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WHAT IS THE DUTY OF THE ISRAELI LEFT IN A TIME OF GENOCIDE?  
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Hadas Binyamini
January 3, 2025
972 Magazine
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_ Israeli leftists have been more divided and marginalized than ever
since the October 7 assault, with joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle at
a breaking point. Yet their sights remain set on long-term political
change. _

Left wing activists protest against the war, calling to end the war
in Gaza and Lebanon, outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, November 20,
2024, Erik Marmor/Flash90

 

This past June, the news of a merger
[[link removed]] between
two veteran Israeli political parties on the left of the Zionist
spectrum, Labor and Meretz, passed without much fanfare. With the
once-hegemonic Labor Party occupying only four of the Knesset’s 120
seats, and Meretz having been wiped out altogether in the 2022
election, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Lacking a
compelling alternative vision to the perpetual subjugation of
Palestinians under the boot of the Israeli military, Israel’s
parliamentary left — now led by Yair Golan, yet another former army
general, who led the calls
[[link removed]] over
the summer for an invasion of Lebanon — has been condemned to
irrelevance.

“There is no left-wing politics in Israel; this is a reality many
people overlook,” Palestinian activist Hamze Awawde tweeted
[[link removed]] in July. His
remarks came after the Knesset passed a resolution opposing
Palestinian statehood by 68 votes to nine, with only lawmakers from
Palestinian-led parties voting against it. “While there are some
grassroots left-wing movements, left-wing politics as a political
force simply doesn’t exist in Israel.”

The question of how leftists can best shift Israeli policy from the
inside, in the absence of leftist political leadership, provokes
endless debate among activists on the ground. Since the Oslo peace
process, conventional wisdom both within and outside the left has
dismissed any political potential for Israeli leftists — due to the
camp’s small size, its electoral weakness, its infighting, and its
abandonment of Palestinian solidarity and leadership.

[[link removed]]

The left’s complete marginalization, enforced by Israel’s
politicized police
[[link removed]],
has only accelerated since October 7. Even family members of Israeli
hostages
[[link removed]],
who call for a ceasefire in order to free their relatives, are
harassed and smeared as leftist traitors. The increased suppression of
Palestinian society, too, has radically limited the horizon for
dissent or collective political action over the past year. Since just
days after the Hamas attack, Palestinian citizens have faced a
government-backed campaign of intimidation
[[link removed]], persecution
[[link removed]], surveillance
[[link removed]],
and harassment
[[link removed]].

Nonetheless, this past year has seen left-wing Israeli activists
persist in their efforts to build power in pursuit of a more peaceful,
just, and equal future for Israelis and Palestinians.

The more mainstream “peace camp
[[link removed]]” — which is
closer to the Zionist left, largely represented by NGOs and funded by
international philanthropy — is currently reconstituting itself
[[link removed]] following
the shock of the October 7 Hamas attacks and the despair of Israel’s
subsequent onslaught on the Gaza Strip. Further to their left is a
smaller network of organizers who receive less international
attention, and who often find themselves sidelined even by the peace
camp. Ranging from anti-Zionists to non-Zionists to those who refuse
such categories altogether, these activists are at the far-left margin
of Israeli society, sometimes identified as the “radical left
[[link removed]].”

[Demonstrators protest calling to end the war in the Gaza Strip, at
Habima Square in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)]
[[link removed]]
Demonstrators protest calling to end the war in the Gaza Strip, at
Habima Square in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
Demonstrators protest calling to end the war in the Gaza Strip, at
Habima Square in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Unlike the mainstream peace camp, they have unequivocally opposed the
current war from its very outset — and they call for the dismantling
of Israel’s regime of occupation, apartheid, and Jewish supremacy.
They emphasize bottom-up organizing, strengthening Jewish-Palestinian
joint struggle, and highlighting the links between Israel’s colonial
domination over Palestinians and ethno-class inequality within Israeli
society.

Most days, these activists can be found planning or participating
in anti-war protests
[[link removed]], or
engaging in “protective presence
[[link removed]]” —
physically supporting Palestinian communities in the occupied West
Bank that are at risk of expulsion
[[link removed]] through
settler and army violence. Many of them have served jail time
for refusing mandatory military service
[[link removed]],
and they regularly join Palestinian-led protests both in the West Bank
and inside Israel.

None are under any illusions that internal leftist pressure will be
the decisive factor in forcing Israel to end its carnage in Gaza;
instead, all of them call on foreign governments to stop sending
weapons to Israel. Subdued resignation and despair are the prevailing
sentiments. But they see their activism as the bare minimum from their
position of relative privilege, even while recognizing the limited
material impact of their actions.

[Conscientious objectors demonstrate outside the IDF Recruitment
Center at Tel Hashomer, in central Israel, August 5, 2024. (Tomer
Neuberg/Flash90)]
[[link removed]]
Conscientious objectors demonstrate outside the IDF Recruitment Center
at Tel Hashomer, in central Israel, August 5, 2024. (Tomer
Neuberg/Flash90)
Conscientious objectors demonstrate outside the IDF Recruitment Center
at Tel Hashomer, in central Israel, August 5, 2024. (Tomer
Neuberg/Flash90)

The nearly two dozen such activists who spoke to +972 also recognize
that a ceasefire in itself wouldn’t change the political structures
in Israel and the US — those that made it possible for people
in both
[[link removed]] societies
to participate in starving and murdering Palestinians on a mass scale.
Even if a deal is reached, the process of reckoning with being part of
an eliminationist society, one that has crossed new thresholds in its
dehumanization
[[link removed]] of
Palestinians, is just beginning.

“So many people here are in a fascist frenzy,” activist
and podcaster
[[link removed]] Yahav Erez
told +972. “I ask myself, ‘You’re living in a genocidal state,
almost everybody around you has zero empathy toward anyone who’s not
‘their’ people, and you’re still in contact with them — how
can you be giving them legitimacy?’ But on the other hand, I was
once just like them.”

Facing these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Israel’s radical
leftists have set their sights on long-term political change. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not immortal; the militaristic center
and messianic far-right currently appear to be his most likely
successors. Leftists’ goal is to lay down the groundwork that could
make them a viable political force once the war ends. To do so, they
are now compelled to re-examine how they understand their own power,
their base, and their ability to create change.

Pulling to the left

For the past two decades, the Israeli center and right have pushed for
“managing” or “shrinking” the conflict — the idea that
Israel can violently control Palestinians and enforce occupation and
siege with its high-tech military, while simultaneously pursuing
normalization agreements with Arab countries.

For a while, this appeared to work. Activists in both the radical left
and the broader peace camp struggled to generate popular urgency and
crisis around Palestinian rights, and most Jewish Israelis were able
to go about their daily life as “normal” without giving the
Palestinians too much thought. “I will be very honest: we were
stuck,” Sally Abed, a leading Palestinian activist in the
Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together, said. “No one talked about
the occupation, no one talked about peace. The attitude was, ‘Who
cares?’”

Despite the astronomic government and military failures on and since
[[link removed]] October
7, Israeli leaders have not altered their approach. For Abed,
politicians across the spectrum have continued to present the public
with only different shades of the same policy. “Even if you go all
the way to the left [in the Knesset], no one is offering anything to
the Israeli public beyond, ‘Let’s bomb some more. Oh, that’s not
working? Let’s bomb some more.’”

Outside the halls of power, growing opposition to the war has led to
occasional bursts of energy in the Israeli peace camp, symbolized by
the July 1 gathering “It’s Time – The Big Peace Conference
[[link removed]].”
This has marked a potential opening for leftists, who have sought to
push the ceasefire protests to articulate an explicitly
anti-occupation agenda. Abed explained that Standing Together, which
occupies a space somewhere between the traditional peace camp and the
radical left, aims to act as “the weight that pulls [to the left]
those who are just to our right, who are mostly with us but don’t
have the edge to say what we’re saying.”

[Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the Menora Arena calling for
an end to the war and a solution to the conflict, Tel Aviv, July 1,
2024. (Oren Ziv)]
[[link removed]]
Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the Menora Arena calling for
an end to the war and a solution to the conflict, Tel Aviv, July 1,
2024. (Oren Ziv)
Israeli-Palestinian peace conference calling for an end to the war and
a solution to the conflict, Tel Aviv, July 1, 2024. (Oren Ziv)

But to avoid the fate of the Israeli peace camp since Oslo, organizers
told +972 they will have to learn from the left’s failures
throughout its history — and most recently from the weaknesses of
the mass protests
[[link removed]] against
the far-right government’s judicial overhaul
[[link removed]].

Those demonstrations
[[link removed]], which
occurred on a weekly basis from January 2023 until October 7, saw
hundreds of thousands of Israelis take to the streets in the name of
democracy. Yet leaders of the pro-democracy protests tried hard “to
limit the scope of the debate to judicial reform and Netanyahu’s
corruption charges,” according to Noa Levy, secretary of the Tel
Aviv-Jaffa branch of the Communist-led Hadash party, and legal advisor
and co-founder of the army refuser network Mesarvot.

Against these attempts, Levy and other activists formed an
“anti-occupation bloc” within the wider protest movement,
emphasizing apartheid and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians as
core to any discussion of Israeli democracy. The mainstream protest
movement generally treated the anti-occupation bloc — which
sometimes amassed several thousand demonstrators — as an irritating
pariah [[link removed]],
with its Palestinian flags, Arabic chants, and slogans like “No
democracy with occupation.” Yet even within this bloc, there were
strong disagreements.

[Israelis protest against the Netanyahu government's judicial
overhaul, in Tel Aviv, on September 30, 2023. (Avshalom
Sassoni/Flash90)]
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Israelis protest against the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul,
in Tel Aviv, on September 30, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Israelis protest against the Netanyahu government’s judicial
overhaul, in Tel Aviv, on September 30, 2023. (Avshalom
Sassoni/Flash90)

The Radical Bloc,
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collective of a few hundred far-left Israelis that formed alongside
the anti-occupation bloc, soon emerged as an independent force, and
has become a fixture at ceasefire demonstrations
[[link removed]] since
October 7. Unlike the broader anti-occupation bloc, this collective
understands Zionism as a settler-colonial project, and struggles for
an equal society for everyone between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Sea — as well as for Palestinian refugees’ right of
return [[link removed]].

From “This is not a conflict, it is a genocide,” and “Pilot,
stop murdering children,” to “Grandma, where were you during the
Gaza genocide?” their slogans and chants at the ceasefire
demonstrations have represented more than just an irritation for the
mainstream protesters — but rather a total repudiation of them.

‘If we think things can’t be fixed, we are not doing politics of
change’

These factions’ disagreements cannot be dismissed as leftist
splintering or petty infighting. They reflect their different answers
to the same fundamental question: can Israeli society change — or is
it stuck in a permanent state of violent anti-Palestinian rage?

Israeli leftist opinion is mixed. “I don’t think we can change
people’s opinions from within,” said M., an activist with the
Radical Bloc who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of being
doxxed. “We’re not convincing anyone who’s not with us
already.” The goal, she said, is not to change Israeli minds, but
rather to be a voice of truth in a society that is in an almost
compulsive state of denial about the violence it is inflicting.

“There is ‘David and Goliath syndrome’ here,” M. continued.
“We [Israeli Jews] always cast ourselves as David, and there always
has to be a Goliath who is attacking us. Even if we kill more than
40,000 people — we’re always the victim.”

[Left wing activists protest calling to end the war in Gaza and
Lebanon, outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, November 20, 2024. (Erik
Marmor/Flash90)]
[[link removed]] Left
wing activists protest calling to end the war in Gaza and Lebanon,
outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, November 20, 2024. (Erik
Marmor/Flash90)
Left wing activists protest calling to end the war in Gaza and
Lebanon, outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, November 20, 2024. (Erik
Marmor/Flash90)

Yahav Erez sees things differently. Zionism is not an innate identity
for Israelis, she argues, but rather a political ideology that can be
challenged like any other — and doing so remains an essential task
for Israeli leftists. “I talk to people whose stories are living
proof that you can change,” she told +972. “Zionism is not
something you’re just born with, and then that’s who you are for
the rest of your life.”

Yeheli Cialic, an activist with the Israeli Communist Party
[[link removed]] and a
past coordinator with the army refuser network Mesarvot, concurs. “I
don’t want [Israelis] to be painted as [being different from] any
other assholes in the world,” he said. “If we think people are
stagnant and things can’t be fixed, we are not doing politics of
change. And this is irresponsible, because we are dealing with human
lives.”

The different approaches to the Israeli public tend to surface around
language choice — whether in protest signs, group chats, or social
media posts. In November 2023, the occasional partnerships between the
Radical Bloc and the broader anti-occupation bloc ended over the
latter’s reluctance to use the term “genocide” to describe
Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Their strategy was to speak to the
mainstream as much as possible,” M. explained. “Our strategy was
to be uncompromising in our statements; if the mainstream public
can’t [name genocide for what it is], at least we are speaking the
truth.”

Cialic, in contrast, describes the use of uncompromising language
within the Israeli left and among activists abroad as evidence of a
“loser” mentality. “It’s the politics of self-expression and
not the politics of building power or playing to win,” he argued.
“When you are holding a sign in the street in Hebrew, you are in
conversation, trying to communicate something to the Israeli public.
If your message straight away makes people close up, or they don’t
even understand it and get angry, then you have failed in your act of
communication and you have failed in this political action.”

Activists who try to appeal to the Israeli public grapple with the
current Israeli government’s total imperviousness to popular
pressure. Even if ceasefire protests were to grow, they are unlikely
to impact Israel’s military actions. And this is true not just in
Israel, but across the world: from the United States
[[link removed]] and Germany
to Egypt and Turkey
[[link removed].],
huge protests have flooded the streets to call for justice in
Palestine, with little impact on their governments’ policies. This
problem leads to a broader feeling of aimlessness among activists,
where it is virtually impossible to gauge whether their efforts are
making any difference.

“There isn’t a single element within the government that’s worth
trying to pressure,” Amjad Shbita, secretary general of the Hadash
party and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said. “Even under
Netanyahu’s previous governments, when we would go out to the
streets we would say, ‘Okay, Bibi is not going to listen to us, but
there are other more moderate elements that the pressure will work
on.’ This is not our current situation.”

With meager results for bottom-up protest, Israeli leftists are left
to count on external forces: diplomatic pressure and bids for
Palestinian statehood, international courts, boycott movements, and
sanctions. At the end of October 2024, more than 3,500 Israeli
citizens signed an open letter
[[link removed]] calling
for every possible form of global pressure on Israel to stop the
genocide in Gaza. “Unfortunately, the majority of Israelis support
the continuation of the war and massacres,” they affirmed, “and a
change from within is not currently feasible.”

A fractured partnership

With little recourse to pressure their government or persuade their
fellow citizens, many Israeli leftists have tried to sustain a joint
Palestinian-Jewish struggle. Yet the October 7 attacks and the
subsequent mass violence in Gaza have pushed Palestinian-Jewish
organizations close to a breaking point.

“In the beginning of October, no one imagined how you could even sit
in the same place and acknowledge mutual pain. It was unimaginable,”
Abed, of Standing Together, recalled. “A lot of Jewish Israeli
leftists changed their basic view of who counts as ‘us,’”
Hadash’s Levy explained. “They now think of ‘us’ as Jews, and
‘them’ as Arabs who need to prove they are ‘our’ partners.
Suddenly, partnership itself became a question.”

[Palestinians and Israeli left-wing activists protest against an
illegal settlement outpost on the land of Al-Makhrour, near Bethlehem,
in the occupied West Bank, September 3, 2024. (Wisam
Hashlamoun/Flash90)]
[[link removed]]
Palestinians and Israeli left-wing activists protest against an
illegal settlement outpost on the land of Al-Makhrour, near Bethlehem,
in the occupied West Bank, September 3, 2024. (Wisam
Hashlamoun/Flash90)
Palestinians and Israeli left-wing activists protest against an
illegal settlement outpost on the land of Al-Makhrour, near Bethlehem,
in the occupied West Bank, September 3, 2024. (Wisam
Hashlamoun/Flash90)

Nisreen Morqus, the general secretary of the communist-affiliated
Movement of Democratic Women in Israel (known by its Hebrew acronym
“Tandi”), sees these tensions as a natural part of joint struggle,
resurfacing during each escalation of violence. “Nationalistic
feelings can overtake our shared principles and ideology,” she said.
“When that happens, we have to hear everyone’s perspective, but we
also have to keep working to impact the policies of the government and
the public. For that we need a joint struggle, not a separate one.”

Joint struggle does not mean partnering on every initiative,
Hadash’s Shbita explained; rather, activists must discern when joint
action is most strategic. For Shbita, “Arabs and Jews protesting
together publicly has a drastic added value; people see us together
and they feel hope.” But in municipal or national elections, where
Jewish-Arab parties tend to underperform and face additional political
and bureaucratic hurdles, he argues “too close a Jewish-Arab
collaboration can sometimes be much less effective.”

Regardless of whether some tactics are pursued jointly or separately,
Shbita concluded, “what is important is that people have their heart
in the right place, which means being open and seeing this as a single
unified struggle.” And to convince their base that such a unified
struggle exists, activists value the ability to show that Jewish and
Palestinian interests are complementary and intertwined — that
Jewish-Israelis have something to gain from Palestinians acquiring
freedom and rights.

This point is not obvious to most Israelis outside the left. Instead,
peace is often seen as something akin to “generosity” toward
Palestinians, that would come at a cost to Jewish-Israeli society.

Against this dominant view, the left asserts that Israeli Jews
actually have an interest in giving up the privileges of Jewish
supremacy, since these privileges rest on a false bargain. Palestinian
subjugation requires increasing levels of dehumanization and violence
which do not spare its presumed beneficiaries; the regime of Jewish
supremacy can only be maintained by a militarized society that demands
uniformity and obedience from all its members, directing its violence
inwardly as well, towards immigrants, women, queer people, the
disabled, the poor, dissidents, and all of Arab culture.

[Israeli police officer at a left wing protest march against the war
in Gaza, in Jerusalem, November 22, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)]
[[link removed]]
Israeli police officer at a left wing protest march against the war in
Gaza, in Jerusalem, November 22, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
Israeli police officer at a left wing protest march against the war in
Gaza, in Jerusalem, November 22, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Appealing to Jewish Israelis’ own interests makes many
uncomfortable; talk of Israelis’ fears can be cruel or detached
while Israel’s genocide in Gaza creates new horrors
[[link removed]] every
day, whose full extent is still not known. Moreover, amid a tug-of-war
within the global left between opposing
[[link removed]] views
[[link removed]] of
the meaning and practice of solidarity, some insist that the
privileged party — the settler — should not be motivated by its
own self interests to support the oppressed, and do so
unconditionally.

In another view, solidarity is not simply a discursive expression of
support from one group to another. Rather, it is a process of social
and political transformation
[[link removed]] which
replaces the logic of separation and relations of violence with new
political alliances through joint political struggle. Such solidarity
begins with recognition that the fates of all those living between the
Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are materially and irrevocably
intertwined.

‘The occupation is fed by economic and material considerations’

An enduring weakness of traditional anti-occupation spaces has been
the frequent derogatory dismissal of half of the country’s Jewish
population as irrelevant for building leftist political power — that
is, Mizrahim, who trace their heritage to the Middle East and North
Africa, and who have been historically marginalized
[[link removed]] in
Israel at the hands of Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Europe. This stems
from the popular notion that Mizrahim are wedded to right-wing
politics
[[link removed]], and
Netanyahu’s Likud party in particular.

“There is a stereotypical view that Mizrahim support the right which
supports the occupation — that if it wasn’t for the Mizrahim,
maybe there wouldn’t be an occupation,” Professor Moshe Behar,
co-founder of the Mizrahi Civic Collective, explained. This view
endures in anti-occupation spaces, despite studies showing
[[link removed]] that the difference between
Mizrahi and Ashkenazi right-wing voting fluctuates widely over time,
and that education is a more significant indicator of voting than
ethnicity.

According to Behar, the anti-occupation left sees ethno-class
divisions among Israeli citizens as a “second-order or marginal
issue” in the fight for Palestinian rights. Yet the two cannot be
separated, he continued, because “the question of Palestine
doesn’t only rest on political problems within two nations, one
Jewish and one Palestinian; the occupation is fed by economic and
material considerations.” And it was “precisely the traditional
left disconnecting ethno-class divisions from the political rights of
occupied and stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza that has
weakened the left since 1967,” he added.

This weakness was blatantly evident in last year’s pro-democracy
demonstrations, which failed to mobilize
[[link removed]] or
even try to appeal to Mizrahim. The protests overlooked how the
far-right’s judicial reforms would impact Israel’s poor, working
class, and disenfranchised communities — an oversight that
galvanized a response from Mizrahi activists and movements from the
left.

As Behar explained, the democracy protests made “no mention of the
welfare system, unionization, labor rights, or how the judicial
reforms would completely dismantle public education and health
systems.” This made it easy for the right wing to
mobilize populist resentment
[[link removed]] and
revanchist Mizrahi identity politics against the Ashkenazi elite, the
constituency that dominated the protests.

According to Sapir Sluzker Amran, a human rights lawyer
[[link removed]] and
co-founder of the Mizrahi feminist movement Shovrot Kirot
[[link removed]] (which
recently announced that it would cease its operations at the end of
the year), the right successfully caricatured the protests as
“privileged, left-wing, rich Ashkenazim who were in control [of the
country] all these years, and now they’re crying because someone is
trying to touch their privilege.”

[Palestinian single mothers from Jaffa protest alongside activists
from Shovrot Kirot outside the home of Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar,
holding a banner that reads "Women of Jaffa demand housing", November
27, 2021. (Oren Ziv)]
[[link removed]]
Palestinian single mothers from Jaffa protest alongside activists from
Shovrot Kirot outside the home of then-Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar,
holding a banner that reads
Palestinian single mothers from Jaffa protest alongside activists from
Shovrot Kirot outside the home of then-Justice Minister Gideon
Sa’ar, holding a banner that reads “Women of Jaffa demand
housing”, November 27, 2021. (Oren Ziv)

By emphasizing distributive justice alongside the dismantling of the
occupation, the Mizrahi Civic Collective and Shovrot Kirot challenge
the populist and conservative co-optation of the whole Mizrahi
struggle. In this, they represent a reinvigorated materialist approach
to Mizrahi activism.

According to Behar, in the last 15 or so years, “a lot of what used
to be the Mizrahi left was channeled into issues of culture,
representation, music and art,” sidelining both Palestinian and
socioeconomic issues. “It is the abandonment of its material basis
that made it so easy for the right to co-opt the Mizrahi struggle.”

For Netta Amar-Shiff, a lawyer and co-founder of the Mizrahi Civic
Collective, Israeli leftists must stop treating opposition to the
occupation as a marker of class, status, or education. “Support for
peace is not a cultural asset,” accessible only to Israelis of a
certain background, she emphasized. “We are offering something that
doesn’t currently exist in the peace camp: a broader understanding,
a wider spectrum of political approaches. And if you choose to listen
to us, then all of us together, maybe, will be able to confront
inequality and war.”

The battle for the periphery

By linking the anti-apartheid and ethno-class struggles, Israeli
leftists may be able to capitalize on small cracks in the regime’s
support in what Israel calls its “periphery” — the regions
around the Negev/Naqab in the south of the country and the Galilee in
the north. This is particularly true among the Bedouin
[[link removed]], Mizrahi,
and working-class residents
[[link removed]] of the areas
surrounding the Gaza Strip, who were among the communities most
severely harmed by the Hamas-led October 7 attack. Their abandonment
by the government that day, as well as in the rehabilitation plans
that followed, was a clear continuation of a long history of
institutional discrimination.

Now more than ever, the political sympathies of neglected and
vulnerable communities appear to be up for grabs — a fact that has
not gone unnoticed on the right. Omer Rahamim, the head of the Yesha
Council, an umbrella group of settler municipal councils, warned
[[link removed]] that
right-wing polling shows that “the largest public that has always
voted for Likud but would abandon it is the traditional-Mizrahi
public.”

Meanwhile, new initiatives, like Shovrot Kirot’s “Okef Israel
[[link removed]],” are aiming
to build an alternative political infrastructure through which
representatives from cities and unrecognized villages
[[link removed]] in the
periphery can engage in joint fundraising and policymaking.

“There is an opening to new approaches [among the residents],”
Amar-Shiff said. But the right is more prepared to capitalize on these
openings. “I can come to Ofakim [a mostly Mizrahi city in southern
Israel, which saw one of the most significant battles of October 7] as
a nice lady and offer my help to the community in achieving its
political goals, but there is also the Garin Torani
[[link removed]] [a
religious-Zionist network of new missionizing communities aiming to
“Judaize” more neighborhoods and towns]. And they have more than
just nice words.

“They can offer weapons, housing, childcare, and after-school
programs,” she continued.

“And they bring their own version of Judaism, which is a Judaism of
hate.”

The Mizrahi Civic Collective, on the other hand, practices what it
calls “mutual rescue,” the idea that different materially
vulnerable communities in the region — the residents of Israel’s
geographical and social “peripheries”, for example, and
Palestinians in rural areas of the West Bank — have the power to
save each other from violence and dispossession, and that such
mutuality is highly political.

Many on the left, wary
[[link removed]] of
depoliticized coexistence initiatives and critical of any assertions
of equivalence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, reject this
idea. But as Amar-Shiff explained, it does not propose that Jews and
Palestinians operate on a level playing field. “Mutuality does not
in itself dismantle hierarchy between Israelis and Palestinians or the
hierarchies within those societies,” she said. “There is [still] a
hierarchy; there is no symmetry.

[Protesters march in A-Rakeez in the Masafer Yatta region of the
South Hebron Hills after Israeli soldiers shot 24-year-old Harun Abu
Aram in the neck, January 8, 2021. (Keren Manor/Activestills.org)]
[[link removed]]
Protesters march in A-Rakeez in the Masafer Yatta region of the South
Hebron Hills after Israeli soldiers shot 24-year-old Harun Abu Aram in
the neck, January 8, 2021. (Keren Manor/Activestills.org)
Protesters march in A-Rakeez in the Masafer Yatta region of the South
Hebron Hills after Israeli soldiers shot 24-year-old Harun Abu Aram in
the neck, January 8, 2021. (Keren Manor/Activestills.org)

“I am not saying the Jewish people are currently facing existential
threat,” Amar-Shiff affirmed. “I am saying that I carry within me
this threat, both because I am from Yemen where we had our own
atrocities, and as a Jew. We cannot let the right wing be the only
ones who ever talk about this [fear]
[[link removed]],
because the right carries it to a violent place of mutual
annihilation.”

Indeed, the horrors of October 7 revealed the power of mutual rescue
to most Jewish-Israeli activists +972 spoke to, who recalled moments
when Palestinian friends or comrades expressed solidarity and concern
immediately after the attacks. More than anything else, their
political relationships with Palestinians deepened their resolve and
commitment to resisting the Israeli regime, cutting through prevailing
despair and powerlessness. 

_Hadas Binyamini writes about Jewish politics and conservatism in
American history. She is a doctoral candidate at New York University.
Twitter: @hadasbinyamini [[link removed]]_

_+972 Magazine [[link removed]] is an independent,
online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli
journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth
reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine.
The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that
can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine._

_Our core values are a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of
information. We believe in accurate and fair journalism that
spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and
apartheid, and that showcases perspectives often overlooked or
marginalized in mainstream narratives._

_Want +972’s most important stories sent directly to your inbox?
Sign up [[link removed]] for our weekly
newsletter._

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