'Peace Now' initiative still elusive in Israeli process

TEL AVIV, Israel - They were angry young men then, angry because they thought Israel was missing the chance to make peace with an Arab enemy.

So they decided to write a letter. The letter sparked a movement. The movement brought tens of thousands of Israelis into the streets and helped move a reluctant government to sign a peace accord with Egypt.

Twenty years later, the men - joined by the women they initially excluded - are not so young, and the peace they sought with all the Arabs is still elusive.

Their movement was dubbed Peace Now, to their consternation - they thought it was too insistent, too "American." After two decades the name seems to mock their concern. Peace has not come "now," and the present animosities between Israel and the Palestinians suggest peace may yet have a long wait.

For many who helped draft the original letter, such as Tzali Reshef, the current impasse in Israeli-Arab relations is discouraging. "I don't think we have all the time in the world," Reshef said. "In the Middle East, if you have a deadlock, the way it gets broken is with a war."

Their disappointment is all the more bitter for having come so close to success. Three years ago, the government had adopted the basic goals of Peace Now: peace with Arab neighbors, return of land to the Palestinians. But leaving a huge celebratory rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

Peace Now watched in dismay as the soaring hopes of those times fell into suspicion and hostility, and Rabin's Labor Party government was replaced by a coalition, led by the Likud party, opposed to the negotiations Labor pursued.

"It caused a depression that paralyzed people," said Janet Aviad, one of the early activists of the movement. "We didn't immediately understand the political tragedy of Rabin's death. I never dreamed that from November to May our world would explode."

There are now no negotiations with Lebanon and Syria. Egypt is frosty toward Israel; Jordanians are angry at their king's embrace of the Jewish state. The peace accords with the Palestinians are in disarray, as both sides live in apprehension of violence from the other.

Faced with a government hostile to its goals, Peace Now feels that it has little voice in the current Israeli discussion. "There is a change in the country that has marginalized Peace Now," acknowledged Avishai Margalit, one of the intellectual founders of the movement.

For some, there is comfort in a long view backward. The movement has waxed and waned in Israeli public favor, sometimes riding the crest of popular sentiment, sometimes sounding a forlorn and futile note of protest. Peace Now demonstrators have been beaten by police, attacked by other Jews, abused and denounced.

But the movement helped shove then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin into peace with Egypt; it shamed the Israeli government into pulling its troops back from Beirut after the invasion of Lebanon; it has painstakingly helped turn the question of returning land to the Palestinians from one of "whether' to one of "how much."

04-16-98