Word: gaza
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Israeli peaceniks are lonely people these days. The Gaza war may have sparked global protests condemning the heavy number of Palestinian civilian casualties. But inside Israel, peace demonstrations gathered only a few hundred protesters, who were swiftly shouted down by mobs yelling "Death to Arabs...
Have Israelis given up on peace? It can seem that way. Polls show that more than 90% of Israeli Jews favored the blitz on Gaza. But in truth, the demise of the Israeli peace movement has been a long, drawn-out agony. Its main advocate, Peace Now, was once able to lure hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets. But after the Oslo accords with the Palestinians in 1993, the steam started to go out of the peace movement. Israelis became convinced that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat played a double game, talking peace but battling Israelis from within...
...that was enough to make Israeli peace activists doubt their mission. But worse was to come. In 2005, just after the last Israeli soldier left Gaza - which Israel had occupied since 1967 - a Palestinian rocket arced its way from the territory into Israel, and thousands more followed. Israeli leftists had always believed in "land for peace" - the idea that if Palestinians had the real estate on which to create a viable nation, they would learn to live side by side with Israel. But as Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, says, "In the end, we didn...
...pictures of life under Hamas in Gaza...
...experience of the Gaza pullout convinced even some of the most ardent peace activists that turning over full control of the West Bank to the Palestinians could be dangerous. With land for peace discredited, the Israeli public turned to deterrence, using the strongest army in the region to crush opponents. Once Palestinians realize that they cannot defeat Israel - the thinking goes - Israel's other adversaries will...