Shortly before the Knesset elections of 2006, Ada Ya’alon mailed a personal letter to dozens of her friends. It was a long missive of about 3,000 words, philosophical, ideological and incisive. She wanted to convince her friends, almost all kitbbutz members and part of Israel’s historical Labor movement, “to transcend the psychological barrier” and not vote for Kadima or the Labor Party in the upcoming elections. She tried to persuade them to commit the inconceivable and vote Likud. She explained fervently and at length what had happened to the Israeli left over the past few decades, and how it had fallen captive to the impractical, utopian idea of a permanent peace with the Arabs. By doing so, she explained, the left had sacrificed its real, humanistic values, such as women's and minority rights.
Ada Ya’alon is the wife of Moshe Ya’alon, Israel's vice prime minister, minister of Strategic Affairs and former military chief of staff. Barring any dramatic last-minute changes, he will also be the next defense minister of the State of Israel. Ada's disillusionment happened even earlier to her husband Moshe, and what happened to the Ya’alons happened to large swathes of Israel’s historic peace camp.
The movement fell apart once the dream came crashing down, and its shattered fragments flew off in every conceivable direction. The camp which once encompassed about half of the Israeli electorate now holds something like fifteen or twenty seats in the Knesset (Meretz and Livni’s HaTenua Party, plus small groups of Lapid's Yesh Atid and Labor voters).
It’s not that the Israeli public stopped wanting peace. They still want it. They simply stopped believing that it is possible. They stopped thinking that there are people on the other side who would agree, at some point, to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the region. This crisis of trust was the result of Oslo, the Second Intifada, the Hamas coup in Gaza and the Palestinians’ refusal to accept the proposals of former prime minister Ehud Barak, former US president Bill Clinton, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni and former prime minister Ehud Olmert. It is more than just an ideological or political crisis. This crisis is emotional.
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