“We dreamed about this for a long time, and now we are able to start this unique campaign,” a GushShalom spokesman said at the opening of a press conference conducted mainly in Russian. Theconference took place on Sunday (19.9) in Tel-Aviv’s Press Center. The representatives ofall Russian media in Israel were invited, and most of them took part.
“There lies an abysmal chasm between the Peace Camp and the Russian-speaking community,”Gush activist Uri Avnery said, “which we cannot tolerate. We do not accept the opinionprevalent in the Peace Camp that a million Russian-speakers think alike and all of them areextreme rightists, Arab-haters and Peace-Camp haters.”
The press conference was convened as a start of a wide and continuous campaign. On the eve ofYom Kippur, 60 thousand copied of the brochure “Truth Against Truth” in Russian will bedistributed as an insert in the Russian-language papers “Vesti” and “Globus”. Until now,this new brochure has appeared only in Hebrew and English (and has been translated abroad inGerman and Dutch, with the Arab edition to appear in the coming weeks). It throws completelynew light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its origins and phases. The Russian versionis an exact copy of the Hebrew original, both in content and form. It, too, bears on its cover thewarning: “Caution! This is a subversive text. It undermines the very foundations on which theNational Consensus is based!”
Gush Shalom, which is not blessed with abundant funds, has decided to invest the necessaryresources for this campaign out of conviction that it is impossible to attain peace ifimportant parts of the Russian-speaking community does not join the Peace Camp. “I believethat the whole Peace Camp is guilty of ignoring this important community, as we ignored theOriental one,” Avnery commented, pointing out that all Russian-language media in Israelfollow an extreme right-wing line, isolating Russian-speakers from the Israelimainstream.
“Israeli society is divided into five big sectors – the veteran Ashkenazi, the Oriental, thereligious, the immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the Arab citizens. We cannotsucceed in the struggle for peace while being based only on two of them (the veteran Ashkenaziand the Arab), without winning support within the three others.”
Together with the distribution of tens of thousands brochures, the Gush Shalom campaignwill include publishing banners on Russian-language web-sites, extensive publicrelations and ads in the Russian-language media. A Russian-language sector on the Gushweb-site is soon to follow.