Peace movement Totally Explained

Everything about Anti-war Movement totally explained

A peace movement is a social movement that seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war (or all wars), minimize inter-human violence in a particular place or type of situation, often linked to the goal of achieving world peace. Means to achieve these ends usually include advocacy of pacifism, non-violent resistance, diplomacy, boycotts, moral purchasing, supporting anti-war political candidates, demonstrations, and National Political lobbying groups to create legislation. The Political Cooperative is an example of an organization that seeks to merge all peace movement organizations and green organizations which may have some diverse goals, but all of whom have the common goal of peace and humane sustainability.
Some people refer to the global loose affiliation of activists and political interests as having a shared purpose and this constituting a single movement, "the peace movement", encompassing "the anti-war movement". Seen this way, the two are often indistinguishable and constitutes a loose, reactive and event-driven collaboration between groups with motivations as diverse as humanism, nationalism, environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, decentralization, hospitality, ideology, theology, and fear.

Diversity of ideals

There is much confusion over what "peace" is (or should be), which results in a plurality of movements seeking diverse ideals of peace. Particularly, "anti-war" movements often have ill-defined goals.
   It is often not clear whether a movement or a particular protest is against war in general, as in pacifism, or against one side's participation in a war (but not the other's). Indeed, some observers feel that this unclarity has represented a key part of the propaganda strategy of those seeking victory in, for example, the Vietnam War. Global protests against the US invasion of Iraq in early 2003 are an example of a more specific, short term and loosely-affiliated single-issue "movement" —with relatively scattered ideological priorities, ranging from absolutist pacifism to Islamism and Anti-Americanism (see Human shield action to Iraq). Nonetheless, some of those who are involved in several such short term movements and build up trust relationships with others within them, do tend to eventually join more global or long-term movements.
   By contrast, some elements of the global peace movement seek to guarantee health security by ending war and assuring what they see as basic human rights including the right of all people to have access to air, water, food, shelter and health care. A large cadre of activists seek social justice in the form of equal protection under the law and equal opportunity under the law for groups that have previously been disenfranchised.
   The movement is primarily characterized by a belief that humans shouldn't wage war on each other or engage in violent ethnic conflicts over language, race or natural resources or ethical conflict over religion or ideology. Long-term opponents of war preparations are primarily characterized by a belief that military power isn't the equivalent of justice.
   The movement tends to oppose the proliferation of dangerous technologies and weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons and biological warfare. Moreover, many object to the export of weapons including hand-held machine guns and grenades by leading economic nation's to lesser developed nations. Some, like SIPRI, have voiced special concern that artificial intelligence, molecular engineering, genetics and proteomics have even more vast destructive potential. Thus there's intersection between peace movement elements and Neo-Luddites or primitivism, but also with the more mainstream technology critics such as the Green parties, Greenpeace and the ecology movement they're part of.
   It is one of several movements that led to the formation of Green Party political associations in many democratic countries near the end of the 20th century. The peace movement has a very strong influence in some countries' green parties, such as in Germany, perhaps reflecting that country's negative experiences with militarism in the 20th century.

Current events

Some believe that as of the Iraq crisis, peace movements could be seen as part of a global effort to cohere "public opinion as a superpower" to compete with perceived U.S. unilateralism.
Peace movements are also generally thought to have benefited from the rise of Internet communication and coordination, the so-called smart mob technology.

Detailed history by region

These histories will begin with the countries that suffered during World War II, and which effectively began the postwar period in a submitted position, and wrote peace into their constitutions. They will then deal with the English-speaking world and the arguments more familiar to the English speaking reader, which intersect with current events most strongly, and are the current focus of the peace movement worldwide.

Germany

Such Green parties and related political associations were formed in many democratic countries near the end of the 20th century. The peace movement has a very strong influence in some countries' green parties, such as in Germany. These can sometimes exercise decisive influence over policy, for example as during 2002 when the German Greens influenced German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, via their control of the German Foreign Ministry under Joschka Fischer (a Green and the single most popular politician in Germany at the time), to limit his involvement in the War on Terrorism and eventually to unite with French President Jacques Chirac whose opposition in the UN Security Council was decisive in limiting support for the U.S. plan to invade Iraq.

Israel

Peace Now

The Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflict have existed since the mid-nineteenth century creation of Zionism, and especially since the 1948 formation of the state of Israel, and the 1967 occupation of Palestinian and other Arab lands. The mainstream peace movement in Israel is Peace Now (Shalom Akhshav), whose supporters tend to vote for the Labour Party or Meretz. Peace Now was founded in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, when many people felt that the chance for peace might be missed. PM Begin acknowledged that the Peace Now rally in Tel-Aviv at the eve of his departure for the Camp David Summit with Presidents Sadat and Carter – drawing a crowd of 100,000, the largest peace rally in Israel until then – had a part in his decision to withdraw from Sinai and dismantle Israeli settlements there. Peace Now supported Begin for a time, and hailed him as a peace-maker, but turned against him when withdrawal from Sinai was accompanied by an accelerated campaign of land confiscation and settlement building in the West Bank.
   This was followed by the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon, under the name "Operation Peace for Galilee". In the first weeks of the invasion Peace Now kept silent under the doctrine of "no political protests during wartime". However, more radical peace groups united into The Committee Against The Lebanon War and held increasingly large protests, which drew many Peace Now grassroots activists. Also, Peace Now members who had been drafted called the movement leadership from the Lebanon front line, giving eye-witness testimonies on the lies of government propaganda on the conduct of the war.
   As a result, Peace Now changed its position and launched an intensive campaign against the war. Peace Now remained, however, opposed to soldiers refusing military orders, specifically the order to be deployed to Lebanon. The anti-war group Yesh Gvul (There is a Border/Limit) had organized a campaign which signed up some 2000 reservists who requested not to serve in Lebanon. While Yesh Gvul didn't directly advocate that reservists refuse deployment orders, the group counseled those who did. Around 200 soldiers actually served prison terms. Also during the first Intifada (Palestinian Uprising) of 1987-1993 and the Second Intifada (which began on October 2000 and may or may not have ended – opinions are divided) the issue of refusing military orders remained one of the main issues dividing Peace Now from the more radical movements and groups to its left.
   The Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982 precipitated an unprecedented week of protest demonstrations throughout Israel, dozens of demonstrators being dispersed with tear gas and hauled to detention in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. It culminated with Peace Now's "400,000 rally" in Tel-Aviv, the largest gathering of any kind in Israel’s history up to then, which led to the establishment of the Kahan Judicial Commission of Inquiry whose half a year of deliberations led to the impeachement of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon for indirect responsibility for the massacre.
   As described in the commission’s report, the actual killing of at least 400 Palestinian civilians (some estimates put it as high as 2000) was perpetrated by the Christian-Lebanese Phalanges. This militia was at the time armed and trained by the Israeli army, and its armed members were introduced by Sharon into the Sabra and Shartila Palestinian refugee camps at Beirut which were surrounded on all sides by Israeli forces, and whose own inhabitants had been disarmed by Israel shortly before. Sharon took this decision while knowing that the Phalangists deeply hated Palestinians and had a long record of massacring Palestinian civilians whenever they got the opportunity.
   In February 1983 the Kahan Commission published its report, calling for Sharon’s removal from the Defence Ministry, but Sharon refused to comply, claiming the report was no more than a “non-binding recommendation". A Peace Now march in Jerusalem, calling for Sharon’s resignation, was brutally assaulted by extreme-right mobs, culminating with the throwing of a grenade, killing Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig – a reserve army officer recently returned from Lebanon – and severely wounding five others. Only then did Sharon resign and his political career went into a long eclipse (from which he emerged twenty years later to be elected Prime Minister in January 2001).
   At the same period the government also announced the official end of the Peace for Galilee operation or war (the name never really caught on among the general public). In fact, however, Israeli occupation in Lebanon lingered on for another eighteen years, costing thousands of Israeli, Lebanese and Palestinian lives, until the soldiers were finally evacuated in May 2000 – due especially to the highly effective campaign of the Four Mothers movement (launched in 1997 by four mothers of soldiers serving in Lebanon).
   Peace Now also advocates a negotiated peace with the Palestinians Originally this was worded vaguely, with no definition of who “the Palestinians” are and who represents them. Peace Now was quite tardy in joining the dialogue with the PLO, started by such groups as the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and the Hadash communist party. Only in 1988 did Peace Now accept that the PLO is the body regarded by the Palestinians themselves as their representative.
   During the first Intifada, Peace Now held numerous protests and rallies to protest the army's cruelty and call for a negotiated withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. At the time Peace Now strongly targeted then for Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his infamous order to "break the bones of Palestinian trouble-makers." However, after Rabin became Prime Minister, signed the Oslo Agreement and shook Yasser Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn, Peace Now strongly supported him and mobilized public support for him against the settlers’ increasingly vicious attacks. Peace Now had a central role in the November 4, 1995 rally after which Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an extreme-right miltant.
   Since then the annual Rabin memorial rallies, held every year at the beginning of November, have become the main event of the Israeli Peace Movement, always certain to draw a crowd in the tens or hundreds of thousands. While officially organized by the Rabin Family Foundation, Peace Now presence in these annual rallies is always conspicuous.
   Nowadays, Peace Now is especially known for its relentless struggle against the expansion of illegal settlement outposts on the West Bank. Dror Etkes, head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch, is highly regarded for his meticulous work and on one recent occasion was invited to testify before a US Congressional committee at D.C.

Gush Shalom

Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc, takes pride in being a radical movement to the left of Peace Now.
   In its present name and structure, Gush Shalom grew out of the Jewish-Arab Committee Against Deportations, which protested the deportation without trial of 415 Palestinian Islamic activists to Lebanon in December 1992, and erected a protest tent in front of the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem for two months – until the government consented to let the deportees return.
   Members then decided to continue as a general peace movement with a program strongly opposing the occupation and advocating the creation of an independent Palestine side-by-side with Israel in its pre-1967 borders (“The Green Line”) and with an undivided Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states.
   Members of Gush Shalom are motivated by moral outrage and the feeling that it's the duty of a decent person to oppose wrongdoing in general and the wrongs perpetrated by his or her own country in particular. They are also, however, motivated by what may be called enlightened self interest – the recognition that at present Israel’s existence relies on the state’s military superiority in the Middle East, on its alliance with the United States, and on US’s hegemony in the world. None of these factors is guaranteed to last forever, and in fact history shows that no alliance and no military superiority lasts without an end. Therefore, Israel’s long-term survival depends upon being accepted by its neighbours – first and foremost, by the Palestinians – as a legitimate part of the Middle East.
   While existing under the name Gush Shalom only since 1992, this movement is in fact the lineal descendant of various groups, movements and action committees which espoused the much same program out of the same motivation at least since 1967, and which occupied the same space on the political scene. In particular, Gush Shalom is the descendant of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP) which was founded in 1975.
   The ICIPP founders included a group of dissidents coming out the Israeli establishment, among them were Major-General Mattityahu Peled who was member of the IDF General Staff during the 1967 Six Day War and after being dishcarged from the army in 1969 turned increasingly in the direction of peace; Dr. Ya'akov Arnon, a well-known economist who headed the Zionist Federation in Holland before coming to Israel in 1948, and was for many years Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Finance and afterwards chaired the Board of Directors of the Israeli Electricity Company; and Aryeh Eliav who was Secretary-General of the Labour Party until he broke with the then PM Golda Meir over the issue of whether or not a Palestinian People existed and had national rights.
   These three and some two hundred more people who had essentially come out of the Israeli establishment, become radicalised and come to the conclusion that the arrogance of power was a threat to Israel’s future and that dialogue with the Palestinians must be opened. They came together with a group of younger, grassroots peace activists who had been active against the occupation since 1967. The bridge between the two groups was Uri Avnery, a well known mud-raking journalist who had been member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) between 1965 and 1973, at the head of his own radical one-man party.
   The main achievement of the ICIPP was the opening of dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO, with the aim of making Israelis understand the need of talking and reaching a peace deal with "The Palestinian terrorists", and conversely making Palestinians aware of the need to talk to and eventually reach a deal with "The Zionist Enemy".
   It was far from easy. Two of the ICIPP's Palestinian interlocutors, Sa’id Hamami and Imad Sartawi, were assassinated by Palestinian militant groups which considered them traitors – which didn't deter other Palestinians from taking the murdered men’s place and continuing the dialogue. The Israeli participants received countless death threats, and some efforts were made to implement such threats. On one occasion Avnery was stabbed and spent a week in intensive care – which didn't deter him from setting out to meet Yasser Arafat in 1982 besieged Beirut, the act of crossing and recrossing the front line involving considerable risk.
   Between 1986 and 1993 the very act of an Israeli citizen meeting with a member of the PLO was an offence under Israeli law, carrying a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment. Members of the ICIPP and of other groups, such as the Hadash communist party, were actively involved in meetings with the PLO held in defiance of that law, the first one being held at November 1986 at the Romanian Black Sea resort of Costinesti. A total of some fifteen activists had been charged under what came to be known as "The Anti-Peace Law". Two of them served a half-year prison term each - the well-known philanthropist Abie Nathan who for many years operated the "pirate" Voice of Peace Radio from a ship off the Tel-Aviv shore, and Jerusalem activist David Ish Shalom. The two were accompanied to the prison gates by large crowds of supporters. At the time the prohibition on meeting with the PLO was abolished in early 1993, various other judicial proceedings were still going on against other activists.
   After the signing of the Oslo Agreements in September 1993, meetings with the PLO became not only legal but official government policy. Members of Gush Shalom (into which the ICIPP merged) who came to meet Yasser Arafat found themselves rubbing shoulders with senior Israeli government officials.
   However, after the collapse of the Camp David Summit in August 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, a concerted and quite successful campaign was launched to “re-demonise” the Palestinians, the PLO and particularly Yasser Arafat Of course, even once government sponsorship is achieved every movement still has dissenters. Many Americans still smoke, prefer to litter, desire slaves (External Link

), wish women didn't vote, and enjoy a good war.

Domestic Peace Movement in the United States

The Peace Movement in the United States is perhaps less popular in the media but supported by vast numerous of professionals in many areas, gang violence Prevention, domestic abuse Counseling, Violence against children Awareness, and Character education (External Link

) in Primary Schools.
   Gang Violence Prevention is primarily a regional effort lead by local Law Enforcement and special programs within schools.
   Domestic Abuse Counseling is supported by many non-profit organizations
   Violence against Children Awareness
   Character Education is a growing program in American primary school education. Recognized as a pillar of strength in the foundation of our society along with a strong family support, Character education resources are used broadly to shape young minds.

Day of Silence for Peace

Also known as The Peace Movement, the Day of Silence for Peace follows the tradition of rallies that use silence to be noticed. Participants wear a piece of white cloth across their mouths with Peace written on it to symbolize their unity and readiness to change their world. It means they're tired of the status quo, and are willing to challenge it. It hopes to achieve unity and a sense of empowerment for its participants - including the knowledge that they can have an impact without traveling to the far reaches of the earth.
The first Day of Silence for Peace took place on October 23, 2007. The Peace Movement

Bibliography

Charles Chatfield, editor, Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). ISBN 0-8052-0386-0
Charles Chatfield with Robert Kleidman, The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). ISBN 0-8057-3852-5
Elsie Locke, Peace People: A History of Peace Activities in New Zealand (Christchurch, NZ: Hazard Press, 1992). ISBN 0-908790-20-1
Sam Marullo and John Lofland, editors, Peace Action in the Eighties: Social Science Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). ISBN 0-8135-1561-0
Caroline Moorehead, Troublesome People: The Warriors of Pacifism (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1987).
Roger C. Peace III, A Just and Lasting Peace: The U.S. Peace Movement from the Cold War to Desert Storm (Chicago: The Noble Press, 1991). ISBN 0-9622683-8-0
Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). ISBN 0-87722-342-4
Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). ISBN 0-03-005603-9
André Durand: Gustave Moynier and the peace societies. In: International Review of the Red Cross, no 314, p. 532-550 (31-10-1996): http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/57JNAW

Further Information

Get more info on 'Anti-war Movement'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://peace_movement.totallyexplained.com">Peace movement Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.