Background / Israel's new peace groups - a field guide

The stunning defeat of the proposal, which had been seen as a shoo-in just weeks before, gave rise to hopes on the right that the unilateral plan to level all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip, and four in the West Bank, was as good as dead and buried.
But this is Israel, where it is often the case that the more that things appear to remain the same, the more likely they are to be changing.
Signs of momentum toward implementation of the Gaza withdrawal have mounted on a nearly daily basis since the plebiscite, with officials courting settlers with generous compensation offers for those willing to come forward in the near future and voluntarily surrender their homes.
The Likud referendum also had a profound and immediate effect on the long-dormant, intifada-crippled Israeli peace camp, sparking new interest, new groupings, a mammoth rally in the heart of Tel Aviv, and - perhaps inevitably - new disputes.
The debates within the left focus on the very issues that have driven deep rifts in the right: the concept of a unilateral withdrawal from the Strip, and the prospect of the Labor Party joining Sharon's Likud in a unity government.
The following is a guide to three of the most prominent of the new Israeli peace groups and groupings:

MATEH HA'ROV

Literally, the Coalition of the Majority.
PEDIGREE: Born in response to the Likud referendum, in which about one percent of Israel's population voted to reject the withdrawal, and to concurrent opinion polls showing that 60-70 percent of Israelis at large favored a withdrawal from Gaza, among them, a majority of Likud voters in general elections.
Mateh Ha'rov is an outgrowth of the veteran Peace Now movement, founded in 1978 by hundreds of IDF reservists, with leftists and centrists banding together to back the efforts of then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and then-Likud prime minister Menachem Begin to forge the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty.
Coalition organizers hoped to stage a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square, recalling a now-legendary 1982 protest in which hundreds of thousands demanded that steps be taken against then-defense minister Ariel Sharon for failing to bar Lebanese Christian militiamen from killing Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.
THE COMPONENTS: Peace Now, the center-left Labor Party, the leftist Yahad , Histadrut Chairman Amir Peretz's One Nation faction, the kibbutz movements, the Geneva Initiative organization, left-oriented youth movements, the Forum of Bereaved Parents, and Ami Ayalon, former Shin Bet chief and co-founder with Palestinian official and intellectual Sari Nusseibeh of the People's Voice peace initiative.
THE CHALLENGE - The forces of the left, seen by many in Israel as quarrelsome, at times arrogant, at times self-loathing, have been hobbled by the death of the Oslo process and a sense - mutual, to a degree - of betrayal at the hands of Palestinian allies.
At present, a number of the constituent groups are deeply divided over the twin core issues. Some stridently oppose a possible move by Labor Chairman Shimon Peres to lead the party into a unity government. The opponents include at least four senior legislators of Labor itself, Avraham Burg, Yuli Tamir, Eitan Cabel and Colette Avital.
There is also dissension over supporting a unilateral withdrawal. Yossi Beilin and other advocates of the Geneva Initiative have argued strongly that efforts must still be directed toward a withdrawal in the context of talks with the Palestinians.
THE INTERIM SOLUTION: An umbrella slogan bridging, to a degree, the differences of opinion - "Get out of Gaza and Begin to Talk." The slogan, along with the inclusive name of the coalition, brought as many as 200,000 Israelis to the square on May 15 for the largest rally there in recent memory.
"The aim of the slogan was to say "Yes to a unilateral step, but at the same time, let us not abandon our comrades who still solely back the option of negotiation, in the main, the Geneva Accord advocates," says Haaretz commentator Lily Galili.
"Traditionally, bodies like Peace Now and other non-radical, extra-parliamentary movements, seek to locate the consensus, and then to take it a drop to the left. They sensed the 'collective insult' felt by the general public, a majority of which supports the disengagement, and suddenly felt itself taken hostage by a minority of the Likud," Galili says.
HAZARDS AHEAD: The attorney general's decision this week to close a corruption case against the prime minister has lifted a main obstacle in the path of a Likud-Labor-Shinui unity coalition.
Although a unity government may still be months off, its establishment could drive a swift stake into the heart of the fragile dovish consensus.
"Without Labor, Mateh Ha'rov ceases to exist," Galili says. "The coalition exists in practice only so long as Labor is in opposition. The moment that the Labor Party joins a unity government, Mateh Ha'rov disintegrates," she explains.

YAHAD

PEDIGREE - Heir to a historic procession of leftist leaders who bolted the Labor Party and its antecedents, notably Shulamit Aloni, founder in 1973 of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1984, former Mapai (Labor) spokesman and MK Yossi Sarid also left Labor for the CRM, which in 1992 merged with Shinui and the socialist-leaning Mapam to form Meretz.
Last year, Labor legislators Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan quit Labor to form a faction called Shahar (Dawn), which allied itself to Meretz. This year, Meretz, Shahar, and a faction headed by iconoclastic MK Roman Bronfman formally merged to establish a new party, Yahad, with Beilin defeating senior Meretz MK Ran Cohen to replace Sarid as party chief.
COMPONENTS - A substantial number of Meretz legislators, notably Cohen and Bronfman, generally support the prime minister's withdrawal proposal. Beilin, an architect and frontman for the Geneva Initiative, at first condemned the unilateral pull-out concept, telling Haaretz that Israel had as long as six years from a demographic standpoint and five politically in which to work toward an accord with the Palestinians over a withdrawal. Beilin's position found an echo in Yahad faction chair Zehava Gal-On.
More recently, although urging Labor to withdraw the parliamentary "safety net" that has kept the Sharon government from collapse, Beilin has voiced a measure of openness to the disengagement, and Gal-On has softened her position as well. Meanwhile, Bronfman, with Gal-On one of the few MKs to have voiced support for refusal to serve in the territories, said this week that if there was "one chance in a hundred" that Sharon's plan could succeed, Yahad should give him the chance.
"As a political man and as head of Yahad, Beilin came to see that this [anti-unilateral withdrawal] view doesn't work, even on the left," Galili notes. "He reconciled himself to the majority position, that the left cannot oppose an Israeli withdrawal, even if it is unilateral. Thus the slogan was created, to provide an answer to both views within the left."
HAZARDS AHEAD - Should the Labor Party join a unity government and the government takes steps to implement the disengagement plan, debates over supporting its moves may sharpen, even to the point of splits within Yahad. In particular, friction would be keenly felt if the disengagement moves are accompanied by new construction on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the relocation of Gaza settlers to these territories.

SHUVI

Literally, "Come Home," a grass-roots movement of women supporting withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
PEDIGREE - Born when group co-founder Dalia Megiddo received a telephone call from her son, an IDF soldier stationed in Gaza for a year. "Before you hear it on the news, know that I'm okay," he told her. Television and radio bulletins then reported that a gunman had killed three IDF soldiers - two of them women asleep in their beds - deployed in the Gaza Strip settlement of Netzarim.
Following the Likud referendum, Megiddo and seven other women, among them mothers of soldiers on active duty and in the reserves, then began a drive on the Internet and in public locales to secure 60,000 signatures on letters to the prime minister supporting the withdrawal.
The organization recalls a number of non-partisan, women-based campaigns aimed at ending the Lebanon War, beginning with Mothers Against Silence near the outset of the 18-year conflict, and Four Mothers, which oversaw and may have helped catalyze the unilateral withdrawal that ended it in May, 2000.
COMPONENTS - "Most of the new groups that have arisen are 'movements of emotion,'" Galili observes, speaking of a number of grassroots organizations, including groups of IDF reservists who serve guarding in Gaza settlements and who back a withdrawal.
"Clearly, everything in Israel is political, but they are less political, and here there is a parallel with Lebanon, in that the groups are either led by soldiers or by parents of soldiers, exactly as in the days of the Lebanon war."
According to Galili, over the years there has been a major change in the way Israel views the opinions expressed by women regarding war. "In the early 1980s, it was a matter of great controversy, whether women even had the right to speak out against the war in the name of mothers and motherhood.
"The women themselves had their doubts at the time," she adds, noting that their views were often dismissed as based on unknowing emotion. Yet changes in Israel itself over the last two decades have caused men, and society as a whole, to be more receptive to the womens' voices, she says.
"The elevated stature of the army in society has changed over the years; it has eroded. At the same time, there are increasing, heretofore unseen signs of the creation of a civilian society. All of this has brought about a greater willingness to listen to the voice of women, and at times, leadership by women of these movements, especially when there is a sense that their sons are being sacrificed for no reason."