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Civil Society and Peace Advocacy:
Marginalization and Perseverance
Israel is home to a vibrant "third sector" of more than 44,000
registered non-profit associations, among the world's largest
in terms of organizations, employees and financial activity per
capita (Civic Leadership, 2016). Civil society organizations
(CSOs) span the country's famously fractious and fragmented
social spectrum, in terms of communal affiliation and political
orientation. In recent years, Israeli civil society advocates
have garnered headlines, shaped political discourse and set
legislative agendas through advocacy for social justice and
economic equality – embodied by the mass demonstrations of
summer 2011, the largest sustained protest movement in the
country's history. A new generation of civic and parliamentary
leaders and CSOs emerged from that summer's Israeli echo
of the Arab Spring, advocating a broadly popular agenda
of socioeconomic change, albeit with mixed results to date
(Shaffir, 2016).
"Peace NGOs" form a small but prominent constellation within
the larger civil society sector. The term is a homogenizing
label for an eclectic cadre of civic and grassroots initiatives
working to advocate for human rights and conflict resolution,
to protest discrimination and occupation, to educate for peace
and otherwise transform perceptions and relations between
Israeli Jews and Arab-Palestinians, both within and across
the "Green Line." Among at least 100 registered organizations
working on the Israeli-Palestinian front are initiatives that
integrate peacebuilding content into environmental protection,
economic development, health and medicine, media, and
sport alongside the classic peacebuilding approaches of
advocacy, dialogue, multi-track diplomacy, peace education,
and nonviolent protest. The field includes veteran organizations
established in the first intifada and Oslo years alongside
nascent start-up initiatives. It is an ideologically diverse
sector, ranging from strategy development in dialogue with
any government, to officially "apolitical," to militantly critical in
terms of orientation toward the peace process, the occupation,
and the state. Indeed, activists and initiatives may have little in
common other than dedication to working across the conflict
divide – which is enough, at present, to set them apart from
the Israeli mainstream.
It is, to put it lightly, a hard time to be a "peace organization."
Since the eruption of the second intifada in the year 2000,
the official peace process has gone through a process
of trial and error, alternated between episodes of failed
negotiation, violent escalation and prolonged stagnation.
With no "political horizon" to embody the value of working
with "the other side," the field faces a chronic legitimacy crisis
(CMM Field Study, 2014); joint work has been stigmatized as
"normalization" in Palestine and effectively marginalized in
Israel, prompting repeated eulogies in the media (Kalman,
2014). Every crisis – the second intifada, the second Lebanon
War, asymmetric wars in Gaza with increasingly asymmetric
casualty counts – takes a toll as planned joint programs are
postponed, relations strained and hopes shattered amid
renewed hostilities and fatalities.
In recent years, moreover, attacks on "Leftists" have become
a cause célèbre for Israel's militant Right, whose own civil
society wing has orchestrated a campaign of digital character
assassination, organizational espionage, vandalism and
street violence to stigmatize and intimidate Israeli advocates
for peace and human rights. The assailants are buoyed by
multiple ministers of the current government, who use their
bully pulpits, bureaucratic prerogatives and legislative powers
to defame, harass and otherwise undermine prominent Israeli
CSOs that work to expose and oppose the systematic abuses
of the occupation.
Yet rumors of the demise of "peace activism," as the saying
goes, are greatly exaggerated – veteran organizations have
adapted a variety of different and complementary strategies,
persevered and in some cases even grown through the
tumult of the 21st century. A survey of cross-conflict activity
in July 2016 features a "Freedom March" of 800 Israelis and
Palestinians at an Israeli army checkpoint in the West Bank,
Palestinian and Israeli youth delegations attending multiple
summer dialogue programs in the country and outside, a
trend of interfaith "iftar" gatherings and "Ramadan Nights"
gatherings in Arab cities in Israel, Israeli activists delivering
water to Palestinian towns cut off by Israel's national water
company, informational tours of the Separation Barrier and
Palestinian East Jerusalem for Israelis and diaspora Jews,
Knesset sessions featuring prominent NGO advocacy on
anti-discrimination and peace process issues, bi-national
backgammon tournaments in East and West Jerusalem,
a documentary film screening on the Separation Barrier, a
delegation of Israeli peace NGOs meeting in Ramallah with the
PLOCommittee on Interaction with Israeli Society, and outdoor,
public Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and negotiation sessions
in Tel Aviv – among numerous other events. Women Wage
Peace, an Arab-Jewish women's activist movement formed
in response to the Israel-Hamas war of summer 2014, has
organized a greatly successful two-week long women's "March
of Hope" in October 2016, culminating in a demonstration of
20,000 people in front of the Prime Minister’s house on October
19, 2016. Probably most important, a major effort is underway,
aimed at mobilizing “Israel’s moderate majority”, and several
multi-track diplomacy efforts are being launched, aimed at
rebuilding trust and paving the way for the renewal of Israeli-
Palestinian peace negotiations, supported by regional powers
and the international community at large. In a relentlessly
challenging context, the field remains remarkably resilient.
In terms of political strategy, peace NGOs have responded to
the legitimacy crisis in different ways – radical Left groups have
focused on building legitimacy in Palestinian society, adopting
frames of joint struggle or co-resistance, solidarity and
nonviolent direct action against the occupation. In divergent
fashion, other initiatives have moved to broaden legitimacy
in Israeli society, by engaging with Israeli constituencies that
have traditionally been alienated from or outright opposed
to peace activism. This includes a groundbreaking series of
programs engaging in inter-communal dialogues on peace
involving Haredi, Russian, and Arab civil society leaders,
