Peace Summit Galvanizes a Divided Nation

Ronen Zexer, a manager at an Israeli high-tech firm, sent an e-mail to 20 of his computer buddies. Each of them sent out more e-mails. Soon, hundreds of people were being recruited to join nightly demonstrations in support of this week’s Camp David peace summit.

Zexer felt that many Israelis, out of apathy or fatigue or inertia, were talking a lot about peace but not doing much about it. It was time to go beyond the animated Friday night dinner table talks and into the streets.

And thus was born “High-Tech for Peace,” one of several grass-roots factions mobilizing for and against historic U.S.-hosted talks aimed at finally settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whether on the left or right, there is a growing sense among Israelis here that the Camp David summit will produce far-reaching decisions that will alter lives forever. Taboos are falling, now that the fate of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees are topics on the table. Sacrifices that were unthinkable just a few years ago are a looming reality.

It is painful for Israelis across ideological boundaries and, for many, the substance of today’s talks represents nothing short of an existential struggle, a redefining of the Zionism that founded the state and fueled its expansion. Depending on one’s viewpoint, it will end in coexistence or bloodshed.

If the impact on the Israeli psyche is traumatic, Palestinians are experiencing a similar sense of foreboding. Palestinian citizens are reported to be hoarding food in fear of violent days to come, and summer youth camps have added weapons training involving automatic rifles.

Publicly, Palestinians present a relatively unified posture of pessimism, while Israelis are divided and polarized.

Zexer and his computer friends have added their efforts, along with those of the kibbutzim, women’s groups and others, to the peace movement that for two decades demonstrated in favor of ending hostilities with Israel’s Arab enemies. They staged a nighttime rally in front of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s residence earlier this week and have been keeping vigil in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, named for the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was slain by a Jewish extremist after launching the current peace process.

On the other side of the fence, Jewish settlers, right-wingers and others opposed to what they see as dangerous concessions to the Palestinians also have organized daily demonstrations and blanketed roads and neighborhoods with banners.

In the Wohl Rose Park across from Israel’s parliament building, a group of mostly middle-aged men has taken up residence under a blue “protest tent,” where they are holding a hunger strike for the duration of Barak’s participation at Camp David, Md.

Yitzhak Sappir, a 55-year-old teacher, has lived in the West Bank settlement of Maale Mikhmas for 30 years. His two grandchildren were born there, and he is determined not to be driven from his home if Barak agrees to dismantle some Israeli settlements. The Camp David talks, he said, endanger the existence of the state of Israel.

“Israel is a young state. To be alive, it depends on its history, its traditions, its myths,” Sappir said. “Barak is ripping this to shreds.”

Another of the protesters, retired Col. Yitzhak Cahani, 63, agreed. “It’s a question for us of to be or not to be.”

Sappir’s settlement is in the scrubby hills of the West Bank, the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria that Jews believe was given to them by God. Though most of the West Bank’s population now is Palestinian, about 200,000 Jewish settlers live in the area, maintaining what they believe is the last grasp on the biblical Land of Israel. Palestinians want the West Bank as the basis for an eventual independent state.

People like Sappir believe that Barak, by sacrificing land, is sacrificing the Zionist dream, gutting the foundations of the state. Those at the other end of the spectrum believe that giving up some land, even some piece of Jerusalem, is the only way to have a peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians that will allow Israel to become a normal, modern state.

Both the right and left are gearing up for major rallies in the coming week, as the Camp David summit is expected to continue.

Rani Cohen will join protesters in Rabin Square demonstrating in favor of Barak’s peace efforts. Cohen has never been one to demonstrate for or against anything. But when he received Zexer’s e-mail, he decided to act.

“I’m what is called the silent majority, and I do believe it’s a majority,” Cohen, 45, said from his home in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevaseret Zion.

“We have learned that you have to be heard and seen and be around and not just sit at home and argue among ourselves,” he added. “This is a crucial moment, I hope. I believe. We Israelis say everything is crucial, but I really think we have reached the point where we must go one way or the other.”

Cohen, a onetime member of a specialized army paratrooper unit, today helps run a company that manufactures printed circuit boards for computers. In a sense, he and Zexer and other members of their “e-mail chain” are the face of a new and largely secular elite born of the high-tech industry, whose explosive success now sustains the Israeli economy.

They will be crucial to Barak’s campaign to win approval for any peace deal that he brings home. Barak’s coalition government collapsed on the eve of the summit, and he would have trouble mustering sufficient support in the fractious parliament. Instead, Barak has said he will take the deal to the people in a referendum.

“This is going to be the most important step in Zionist history . . . in 100 years,” said Yossi Danziger, a businessman and farmer who is a member of the High-Tech for Peace group. “We will have to give up, let go of a lot of things we believed in, that we thought were impossible to give up. It’s a very tough decision.”

Danziger, 40, came up with the idea for the e-mail recruitment along with Zexer. He said people were losing their focus and needed to be reminded what was at stake.

Given the potential scope of the agreements that might come out of Camp David, mobilization in the streets has been rather low-key.

Ron Breiman, one of the organizers of the hunger strike at the protest tent, said he had trouble rallying large numbers because Israelis are unaware of how close the threat is. Organizers on the left said some people are angry with Barak because he has made too many concessions to ultra-Orthodox political parties. Both left and right bemoaned complacency.

David Grossman, one of Israel’s preeminent authors, lamented the timid response in an essay this week.

“How did this strange development come about, that Barak must strive for Israel’s most-sought-after peace without broad public support? Where are you, the 51% that voted for Barak and his statesmanship? Could it be that you didn’t know what the price of real peace would be? And where are you, the moderate, clearsighted and conscientious members of the right? Do you really believe it’s possible to achieve this peace without very painful concessions?”

“It is depressing to see that, just at this very decisive moment, peace is almost completely bereft of open support,” he wrote. “Israel, whose children took in with their mothers’ milk the ethos that their nation ‘pursues peace at any price,’ is now displaying the fact that for many of its citizens, any price is worth not making peace.”