The week of the United Nations General Assembly, I found myself in a familiar place. Alongside a group of Israeli expats, I stood across the street from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hotel as we held signs and led chants loudly denouncing the Israeli and American far-right for their callous disregard for Palestinian and Israeli lives. I found myself in the same position over two years ago, with a different group of activists, protesting Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN during what we then thought was one of the most difficult periods in the region’s history. This time, as I stood alongside the other demonstrators, the same passion and frustration I felt last time remained true, but they existed alongside another emotion: hopelessness.
In prior moments of crisis, rage felt motivating. Seeing our societies’ failings up close made me feel that it was not only my responsibility to help fix our broken world, but that change was possible. I volunteered on state and federal campaigns supporting progressive candidates. During the judicial coup in Israel, I challenged my peers to see the connection between the assault on Israeli democracy and deepening occupation. Today, confronted by many of the same moral and political challenges, I sometimes feel shamefully numb, overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness to do anything productive to change the situation.
This sense of powerlessness is especially acute as we mark the second anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023. It has been extremely disheartening to see how empathy and compassion for suffering on both sides of this bloody conflict have been deemed radical or traitorous. If I brought up the loss of life in Gaza in many Jewish spaces, I’d be looked at with suspicion. I avoid mentioning my concerns about rising antisemitism, for fear that I’ll be caricatured as a right-wing reactionary. In the early months, I avoided any demonstrations for fear that I would be asked to choose a side.
One of the few reprieves from this toxicity has been getting to hear from voices on the ground. Over the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of getting to meet and listen to the voices of civil society, Palestinians and Israelis, some of whom I now call friends. Being in such great company is both a sense of strength and frustration. They are refreshingly clear-eyed and empathetic, living in the complex moral and political realities of the land. Perhaps because their perspectives don’t lend themselves to soundbites or neat categorization, they have struggled to gain a foothold in the American political discourse.
They are Israeli Jews whose Zionism drives them to speak out against the war crimes committed in the West Bank and Gaza. They are Palestinians whose generational trauma from the Nakba to the present motivates them to fight for peace. But in New York, Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem, the binary remains strong. Too many lawmakers and Jewish communal leaders pit the plight of the hostages against the plight of Palestinians starving in Gaza and living under settler terrorism in the occupied West Bank. We must break this binary.
As my friends on the anti-occupation left are fond of saying: “There are 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living in the land and none of them are going anywhere” This should not be a radical statement. Authoritarians have a vested interest in pitting our communities against each other. Israel’s far-right government and Hamas quite literally feed off of each other to further inflame the conflict.
As a result, we must empower the voices of peace and mutual understanding to break free from the cycle of violence — so that no one else has to endure anything like the crimes committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, or the crimes committed during Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, which has now killed over 60,000 Palestinians, many of whom are civilians.
These voices include Yonatan Zeigen, son of the peace activist Vivian Silver, whom Hamas murdered on Oct. 7. At the joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day on May 12, 2024, Yonatan said: “We all need to realize that the occupation, the 7th of October, the war in Gaza, Jewish and Arab terrorism, and any kind of political violence, are not inevitable. They are based on false and toxic ideas that bring and will continue to bring destruction on us all.”
As we mourn our dead and fight like hell for the living, we must stand with these voices and against a politics that actively pits Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom against one another. J Street U will continue to bring peacebuilders to campus, and I hope to see some of you there, even if you bitterly disagree with what is being said. Because if we are not willing to use our relatively privileged position, removed from the immediate violence of the region, to engage in dialogue, then we cannot take the larger steps towards a lasting peace.
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