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Peace now celebrates its 30th year of existence

A man looks at posters of various activities by Peace Now during an exhibition to mark the movements’ 30th anniversary in Tel Aviv, Israel, yesterday. PHOTO :AP

Israel’s largest peace group marked what it said was a bittersweet milestone on Tuesday — 30 years since its founding, Peace Now’s call for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel has largely been embraced by the Israeli mainstream, but peace itself remains painfully elusive.

For the anniversary, Peace Now pitched a large white tent in Tel Aviv’s central square, site of Israel’s largest peace rallies, but also the spot where Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist trying to sabotage Rabin’s attempt to trade land for peace with the Palestinians.

Only a few hundred invited guests attended afternoon panel discussions inside the tent in the epicenter of secular Israel, perhaps reflecting what critics say has been one of Peace Now’s biggest failings — to reach out to working class or religious Israelis, who traditionally hold hardline views.

In a side tent, an exhibition of posters documented Peace Now’s history, from its founding in 1978 by several hundred army reserve officers, to the present. Reviewing the display, Peace Now veteran Yair Inov, 81, recognized himself in a photograph from the 1980s, showing a few activists protesting at the site of a new West Bank settlement.

“To a certain extent, it’s a sad day,” Inov said. “I cannot call this [the past 30 years] a success. A peace agreement with the Palestinians, that’s the key.”

Just a few hours earlier, at a news conference down the road from the Peace Now tent, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator warned that prospects for a peace deal this year are increasingly slim.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators would have to intensify the pace of talks dramatically in order to meet the US-suggested target date set this year, said Yossi Beilin, a founder of the Geneva Initiative, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have drafted an unofficial peace deal to show decision-makers that it is possible.

At present the leaders of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams meet once or twice a week, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hold intermittent talks.

“Our main message is that those who really want to make peace in a year need to change their mode of operations dramatically,” said Beilin, a key player in negotiations in the 1990s and a participant in a failed Middle East summit in 2000. “If the behavior remains what it is today ... you cannot reach an agreement this year.”

The Palestinians want a state in all of the territories Israel captured in the war of 1967 — the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Israel has expressed willingness to give up land, but has said it would not return to the 1967 borders and intends to hang on to large illegal Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.

The most explosive issues are the fate of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and a division of Jerusalem.

When Peace Now was founded, negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel were still considered radical ideas by many Israelis. In subsequent decades, the country remained bitterly divided among those ready to give up much of the land captured in 1967 and those who were not.

However, the Israeli consensus has shifted in recent years, and polls suggest a majority of Israelis would be willing to reach a land-for-peace deal. However, many Israelis also doubt the Palestinians could implement an agreement, in part because of the growing influence of the Islamic militant Hamas.

Peace Now leader Yariv Oppenheimer said that Israeli settlement expansion has continued without letup in the past three decades — some 450,000 Israelis now live on war-won land claimed by the Palestinians — and that it will become increasingly difficult to set up a Palestinian state.

“It seems that the most terrible thing that happened to us is that our position became the mainstream position, but on the other hand it’s much harder to implement it on the ground than it was 30 years ago,” he said.

“We had some achievements and the settlers had a lot of achievements as well,” he said. “But without Peace Now, I think the West Bank would look even worse than it looks today.”


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