On 24 October, Standing Together leaders Sally Abed and Uri Weltmann, alongside Palestinian educator and activist Kefah Abukhdeir and Israeli activist Yael Berda, a supporter of the “A Land for All” initiative, spoke at an online webinar organised by activists in the USA. These are lightly edited excerpts from their comments, some of which were made in response to questions from the moderator and therefore do not necessarily reflect “prepared” remarks. The webinar can be viewed on YouTube
Sally Abed
I identify as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Especially these days, unfortunately, the political ethos of what is “Israeli” definitely doesn’t see me as part of it [...] I see a very great responsibility in my existence here as part of 20%, 17%, of citizens; and you have Eastern Jerusalemites such as Kefah who are not citizens, but are residents. [...]
I see my role here as a social justice activist [...] How can I look at the people who are currently not convinced, the people who currently don’t have the political will to even acknowledge the fact that I’m Palestinian and acknowledge my history and narrative, and actually bring them to our side, to my side, to acknowledge that? It’s a very different kind of work than Palestinians abroad, or even in the occupied territories or in Gaza. I feel that responsibility because I have a privilege of experiencing a semi-democracy of some sort. [...]
And right now, in these very polarised moments, staying put in the middle [is difficult], while my people are being slaughtered very brutally, while we are being silenced here in Israel, while we’re being persecuted and we’re being arrested and fired from our jobs and expelled from universities, not even for talking about the occupation or about apartheid or about the brutal attacks on Gaza… just mere expressions of solidarity with people and with children are being criminalised at this moment. [...]
I live in Haifa. There are organised civil groups that are being heavily armed by our National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who is an openly Kahanist Jewish-supremacist. It’s extremely hard to navigate the persecutions that we are facing while also not being able to express our collective trauma as Palestinians, but also enduring the trauma of Israeli society. My very close friends, Jewish friends and neighbours and colleagues, have been deeply impacted by the 7 October attack. So it’s probably one of the most complex experiences to have, but in many ways it is, in my opinion, one of the most critical spaces to maintain and stay put in. […]
[On 24 October] we woke up to the bloodiest night yet in Gaza. [...] It’s just heart-wrenching to see that and to feel so hopeless and helpless to actually do something about it, especially here from Israel as a Palestinian. [...] I think a message for me as a Palestinian that is very important to portray to everyone in the world, is that there are Palestinians in Israel who are going through the experience and the humanitarian loss and the catastrophe that the Israeli public has gone through.
Our cause for Palestinian liberation is a very just cause. However, we cannot justify the extreme measures that Hamas took to advance this cause. And I think one of the most important things that we need to hold right now, as a Palestinian liberation movement and as Palestinians, is our rights, all of us, as civilians, to life, and to live securely. And I really want to hold that very, very tight. I want to say: listen to us. Listen to the people on the ground here in Israel. We are often overlooked. We are seeing amazing cases of radical empathy, of victims, Israeli victims, who have lost dear ones, who have people in captivity right now, and who are still calling for a ceasefire, who are still calling for ending the occupation, who are still calling for peace. [...]
The conversation abroad around Palestinian liberation is quite academic, talking about decolonisation and resistance in a very theorised way, not that I’m taking away from its merits and what it has done for the Palestinian liberation movement abroad. However, I do think it’s critical, especially now, after 7 October and after a lot of these movements have failed to hold the humanity of the Jewish Israelis that live in this land… I think it’s more critical than ever to really connect between our efforts here on the ground in Palestine and in Israel and what is happening abroad. These theorised ideas of liberation need to have some kind of translation into how we build the political capital within our societies to do those things, to decolonise. Reach out to us and let’s work together to create a much better and more constructive conversation.
Uri Weltmann
Standing Together has been setting up local groups throughout the country called the Jewish Arab Solidarity Networks, or the Jewish Arab Solidarity Guard, as a way to prepare for the fact that the political leadership in the Israeli state is pushing towards a clash between Jewish and Palestinian citizens inside Israel. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the most extremist, hawkish nationalist minister ever to preside in the Israeli government, is openly talking about preparing for a scenario similar to May 2021. He has handed out guns and motivated people to form local militias in big mixed cities like Yafa and Haifa and Akko and Lyd. This is a very dangerous development.
So, rather than sitting on the sidelines and letting the right wing take the initiative and push in this dangerous direction, we in Standing Together, along with other partners, have been working on the ground to set up these solidarity networks, to bring together Jewish and Arab neighbours from different neighbourhoods of the same city or living in adjacent towns, to do solidarity work, to do mutual aid work, to promote equality and anti-racism in the public sphere. [...]
Some of our groups also faced state repression. Standing Together activists in West Jerusalem, both Jews and Palestinians, were detained by the police. Their crime? They were hanging posters that said, “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together.” This shows the extent of the public atmosphere inside Israel right now [...]
Since the escalation began, we’ve been swamped with hundreds of people turning to us, Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, college students who had faced disciplinary procedures because they, for example, changed their Facebook profile to a picture that said, “Stop the war” in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Suddenly they received an email from their college saying that they were suspended, and faced disciplinary charges because they “supported Hamas”. Or Arab workers in mixed workplaces where Jewish and Palestinian workers work together, hospitals, municipalities, and elsewhere that are facing repression, that are facing disciplinary procedures for liking an Instagram page that highlighted the suffering of children and innocent civilians in Gaza. [...]
There has been an ongoing project of right-extremist forces for years to try to Judaise the mixed cities. We have organised groups that try to create an atmosphere that is intolerant towards the Arab residents. And in May 2021, in places such as Yaffa and Lyd, some of these groups took up arms and were instigators of violence towards their Arab neighbours, sometimes even causing hurt and loss of life. And while in 2021, Itamar Ben-Gvir was an isolated member of parliament from the opposition, now he is the Minister of National Security, in charge of the police. So he has a lot more power in his hands to push for his dangerous agenda. […]
Since 2005, there have been 16 major military operations carried out by Israeli governments against the population of Gaza. None of these actions brought safety and security to Israelis. They only wreaked havoc on the population in Gaza, costing many innocent lives, including children, and each one of them merely planted the seed for the next major military operation. I fear we are going in the same direction. I fear our government is pushing us into yet another round of violent bloodletting, yet another round of taking a terrible toll of human life in Gaza, and yet another round of undermining the safety and security of the people who live in Israel.
We need to go in an entirely different direction. We need to go for an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on UN resolutions. We need to go in the direction of ending the siege and ending the occupation and securing the independence, freedom, and justice of both peoples. This is what Standing Together is doing, and we are doing this not on the West Coast or the East Coast or in Europe. We are doing this inside Israeli society, organising Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, which we think is the only way for us as an Israeli peace movement to go about.
Kefah Abukhdeir
People need to know how intimately we are bound together as Israelis and Palestinians. Israel needs to know that Palestinians see them every day. We look into their eyes and we know them the best. We’ve seen them in uniform. We’ve seen them occupy us. We’ve seen them every day, in the fleeting moments where we’re passing each other. I see every day when Israelis send their children to my neighbourhood and I wake up to their children every day in their uniforms, occupying us. I see them at the checkpoints, I see them in university, I see them in different places.
What do we need right now? We need for Palestinians to be protected, to be given agency, equality, and equity, and to be able to speak to the Israelis and hammer out some type of justice. What I’m asking for is to not let blood [have] blood, even as both of us, as both societies are [...] trying not to go crazy with all that they’ve seen [...] [There are] two failed national projects that are now basically Siamese twins. [We need] to come out with something that all of us can be proud of, and come out with sanity. I want everybody to abandon their pride, abandon the pomp and circumstance, and to try to move forward. Because anytime that children are being killed, anytime we’re speaking of massacres as if it’s some kind of sport… enough is enough. I think this is where it needs to end. [...]
Israel is [a] nationalist movement created out of victims. These are people who have been rejected and were hated, and they came to Palestine seeking refuge, and it turned into a disaster. And our movement was sabotaged by this influx of people, and we’ve never been able to deal with it. We’re the “victims of victims”. This is a famous quote by Edward Said. […] I want to have the opportunity to explore that, to address it. I don’t know where. Connecting social justice issues to peace-building and anti-occupation efforts… that’s the organiser’s answer.
Yael Berda
We need to be able to see on the ground how we are intertwined. We are intertwined on this territory, from the river to the sea. There are Israelis and Palestinians. Nobody’s going anywhere, and their diasporas aren’t going anywhere, and unless we want to live in perpetual war [...] we need to be able to see that we share this place. I know how difficult it is to hear. Yes, this is a settler colony… of refugees. [...] There’s no military solution. We need to talk about political solutions, but first of all we need to stop the killing. [...] On the one hand, there’s an understanding that as the right wing pushed to destroy the possibility for Palestinian unity and for an agreement with Palestinians, one of the ways they did that was by upholding Hamas and giving [Hamas] various ways to become stronger. One of the things you see on social media very strongly is Netanyahu and people from the Religious Zionist movement saying that Hamas is a gift to the right wing because it prevents a peace agreement. People continue to make that connection. The rift in Israel is massive, and this is part of it.
But I have to say, on the other hand, that one of the things you also hear is people saying they cannot remain complacent in front of a continuation of the Hamas government in Gaza. And this is a very complex issue. Because we come back to the issue of, who’s going to tell the Palestinians how to run themselves? But I think that [...] one has to be open and not just move forward with ideological constructs [...] but, because of the sense of vulnerability and because of the utter need for security, to be able to look at both sides of this issue, both at the internal strife and what people are saying.
If you have right-wing, theocratic movements that are being upheld by other right-wing, theocratic movements, then as someone who opposes right-wing, theocratic movements, I stand in direct opposition to that [...] in my society, for sure, but many of my Palestinian allies [also] stand in front of Hamas. [...] I think it’s very important to listen to Palestinian voices explaining the different connections [...] [As] Sally said, listen to people on the ground, listen to what they’re telling you.
We’re also having this conversation as the Gaza medical system collapsed a few hours ago. God knows what’s going on. [People] want life. They want their children back. They want their children safe [...] They want to have another day or they want to have another night. That’s where we need to be as we think of the future, as we think of the possibilities. I know that isn’t a programme, [but] this is a hard conversation.
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