Next year, Israel will mark the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, which broke out in June 1967. It was the war that transformed Israel from a tiny, precarious and besieged state into a regional empire. The left and the right will each try to define the event in a way that aligns with their conflicting ideologies. For the left, including Israel’s dwindling peace camp, the event marks 50 years of occupation, and the right will celebrate 50 years since the reunification of Jerusalem. The two sides will be locked in a struggle over the memory, the narrative and the national agenda.
The left is coming at this from the position of the irrelevant underdog that lost the public's support and is trying to reinvent itself. The right, which has dominated Israel for the past few decades, will try to brand this historic anniversary from the most popular perspective, highlighting the consensus on Jerusalem in order to obscure the reality on the ground.
The opening salvo will come from the left, as early as September. A new organization called “Deciding at 50” is set to launch a digital campaign that includes a proposal for a referendum on the future of the territories occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War.
The first person to give voice to this idea was Tzali Reshef, a veteran member of the Israeli peace camp and one of the historic Peace Now movement leaders. Labor Knesset member Eitan Broshi is providing the political momentum behind him. Others who joined are some of the fewer and fewer prominent Israelis who still support a diplomatic arrangement — including attorney Gilead Sher, the chief of staff of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a prominent peace activist, and businessman and philanthropist Orni Petrushka, Sher’s partner in the “Blue White Future” movement. There is also former Shin Bet Director Ami Ayalon, another prominent peace activist. Former Labor Party head Amram Mitzna and Knesset member Tzipi Livni, Isaac Herzog’s partner in the leadership of the Zionist Camp, are also considered fervent supporters of the initiative.
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