The 2006 Lebanon War and the Israeli Peace Forces
By Joel Beinin
Those who remember Israel’s 1982 war against Lebanon will recall many similarities with the 2006 war: brutal attacks against civilians; widespread destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure; indiscriminate air bombardments; use of cluster bombs, etc. There was also an Israeli-Jewish opposition to both wars. In 1982 that opposition became massive and mainstream. But in 2006 the opposition, though persistent and militant, remained politically marginal.
On the first day of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, about 200 protestors gathered to express their opposition. Within weeks their numbers reached 10,000. These early demonstrations were organized by radical Israelis, many of them non-Zionists. Following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, on September 25, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding the resignations of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and establishment of a judicial commission to investigate the massacre. Most of these demonstrators considered themselves Zionists. Many were supporters of Peace Now, the largest Zionist peace organization.
An investigative commission headed by Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan was appointed. It concluded that Sharon “disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps” and recommended that he resign or that the prime minister should dismiss him. One peace activist, Emil Grunzweig, was murdered by a right wing extremist as he was leaving a demonstration that demanded implementation of the commission’s report.
Similarly, 200 people protested in Tel Aviv against the bombing of Lebanon hours after it began on July 13, 2006. Four days later, 600-800 people marched through the streets of Tel Aviv opposing the war. On July 22, about 2,000 people, including many Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel organized by the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality and the National Democratic Alliance, demanded an end to the assault on Lebanon. This demonstration forthrightly repudiated George W. Bush’s “Broader Middle East” policy. In addition to calling for the resignation of the prime minister and defense minister demonstrators chanted “We will not kill, we will not die in the name of Zionism” and “We will not die and will not kill in the service of the United States.” On August 5, a coalition of several thousand Zionists and non-Zionists demonstrated in Tel Aviv, including former Knesset members of the liberal Zionist Meretz party, Mossi Raz, Naomi Hazan and Ya‘el Dayan.
The Coalition of Women for Peace was a dynamic and prominent force against the war. In addition to organizing a demonstration of 1,000 people on July 29, Khulud Badawi, a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel, and Yana Knopova, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, reported over a dozen anti-war demonstrations and vigils led by Israeli women. Their actions inspired international protests, many organized by Jewish groups, in nearly sixty cities around the world. At one such demonstration in San Francisco, Henri Piciotto, a Jew of Lebanese origin and chairman of the board of Jewish Voice for Peace, a national organization with 20,000 members and supporters (www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org), was arrested with sixteen others.
During the war one Israeli officer was jailed for refusing to deploy to Lebanon. Three more were jailed for refusing to serve in the West Bank. Others evaded service without being charged in military courts. Yonatan Shapiro, a helicopter pilot who was dismissed from the air force reserves after he refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, told the London Observer that he spoke with several F-16 pilots who intentionally missed their assigned targets in Lebanon because they feared civilians were present.
However, unlike in 1982, the Israeli peace movement has not become a mass phenomenon in 2006. What explains this difference? One element of the explanation is that Israel’s devastation of Lebanon was coordinated with and received unlimited support from the Bush administration, while Europe stood idly by. The other element is the nature of Israel’s peace forces.
Some Israeli Jews have consistently criticized their government and sought peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors. But criticism of Israeli militarism was politically marginal until 1982. The peace movement which emerged in response to the invasion of Lebanon gathered strength and peaked during the first Palestinian intifada of 1987-91. During this decade hundreds of soldiers and officers refused to serve in Lebanon or the occupied Palestinian territories. Some served repeated jail sentences. The many acts of solidarity with the Lebanese and Palestinian people included meetings with official representatives of the PLO, which were then illegal.
The peace movement became a mass phenomenon in the 1980s because many Israelis who considered themselves Zionists were shocked by their government’s excesses in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories. Because the first Lebanon war was conducted by a Likud government led by Menachem Begin, many Labor Zionists – kibbutz and trade union members, most of the intelligentsia, the women’s movement, and others – believed that this was not “their” war. Consequently, they could oppose it without raising fundamental questions, even as radical acts like refusing military service challenged the central position of the army in Israeli society, culture, and politics.
Opposing the Lebanon war brought many Zionist peace activists to call for negotiations with the PLO and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. They sought peace treaties that guaranteed recognition and security for Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories. But they did not understand that the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt was unacceptable to the Arab world because it ignored the Palestine question and facilitated Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Disappointed with the Egyptian and Arab response to that treaty, they adopted a concept of peace in which Israel would live separately from its Arab neighbors in its own European world. “Us here, them there,” as prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak said regarding the Palestinians.
The Zionist peace forces were overjoyed when Israel and the PLO signed the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles, even though the agreement did not guarantee creation of a Palestinian state or full Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967. They rarely noted that during the 1990s the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem increased by over 70 percent. Few except the women’s Checkpoint Watch group monitored the many Israeli checkpoints established after 1991, which subjected Palestinians to daily humiliation and impeded economic activity. Largely because of the checkpoints, there was no “peace dividend” for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Instead, their standard of living deteriorated.
The Zionist peace camp did not think that leaving the extent of the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the political nature of the Palestinian entity to be established in the evacuated territories, the future of Israeli settlements and settlers, the status of Jerusalem, and the refugee question to “final status” talks was problematic. Many believed that the PLO would eventually drop the refugee issue altogether, since Israel has never, except briefly at the 1949 Rhodes talks, agreed to the return of a significant number of refugees.
Consequently, the Zionist peace forces were surprised and even outraged that Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s terms for peace at the June 2000 Camp David summit. They uncritically embraced Israel’s propaganda campaign depicting the Palestinians as responding to Barak’s “generous offer” with violence. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, they believed that Yasser Arafat never intended to sign a peace treaty with Israel and was “not a partner for peace.” This was all the more so regarding Hamas. They forgot that Israel had refused to negotiate with Abu Mazen despite his being approved as Arafat’s successor as president of the Palestinian Authority by both Israel and the United States.
Therefore, most of the Zionist elements of the Israeli peace movement arrived at the 2006 Lebanon war in a state of myopia and historical amnesia. Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War, the second intifada, and the January 2006 electoral victory of Hamas frightened them into accepting tactics of the army that they would previously have denounced. Israel was more united during the first month of the 2006 Lebanon war than at any time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
The prominent personalities and organizations of the Zionist peace movement supported the assault on Lebanon. At a Peace Now meeting on July 24 the movement’s leaders rejected a proposal to demand a cease fire. They argued that Peace Now supporters would not understand such a position and that a cease fire might help Hezbollah. On August 6, when it was becoming obvious that Israel’s war objectives could not easily be achieved, three leading Zionist novelists who had earlier supported the war – Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman –called for a cease fire.
Ignoring their leaders, grass roots activists of Peace Now and Meretz called for a “Zionist demonstration” to demand a cease-fire on August 11. Only as the war was about to end did the “leaders” adopt this demand. Widespread reports of a large land offensive to reach the Litani River revived the Zionist peace forces. They rejected this as a maneuver by the army high command to give the false appearance of a victory.
Why did the leaders of the Zionist peace movement refuse to oppose a totally unnecessary war? It should have been easy to oppose such a vicious assault directed primarily at Lebanese civilians. It was planned months before Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others on July 12, 2006. The two prisoners could have been retrieved through a prisoner exchange without firing a shot. The purpose of the war was purely militaristic – to restore Israeli deterrence.
The explanation is the unique character of Israel’s peace movement. The non-Zionist elements share the common values of progressive movements around the world. The Zionist elements are constantly caught in the contradiction of proving that they are loyal and patriotic Israelis while their human consciences rebel against the acts of their government. They are proud of serving in the Israeli army, especially as officers in elite combat units. They have great difficulty believing that the army high command and the many retired officer-politicians and others who see the world through a gun sight have no regard at all for Arab lives and not much more for Jewish lives. They oppose wars in principle and may understand that force will not provide Israel with security or resolve the conflicts with its neighbors. But they lack the political and moral courage to oppose a war in progress.
Israel is experiencing a multi-faceted crisis. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s popularity has plummeted. The army high command is in disrepute because of its military failures. The media have attacked Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz for selling $28,000 worth of stocks just three hours after the capture of the Israeli soldiers on July 12. He is under pressure to resign. Ehud Olmert’s plan for a unilateral Israeli redeployment from the West Bank is dead. The days of his government are probably numbered, and his Kadima party will likely experience a sharp decline, since it has no other program.
The intimate link of the Zionist peace movement to the Israeli military gives some small hope that the war may lead to a positive political change in Israel. Israel’s military failure in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War broke the taboo of criticizing the army, redrew the political map, and established the foundations for a mass peace movement a decade later. That movement failed to meet the challenges of the second Palestinian intifada and the 2006 Lebanon war. A quarter of a century of experience may produce a better outcome. Either way, this will offer little consolation to the Lebanese people. They have paid an enormous price in loss of human life, social ruin, and physical devastation for the possibility that Israel may learn a lesson.
Joel Beinin has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. He lived in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993 and Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, and 1993.. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
