Israelis Protest Against Gaza Action
Patrick Martin, The Globe and Mail
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.
Protesters in Tel Aviv. (Photo: AFP / Getty Images)
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."