'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 1: Daphna Golan

I have so much great material in my notebooks from my recent trip! Now, I'm going to start presenting some of the highlights from the interviews I did with various Israeli figures, mainly in the peace movement. These are, of course, in addition to the interview I did with Likud strategic thinker Efraim Inbar, which I already published here, and some highlights from the interview with Benjamin Pogrund, as published here. I have more from Pogrund that i might use sometime, too. he's a fascinating representative of a fairly influential brand of "Left" Zionism.

Daphna Golan is a long-time Jewish-Israeli activist for peace and human rights who runs a human-rights program in the law school of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We met in late February in the university’s Ramat Gan campus. She spoke very poignantly about how isolated she and other Israeli peace activists had felt during the Gaza war.

Even during the war there were only twenty people or so taking part in the weekly Women in Black antiwar protests. There was one antiwar demonstration in Tel Aviv with about 20,000 people in it. But most pathetic of all was an action that Peace Now organized here in Jerusalem: There were fewer than twenty people taking part.

Honestly, the war was the worst time for us, we were feeling so isolated. But it seemed so obvious to us that the war would not “achieve” anything except spread more misery and anger.

… During the war, of course, Israelis weren’t shown anything about what was happening inside Gaza. We don’t even have CNN on our cable offerings here. Mostly, what we shown on our t.v. was lots of ex-generals giving their ‘analysis’ of events. But it was meaningless technical gobbledygook: ‘Bank of targets’—what is that supposed to mean?

Later, as we walked out the campus’s main gate, she pointed to a fence where, she said, during the war some rightwing students had hung some very racist posters urging the killing of all the Gazans.

She recalled that she started tearing the posters down, whereupon some of the defenders of the posters came and surrounded her and started threatening her. She called the security guards from their nearby booth and they came and escorted her to safety. But when she then protested the hanging of the posters to the university authorities she felt she got no satisfactory response from them at all.

During the interview she talked about the strong effect the buiding of the Wall had had on relations between Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank:

The politics of separation that the Wall represents has been generally successful. We don’t go there and they don’t come here. It makes it much easier for politicians here to demonize all Palestinians.

One way that she and some of her friends have been using, to reduce the separation the Wall has caused, has been to support the small-scale “veggie coops” which have Israelis going into West Bank villages to buy organic fair-trade produce there and then distribute it among co-op members inside Israel. 

Golan talked about the sorry state of the Israeli left in general.

What is ‘the left’ here, anyway? Labour is not left. And Meretz? They supported the war. Hadash [Israel’s longtime Communist party] is the most interesting party on the left, and they have one of the most interesting upcoming political personalities: Dov Khenin. He’s an anti-Zionist. When he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv last autumn he got one-third of the vote—and Hadash won more seats there than Meretz did.

People are tired of Meretz. They are seen as old-fashioned and tied far too closely to the old kibbutz system.

It’s true Hadash is still mainly a party of Israeli Arabs, but they’ve doubled the number of Jews who voted for them. But they have a major problem in that they don’t have any women near the top of their list, so how can they present themselves as a party of the left?

She described Labour leader Ehud Barak as “one of the most dangerous people.” She, like many other members of the Israeli peace camp, heaped particular scorn on him for the declaration he made in early 2001 that he had made a “generous” peace offer to Yasser Arafat and that Arafat had capriciously turned it down. Therefore, Barak said frequently at that time and since, that proves that Israel “has no partner for peace.” The fact that Barak had been prime minister at the time—and one elected 18 months earlier on an explicitly pro-peace platform—gave his diatribe against Arafat considerable weight.

More recently, of course, Barak was the defense minister who masterminded the whole Gaza war. And more recently still, he has announced he will go into the upcoming Likud-led government.