Last week’s official announcements about the renewal of the diplomatic process on July 20 put the chair of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, into emergency mode. He has spent the past 10 years as head of the veteran, left-wing, extraparliamentary movement. During seven of those years, talks with the Palestinians were either gridlocked or completely frozen.
Oppenheimer is facing a difficult test. He has to lead a campaign to win public support among Israelis for the implementation of a two-state solution. He hopes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be swept up in this wave of support and be prodded to take a historic step forward. And he is organizing this campaign even though the Israeli peace camp has become something of a pariah among some of the leaders of the political center, headed by the Chairwoman of the Labor Party Knesset member Shelly Yachimovich.
Oppenheimer really felt it on his flesh. He ran for a slot on the Labor Party’s Knesset list, only to discover that Yachimovich had blocked him from obtaining a realistic place because he was considered too far to the left. The head of the Labor Party’s greatest concern was that placing him on the list would prevent people on the right from voting for the party, particularly because he had waged a longstanding battle against construction in the settlements. Yachimovich eventually paid a steep price in Knesset seats for abandoning the banner of the diplomatic process. She eventually admitted that she had been wrong. Oppenheimer will neither forget nor forgive.
The chairman of Peace Now has been very busy for the past few days, putting together a public campaign that will present the renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians as the state of Israel’s moment of truth. Are we headed toward becoming a binational state, or will we remain the Jewish state? He believes that the Israeli public is starting to understand the full significance of a binational state. He is therefore putting together a kind of “intimidation campaign” with the message that abandoning the two-state solution means abandoning the idea of a democratic Jewish state for perpetuity.
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