Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s familiar voice blared from the car radio in the noon hours of Jan. 15. “The conference convening today in Paris is useless,” the prime minister opined. On the roadside rose a giant, colorful billboard showing protesters carrying Palestinian flags captioned, in Arabic, “Soon we will be the majority.” Those wishing to find out who is behind the campaign of billboards lining roads throughout the country and ads filling newspaper pages are invited to call a speed-dial number.

I called the number. I listened to the recorded message and was persuaded that Netanyahu was right. The international conference in Paris designed to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was indeed futile. But not because, as the prime minister claimed, the views expressed at the conference hardened the positions of the Palestinians and distanced them from the negotiating table. The recorded message persuaded me that the conference did not contribute to peace and to reviving the moribund negotiations, because the Israeli peace camp had given up the fight even before the conference started.

The white flag of surrender (giving up on coexistence) is riding high above the new campaign initiated by well-known peace activists, who joined together under the auspices of a group calling itself Commanders for Israel’s Security. By waiving this flag of surrender, by warning Israelis of a majority of Arabs, they are telling participants of the Paris conference that even the mainstream of the Zionist left in Israel does not support their diplomatic road map for an agreed-upon permanent arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians, under the auspices of the Arab world and with the support of the international community.

“Soon we will be the majority,” a man says in Arabic on the recorded message. He repeats the words in Hebrew, with a heavy Arabic accent. Then comes the voice of Maj. Gen. Amnon Reshef, who heads the organization of some 250 senior retired defense officials. “Angered by Palestinian ads?” he asks. “I am too. But these are just ads. In a few days they’ll be gone.” And then comes the crux — a sentence designed to generate xenophobic sentiment that has nothing whatsoever to do with values such as peace, reconciliation, coexistence and fair dialogue: “What will not go away are the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank,” Reshef goes on, and warns, “They want to be the majority here. If we do not separate from them, Israel will be less Jewish and less secure.”