[Antiracism] The View From Tel Aviv Peace Movement

[Carolyn Oppenheim]

To All:
  A voice less often heard from Israel is the peace movement working on
governmental changeabout the larger questions (different from RHR work) and
that is what I am forwarding, below.
    There is a link to the longer article appearing now in the Nation
on-line and written by an an old journalism colleague of mine.
HillelSchenker has been a peace activist in israel for close to 40 years and
he is editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal
<http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=1203>the only joint Israeli-Palestinian
Journal coming out of Israel working on the peace issue.

So, here is an excerpt from The View from Tel
Aviv<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/schenker?rel=hp_picks>in
the current
*Nation* online by Hillel Schenker, their Tel Aviv correspondent, that I
think would shed a lot of light on a voice we are not hearing from Israel.

"Not all Israelis supported military action. On Saturday night, the day the
aerial bombardments began, a demonstration was organized in Tel Aviv, just
by e-mail and word of mouth, protesting the military action and calling for
an immediate cease-fire and a return to negotiations. It drew more than
l,000 participants.

On Tuesday evening, the Israeli PeaceNGO Forum (many joint
Israeli-Palestinian groups), a coalition of over seventy groups that work
for peace and coexistence, met in Tel Aviv to formulate its position--most
appropriately, in the Society for a Beautiful Israel building next to the
Yarkon River. It resolved to issue a three-point declaration:

1) to call for an immediate Israeli unilateral ceasefire, without regard to
how Hamas reacts, in the spirit of an
op-ed<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/opinion/31grossman.html>that
was published in both
*Ha'aretz* and the *New York Times* by leading Israeli author David Grossman
(whose voice carries special moral authority because his youngest son was
killed on the last, unnecessary day of the 2006 Lebanon War);

 2) to declare that the killing of innocent civilians, on both sides, is a
moral crime, and to identify with the suffering of the populations in Gaza
and in the Israeli south;

 3) to simultaneously call for a renewal of the peace process, based upon
the Arab Peace Initiative<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/opinion/31grossman.html>,
as the only alternative.

 An ad announcing the initiative will be published in *Ha'aretz* on Friday,
the daily read by Israeli decision-makers, and members of the forum will
take buses to the south hoping to reach a hill that overlooks both Gaza and
Sderot, where they will issue the declaration in the presence of local and
international media representatives to give it the broadest possible
exposure--that is, if the army doesn't stop them first because it is a
closed military zone.

It was also decided that representatives of the forum will meet with the
ambassadors of the United States, Russia, the European Union, Egypt, Jordan
and Turkey to call upon them to act as facilitators to end the violence and
resume negotiations. Their counterparts in the Palestinian PeaceNGO forum, a
coalition of about forty organizations, met Wednesday in Ramallah and will
also issue a statement. Another quarter page ad on the front page of *
Ha'aretz* by the veteran Peace Now movement will declare in bold letters
"Now is the time to stop!", accompanied by a warning to Barak, Livni and
Olmert "not to repeat the mistakes of the second Lebanon War..."

At a Thursday evening meeting of the Israeli Council for Peace Initiatives,
a forum of leading Israeli academics, security figures, industrialists,
media people and activists, it was noted that there are times when a crisis
situation shatters the inertia that affects many of the players in a
particular context, and it can even lead to major constructive
transformations and initiatives.

Thursday's targeted killing of a Hamas leader, and the increased firing of
rockets from Gaza at the southern Israeli cities of Beersheva, Ashkelon and
Ashdod, are a dangerous escalation of the hostilities.

Amid the growing cacophony of violence, a powerful counterpoint was heard in
Jerusalem Thursday evening opposite the prime minister's residence, when a
group called Another Voice from Sderot called for an immediate cease-fire,
for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians. Among the placards they
carried were two which read "Free Israel" and "Free Palestine."

It is to be hoped that sanity will prevail, on all sides."



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