BICOM

A new paper by BICOM published today urges the Israel peace camp to break out of its comfort zone and engage with new sectors of Israeli society to generate new ideas to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, BICOM has published a paper examining how to rebuild the peace camp in Israel. In the opening essay, peace activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi argues that the traditional Israeli peace camp needs to break out of its comfort zone and stop talking to the same people over and over again. Instead, the peace camps must reach out to Russian speakers, the ultra-Orthodox, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the National- Religious. Shuster-Eliassi says: “No scenario for a sustainable breakthrough with the Palestinians exists without these populations nor without recalculating our perceptions of peace to involve representatives from these communities and space needs to be created for these voices to be heard.”

She also presents a series of operating principles for the Israeli peace camp, international diplomats, and philanthropists for more effective work within Israeli society. She concludes that “many in the Israeli public believe that only the right can provide a direction for the country and that the left is stuck with irrelevant ideas,” adding that “it is essential that the public is shown that another way is possible – one beyond dichotomies of right and left”.

The paper builds on a landmark BICOM report by Dr Ned Lazarus in July 2017 which argued that grassroots peacebuilding efforts were a vital missing ingredient in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. While there is now widespread understanding over the effectiveness of “cross-border” and “shared society” initiatives as well as the vital role constituencies of peace play in facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian political agreement, Shuster-Eliassi’s paper is the first to detail in practice how to build such constituencies.