Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
DR: You recently visited London along with Sondos Saleh, a Palestinian activist and fellow member of Standing Together’s leadership, speaking at several meetings and briefing politicians and trade union leaders. Was the visit a success from your point of view, and how important is building ties of international solidarity to your struggles?
UW: We visited London for a couple of days, to participate in a conference organised by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in cooperation with progressive Jewish organisations based in the UK. The event was attended by several hundred people, and was an opportunity for us both to outline our ideas about how to move forward with ending the war in Gaza, as well as our perspectives about the need for social and political transformation within Israeli society.
We also spoke at several events organised by UK Friends of Standing Together, including one in the House of Commons, attended by several MPs, and worked to further develop our ties with organisations in Jewish and Muslim communities which share our commitment to ending the occupation and to peace and equality. We learned from them about the often polarised nature of discussion around this issue in the UK, and about the rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia against the backdrop of the war.
Of particular importance to us was building ties with trade unions. This is both because, as socialists, we share the commitment of organised labour to a vision of social justice, and also because of the clout that trade unions have with the politics of the UK Labour Party, which is now in power. Of particular importance for us was our meeting with Mick Whelan, the general secretary of the train drivers’ union Aslef, which had passed a resolution supporting Standing Together at its 2024 conference. By exchanging analysis and experience with trade union leaderships, we hope to inform the discussions inside the Labour Party, so that the views of party members who stand for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and reject the idea that the UK should treat Netanyahu’s government with impunity, will receive greater hearing and acceptance. When the Israeli peace movement and the UK peace movement speak in a united voice, it is heard louder.
Can you give a brief overview of Standing Together’s recent campaigns and activity?
Ever since the start of the war, Standing Together was the most prominent voice inside Israeli society pushing for an alternative path to that of our government, organising the biggest mobilisations of the peace movement that called to end the war in Gaza. Often we faced police repression, including unwillingness by the police to issue permits to legally hold demonstrations and marches. We took them to court and won, including in July in the Supreme Court of Justice.
Recently, on the eve of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (29 November, observed every year since 1977 by the UN), we initiated an anti-war march in Tel-Aviv, in cooperation with Women Wage Peace and other organisations, in which we demanded an end to the war on Gaza and the return the hostages alive through a diplomatic agreement. The march was called under the slogan “If We Don’t End the War, The War Will End Us All”.
What made this anti-war demonstration stand out from previous ones we organised since the beginning of the war was the fact that among the speakers at the rally were some very mainstream and institutional public figures, for whom appearing on stage in an anti-war rally organised by Standing Together was something out of the ordinary.
Among them: Retired Major General Amiram Levin, former Commander of the Israeli Army Northern Command, as well as former Deputy Head of the Mossad; Eran Etzion, a retired veteran diplomat, former Deputy Chair of the National Security Council and former head of the Department of Diplomatic Planning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Orna Banai, a very well-known TV actress and comedian; Dr. Tomer Persico, a columnist in Haaretz and a lecturer in Jewish Philosophy; Chen Avigdori, whose wife and daughter were taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October, and released a year ago during the temporary ceasefire and hostage deal. Also speaking were Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian leader of Standing Together, and Somaya Bashir, a leader of Women Wage Peace.
Because we see our role not merely as mobilising the already existing “peaceniks”, but also swelling the ranks of the anti-war movement, it was important for us to give a platform for speakers with whom we don’t necessarily agree, or who employ language that at times diverges greatly from our own, but who, owing to their background and positions, can help shift the public conversation and win people over to anti-war positions.
Another important development is that our People’s Campaign to End Starvation in Gaza is reaching completion, after a number of successes. We launched it in August, calling on people inside Israel, especially in the Arab-Palestinian community, to donate food and other basic necessities at collection sites we set up in various towns and villages. Our aim was to get this aid into the Gaza Strip, with the help of international aid organisations, both to help alleviate the dire conditions existing there, but also to send a political message to our government.
Thousands of people volunteered and donated, both Palestinian as well as Jewish citizens of Israel, and we were able to collect close to 400 trucks full of aid. After the government tightened the siege on Gaza in September, the future of this aid campaign seemed bleak. But in recent weeks, after joining hands with more international aid organisations, we were able to enter dozens of trucks into Gaza, both to the southern part, near Khan Younis, and also to the central region, Deir el-Balah, and the surrounding refugee camps. The northern part of the Gaza Strip, unfortunately, remains tightly blocked by the army, as part of our government’s plan of ethnic cleansing, using starvation as a tactic of war to drive people en masse from their homes, to replace them with future Jewish-only settlements that are supposed to be built on the ruins of their homes.
The photos and videos coming out of Gaza, of local volunteers handing out sacks of flour, rice, canned food, and bags of shampoo, washing powder and feminine hygiene products, bring tears to our eyes. These are items donated and collected in our communities, packed and sorted by our volunteers. One of the directors of these Gazan distribution centres told us over the phone: “I insisted that we distribute your aid while wearing purple vests. I turned the city upside down, but I was able to find purple fabric for this.”
More: “More aid from Standing Together reaches Gaza”, 21 November, UK Friends of Standing Together
What is your assessment of the budget recently passed by the Israeli cabinet?
Netanyahu often speaks of winning “total victory” over Hamas, which is, of course, a mere empty slogan to justify extending the war indefinitely. He is not going to achieve “total victory”, nor does he seriously consider destroying Hamas, which is his political partner in undermining prospects for a diplomatic agreement that would guarantee the national rights of both peoples who live in our land.
But there is one “total victory” he is very much determined to achieve, and that is a victory over the living standards and the material well-being of working people in Israel. On 1 January, a price hike is expected to hit working families. There will be an increase in the price of public transportation, electricity, water and municipal taxes. Also, VAT will increase by 1 percentage point, aggravating the already existing cost of living crisis. At the same time, wages will be cut as the government cancels tax subsidies for salaried workers, and increases the health and social security contributions deducted from workers’ pay to compensate for the increased spending during the war.
The original budget proposal of the government went even further, including freezing the automatic update of the minimum wage, old age allowance, and disability allowance, as well as increasing taxation on savings for pensions. However, the Histadrut, Israel’s major trade union federation, opposed these measures and negotiated with the Ministry of Finance to put them off the table. The government agreed, but as a concession, the Histadrut accepted other measures in their place: cutting wages in the public sector by 2.29% in 2025 and 1.2% in 2026, and decreasing the convalescence pay enjoyed annually by workers.
In total, 2025 will be a year in which the Israeli working class will bear the burden of the wars launched by our government against the people of Gaza and against the neighbouring countries. Maintaining a large standing army, purchasing weapons from abroad, allocating budgets for the settlement project, and calling on army reservists to take leave from their workplaces to resume army duty — all of this takes a tremendous toll on the Israeli economy, and our staunchly neoliberal government is expecting working people to pay the lion’s share of the price.
What picture does the Israeli public get, if any, of the devastation the war is causing in Gaza and Lebanon?
The Israeli mainstream media plays an incredibly negative role, as it withholds information about the disastrous consequences of the war on the civilian population in Gaza. When the war raged in Lebanon, before the much-welcomed ceasefire agreement that was reached a couple of weeks ago, very little of the devastation that our army was inflicting on Beirut and the rest of Lebanon was depicted in the Israeli press and TV. Ironically, people abroad, who rely on non-Israeli media, can be far better informed about the reality on the ground in a place that is just an hour’s drive away from where many of us live than most Israelis.
A couple of months ago, a group of civil rights organisations in Israel sent a public letter to the editorial boards of major media outlets in Israel, warning that the coverage of the war on Gaza is keeping the Israeli public in the dark about basic facts. They mention, for example, that when in May, the Israeli air force attacked the displaced persons camp in Rafah, causing a tragic fire that cost the lives of dozens, no pictures of injured Palestinians were shown on Israeli TV, and only 12% of the TV and radio news items regarding the event bothered to mention that there was a great loss of life. The rest of the news items focused on how this event might delegitimise internationally the righteous cause of the war.
This is why it is so important for us in Standing Together to try to speak with the Israeli public directly, without mediation. Both through building our social media presence (our TikTok account, for example, has more followers than that of any other political organisation in Israel — left, right or centre), as well as through public-facing campaigns. For example, we recently posted hundreds of bus stop ads in Tel-Aviv and the surrounding cities, with images of the war on Gaza that our government wishes people not to see.
We want to highlight that our society is at a crossroads, and we must choose: either eternal war, bloodshed, loss of innocent life, or ending the war and the occupation, diplomatic agreement, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace, which is the only way to safeguard the future and security of both peoples.
Uri Weltmann
Daniel Randall
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