A Book I'll Probably Enjoy Reading

It's called:

The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream
TAMAR S. HERMANN
The Open University of Israel
The Israel Democracy Institute
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS





From the blurb:

This books deals with the predicament of the Israeli peace movement, which, paradoxically, following the launching of the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993, experienced a prolonged, fatal decline in membership, activity, political significance, and media visibility.

After presenting the regional and national background to the launching of the peace process and a short history of Israeli peace activism, the book focuses on external and internal processes and interactions experienced by the peace movement, after some basic postulates of its agenda were actually, although never explicitly, embraced by the Rabin government.

The analysis brings together insights from social movement theory and theories on public opinion and foreign and security policymaking. The book's conclusion is that, despite its organizational decline and the zero credit given to it by the policymakers, in retrospect it appears that the movement contributed significantly to the integration of new ideas for possible solutions to the Middle East conflict in the Israeli mainstream political discourse.

Tamar, who I know, explains her book and approach further here:

Why didn't the movement and its activists get any credit for this cognitive and political transformation, not even during the Oslo heyday? Why have both the Israeli upper echelons and the general public consistently turned a cold shoulder to peace activists, and how did these negative relations with the mainstream effect the ideology, strategy, tactics and organizational structure of the peace movement in the years since the signing of the first Oslo declaration of principles in August 1993?...

...former IDF Chief of Staff and current deputy Prime Minister, Moshe (Bougie) Ya'alon, referred to the Israeli peace movement, Peace Now, as "a virus." ...This was - at least thus far - the latest episode in a long chain of attacks, direct and indirect, by Israeli officials, members of the media and often even the "man in the street," against peace activism and the peace movement. The common denominator of all these attacks is the prevalent accusation that the movement and its activists are "unpatriotic" and "self-haters," who, more than the "natural" Israeli and Jewish values and interests, cherish universal values such as human rights and the national right to self-determination (in more refined wording), and the enemy's ideas and interests (in blunter terms).

These attacks are not at all self-evident, considering the small membership and low profile of the peace movement in the last two decades or so, certainly since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000. The intriguing question then, is why do they even bother? If the movement is indeed so small and unnoticeable, why is it the target of so much anger, mistrust, and verbal and non-verbal violence in Israel, yet popular in international public opinion?