The Palestinian Academic Committee for the Boycott of Israel (PACBI) [1], a leading body within the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) [2] in the UK, have published renewed calls to boycott Standing Together, this time also targeting the Friends of Standing Together network, including UK Friends of Standing Together. Their texts repeat and expand on the themes of a previous statement, published in January 2024.

In a response to the January 2024 statement, Palestinian members of Standing Together’s leadership wrote: “The fight for Palestinian liberation is multi-faceted. As a movement operating within Israel, we took upon ourselves a specific role: to shift Israeli public opinion away from supporting policy that maintains and deepens the subjugation of Palestinians.”

No attempt has been made to respond to the statement from Standing Together’s Palestinian leaders. PACBI and PSC’s new statements are also noteworthy for an almost total lack of reference to Standing Together’s actual activity.

We urge all readers to make up their own minds on this matter, and read the calls for boycotts in the context of Standing Together’s record.

In the past weeks and months, Standing Together has:

– Held multiple demonstrations at the Gaza border, including engaging in civil disobedience which attempted to block troop transport vehicles
– Held disruptive direct actions at Ben Gurion Airport [3], and disrupting live television broadcasts
– Campaigned consistently to encourage Israeli soldiers to refuse illegal orders
– Physically confronted far-right settlers and defeated their attempts to impede aid lorries
– Conducted its own “Aid to Gaza” campaign, collecting donations from across Israel, especially in Palestinian communities in the north
– Stood alongside Arab-Bedouin communities in the Negev/Naqab [4] to resist displacement
– Crowdfunded to build bomb shelters in unprotected Arab-Bedouin communities during Israel’s war with Iran
– Mobilised to defend Palestinians and Palestinian-run businesses in occupied East Jerusalem against attacks by racist mobs
– Supported and organised nationwide protests, strikes, and other direct actions to demand a ceasefire
– Spilled red paint outside the residence of the IDF [5] chief of staff
– Held a die-in outside the army HQ in Tel Aviv

Are these actions worthwhile? Would the Palestinian cause be better served if the movement organising these actions did not exist?

Also characteristic of PACBI and PSC’s recent statements is a fixation on forms of language above practical politics. The terms we use to describe things do matter. But attacking Standing Together for not using certain words, whilst making no reference to what Standing Together actually does, privileges the linguistic over the material. In any case, the attacks are inaccurate on their own terms: Standing Together does refer to Israel’s policy in the West Bank as apartheid, and does describe the war in Gaza as genocidal.

Contrary to the claims of PACBI and PSC, Standing Together does not equate oppressors and oppressed. They acknowledge, and mobilise to resist, the violent structures which maintain inequality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

The movement’s Theory of Change states: “We will take an active role in the struggle to end Israel’s rule over the Palestinian people.” It affirms that, “The current regime serves the interests of a small group — the capitalist financial elite and the settlement-building political elite — at the expense of the majority’s interests”, whilst acknowledging that the regime “remains dependent on the majority’s consent.”

Standing Together mobilises amongst the Palestinian minority within Israel, a two-million-strong community comprising almost one-third of the Palestinian population between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Half of the leadership body of Standing Together is made up of Palestinians. The fact of their Israeli citizenship does not make these people any less Palestinian.

They have written: “We believe that it is politically effective to argue that oppression, racism, and bigotry harms the people of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. The harm is by no means equal, though the role of self-interest in political organising must not be underplayed. We work under the basic assumption that millions of Palestinians and millions of Jews live in this land today, and no one is going anywhere. Ending Israeli control over Palestinians and forging a society in which everyone is free and equal between the river and the sea is in the interest of both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.”

Readers should consider the perspectives of Palestinians in Standing Together about their own movement: “Standing Together is the only organisation that has provided us and tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel a safe political refuge during these challenging times, a place to demand a ceasefire, grieve safely, and organise for a future where we are free and equal in our homeland.”

Standing Together is a growing movement, and efforts to boycott it have not affected this. But if they were to do so, the beneficiaries would not be the Palestinian people, but the Israeli government. As Standing Together’s Palestinian leaders put it: “Efforts to silence and isolate Standing Together do not serve the Palestinian cause, they serve the interests of Israel’s political establishment, which is also attempting to silence us.”

Standing Together activists have been arrested for their actions, including an August protest outside the IDF chief of staff’s residence, and a protest at the Gaza border in May. In August, a Standing Together fundraiser in Jerusalem was banned, with the police alleging it could “serve Hamas” [6]. Authorities at the University of Haifa, where almost 50% of students are Palestinian, banned the Standing Together chapter in April, after it organised a protest where images of children killed in Gaza were displayed. The ban was subsequently overturned after a local campaign. In April, police attempted to ban demonstrators at an anti-war rally organised by Standing Together from displaying pictures of dead children, or placards using the word “genocide”. Activists defied the attempted ban. In January 2024, a Standing Together protest in Tel Aviv was banned entirely, forcing organisers to rearrange the event.

If the claims made by supporters of the PACBI/PSC position, such that Standing Together “appeases”, “normalises”, or “whitewashes” Israel’s actions were true, why would the Israeli state make such efforts to suppress them?

Anyone who wants to see a stronger anti-war, anti-occupation movement within Israel should support the one that currently exists, and help it grow.

UK Friends of Standing Together remains open to working with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and its supporters wherever we have agreement, for example in campaigning to demand an end to arms export licences to Israel and in protests to demand an immediate end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. PSC activists who want unity in action wherever possible, whilst respecting political differences, will always be welcome at our events.

UK Friends of Standing Together