of Defence offices in Tel Aviv. It was the
first
and only public outburst in Israel against the conflict in the 15
days
since it began.
With the international community largely opposed to Israel's
campaign and with Israel's friends in the region - Turkey, Jordan and
Qatar - questioning their ties to Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert's government
could take solace in the fact that nine out 10 Israelis supported the
attack on Gaza.
Saturday night's protest might mark a turning point, however: The
demonstrators were not all peaceniks who oppose any and all war.
"This was a demonstration by people who supported the military
action when it started," said Avshalom Vilan, a member of the Knesset
from the left-wing Meretz party who attended the rally.
"But after three days of the bombing, it was enough," he said.
"We
couldn't achieve militarily any more than we already had. There was
no
justification for continuing the death and destruction."
It took Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua a week to reach his
conclusion. The 72-year-old fifth-generation Jerusalemite wrote in
the
Maariv newspaper last week: "The people of Gaza are first and
foremost
our neighbours, and we will live shoulder to shoulder with them
forever.
"We must, therefore, be very careful in the type, quality and
intensity and scope of the war we are now waging against them."
Nurit Baltiansky, the organizer of Saturday night's protest,
thinks the Israeli public has a long way to go before it can embrace
Mr. Yehoshua's message. "We're not there yet," she said, adding that
her organization, Peace Now, was only taking small actions -
newspaper
ads, distributing flyers, holding forums - "to educate the public."
"I was opposed to the war from the first day. I didn't think it
would work. You can't get rid of an organization like Hamas just by
military means.
"There weren't enough of us to protest, not at the beginning,"
she
said. "But once the ground invasion moved deeper into Gaza, the
number
grew."
Dan Leon, a long-time peace activist, finds the relative lack of
protest against Israel's action in Gaza disappointing. "In 1982, at
about the same point in our first war in Lebanon, we had a
demonstration of 100,000 people in Tel Aviv protesting against that
war. It's very different today," he said.
Barry Steinberg, a farmer and former kibbutznik in northern
Israel, offers a stark reason for the decline of the peace camp. "I
think we [Israelis] as a people have become more ruthless, more
willing to tolerate the killing of innocent people to attain our
goals," he said. "It's what disturbs me most about this conflict in
Gaza."
Mr. Steinberg, originally an American, thinks it was the second
Palestinian intifada, or uprising, from 2000-2005 that turned many
Israelis hard. People, he said, had been more empathetic toward the
Palestinians after the 1993 Oslo Accords. But when the failed peace
talks at Camp David were followed by the armed uprising in the summer
of 2000, then by wave after wave of suicide bombings, "people stopped
caring as much about others and worried only about themselves," he
said.
"But I also have to say that I don't know why these international
protests against the war have to take on such an anti-Israel tone,
questioning the legitimacy of Israel."
Mr. Vilan, the member of Knesset, agreeds. "Maybe Israel's
reaction [to Hamas rockets] was too strong.... But to be honest,
Hamas
has to remember that eight years of attacking us couldn't continue."
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