Announcing My New Book: When Doves Try
Brave people can change history: A lesson from Israel’s Peace Now movement for today’s world.
Welcome to the many new subscribers who signed up after Robert Hubbell cited last week’s “We are Not ‘Good Germans’” post in his daily newsletter – and a note to everyone: I’m not normally deep in self-promotion mode, but this week is an exception. I promise I’ll get back to my usual fare next week.
I have some news: I’ve written a new book and it’s being published today!
It’s called When Doves Try: Israel’s Peace Now Movement 1978-1983 – With An Epilogue for the Post-October 7 World. I would love for you to purchase it and/or share it.
It tells the story of how a handful of young Israeli reserve officers helped ignite the country’s largest grassroots peace movement. In 1978, their open letter to then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis who then pressed successfully for peace with Egypt, and forced Israeli leaders to reckon with the human and moral costs of occupation and war.
I spent the summer of 1982, between my junior and senior years at college, living on an Israeli kibbutz on the border with Lebanon. With my friends, we watched as Israeli jets flew daily bombing missions to the north and then travelled to Tel Aviv on the weekends to antiwar protests with thousands of other Israelis. I spent half my time that summer interviewing peace movement leaders and journalists, and that resulted in my Princeton senior thesis–which makes up the heart of When Doves Try. (That work also changed the course of my life, but you’ll have to read the book to find out how.)
Building on a long reporting trip I took to Israel-Palestine in March 2024, I’ve added a lengthy prologue and epilogue that explains why I decided to publish this material now, how I think about Israel-Palestine, how the October 7 Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli response has made the conflict even more intractable, and what the peace movement in Israel today is trying to do to make it possible for two peoples to share one land.
Despite the times we live in, the book offers a hopeful lesson: brave people can change the course of history. That’s what Peace Now did in its early years. Not only did it help midwife the peace with Egypt, it also pushed the issue of Palestinian national rights from the margins of Israeli politics to its center.
The future has yet to be written. (More on what is going on right now with Trump’s peace deal for Gaza below.)
The book is available for purchase on Amazon or Ingram as either a paperback ($15) or e-book ($7). All the details for ordering are here: https://micahsifry.com/books/whendovestry/
I’m self-publishing this book, so it would mean a lot if you could share the book with anyone you think might be interested. And if you can leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, that helps too!
P.S. Apologies if you are getting some version of this notice more than once today.
Peace in Our Time?
There’s something about Trump’s 20-point Peace Plan for Gaza that reminds me of an old riddle. A man dies leaving his 17 cows to his three children. He specifies in his will that the oldest child is to get ½ of his property; the middle child 1/3 and the youngest just one-ninth. However, there’s no way to divide the cattle into fractions, so the family is stumped. How to meet the terms of the will without killing the herd? Then a sage offers to lend the family one of her cows, bringing the total to 18. The oldest then gets ½ of 18, or 9. The middle gets 1/3 of 18, or 6. And the youngest gets one-ninth of 18, or 2. Nine plus six plus two is 17; everyone is satisfied, and the wise sage takes her cow back. The trick convinces everyone that this was fair.
In this case, instead of a sage we have a buffoon with the world’s largest army at his command orchestrating the compromise, and all the warring parties have figured out that if they lavish praise on him, they have a very good chance of tilting his pronouncements their way. Thus, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood beside Trump a week ago in the White House and smiled broadly even though some of the points in the deal talk about Palestinian national entities that he scorns (both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority) and Palestinian national rights that he has vowed to never allow to come to fruition. Thus, Hamas said last Friday that it was embracing the deal and would move immediately to release the hostages it is holding in exchange for an end to the war, when Israel has not committed to actually end the fighting once the hostage and prisoner exchange in the deal is implemented. Not to mention that the deal also commits Hamas to leaving Gaza and calls for the disarmament of all Palestinians, which go directly against Hamas’s charter.
Even Israel’s protest movement, which has returned in the hundreds of thousands to demand an end to the war so the hostages can come home, is in on the game of humoring Trump, leading him to cite their efforts as proof of his wisdom. With Netanyahu standing beside him last week, Trump declared, “I noticed that they have large crowds gathering in Israel all the time, and they have my name up. They like me. For whatever reason, maybe, I don’t know, but they do like me. But they say two things, please get the hostages back and please end the war. They’ve had it. They’ve had it.”
So, despite all the loose ends and unanswered questions left dangling by Hamas’s Friday announcement, Trump hailed it as proving “they are ready for a lasting PEACE” and adding that “Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly.”
As the song goes, “The man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
To be fair, there is an important tradition in diplomacy of trying to pull sides closer by emphasizing the points they may agree on and leaving the hardest issues for later. That was, in fact, a key aspect of the 1990s Oslo peace process, which started with both sides declaring recognition of each other and set up the Palestinian Authority to govern the parts of the West Bank that held major Palestinian population centers, while the Israeli military continued to rule over the rest. Oslo also committed Israel and the PLO to a five year process of good faith negotiations on resolving the hardest issues, like the final borders and the future of settlements, Palestinian refugees, and Jerusalem. But real trust was never built between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat, Jewish settlements kept being built, Palestinian terrorist attacks never fully abated, and then Rabin was murdered by a Jewish rightwing religious fanatic. The situation deteriorated from there.
There are also cases when choosing to hear what you want to hear can lead to a breakthrough. That’s what happened most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy’s decision to publicly embrace the first of two differing peace feelers from Soviet President Nikita Khrushkev, while privately agreeing to the second (concerning removing American missiles from Turkey), as the basis for a face-saving de-escalation of the conflict allowed both sides to avoid nuclear war.
Will things work out better this time?
As Ben Franklin said, “There never was a good war or a bad peace.” So anything that halts the bombs and rockets raining down on Gaza (and occasionally Israel, if the Houthis go along) even temporarily has to be welcome. But I don’t think that a bunch of real estate moguls (Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Trump himself) with no experience in international affairs beyond self-enriching deals and self-aggrandizing pronouncements (plus one failed and corrupt British ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair) have the smarts and the stamina to navigate the Middle East’s most intractable conflict. Yes, Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize and his desire to be seen as solving a “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE” (his words) may allow everyone else to keep playing along. Hopefully, at minimum that will lead Israel to stop bombing and conquering more of Gaza, the release of all the Israeli hostages in tandem with many Palestinian prisoners, and a surge of humanitarian aid. That would be good news indeed.
But eventually, if not soon, Trump will pull his cow out of this deal and go looking— for adoration elsewhere. The underlying clash of two national movements—one that has tremendous power and one that has its steadfastness and, for the moment, the world’s attention—will not end. It will take much more – like a new election in Israel sometime in the next year that brings a different political coalition to power, along with the emergence of new Palestinian leaders – to shift the region onto a better track than the one that religious eliminationists on both sides have been pursuing.
—Related: Make time to read Libby Lenkinski’s powerful essay “Rose Jam: A Jewish Call for Reparations for Gazan Families.”
Micah: Congrats on the book!
Meanwhile, I appreciate the link to the Libby Lenkiski essay, and it's an essay that should definitely be widely read. Having said that, here is the comment I left there:
"Libby: This is a lovely essay, but I struggle with the word "reparations" and don't think it is the right term.
While I 100% agree that Israelis and Jews worldwide should contribute financially to the rebuilding of Gaza, I think the appropriate framing for those contributions is the Marshall Fund not reparations.
Which isn't to say no "war crimes" were committed. I'm sure it's true that the IDF committed some war crimes. But it's also true that there were plenty of U.S. actions in World War II that inarguably constitute "war crimes" (as they are defined today), but I think it would be equally wrong (and in a real sense immoral) to say that the U.S. therefore owed German and Japanese families "reparations." The reality is that World War II was started by Germany and Japan and it's important not to obscure that culpability.
Similarly, I think it's important not to obscure the fact that the Gaza war was both initiated by Hamas, and its destructiveness was a function not only of Hamas' refusal to give up the hostages it had taken and to surrender but also a deliberate part of its strategy.
Having said that, that doesn't make the needs of the millions of innocent Gazans any less real, and it would be wrong, both morally and strategically, for Israel and Jews worldwide not to recognize that need and contribute to rebuilding Gaza in the same kind of way that the United States contributed to the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after World War II. But "reparations" is the wrong word, both morally and strategically, for those contributions."
just ordered it and look forward to reading it.