In this moment of extreme polarization, two leaders of a Jewish-Palestinian grassroots movement in Israel came to the Bay Area this week with pleas for compassion for both sides.
“We are holding and containing a lot of pain, grief, loss and fear for both of our peoples and the land,” Sally Abed, a Palestinian leader of Standing Together, told a full house Wednesday night at Temple Sinai in Oakland.
Abed, who is an Israeli citizen recently elected to the Haifa City Council, called for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and a return of all Israeli hostages alive.
“There are two peoples on the land, and no one is going anywhere,” said Abed. “We all deserve to live equally, freely, independently and in prosperity.”
Abed and Alon-Lee Green, an Israeli Jew who is Standing Together’s co-founder and national director, made three appearances this week at synagogues in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Oakland and received standing ovations at all.
There are two peoples on the land, and no one is going anywhere.
Both in their 30s, Abed and Green have made several visits to the U.S. since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. They’ve received lots of attention and press, including a profile in the New York Times. Reform and Conservative synagogues across the country, as well as mainstream Jewish groups, have hosted and co-sponsored their talks.
The New Israel Fund, which grants money to Standing Together and helped organize this visit, said that more than 1,000 people in total attended the three local talks. Additional support came from Congregations Beth Am and Etz Chayim on the Peninsula; Beth El, Temple Sinai and Netivot Shalom in the East Bay, and Beth Sholom, Emanu-El, Sha’ar Zahav, Sherith Israel, The Kitchen and JCCSF in San Francisco.
“We want to be sure to give folks a space to hear all the perspectives and wrestle with them,” Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, Temple Sinai’s senior rabbi, told J. after the pair concluded their talk. “If we can create spaces where they can say what they’re feeling and be heard and listen to other people, that’s what we really need. And if we’re going to be supportive to those living there, we need to be working together, not against each other.”
Standing Together began in 2015 as a social justice movement. It focuses primarily on its vision of a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and works on other equity issues such as climate justice, LGBTQ rights and affordable housing.
“We understood then that we need a new story,” Abed told the Sinai audience, acknowledging that part of that was reimagining who in Israel was meant by “we.” “We’ve never had a ‘we’ that includes all of us.”
When the current war began, the group stuck to its long-held beliefs. “I can’t express how immensely lucky we were — in the most difficult moment of our lives — to have a movement that could react as quickly as we did,” she said.
Green didn’t mince words when he spoke of his deep disappointment in Israel’s leadership in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
Everyone in Israel has been reeling from trauma and shock, and most know someone among the 1,200 people killed or the 240 taken hostage.
“Right away, our leaders promised us revenge and flattening Gaza and killing all our enemies and a complete and total victory,” Green said. “Not compassion, not sorrow, not understanding the trauma, not addressing the emotional state of the entire nation. They haven’t changed course even once.”
Green emphasized that before Oct. 7, Israel was already at war with itself over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul, which led hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest weekly across the country.
Immediately after Oct. 7, he said, the government started to suggest that its Arab citizens, who make up 20% of Israel’s population, were traitors.
“They portrayed this entire group as an enemy we have to deal with,” Green said, “as [if] they’re siding with Hamas and just waiting to attack Jews.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Arabs were experiencing their own grief, Abed said. They lost family and friends too, and as citizens shared in Israel’s grief, she said.
Once the war started, Standing Together immediately began calling for a cease-fire, which remains an unpopular position among most of the Israeli public.
“Killing innocent people or 11,000 children will not make an Israeli family safer,” Green said. “Hamas are fed by the extreme reality we are creating. It was our own government’s strategy to make them stronger, while weakening the Palestinian Authority.”
When the pair were asked during the Q&A period about a two-state solution, Green said he hoped it would be a temporary situation if it were to happen.
“We only require nation-states when we feel unsafe,” Abed added. “If we’re really dreaming, we don’t need them.”
Green implored those in the audience to contact their elected officials, emphasizing advocacy for both sides.
“Our lives are so interconnected at this point,” he said.
“If someone calling for a cease-fire is triggering for you, I understand how some groups can use it with antisemitism behind it,” Green added. “But seeking and demanding Palestinian freedom is not against Jews, it’s for all of us.”