When Doves Try

When Doves Try: Israel’s Peace Now Movement 1978-1983 tells the story of how a handful of young Israeli reserve officers helped ignite the country’s largest grassroots peace movement. In 1978, their open letter to Prime Minister Menachem Begin struck a chord that mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis, pressed for the Camp David accords, and forced Israeli leaders to reckon with the human and moral costs of occupation and war.

Journalist and organizer Micah L. Sifry first encountered Peace Now as a college student, researched its rise while living on a kibbutz during Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War, and has followed its trajectory ever since. Blending memoir, archival research, interviews with its founders, political history, and fresh reporting, he traces how an all-volunteer movement reshaped Israeli politics—and what its struggles reveal about the possibilities and limits of democratic activism.

At a time when Israelis and Palestinians remain locked in cycles of violence, When Doves Try shows what it means to stand as a loyal opposition in the face of nationalist fervor, and why the lessons of Peace Now still matter today.