Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 10 perception of Arabs as intending to destroy Israel dramatically lost strength after Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1979 (Stone, 1983). Public polls of that time also show an influential drop in Israeli Jews’ belief that Israel can successfully wage war against all the Arab states (Oren, 2009). Textbooks transformed from a didactic patriotic approach to a more academic one (Dror, 2004) and Israelis’ willingness to sacrifice themselves for their state dropped (Oren, 2009). It is also at this time that peace beliefs became more central in Israeli society and more concrete than an abstract idea as it was before. Oren separates the changes of the Israeli ethos of conflict into five different periods. She claims that when comparing the ethos of conflict of the years 1977-1987 to the ethos during earlier years, there is a “general weakening of the ethos of conflict as a unifying element for Israeli society and its various divisions” (Oren, 2009, p. 15). This weakening is mainly related to contradictions between the old elements of the ethos and the new reality in which Israel did sign a peace agreement with Egypt. Israeli society realized that there was not one unified Arab population in conflict with it, but rather there are a few different conflicts between Israel and its Arabs neighbors. The third period, defined by Oren as the period between 1987 and 1993, although starting in the Intifada, also showed “a further decline in the strength of the ethos of conflict in Israeli society” (Oren, 2009, p. 16). This decline had to do with contradictions between valuing greater Israel and keeping Israel as a Jewish democratic state, and a decrease in the perception of continuing the status quo as good for Israel (Goldberg, Barzilai, & Inbar, 1991; Shamir & Shamir, 2000). It is at this period that Israelis showed more optimism about finding a way to end the conflict, and less fear of the Arabs wish to exterminate Israel (Oren, 2009). These changes all lead to the period between 1993 and 2000 when the ethos of conflict was the weakest with “a reduced tendency to consider the conflict as a zero-sum game” (Oren, 2009, p. 19). Yet in the year 2000, after the failure of the Camp David talks and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the ethos of conflict strengthened due to the new perception of Israeli society in which Israelis perceived themselves as wanting peace but not believing it can be reached because of their adversaries (Oren, 2009). This can be seen, for example, in the platforms of both the leading right wing and left wing parties running in the Israeli election at the time (Oren, 2010). Although Oren (2009) separates her analyses to different time periods, in the time- frame discussed in this paper, it is important to note that the general picture is one in which a