They have begun anew championing two crucial issues: halting the settlement process and fashioning a two-state solution with defensible borders. While critics on the right say the peace camp is naive or irrelevant, no one - including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - has proposed any other path to end what is at present an untenable situation.
Making the case for peace isn't easy. Sharon enjoys ratings topping 70 percent, largely because of recent Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel. Passions and mistrust run unchecked on both sides. The peace process feels in Israel as if it has lost years - if not a decade - of momentum. The debate has returned to the most basic question: whether or not the Palestinians can be a partner for peace. But the fact is, there remains no military solution to this crisis. Both sides must return to the table. And it's important for Israel to accept that the Palestine Liberation Organization is the entity negotiating for the other side.
Many people on the Israeli right are, at least metaphorically, waiting for the Messiah. If they can just wait out Yasir Arafat, who won't live forever, then perhaps the next Palestinian leader will bring deliverance. But the alternative to Arafat might be a Palestinian who, like many fundamentalist Jews, listens to a rejectionist God.
"We don't have the luxury of ruling out Arafat as a partner," argues Yossi Beilin, justice minister in the government of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. "For decades, we searched for a partner - King Hussein (the Jordanian option of linking Palestinians to Jordan), Palestinian mayors, village leagues - never successfully. The only ones to represent the Palestinians is the PLO and Arafat. ... Part of the criticism of him is right, but this is commentary, not policy."
