When the Israeli prime minister and the PLO chairman shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993, Israeli peace activists had good reason to celebrate this major step on the long road to peace.This book tells the story of the Israeli peace movement and the role it played in that pursuit of peace. It is an eloquent, fascinating account of a remarkably diverse and determined cast of activists: from war-weary soldiers to hard-headed politicians, careful scholars to impassioned artists.Drawing on his experience in the peace movement, Bar-On provides intimate portraits of groups like Peace Now, Yesh Gvul, and the Women in Black, he also provides a sweeping historical synthesis of the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict, especially between 1967 and 1993.

What has become of Israel's peace movement? In the early 1980s, it was a major political force, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets; but since then, its importance has declined amid spiraling violence. Now, and especially since the second Intifada of 2000-5, the 'doves' of the Israel/Palestine conflict struggle to be heard over its 'hawks', and the days of mass mobilization are over. Doves Among Hawks charts the successes and failures of a beleaguered peace movement, from its formation after the Six-Day War to the current security-obsessed climate, where Israel's 'doves' seem to be fighting a lost and outdated battle. Samy Cohen's history of a peace process that once took on the Israeli settler movements exposes how that cause has been derailed and demoralized by suicide attacks. But the peace movement isn't dead--it has simply transformed. From human rights monitors to lobbies of the bereaved, Cohen reveals a multitude of smaller, grassroots organizations that have emerged with unexpected energy. These lawyers, doctors, army reservists, former diplomats and senior security personnel are the unsung heroes of his story.

The story of this movement reveals the horror of the occupation and the new hope for growing international solidarity.

This book discusses 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 book concludes that, despite its organizational decline and the zero credit given to it by the policy makers, 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.

The state of Israel is often spoken of as a haven for the Jewish people, a place rooted in the story of a nation dispersed, wandering the earth in search of their homeland. Born in adversity but purportedly nurtured by liberal ideals, Israel has never known peace, experiencing instead a state of constant war that has divided its population along the stark and seemingly unbreachable lines of dissent around the relationship between unrestricted citizenship and Jewish identity. By focusing on the perceptions and histories of Israel’s most marginalized stakeholders—Palestinian Israelis, Arab Jews, and non-Israeli Jews—Atalia Omer cuts to the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict, demonstrating how these voices provide urgently needed resources for conflict analysis and peacebuilding. Navigating a complex set of arguments about ethnicity, boundaries, and peace, and offering a different approach to the renegotiation and reimagination of national identity and citizenship, Omer pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of the single narrative and toward a new and dynamic concept of justice—one that offers the prospect of building a lasting peace.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

This is the first study to introduce the subject of Arab-Jewish relations and encounters in Israel from both conflict resolution and educational perspectives. Through a critical examination of Arab and Jewish encounter programs in Israel, the book reviews conflict resolution and intergroup theories and processes which are utilized in dealing with ethnic conflicts and offers a detailed presentation of intervention models applied by various encounter programs to promote dialogue, education for peace, and democracy between Arabs and Jews in Israel. The author investigates how encounter designs and processes can become part of a control system used by the dominant governmental majority's institutes to maintain the status quo and reinforce political taboos. Also discussed are the different conflict perceptions held by Arabs and Jews, the relationship between those perceptions, and both sides' expectations of the encounters. Abu-Nimer explores the impact of the political context (Intifada, Gulf War, and peace process) on the intervention design and process of those encounter groups, and contains a list of recommendations and guidelines to consider when designing and conducting encounters between ethnic groups. He reveals and explains why the Arab and Jewish encounter participants and leaders have different criteria of their encounter's success and failure. The study is also applicable to dialogue and coexistence programs and conflict resolution initiatives in other ethnically divided societies, such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Sri Lanka, where the minority and majority have struggled to find peaceful ways to coexist.