How the Oslo Opposition Movement Plays Into the Hands of the “Peace Now” Camp

In the left-wing newspaer, Al HaMishmar, back in October, 1993, an intimate of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, industrialist Yekutial Federman, published a simple public relations strategy for the PM to deal with the increasing opposition to the Oslo accords. His counsel was simple: isolate and demonize the opposition to the accords. Federman counseled Rabin to portray the opposition as being totally ideologically oriented in a non-ideological society, while being concerned only for their real estate which may soon be up for grabs in a forthcoming peace deal. Federman presented the odds as very easy: 3 or 5 percent of Israeli society against the desire of everybody else for peace.

Federman assured Rabin that he could rely on the precedent of the failed opposition to the peace treaty with Egypt and the devastation of Yamit and eighteen other settlements in the Sinai, as demolished by the icons of the Israeli right – Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan, who in 1982 were then the prime minister, Defence minister and IDF chief of staff.

For the last seven years, the protest movement against the Oslo accords has functioned in accordance with the analysis of Yekutial Federman. The leaders of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan and the Jordan Valley and the few ideologues whom they have managed to align themselves with have organized themselves on the basis of the idea that if they yell loud enough about their concern for the parcels of land upon which they live, and show themselves to be reasonable people who believe in Zionism and living a normal life, then the Israeli government will back down from the Oslo process.

What we have here is a community of people who essentially convince themselves to be more convinced by the day, while not addressing the concerns of 90% of the people of Israel, who do not perceive the importance of areas beyond the green line. The people of the Golan have not stressed enough that Syrian control of the Golan would represent a life threat to the people of the Galil. The council of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria have not conducted any thorough nor systematic effort to educate the people of greater Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheva and Jerusalem that the permanent deployment of the Palestinian Liberation Army in Judea and Samaria will threaten the entire coastal plain of Israel, let alone the Negev and Jerusalem.

Essentially, the Oslo opposition movements have unwittingly served the interests of Federman formula, and strengthened the notion promoted by the “Peace Now” camp that the opposition is only interested in promoting a minority ideology and the private interests of their own parcels of real estate. The Oslo opposition movement has consistently ignored the Sadat/Yamit precedent. The people who lived in Yamit were peaceful people, some of whom were ideologically committed to Zionism. Once the Israeli government had convinced the people of Israel that it peace was more important than any sentiments for Yamit and its suburbs, 95% of the people of Israel supported the demolition of eighteen thriving Jewish communities.

Today, the settlers and the Oslo opposition movement project themselves as nice people with friendly faces a string of advertisements, as if this would prevent them from being moved out of their homes in the interests of what the public perceives to be a peace agreement.

So long as the public assumes that what the other side is offering is peace, public opinion in Israel will support the “peace now” position that supports the uprooting of settlements, no matter how many people have to be removed.

What the settlement movement and the Oslo opposition have not done is to conduct any kind of campaign to convince the public that the other side does not want peace.