Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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 the Jewish state and the Palestinian territories. In 2000, after the collapse of the Clinton Administration's peace talks...
...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...
...there are indeed Israelis who still want to reach out to Palestinians. They are part of what political scientist Ezrahi calls "the liberal-humanitarian strain" of the peace movement. Such activists help protect Arab Bedouins from armed Jewish settlers, challenge illegal demolition of Arab houses in East Jerusalem, keep an eye out for bullying Israeli guards at Palestinian checkpoints and fight in Israeli courts against army and police excesses. But even among these die-hard believers in peace, there is a sense of exhaustion, says David Shulman, a Hebrew University professor of Tamil language and culture who is an activist...
...grilled lamb to heal the gaping divisions in the Arab world. "If these breaches are so easy to solve by having lunch, then they should be having breakfast, lunch and dinner," said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Center of Lebanon at the American University of Beirut. As Palestinian survivors of the three-week military onslaught in Gaza scooped out the dead from the rubble, Khouri says the Arab world's squabbling rulers have never looked more "collectively mediocre...