Summary
The Israeli ‘peace camp’ movement. In Pappe’s account in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, it produced the guidelines on which Pax Americana and the Oslo Accords were based, while always evading the 1948 issue and sidelining the refugee question.
Details
- After 1967 the Israeli left wing was dubbed the ‘Peace Now’ movement and its members ‘custodians’: Israelis who wanted to hold the Occupied Palestinian Territories as bargaining chips in future negotiations, while accepting settlements in Greater Jerusalem and certain settlement blocks (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.275).
- It was given to the Israeli ‘Peace Camp’ to produce the ‘common wisdom’ on which the American peace effort based its guidelines for a settlement (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.275).
- The architects of the Oslo formula were Israeli intellectuals of the ‘peace camp’, institutionalised in an ex-parliamentary movement called Peace Now, with several political parties on their side; Peace Now has always evaded the 1948 issue and sidelined the refugee question, and did the same in 1993 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.278).
- Peace Now is listed among the extra-parliamentary groups in 2006 each with its own favourite recipe for tackling the ‘demographic problem’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.287-288).
- The Geneva Accord is, for Pappe, more or less the best offer the Israeli Jewish peace camp proved able to come up with in the beginning of the twenty-first century, and it confined ‘return’ to the West Bank and Gaza without acknowledging the ethnic cleansing (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.283-284).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oslo Accords, Right of Return, Fortress Israel