Equal rights

All speakers emphasised the need for common organisation between Jews and Palestinians against the agenda of the Israeli government as a necessary basis for forging a shared future based on equal rights.

Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a leader of Standing Together, said: “As a Palestinian, as a social justice activist, I have to look to the people in my society who are currently not convinced, who don’t have the political will to even acknowledge the fact that I’m Palestinian, to acknowledge my history and my narrative, and bring them to my side. It’s a different kind of work than Palestinians abroad, and especially than in the occupied territories and in Gaza, because I have the ‘privilege’ of experiencing a semi-democracy of some sort, and I have some tools I can use […]

“This is very difficult in these very polarised moments […] whilst my people are being slaughtered, whilst we’re being fired from our jobs, and expelled from universities […] At this very moment, there are organised groups that are being heavily armed by our national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an openly Kahanist Jewish supremacist.

“It’s very hard to navigate all this in this moment, and to express our trauma as Palestinians, and also to express the trauma of Israeli society. My very close friends, my neighbours, my colleagues, have been deeply impacted by the 7 October attacks. So it’s one of the most complex experiences to have, but in my opinion it’s one of the most critical spaces to maintain and stay put in.”

Solidarity

Uri Weltmann, the National Field Organiser for Standing Together, explained Standing Together’s work on the ground, especially its establishment of “Jewish-Arab Solidarity Guards”’ in mixed cities. These initiatives aim to organise community self-defence against incitement to racist violence:

“Ben-Gvir, the most hawkish, extremist-nationalist minister ever to preside in an Israeli government […] has handed out guns, and is motivating people to form local militias in mixed cities like Yaffa, Haifa, and Lod. So rather than sitting on the sidelines and letting the right-wing have the initiative […] we have set up these solidarity networks to bring together Jewish and Arab neighbours, from different neighbourhoods of the same cities or from adjacent towns, to do mutual aid work and anti-racist work […]

Peace

“One of our groups, in Hadera, went out and changed racist graffiti. We do bilingual postering, bringing a message of solidarity and equality […] The message, in Hebrew and Arabic, ‘only peace will bring security’, which is entirely different from the message we hear from our leadership, is now visible in the streets thanks to volunteers from our groups.

“Some of our groups have faced state repression. Some of our activists in Jerusalem were detained by the police for the ‘crime’ of hanging posters that said, in Hebrew and Arabic, ‘Jews and Arabs will get through this together.’ This is indicative of the atmosphere inside Israel at the moment.”

Kefah Abukhdeir, a Palestinian-American educator and activist living in occupied East Jerusalem, gave her view on the future: “People need to know how intimately we are bound together as Israelis and Palestinians. We look into their eyes every day, we see them in uniform, we see them occupying us. Right now we need Palestinians to be protected.

“But we need justice and equity. We need to be able to speak to the Israelis and hammer out some type of justice […] We have two failed national projects that are now siamese twins. We have to come out with something all of us can be proud of. I want everyone to abandon their pride and try to move forward, because we are speaking about massacres, about children being killed. This is what needs to end.”

Two states

Yael Berda, from A Land for All, struck a similar note. She said: “We are intertwined. There are Israelis, and there are Palestinians, and nobody is going anywhere. And unless we want to live in perpetual war, that also creates war elsewhere, feeding the worst kinds of violence, feeding racism […] what we need is to be able to see that we share this place […] As difficult as it is to hear, yes, this is a settler colony… of refugees.”

A Land for All advocates for a confederal two-state model, with sovereign and independent states of Israel and Palestine linked by confederal structures. Its activists say they look to the EU as a potential model. They argue that the idea that European powers, that had been involved in brutal and bloody wars with each other for hundreds of years, might one day confederate in an international body with rights of free movement would at one point have seemed similarly impossible.

Ceasefire

Socialists in Britain must do what we can to pressure our own government to change its policy — to support calls for a ceasefire and apply diplomatic pressure to that end, and to increase humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. We can attend marches and protests.

But progressive social change in Israel/Palestine can only come about as the result of movements on the ground organising for it. The most powerful single thing we can do at this moment is, therefore, to provide direct support and solidarity to voices such as those represented on the 24 October panel, Jewish and Palestinian activists advocating for equal rights and a shared future.

Jim Denham

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