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Saturday, November 9, 2002
Peace Now Leader: our strategy not to reveal true goals

Peace Now Leader: our strategy not to reveal true goals

Excerpts from an interview with Tzali Reshef by Ari Shavit - Ha'aretz
Magazine 8 November 2002

[IMRA: For some reason this item was published in the hard copy English
edition but not on the Ha'aretz website. Given that Reshef openly admits
Peace Now did reveal its goals in the past, an interesting follow-up is what
the true final goals of Peace Now are and if the wealthy American Jews who
have been helping to pay for the "trip" all these years have a clue what
they have been actually supporting.]

Our idea was to talk to the public in a language it was ready to listen to
and not try to foist on it ideas it was not ready to accept. I called it
the principle of the bus: not to argue now about what the end of the journey
will be, but to invite aboard everyone who is ready to travel to the next
stop. If we had written in the officer's letter of 1978 that in order to
obtain peace, we will have to return all the territories and go back to the
1967 borders and divide Jerusalem and recognize the human aspect of the
refugee problem very few people would have gone along with us. We would
have remained a pure but marginal left-wing group.

Therefore, I was insistent that our message not be radicalized and I didn't
want to have my photograph taken too often as part of the human rights
struggle. What gave Peace Now its great strength was our external image as
patriots and as people who do not represent the other side. We were able to
create a label ("brand") that spoke to a great many people. That label is
our success. The result was that while the left wing movements in which my
parents were members had dozens or hundreds of people, tens and hundreds of
thousands of people support our movement.

Question: Isn't there a manipulative element here?

Of course there is. I was a manipulator when I was 24, but a manipulator in
a positive sense of the word. I knew back then that if we said what we
thought it would be taken badly. To say we have to make concessions is bad.
That is why we went with the officer's letter. That I why we took Yuval
Neria, who was awarded the Medal of Valor in the Yom Kippur War, and placed
his name at the top of the list. Do you really think that I thought Yuval
understood more than I did because he got the Medal of Valor and I didn't?

We did it in order to combat the negative image and to talk to people in a
language that would make it possible for them to identify with us. You can
call it manipulation and there were some who called it opportunism. But in
my view, it was a farsighted strategy. I think it was smart.

Ha'aretz (Magazine Section) 8 November 2002
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Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
(mail POB 982 Kfar Sava)
Tel 972-9-7604719/Fax 972-3-7255730
INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il
pager 03-6106666 subscriber 4811
Website: http://www.imra.org.il

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