Israel's Lonesome Doves

Correction Appended: Aug. 7, 2009

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It's quixotic, being a peace activist in Sderot, an Israeli town that has borne the brunt of rocket attacks from Gaza. When Israeli air strikes on Gaza began last month, hundreds of people from Sderot swarmed to a vantage point known as Horseman's Hill to watch the fiery spectacle and cheer. Nomika Zion was not among them. "I listened to one of my neighbors telling Israeli TV that the sound of the bombing was like a symphony, that he's never heard such powerful music before," she says. "And I was thinking, How many people are dying because of that 'music'"

Zion and a local entrepreneur, Eric Yellin, who is blogging and phoning peace-minded Gazans, are among the very few people in Sderot — and in all of Israel, for that matter — who opposed the 22-day offensive into Gaza, which ended on Jan. 18 in the shakiest of cease-fires. Lately, Zion has rarely gone out. When she did leave home, she was often forced to dive into the bunker of her suburban house — Sderot was hammered by 203 rockets during the fighting. And if, despite the risks, she got to Sderot's flag-festooned marketplace, she was often cursed for loving the enemy in a time of war. "I understand their anger and feelings of revenge after so many years of helplessness," says Yellin of his neighbors. "But there are other ways to solve this than brute force." (Watch a video about Israel's lonesome doves.)

Israeli peaceniks are lonely people these days. The Gaza war may have sparked global protests condemning the heavy number of Palestinian civilian casualties. But inside Israel, peace demonstrations gathered only a few hundred protesters, who were swiftly shouted down by mobs yelling "Death to Arabs!"

Have Israelis given up on peace? It can seem that way. Polls show that more than 90% of Israeli Jews favored the blitz on Gaza. But in truth, the demise of the Israeli peace movement has been a long, drawn-out agony. Its main advocate, Peace Now, was once able to lure hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets. But after the Oslo accords with the Palestinians in 1993, the steam started to go out of the peace movement. Israelis became convinced that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat played a double game, talking peace but battling Israelis from within the Jewish state and the Palestinian territories. In 2000, after the collapse of the Clinton Administration's peace talks at Camp David, Arafat, claiming that Israel had failed to honor its commitments, presided over a second intifadeh. Then came the wave of suicide bombings from 2001 through mid-2002, which wreaked terror in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

All that was enough to make Israeli peace activists doubt their mission. But worse was to come. In 2005, just after the last Israeli soldier left Gaza — which Israel had occupied since 1967 — a Palestinian rocket arced its way from the territory into Israel, and thousands more followed. Israeli leftists had always believed in "land for peace" — the idea that if Palestinians had the real estate on which to create a viable nation, they would learn to live side by side with Israel. But as Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, says, "In the end, we didn't get land for peace. We got land for rockets."

See pictures of life under Hamas in Gaza.

See pictures of 60 years of Israel.