DR: What is your assessment of the war, and what do you think is the most effective thing that people around the world who want to see it end can do to help achieve that?

UW: We are talking in the middle of December. This war is on a scale we have not previously seen. It’s not your regular military skirmish in Gaza, the likes of which we saw 16 times since the disengagement [in 2005]. It’s not a military operation done mostly by air, that takes place within a limited space of time of one week or ten days, with very few Israeli casualties, military or civilian, and then “normality” restored, so to speak. This is one of the most extensive Israeli military campaigns for years, with no prospect of an end in sight.

The government and politicians are climbing up a very tall tree when they make statements raising the bar about how this war cannot end until without the extermination of Hamas. They are making claims I feel they know they cannot achieve, but they are making them nonetheless - which raises the possibility of extension of the war even further.

Commentators in Israeli media assess that, in several of the neighbourhoods now occupied by the Israeli army in Gaza, it will take at least six months for the Israeli soldiers occupying them to be sure they are so-called “free of Hamas”. So both mainstream politicians and the traditional media are trying to get public opinion in Israel to adapt to the idea that this will be an extremely ongoing conflict. And Netanyahu rejects the idea of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, or indeed any form of diplomatic resolution. The Americans, for example, floated the idea of Egypt taking over Gaza, which Egypt bluntly rejected.

What is at stake is a prolonged military occupation of the Gaza Strip, similar perhaps to what happened in south Lebanon following the withdrawal of the majority of the Israeli army from Lebanon in the early 1980s. Israel maintained its presence in the southern part of the country until 2000 — that is, for almost 18 years, with weekly Israeli casualties, with terrible loss for the local Lebanese population, and some Palestinians who remained there. And this is what Netanyahu has in store for us. His opposition to the idea of a two-state solution, of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, is so deeply rooted in the way that he has positioned himself as a figure in Israeli political life, that he’s willing to push us in that direction.

International pressure is a buzzword that’s been thrown around a lot. International public opinion has shown it has many limitations. Just before the interview began, you mentioned Ukraine. Russia’s war against the Ukrainian people has been going on for well over a year now, international pressure notwithstanding. And so, while international pressure has its role to play, I think that the internal dynamics of Israeli society and Israeli politics will have a role to play also. This is not to write off the importance of international pressure, but to stress that the internal dynamics of Israeli society are a determinant.

Biden has shifted his position a bit. Just a few days ago he said that Israel attacks “indiscriminately”. This is not a phrase that he used before. He also floated the idea that Netanyahu should change the composition of his government. So he seems to be worried about the very hawkish element in [Netanyahu’s] cabinet, most notably the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who is the head of the Religious Zionism party, and Itamar Ben Gvir, the head of the Jewish Power party, two leaders of the settler elite. The UK also announced a travel ban on violent settlers, which, although not directly related to Gaza, is nonetheless a decision taken in the context of the war in Gaza. It’s another way to signal to the Israeli government that governments abroad are unwilling to to maintain their blank cheque.

But like I said before, I think a determining factor is the interplay inside Israeli society. And around three weeks ago, the ceasefire was reached, a temporary truce that allowed for the return of around 100 Israeli hostages, allowed the Palestinian population in Gaza to receive much needed humanitarian aid, and offered a few days of quiet, without air bombings, without rockets being fired. This truce was adopted by the Israeli war cabinet, the very same people who rejected similar deals ever since the war began. It has been published in national and international media that the contours of this deal were known since early October. Indeed, a deal whose details were very similar was rejected the week before. But politicians such as Gallant and others have changed their opinion 180 degrees about reaching a cease fire.

The Ha’aretz newspaper commented, based on leaked information from people close to government ministers, that the pressure inside Israeli society of the families of the hostages, of the protest movement in the streets, of the demonstration of thousands and tens of thousands, is what forced Israeli politicians to reconsider their position. Every politician has to take into account people’s considerations. And the plight of the Israeli hostages in Gaza is one major contradiction that the Israeli government cannot resolve.

The demand for the release of the hostages is a just demand, that should be supported by anyone whose moral compass is uncorrupted. The hostages held in the Gaza Strip, many of them are children, the youngest being an infant, 11 months old. Some are elderly, and require medical attention. They need to get back to their families. They cannot be held any more in Hamas captivity. We heard hostages say that they feared for their lives when Israel bombed Gaza. We heard how the tightening of the siege on Gaza was also translated to lack of proper food and water for the hostages. So we want them back.

It is worth noting, that much to the detriment of the government, there is widespread support inside Israeli society for the return of the hostages. And according to public opinion polls, this support cuts across party lines and voters of the left, centre and even right. You have a majority that would support the extension of the ceasefire to allow for the return of the hostages. If past experience teaches us something, it is that the pressure mounting around this issue inside Israeli society has the potential to act as leverage on the Israeli government, forcing it into negotiations about a possible ceasefire agreement.

Thousands have been demonstrating in the streets on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, among them peace campaigners and groups like Standing Together. This is a point of contention between the people and the government, and especially with those representatives of the settlers elite — like Ben Gvir and Smotrich — who seem to have already written off the lives of the hostages as if they are already casualties of war. And we need not.

Naturally, for people outside, in the United Kingdom for example, the dynamics are different. But there is a global division of labour. The peace and solidarity movement in this country, in the United Kingdom, has other avenues to turn to. For example, shifting the rhetoric of your own government for the better. Rishi Sunak, who visited Israel just after 7 October and responded yesterday to the statements by Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, by reiterating his support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. And of course, there’s a lot more to be desired in terms of what the United Kingdom’s government can do to push for a ceasefire. But in this global division of labour, we as the Israeli left, as the Israeli peace camp, as socialists within Israel, and our form of concretely supporting the push for a ceasefire is through rallying behind the struggle for the release of the hostages, which is both a just struggle in itself, as well as a struggle that isolates the settler elements within the government, whose opposition to negotiate for the lives of the hostages puts them in a collision course with the majority of people in Israel.

What are the week-to-week and day-to-day rhythms and routines for Standing Together activists at the moment? What does your base look like, and has it changed as a consequence of your activity since 7 October?

These are two very good questions. I’ll answer the first by opening up my phone and seeing the many reports that people sent to our leadership team, the National Coordinating Team, made up of 60-or-so members from our local chapters, from around the country about what happened just yesterday. Yesterday was a very fruitful day.

In Reineh, on the outskirts of Nazareth, we had an event in Arabic oriented towards Arab Palestinian youth. We aimed to bring together those Arab youth who, following 7 October, felt it has been very dangerous to be critical, to speak out on social media, to speak out on Instagram. There are people in Gaza dying; they feel themselves to be part of the Palestinian people, but feel that there’s no no space to talk about this. And we organised a youth event called “Let’s Build Hope”. Sally Abed, who is a Palestinian leader of Standing Together, spoke. Razi Tatour, who is a young local Palestinian journalist, also spoke. He is also running for city council. He is in his early twenties and if he is elected, he will be the youngest city councillor in Reineh ever. Alon-Lee Green, one of the Jewish leaders of Standing Together, also spoke; he was the only Hebrew-language speaker at that event. He has become well-known amongst some Arab Palestinian youth because of his viral TikTok and Instagram reels about the conflict, against the occupation and against racism. So this was one of the events that happened.

Our local Jewish-Arab Solidarity Guard in the area to the northeast of Tel Aviv did an event for families, where families brought their children, both Jews and Arabs, to speak together and light Hanukkah candles together. They made banners in Hebrew and Arabic, and after the event went out and hung them throughout the area, both in Arab towns such as Tira and in Jewish towns such as Kfar Saba, with messages of supporting Israeli-Palestinian peace.

In Deir al-Asad, which is an Arab city in the Galilee, our local Jewish-Arab Solidarity Guard in that area organised a peace event in coalition with an organisation called Rabbis for Human Rights that does a lot of interfaith work but is very much a political organisation. It participates in demonstrations in the Occupied Territories. It organises an annual olive harvest, where volunteers from Israel go to the Occupied Territories to help Palestinian olive farmers take in the harvest, on Palestinian agricultural land close to the settlements, where settlers often attack. So it was a joint event in cooperation with Rabbis for Human Rights, around supporting a message of peace.

Also yesterday the local Tel Aviv-Jaffa group of Standing Together met for an educational discussion about strategy. It was run by activists from Rosa Media, which is the social media arm of Standing Together. The aim was to train our activists about how to frame politics, especially in social media, but also in day-to-day conversation. For us in Standing Together, as part of our theory of change, it is very important not simply to state the truth, but to convince people of it. We don’t want to throw the truth in people’s faces so that we can say, “We said what needs to be said.” We want to actually convince people. People who are educated in and by the traditional left sometimes need some re-education about this, because the traditional organisations of the left don’t always bother themselves with the question of how to build a majority.

The day before, in Haifa, we had a panel discussion with 45 people attending, called “From Inequality to Equality”, with several speakers. One of the speakers was Eran Zinger, who is a radio journalist for the Israeli public broadcaster. Right-wing activists sent a petition to the public broadcasting authority against him participating in our panel discussion, but to no avail. He participated in the event, which was well attended.
So we have many local groups meeting throughout the country, each doing its thing, but within the framework of the politics of Standing Together. But at times, some events draw more national attention and resources. Tomorrow, Saturday (16 December), we have a rally in Haifa, and we are holding it in an open space. We did not ask for police permits. But for us, it’s very important to be out in the public sphere. The lack of police permits forced us indoors, and this is a problem for us because we don’t want part of our toolbox as a political movement to be taken from us. So we want to reclaim the tools that we can use as an activist movement.

What’s interesting about tomorrow’s rally is that the most prominent message is not the message of Jewish and Arab equality within Israel, but the message of the need to advance towards peace. We are always holding these two messages at the same time. But in the beginning of the war, the first message appeared more prominently because we feared intercommunal violence and wanted to put a stress on the need for Jewish-Arab solidarity within Israel.

Now, when the fear of intercommunal violence somewhat subsided, there are discussions about where to go next. These discussions are not only happening on the left, but in the mainstream of Israeli politics. We really want to put our weight behind the demand for a diplomatic resolution. The slogan of the rally is “only peace will bring security”, and it will feature Jewish and Palestinian speakers from Standing Together and outside of the movement.

One of the speakers will be Maoz Inon, who has featured quite prominently in UK media also. He’s a peace activist. Both of his parents were murdered on 7 October. Ever since then, he has been on a quest to speak out against the continuation of the war, saying it will not bring back his parents and will only cause more people to be orphaned. He has a very clear and conscious voice.

So the day-to-day for Standing Together activists is very diverse, from small activities, mobilising a few dozen, to bigger events such as the one that we have tomorrow in Haifa, where we hope to attract a crowd of hundreds.

If you put the names of the places that I mentioned on the map, you would see they are tilted towards the northern part of the country. This is a new development since 7 October. Many of the Jewish-Arab Solidarity Guards, and our newer chapters, are in various parts of the Galilee. This is the area where Jews and Palestinians live most closely to each other. So for us, this shift to the north is a good development. It is important in terms of our ability to intervene more in the politics of the Arab Palestinian national minority within Israel, which is centred in the northern part of the country, but also because it’s the part of the country that needs our message the strongest because of the enmity between Jewish and Arab communities.

And are you seeing that reflected in a shift in the composition of your activist base? Are you drawing in more Palestinian activists?

This is a nice segue to your second question. Standing Together rests on several social blocs, which, though different from each other, we seek to unite through our messaging and our way of engaging with people.

The first is young Palestinian people, some in their late teens but also people in their twenties, who are becoming politicised, who feel themselves very much to be part of the Palestinian people, but also feel themselves very much to be part of Israeli society, holding Israeli citizenship, and trying to reconcile these two things and to understand the tension that exists between them.

Standing Together interacts with this layer of young Palestinian people through public forums, such as the one I mentioned in Reineh. We had similar ones in Nazareth and Haifa. Our social media platforms, Instagram and TikTok, are bilingual, and every video that goes out in Hebrew has Arabic subtitles, and vice versa. Our TikTok page, for example, has more followers than the TikTok of any political organisation in Israel, to the left or to the right. There are individual politicians who have more followers, but no organisation or party. So this serves as a platform to engage with a social layer that is generally excluded from an Israeli political mainstream that is unfriendly to Arab Palestinians. But it is also excluded from the politics of the Arab Palestinian minority, which tends to be dominated by older people, particularly older men. So by building relationships and offering space for young Palestinians, especially young Palestinian women leaders, we are engaging with this social layer and helping it to become politically active.

A second social bloc that we interact with is old lefties, veterans of the left - people who may have been in Peace Now in the 1980s, in Meretz in the 1990s. They were the backbone of the so-called Israeli peace movement. They were the ones marching against the Lebanon war. They were the ones protesting in solidarity with the Palestinians during the First Intifada. They were the ones opposing Netanyahu in his first tenure. These people, many of them, now feel that they are devoid of a political home. Labour has practically collapsed. Meretz disappeared from the Knesset. Peace Now is a shadow of its former self. So you have a considerable group of people who hail from this background who come to our events and become members of our movement.

A third social bloc that we interact with is among the Arab population, similar in age perhaps to the group that I just mentioned, but who had a different path of politicisation. These are people who were politicised mostly in and around the Communist Party, around the values of Jewish-Arab equality, support for Israeli-Palestinian peace, support for negotiations with the PLO. But some of them feel that the Communist Party and Hadash [the electoral coalition linked to the Communist Party] are now a far cry from the organisations that they started to support in the 1970s and 1980s. They have gravitated towards Standing Together which, for them, seems to be a continuation of the kind of politics that they decided to draw their fates together with in their youth.

The fourth social bloc that Standing Together rests on is among the Jewish population. These are younger, educated, urban youth in their twenties, mostly in the bigger cities such as Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. Our consistent messaging on the question of housing in the past two years, where we oriented Standing Together to speak louder and also to do activities on the ground around the housing crisis, which is one of the biggest social crises currently within Israel, really resonated with these people, especially in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where the housing crisis is acute and people pay 50% and sometimes more of their wage on rent.

This is all drawn with very crude lines, but these four blocs comprise the kind of audiences we speak to. And as a political movement with a broad messaging, it is a balancing act to speak to different audiences at the same time, who are quite different from each other. This requires that we employ an accurate language, because a message that moves one community, and inspires it to action, can be completely detached from the reality of a different community.

The diversity of the blocs with which we seek to engage is reflected in the very diverse composition of our national leadership. In our national leadership team you have, sitting side by side, Sally Abed, a young Palestinian feminist leader, alongside Dr. Suhail Diab, an old-time member of the Communist Party who was deputy mayor of Nazareth under the legendary Communist mayor Tawfiq Ziad. He led the CP’s activities in the Histadrut trade union federation for several years.

Sitting alongside them you can find Erez, a young person from Tel Aviv who finished a degree in philosophy and physics and is now working in high-tech. Nonetheless, he feels that the cost of living crisis and the housing crisis is a strain on his shoulders. And alongside him you can find Zvi, who’s in his sixties, who lives in a kibbutz in the Galilee. He’s a veteran member of Meretz, he was in Peace Now in the 1980s, and very devoted to Jewish-Arab coexistence.

These are four people who hail from very different backgrounds. They have very different personal sociologies. But the balancing act of Standing Together is to speak to these various audiences at the same time. We want our work within these social blocs to extend, and we continue to think about what other audiences we can relate to. It’s a complicated task, but we are guided both by our theory of change, which was adopted as a result of a long internal discussion and analysis, and our strategy adopted two years ago at our first national convention.

Part of your political narrative is that, as well as opposing the occupation and racism, you’re also trying to mobilise working people from both national communities around shared class interests. Even if there wasn’t a war taking place, attempts to do that will always be distorted and skewed by the occupation, by the situation of national oppression. In the current context, I imagine it must be even harder to even begin a conversation about the idea of workers’ unity.

But at the same time, people are still going to work, they’re still engaging with public services, the basic class questions still exist.

You and I have spoken before about the risk of a certain crude economism or workerism, of saying, “if we convince Jewish and Palestinian workers that they have shared interests, they’ll realise they need to unite, and will simply be able to transcend national oppression.” I think we both agree that the process doesn’t work like that. So to what extent is it possible at the moment to have conversations around class struggle issues, and to connect them to the wider questions of war and occupation?

I don’t want to paint a rosy picture. 7 October really tilted Israeli politics very sharply in one direction. It has become very hard to raise political questions that are not related to the war, because it’s like a thick blanket over all of Israeli society. Currently, even when addressing social questions, it is in the context of the war. We have collapsing social services, social workers are overworked and underpaid. And we saw that following 7 October when more than 100,000 Israelis evacuated from the Gaza envelope. They were being put in hotels in the Dead Sea, in Tel Aviv, and Eilat. And social workers were unable to tend to the needs of people who were suddenly cut off from their daily life. This was something that was spoken about a bit in the media, and we are trying to do more to shine a light on that. But against the backdrop of the war, the possibility of campaigning, for example, to raise the minimum wage, which we did in our Minimum 40 campaign in 2021, has become very complex. The mainstream media gives little hearing to stories that are not war-related.

So for us, it has been a challenge to make a conversation around direct class issues, work-related issues, issues that revolve around the lives and the realities of people in the context of the war. The way we respond is by drawing links between the two. Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, is now planning next year’s budget. That will include more resources for the settlements and for settlement-related NGOs that are going to receive money from the state. At the same time, he’s not providing the necessary funds for social services that are so badly needed. We use our social media platforms to echo that. This is how we can make connections between the economic and political spheres, the class questions and the questions of the occupation and settlements.

But there is no doubt that campaigning directly around social questions like housing and raising the minimum wage has become very difficult against the backdrop of the war. For the most part they will have to wait until a later time in which the space opens up for this conversation.

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Uri Weltmann

Daniel Randall

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