Ralph Seliger — October 20, 2026
When Doves Try: Israel’s Peace Now Movement 1978-1983 – With An Epilogue for the Post-October 7 World by Micah L. Sifry
Following Anwar Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, peace negotiations stalled. Prime Minister Menachem Begin allied himself with the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, religious nationalists committed to settling the West Bank territories captured by Israel during the 1967 war. Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) began with an open letter in 1978 to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, signed by 348 IDF reserve officers and NCOs, imploring him to embrace peace rather than insist upon the right of Israelis to massively settle the territories.
In 156 pages of text, Micah Sifry’s book ably encapsulates the struggle between these two energetic grassroots movements, but it was not a fair fight. Gush Emunim was supported by most of Begin’s cabinet, and aggressively spearheaded by Ariel Sharon.
Peace Now’s most committed supporters engaged in disruptive tactics such as blocking traffic and otherwise directly confronting efforts to establish new settlements. Yet, as Sifry points out, its reliance on the voluntary energies of activists who had to make a living, placed them at a disadvantage against the ideologues of Gush Emunim, most living or intending to live in settler communities and therefore motivated by a vested material interest in the settler cause.
The First Lebanon War
The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed in 1979, but a new round of armed conflict was brewing in the north. The Palestine Liberation Movement (PLO) had been expelled from Jordan following its failed 1971 attempt to overthrow King Hussein. It established a new political and military infrastructure in the south of Lebanon. The PLO and its ruling faction, Fatah (both led by Yasser Arafat), so dominated that territory that southern Lebanon became widely known as “Fatahland.”
From there, Palestinian forces launched Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel. The most serious incident was an amphibious landing of attackers who killed 38 civilians along Israel’s coastal road in 1978. Israel responded with Operation Litani, a short-term invasion of southern Lebanon, but a pattern of crossborder violence and tensions continued.
In June 1982, an attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador in London provided the Begin government with the pretext for a massive assault on the PLO in Lebanon, despite evidence that the attack in the UK was perpetrated by a dissident Palestinian group (the Abu Nidal gang) and not the PLO. The IDF sliced through Fatahland in the south and then besieged what remained of PLO forces in Beirut, until they were granted refuge in Tunisia.
During that first summer of war in 1982, Sifry, then an undergraduate at Princeton, was in Israel documenting conversations with leading Peace Now activists. Peace Now organized massive protests against the war in Lebanon, playing a major role in rallying as many as 400,000 (one-tenth of Israel’s population at the time), following the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel.
Still, Peace Now cultivated a consciously patriotic coloration (what Sifry calls “Sane Zionism”) to attempt to mobilize a mainstream Israeli majority against the expansionist policies of Likud and other pro-settler forces. He depicts Peace Now’s pragmatic orientation clashing with the more radical positions of the leftist Sheli party and the Yesh Gvul (there is a limit/border) movement.
Growing up in the US, Sifry joined the socialist-Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, spent time on a kibbutz, and planned to make “Aliyah” in the 1980s. But a career opportunity in journalism intervened, an offer to work for The Nation magazine. His left-Zionist connections made him a natural to document this history as events were ongoing in 1982, interviewing many founding Peace Now activists-- including Abu Vilan, Janet Aviad, and Tzali Reshef-- originally for his senior thesis at Princeton, and freshly mined for this book.
I experienced this conflict personally at about the same time when visiting Israel with a young person’s delegation dispatched by an organization aligned with the socialist-Zionist Mapam political party, Americans for Progressive Israel. We were guests of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation (KAF), then the largest of Israel’s four kibbutz movements (three of which have subsequently merged). We were mostly briefed by members of Mapam, but also some KAF staffers who supported Sheli.
All of these speakers were critical of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, but their positions differed. Sheli advocated a massive refusal to serve in the invasion, while Mapam advised its members to serve if called upon, but to demonstrate against the war upon returning. Mapam’s rationale was that refusing to serve risked undermining their small country’s security. This was the first war Israel waged without an overwhelming national consensus behind it.
After October 7, 2023
Skipping to the post-October 7th era, Sifry recalls his 2024 visit to the modest offices of today’s Peace Now, no longer a mass grassroots movement, but a small professional organization known for its informative “Settlement Watch” program, which tracks and reports upon the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
He also met with Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green, respectively the Palestinian-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli leaders of Standing Together, which he regards as this generation’s grassroots parallel to Peace Now. Sifry describes them as opposing “The zero-sum game of competing oppressions, of competing unilateral claims to justice….”
They chastised the Palestine solidarity movement for “performative” actions against Israel, instead of actually supporting the efforts of Jews and Arabs to co-exist in peace:
Abed denounced the academic left’s pronouncements on the conflict. “It’s so theorized—colonized and colonizers—without any connection to how you build a change on the ground.” Green cut in, “We are not here to entertain you,” alluding to how performative the pro-Palestinian protest movement appears to him. “We are going to stay here.”... “We live together,” Abed said. “I know the conversation here. And I have decided to take responsibility for my society, instead of just saying ‘Free Palestine.’” She paused, and then offered an example of what her lived reality of Jewish-Arab solidarity actually felt like. “One of our leaders in Standing Together, Chaim Katzman, he was at Masafer Yatta [a collection of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank that the Israeli government is demolishing] every week.” Her voice caught. “And they[Hamas] shot him dead.”
During the Oslo peace process years of the 1990s, organizations in the Diaspora that supported Peace Now, such as Americans for Peace Now and Canadian Friends of Peace Now, hosted public forums promoting a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. A number of such events featured Prof. Rashid Khalidi, the preeminent Palestinian-American historian --- until he grew disillusioned with Oslo, as the promise of peace became mired in renewed waves of violence and recriminations. The current dark moment is somewhat brightened by Jewish & Palestinian Israelis rallying under the banner of Standing Together, which emphasizes coexistence rather than one specific formula for peace.
Sifry notes in his concluding paragraph that: “Successful peace movements are rare, but they succeed when they find ways to break the cycle of violence and polarization and replace it with one that reinforces the efforts of moderates to achieve a compromise. And that will mean accepting imperfection and incomplete resolutions.”
Ralph Seliger edited The Third Narrative website from 2015 until June, 2025. Prior to that, he edited the print and online publications of Meretz USA (now Partners for Progressive Israel). He's been an active supporter of the Zionist peace camp since 1982. Among other print and online platforms he's written for: The Forward, Tikkun, The Daily Beast, In These Times, Jewish Week, New Jersey Jewish News, Jewish Currents, Huffington Post, Dissent.
