‘Sane Zionism’ vs. ‘Greater Israel’ -- A History of Peace Now
Following Anwar Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, peace negotiations had stalled due to hesitations by Prime Minister Menachem Begin who was allied with the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, religious nationalists who were promoting settlement in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank, that were captured by Israel during the 1967 war. The Peace Now movement (Shalom Achshav in Hebrew) began as an effort of IDF reservists to pressure Begin to accept the possibility of peace with Israeli’s largest enemy Egypt rather than holding on to all or part of the Sinai desert.
This brief book ably describes the struggle between these two energetic grassroots movements, but it was not a fair fight. Gush Emunim was supported by most of Begin’s cabinet, aggressively spearheaded by Begin’s single-minded Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon.
The peace treaty with Egypt was eventually signed and Peace Now then organized massive protests against Israel’s first war in Lebanon, in 1982, playing a major role in rallying 400,000 people (one-tenth of Israel’s population at the time) in a massive protest in Tel Aviv following the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. This eventually led to the forced resignation of Sharon as Minister of Defense. But the movement ultimately lost the struggle to prevent the massive expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories taken in 1967.
Peace Now cultivated a consciously patriotic coloration to attempt to mobilize a mainstream Israeli majority against the expansionist policies of Likud and other pro-settler forces, what Sifry calls “Sane Zionism.” He depicts Peace Now’s pragmatic orientation as clashing with the more radical positions of the leftist Sheli party and the Yesh Gvul (“there is a limit/border”) movement.
Nevertheless, Peace Now’s most committed supporters also engaged in disruptive tactics such as blocking traffic and aggressively confronting efforts to establish new settlements. Yet its reliance on the voluntary energies of activists who had to make a living placed them at a disadvantage against the ideologues of Gush Emunim, most of whom lived in settlements in the West Bank.
Growing up in the U.S., Sifry joined the socialist-Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, spent six months on a kibbutz, and planned to move to Israel in the 1980s; but a career opportunity in journalism intervened, an offer to work for The Nation magazine. Still, his left-Zionist connections made him a natural to document this history, interviewing many of the founding Peace Now activists -- including Abu Vilan, Janet Aviad, and Tzali Reshef -- for his senior thesis at Princeton.
Later in the book, Sifry recalls his 2024 visit to the modest offices of today’s Peace Now, no longer a mass grassroots movement, but a small professional organization known for its informative “Settlement Watch” program.
Then he discusses meeting with Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green, Palestinian-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli leaders of the Standing Together movement, which he regards as this generation’s grassroots parallel to Peace Now. Sifry describes them as opposing “The zero-sum game of competing oppressions, of competing unilateral claims to justice….” Recalling the October 7th murder of a revered colleague, a Jewish-Israeli anti-occupation activist, they chastised the Palestine Solidarity movement for “performative” actions against Israel, instead of supporting the efforts of Jews and Palestinians to arrive at a peaceful resolution of the conflict based on an end to the occupation.