It’s a hopeless time. Here’s one genuinely good Israeli solution
Just in time for the holiday season, listen to those who have real plans for a better future
Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green of Standing Together, speaking on Dec. 15 at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco. Photo by Zachary Harris
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman December 17, 2024
As 2024 comes to a close, my hope supply is pushing zero. A hostage deal and cease-fire may be closer than ever, but the trauma, hate and distrust caused by Oct. 7 and the catastrophic Israeli response have made the idea of actual, lasting reconciliation feel laughable.
If there is one sentence about the conflict that 2024 has seared into my memory, it was spoken to me by a former Israeli peace activist who lives on Kibbutz Be’eri on the Gaza border. He used to spend his vacation days driving sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals for medical care. Now, after Hamas terrorists killed three of his family members in cold blood on Oct. 7, he told me, “If a Palestinian got into my car, I would break her neck and not think twice.”
And the holiday season has been particularly gruesome in Gaza: five IDF soldiers and at least 63 Palestinian civilians were killed in Gaza as of Monday this week.
Hopeless. That’s why I drove to the Pico Union Project, a multifaith social center near downtown L.A., to hear Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green.
The two Israeli peace activists — Daood is a Palestinian from Kafr Yasif in northern Israel, and Green, who is Jewish, hails from Tel Aviv — brought the message of the Israel-based organization they co-lead, Standing Together, to eager Jewish and Arab audiences across the country. L.A. was the final stop of an exhausting two-week tour of the United States, packed with 12 speaking engagements in seven cities.
“It takes a lot of energy,” Daood told the crowd of 300 Sunday evening. “Because when we get into a room, we feel that people see in us a lot of hope.”
I’ve written about Standing Together before — many people have — but I felt the need to see the group’s leaders in person and, not incidentally, be around a lot of people who, like me, resonated with their message. It’s simply heartening that against such a dreary backdrop of bad news, Standing Together has had, by the measures of community organizing, a good year.
The group’s membership has grown exponentially. Before Oct. 7, it had several hundred members; now it has more than 6,000, with close to 4,000 sustaining members who donate to its efforts monthly. About 20% of its membership is Palestinian, comparable to Arab representation in the Israeli population, and the elected leadership is split 50/50 Jewish and Palestinian. In October, Time named Daood and Green to its “100 Next” list of future leaders.
“We needed to bring a different voice,” Daood said on Sunday. “The real question is, what do we offer our people right now? Are we offering more war, more killing, or are we offering a solution that can bring the people who are living on this land security, safety, peace, and yes, independence?”
“As much as we all lose from this reality right now,” Green said, “we can all benefit from a change. We can all have a wonderful land for countries together. We can have equality, we can have freedom and social justice in our country.”
Green, 36, who organized Israel’s first waiters’ union, co-founded the grassroots movement, which strives to unite Jews and Arabs for peace, in 2015, in pursuit of justice for all people living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
Daood, now 38, joined the organization — where she now serves as national co-director, alongside Green — in 2017. She was pushed to do so after Israeli guards strip-searched her at Ben Gurion Airport upon her return from a vacation to Italy in 2016. The humiliating experience motivated her to fight for equality and coexistence.
The group has organized major protests through the past 14 months of war; Green was detained, and Uri Weltmann, the national field organizer, was arrested, at a Tel Aviv protest last month. The group also opened an emergency hotline for demonstrators arrested by police and launched a nationwide campaign, putting up 200 billboards showing Israelis — whose regular news outlets have deemphasized the effects of the war on Palestinians — the devastation in Gaza.
I first heard of Standing Together when a few of its stateside supporters, dressed in signature purple T-shirts, engaged protesters at UCLA last spring. Now the group has added hundreds of L.A.-based members to its support network, organized through WhatsApp.
The fact that Standing Together brings Arabs and Jews together is a rebuke to the eliminationist, rejectionist voices that have come to feel increasingly dominant on university campuses and social media. The BDS movement added Standing Together to its boycott list in February, damning it for “normalizing” interactions with Israeli Jews — yet more proof that Standing Together is a threat to the sclerotic orthodoxies of the left and right, alike.
When the moderator at Sunday’s event asked Daood about the boycott, she pointed out that Israeli Palestinians and Jews don’t have the luxury of pretending the other doesn’t exist.
“If a peace deal will be signed, you need partners, and the partners will be Palestinians and Israelis,” she said.
“When you’re born here, when this is your reality, this is your only home,” Green added. “Whether you’re Palestinian or you’re Jewish.”
There are, in other words, roughly 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. They can either try to kill, subjugate or expel one another, or they can figure out a way to live side by side. To my mind, that last option is the least idealistic, most pragmatic one.
“It is in the self-interest of all the people that live on the land,” Green said.
Standing Together is not the only Israel-based group of Jews and Arabs pushing for this outcome. Givat Haviva, Combatants for Peace, A Land for All, ROPES and others are part of the struggle. Dreamers? Voices in the wilderness? So was Theodore Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement. The people who think they can crush, kill or exile 7.5 million others are the true fantasists. The reality is that no one’s going anywhere.
To those who wonder exactly what a better Israel might look like, Standing Together is holding a global online grassroots organizing event Dec. 22 and modeling an example on Dec. 26 — a joint Hanukkah and Christmas gathering at the Purple House in Jerusalem, a shared Jewish and Arab community center Standing Together opened in September.
On Sunday, I came away thinking that no matter how despondent we may feel, ’tis not the season for despair. If you’re a college student wondering whose side to take, put on a purple shirt and march with Standing Together. If you’re a parent wanting to direct your friends and family away from the reflexively anti-Israel or anti-Palestinian organizations on offer to students, send them a link to these groups. And if you are looking for a hopeful outlet for your end-of-year donations — you’ve just found it.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
