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Developing an Israeli Grand Strategy toward
a Peaceful Two-State Solution
sensible, moderate Right-wing have much more in common
with the Center-Left than they do with people on the radical
Right wing fringes, and the equation also works the other way
around. There is an Israeli moderate majority... if its members
can unite as a ‘civil society bloc’ they can profoundly affect
the direction the country takes at this critical moment." Their
first steps have been organizing in the front-line communities
of recent years, on the Gaza border: "We are going to knock
on doors, hundreds of thousands of them, across the whole
country... in the places where people may have traditionally
voted for the Right, or been skeptical of the ‘peace camp’
but who now recognize that something is going wrong in
Israel" (Bronstein, 2016).
Opinion researcher Dahlia Scheindlin, who writes for the
unequivocally anti-occupation +972 blog – expresses a
similar critique. Scheindlin laments that, "There isn't enough
empathy [on the radical Left] for the Israeli Jewish mainstream
narrative – that's wrong, it's a lack of integrity, and it's bad for
the cause... strategically, if you don't internalize at least those
arguments that reflect substantive problems, or respect the
Jewish Israeli side, you won't be able to offer any solutions"
(Scheindlin 2016). Scheindlin traces this phenomenon to
a process of disillusionment of the far Left from attitudes
within mainstream Israeli society, beginning during the
second intifada, that led some in the activist camp to "give
up on Israelis."
This trend, echoed in the writing of some prominent Haaretz
and +972 columnists, has mirrored the Palestinian strategic
turn away from engagement with Israel and Israelis, in favor
of using international interventions – UN resolutions and
the boycott campaign – as a deus ex machina to coerce
Israel into ending the occupation. As Scheindlin explains,
"There was an evolving decision on the part of [some in]
civil society to go international, to speak internationally, to
write in English... and advocate for international pressure
in the belief that change would not come from within." This
occurred not in a vacuum, of course, but amid a rising
chorus of sometimes hyperbolic international condemnation
of Israel, embodied by the Durban convention, the BDS
movement, the Goldstone Report, the 2011 Flotilla crisis,
and sporadic attempts to prosecute IDF officers and Israeli
politicians in Europe.
According to Scheindlin, this international strategy had
unintended consequences, providing a convenient narrative
for smear campaigns from the Right, and eroding legitimacy
among mainstream Israelis, who she describes as "allergic
to moralizing" from the international community. The recent
Peace Index poll illustrates this; while 43% of their Jewish
respondents support withdrawal to the 1967 borders in the
context of a peace agreement, only 12% prefer that "the
international community forces Israel to withdraw" (Peace
Index 2016). More to the point, this tendency to prioritize
the international has eroded anti-occupation advocates'
effectiveness in communicating effectively with Israeli
society, precisely when the integrity of their advocacy is
under unprecedented attack: "There's been a conscious
reticence regarding the Israeli public. There hasn't been
khugei bayit
[grassroots meetings], they're not in dialogue
conceptually with the Israeli public, the Israeli discourse.
You have to acknowledge and take seriously security, and
the Israeli critiques."
Rahamim, Bronstein and Scheindlin are among numerous
other civil society peace advocates articulating the spirt of
heshbon nefesh
– the consciousness is there. Yet how can
this awareness be translated into a program that stands a
chance of engaging the same public that has tuned out the
two-states message – the skeptical Center, the demographics
that don't identify with the "peace camp"?
Speaking Across Sectors: Ayman Odeh
and Rubi Rivlin
In recent years, two promising examples have emerged
of political leadership that has changed the civil society
conversation in Israel – and from opposite ends of the
political spectrum. Two figures have succeeded in embodying
radically inclusive "big tent" approaches to Israel's incendiary
identity politics – emphasizing human dignity, shared
citizenship and cross-cutting societal solidarity, cognizant
of complexity, respectful of difference – in short, all that the
ruling coalition's rhetoric of hostile sectarianism is not. Both
figures have succeeded in influencing public discourse and
policy agendas, and inspiring reflection among audiences
far beyond the speaker's own political camp. Their models
are worthy of emulation – both what they are saying, and
how they are saying it.
The first is President Rivlin, whose 2015 "Tribes of Israel"
speech is the most – perhaps the only – influential set of
remarks ever delivered by an occupant of his otherwise
ceremonial office. Previously known as a Likud backbencher
and advocate of Greater Israel, Rivlin used a usually
perfunctory slot at the annual Herzliya policy conference
to suddenly hold a mirror to sea changes in Israeli society, to
electrifying effect. With a pair of pie charts, Rivlin introduced
what he calls the "New Israeli Order" – by simply detailing
the percentages of Israeli school children enrolled in the
country's four sectorally divided school systems – National
(secular Zionist); National Religious (Zionist Orthodox); Haredi
(Ultra-Orthodox) and Arabic – in 1990, and (projected) in
2018. The trend was clear – once dominated by a secular
Zionist majority, contemporary Israel is a society "in which
there is no longer a clear majority, or minority groups," but
rather "four principal 'tribes,' essentially different from one
another, and growing closer in size" (Rivlin 2015).
In detailing the practical implications, Rivlin offered a sobering
reality check – emphasizing the economic imperative of
integrating the impoverished Arab and Haredi populations,
and the impossibility of doing so without transcending the
prevailing "inter-tribal zero sum game" in which politics serves
as a sectoral competition over narrow policy agendas and
parochial resource allocation. On a deeper level, Rivlin
questioned the foundations of Israeli societal cohesion: "We
