The greatest achievement of the Israeli right is not the settlement enterprise. The greatest achievement of the Israeli right is its success in making most of the Israeli public lethargic and apathetic.

Earlier this week (May 27), there was a conference in Tel Aviv dedicated exclusively to the Arab Peace Initiative. The conference was organized by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Dialogue of the Netanya Academic College, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Yisrael Yozemet (Israeli Peace Initiative), which is a group founded to promote the Arab Peace Initiative. The conference had a large turnout that included academics, economists and people who were once senior figures in the Israeli political system.

The only Knesset members who attended were Erel Margalit and Meirav Michaeli, both from the Labor Party. The organizers invited Knesset members from the right as well, but the invitations were turned down. These days, the Israeli political system looks dimly at the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular. There is almost no one who wants to begin any sort of dialogue whatsoever or to make any effort to resolve the conflict.

The position that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict once held in the Israeli agenda has since been assumed by major strategic threats, such as those posed by Syria and Iran. With the prime minister zigzagging from one threat to the next and the political system lining up behind him, almost no one in Israel has responded to the Arab Peace Initiative; even the Labor Party has failed to release an official response to the proposal. True, a few lone wolves in the Labor Party’s Knesset contingent have expressed their personal opinions about it, but there has been no clear and unambiguous response from the very party whose legendary leader was slain two decades ago as a sacrifice on the altar of peace.