MIDEAST : Israel’s Left Wonders if It Has Lost Its Voice : Even after last year’s electoral victories, the nation seems to be ignoring its peace activists.

As 500 peace activists gathered in the bright midday sun at the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip last weekend, the mood was far more that of a reunion of old comrades from bygone struggles than the angry protest its organizers intended.

The demonstrators, Israeli leftists, did denounce the closure more than two months ago of the Gaza Strip and West Bank by military authorities. They shouted the peace movement’s old slogans for Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories and for Palestinian independence and they raised their fists in protest.

“On the anniversary of Israel’s 1967 occupation, I say to Jews and Palestinians that we are standing on the border of the Palestinian state,” Uri Avneri, a veteran radical and a former member of the Israeli Parliament, declared as the group demonstrated along the “green line” dividing Israel and Gaza. “For this, we must go into the streets by the tens of thousands!”

For Israelis opposed to a Palestinian state--and their number includes Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin--Avneri’s call might have been provocative. For those wanting peace but hesitant about its cost, the protest might have crystallized their thoughts. For the left, it could have been a rallying cry.

But the demonstration was, in fact, so ignored by Israelis that it seemed to be on the very margins of present day politics. Even participants appeared to have come to see old friends and enjoy what one called “a political picnic.”

“Irrelevant, simply irrelevant,” a dovish member of Parliament from Rabin’s Labor Party said later of the Erez protest. “Rabin pays even less attention to the leftists than he does to the right because they have nowhere else to go.”

A year ago, Israel’s peace activists mobilized enough votes to put 12 of their number into the Knesset, the country’s Parliament, thus providing the crucial margin for the governing, left-of-center coalition. Today they are wondering where they stand, whether they have compromised too much and what ability they now have to push the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations forward.

Rabin’s government has been harsher in some ways in its crackdown on Palestinian unrest than the old Likud government was, many leftists complain, and it has not moved as fast in the peace talks as it promised last summer.

“The oppression has gotten much worse,” Avneri said this week. “Today (the army) has a free hand to shoot at children who are running away. . . . What is called ‘the closure’ is starvation of the (people in the) territories. I just cannot understand how a leftist . . . can stand behind such things and support them day after day.”

Avneri, who began talking with the Palestine Liberation Organization 20 years ago, helped found Gush Shalom (“Peace Bloc” in Hebrew) in April to put the peace movement “back on the street” and give the left “a sense of direction.”

But Peace Now, the 15-year-old group that campaigned hard for the change in government, and similar organizations feel unable to protest as they did against Likud.

“With regard to its ability to influence (government decision), the left is stronger,” Vered Livneh, a Peace Now spokeswoman, said. “But our ability to activate the street is smaller. . . . The transition from an opposition movement to a pressure group is a process that takes time.”

Janet Aviad, another Peace Now activist, also argued that the left’s voice is stronger than it appears. “We have access to a majority of ministers, and we use that access,” she said.

Hemi Shalev, a political writer for the Labor Party newspaper Davar, sees the left going through a painful maturation, finding that negotiating peace is harder than demanding it. “The left has had to mature because it came into a position of responsibility,” Shalev said. “They have discovered the world is not as simple as they thought.”

Peace Now is pushing hard for fundamental changes in Israel’s negotiating position on Palestinian autonomy, including a halt to all construction on Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Its members are also preparing a new campaign (“Rabin has a mandate for peace”) to respond to right-wing attacks on proposals for Palestinian autonomy and a pullback from the Golan Heights. They are working out detailed plans for an early Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. And they are reorganizing so they can once again bring 100,000 to their rallies.