Rejecting the Binary of Israel or Palestine

Under the radar, a movement led by Israeli-Americans, progressive Jews and some allies is forging a more constructive way of engaging with the current crisis.

I wasn’t planning on writing this week’s Connector about the politics of Israel/Palestine here in the United States, mostly because I thought I had run out of fresh things to say, and I do want to go back to devoting my attention to the larger purpose of this newsletter, which is to report on and analyze the ongoing struggle to build and sustain democracy and to cover important developments at the intersection of technology, organizing and movements. (On that topic, I have something juicy I’m working on regarding AI and campaigns that hopefully will be ready for next week.)

But then I read this post from an old summer camp friend, Ilana DeBare, which reminded me of how toxic the conflict has become here and which pointed to a different path than the binary choice on offer. It’s the text of a “d’rash,” or commentary, that she gave at her synagogue last week, riffing on that week’s reading from the Torah. Contemplating the story of the plagues sent (supposedly) by God to harden the heart of the Pharoah of Egypt, so that he would resist demands to free the Hebrew slaves, Ilana talks about how we often harden our own hearts in the face of human suffering. Then she turns inward, toward her own community of fellow Jews, and talks about the many ways people have hardened their hearts against the human death toll in Gaza being caused by the Israeli military. She writes:

One is to avoid looking. I plead guilty to this. Many days, I see the latest newspaper headline about a destroyed hospital or a family with 35 dead relatives and I can't bear to read about it. I skip to another section of the paper. Another way is to blame the victims. "There are no innocents in Gaza," we may say; "they chose the path of war and terror by electing Hamas back in 2006. They brought this on themselves." Another way is to have blind faith in the Netanyahu government. "They must have good reasons for such widespread bombing," we may tell ourselves. "They have security information that I don't have. They're doing no more than is necessary to secure Israel's borders." Yet another way is to throw up our hands in despair. "There's no realistic solution," we may say. "There's no path to peace. I'm giving up on things ever getting any better."

Then she rejects each of these choices. Looking away doesn’t end the suffering. Blaming the victims makes no sense when so many are children. Giving Israel’s war cabinet a blank check means trusting Netanyahu, a man who will never allow a Palestinian state to exist and who anyway lies more than most politicians. And despair violates the most basic commandment, to choose life.

But then she gets to the hard part. Since October 7, we’ve been asked to make a binary choice. Either you are for Palestine or you are for genocide. Or, either you are for Israel or you are for terrorist savagery. Chances are, if you are reading this post, you bristle at this binary. Or worse, you have lost precious relationships because of it. Or, you’ve pulled back from some or all of your political and civic engagements because you are afraid of conversations you haven’t yet had, or you just recoil from the rancor from people who used to be friends and colleagues.

This isn’t just a private, personal problem. Binary thinking and action in response to the Israel-Hamas war has exposed and widened an already-existing fault line within the Democratic coalition. And even worse, on the anti-Zionist left we’re seeing an accelerating normalization of extremely stupid performative behavior. What else would you call this statement from Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum here in New York City: “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the State of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to global capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime.” (I get that Israel has played an ugly role backing pro-US military regimes since the 1970s and its spying technology is also used by many authoritarians, including oil monarchies, to prop up their regimes. But it’s hardly obvious that the way to end those policies is to “destroy Israel” instead of helping change its leadership.) And why did pro-Palestine demonstrators swarm outside Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center yesterday, accusing the hospital of abetting genocide? Because it took a donation from billionaire Ken Griffin, a Harvard alum who has spoken out against students there who blamed Israel for the October 7 attack? How does that make the center complicit in genocide?

Is there a way out of this binary? Back at the end of November, I reported on the overall pattern of pro-Palestine vs pro-Israel demonstrations, using data collected by the Crowd Counting Consortium. What was notably missing from the big picture of hundreds of one-sided rallies were bridging efforts that sought not to lift one side over the other, but to bring together people around a common agenda. Well, now it’s possible to point to an alternative.

Since early November, there have been a handful of strikingly different actions in places like New York City, Boston, Washington, DC, and the Bay Area.* All of them have been ad-hoc efforts generally pulled together and led by Israeli-Americans and/or progressive American Jews; all of them have described themselves as “peace vigils” instead of “rallies”; all of them have told participants to not bring any of their own signs or flags to reduce divisiveness, instead pre-printing and distributing their own carefully prepared signs; and all have coalesced around the same five principles:

1.     A bilateral ceasefire now

2.     Full hostage deal now

3.     Humanitarian relief now

4.     Protection of Palestinians in the West Bank

5.     An end to the political persecution of Palestinian citizens of Israel

This morning I got a chance to talk with Ben Linder, an Israeli-American who lives in the Bay Area and who was part of a group of local activists who organized a peace vigil on January 7 at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater in Oakland which was attended by about 250 people. For starters, I asked him to explain where this effort came from. “Starting in January, where a large segment of Israeli Americans became activated to specifically protest against the Israeli government’s overhaul of the judiciary, a series solidarity protests began across the US by Israeli expats,” he explained. “Many of the communities that are now active in the vigil space came out of what became called UnXceptable [an American-Israeli pro-democracy network]. And many of us, although not exclusively, organizing these had previously participated in organizing UnXceptable and what we mostly had in common was that we were also doing anti-occupation work and people-to-people type work.”

October 7 was a crossroads for many of these newly politicized Israeli-Americans, who number perhaps a half million in the US. Linder commented, “I would say most Israelis in the United States and most American Jews kind of rallied behind the flag. And it did become an ‘us-vs-them’ situation. Are you the pro-Israel camp or are you in the ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ camp? For us, that was that was not a valid choice.”

Why not? Because as Israelis, Linder said they understood that October had shattered the old assumption in Israel that they could just live with the Palestinian conflict without resolving it. And Linder said expats like him felt they needed to do more than simply rally in solidarity from a distance. “While most of Israel fell into a defensive posture, we feel like we have ‘the privilege of distance’ and that phrase, ‘the privilege of distance’ is something that we in the San Francisco Bay Area group have been working with lately.” He argued that “we're able to have a holistic view of the situation. And we feel it's our duty, while both sides in country are engaged in their camps, we feel like we have an opportunity being physically distant to extract ourselves and to try to take a different tack.”

Linder told me that the Oakland vigil’s specific goals were very carefully worded. “First of all, we use the phrase bilateral ceasefire, to signify it is not the left's unilateral call for Israel to stop killing Palestinians. It's more that both sides have some things to discuss, right? A call for what we termed ‘a full hostage deal’ signifying the return of the Israeli hostages and the release of Palestinian prisoners. We called for protection of Palestinians in the West Bank and safety and security for all.” And at the top of the list of words used by the vigil organizers were the words “justice, equality, freedom and peace.”

Oakland peace vigil, January 7, 2024 (photo provided by Ben Linder)

The vigil was clearly therapeutic for my friend Ilana, who wrote after attending, “I had wanted for some weeks to express my support for a ceasefire, but this was the first action that felt comfortable for me—where I could stand up for Palestinian lives without being surrounded by people devaluing Israeli lives. The mood was somber and reflective, as you'd expect—but also surprisingly uplifting, from being around so many other people who refuse to let fear, anger, or despair harden their hearts.”

Linder made a similar point, when I noted that vigils like the ones he and his friends are organizing (they are doing another in San Francisco January 28) didn’t have a clear set of demands for action. “Some of us are politically active, but we do that through other organizations,” noting his own involvement in J Street and Combatants for Peace.  But, he added, “There is a therapy aspect. And also a loneliness aspect right now. Being a seeker of peace in a sea of warmongers. Many of us need that community. There is also the sense, and this goes back to the privilege of distance again that I talked about, that it is very scary to be a peace seeker in Israel right now and for sure in Gaza, both places. We feel we have a duty to carry the torch.” He also noted that such efforts were doubly important given the “political persecution of free speech in Israel,” where many Palestinians have been arrested simply for statements on social media and Israeli Jewish-led rallies for a cease-fire have also been prevented by the police.

Oakland peace vigil, January 7, 2024 (Photo provided by Ben Linder)

Notably, efforts like Linder’s group in the Bay Area do not yet have a common banner. “We purposely don’t have a website,” he added, saying that his group’s members preferred to work via word-of-mouth. And perhaps there’s wisdom in that approach, because it forces people to slow down and take the time to talk through a difficult subject together before they move to action. The opposite approach, of rushing to the barricades, waving flags and shouting angry slogans, is an old trope on the left and one that seems to be leading nowhere useful.

There’s bad lines being drawn; nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

Singing songs and carrying signs, mostly say, hooray for our side.

It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down.

Additional Reading

—David Davidi-Brown, “Can we in the LGBTQ+ community go beyond binary thinking on Israel-Palestine?”, Medium, November 16, 2023

—Einat Wilf, “Zionism as Therapy,” Jewish Priorities, January 16, 2024

—“'The Misconception Was That the Palestinians Aren't a People. They're Willing to Kill and Be Killed for Their Independence',” former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon on how to resolve the Gaza crisis, Ha’Aretz, January 10, 2024

—Kein Robillard and Akbar Shahid Ahmed, “How Israel’s Assault on Gaza Has Shifted Democratic Calculations,” HuffPost, January 11, 2024.

—Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, “Gazans are starving. Airdrops of aid could help change that,” The Forward, January 6, 2024.

*Contact info: Boston:  propeaceboston@gmail.com; San Francisco: SFBay4peace@gmail.com; DC: jhuddle2023@gmail.com.

Deep Thoughts

—Mike Podhorzer trenchantly sums up our democratic predicament.