This Week: Stand With the Striking Israeli Hostage Families ✊ | Your Guide to Tough Conversations 🗣️ | What US Leaders Miss on Their Trips to Israel ✈️ | Witnesses to Gaza’s Aid Crisis Speak Out 🌾 | Former IDF Spokesperson on Why Reoccupying Gaza is a Dead End ⚠️ | Help a Violently Expelled West Bank Community Return Home 🏠 | This Week’s Must-Reads/Listens 📖 | Our Pro-Democracy To-Do List 🗳️ | And much more.
✊ Stand With the Striking Israeli Hostage Families: This Sunday, workers across Israel – led by the hostage families – will stage a massive walkout and take to the streets to demand a war-ending hostage deal. Hostage families are saying what the government refuses to admit: Only a ceasefire can save their loved ones – endless war only puts them in greater danger.
🗣️ Your Guide to Tough Conversations About Gaza: Our community is facing a painful moment of moral reckoning – one made even harder by the spin, deflections and calculated distractions churned out daily by Netanyahu and his backers and repeated ad nauseam online. That’s why we’ve put together a guide to the misinformation and talking points we hear again and again – with clear, grounded responses to cut through them. Read and share the whole guide here! >>
✈️ Half the Story: What US Leaders Miss on Their Trips to Israel. J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami recently led a J Street delegation of former senior national security and foreign policy professionals to Israel/Palestine. He wasn’t the only one: Speaker Mike Johnson led a delegation, sponsored by an Evangelical group focused on deepening American ties with West Bank settlements, and there were two AIPAC trips, one for Freshman Democrats and one for Freshman Republicans, the week before.
- Getting the Full Picture: While J Street trips spend equal time on both sides of the Green Line and hear from both Israeli and Palestinian activists, other trips only show one side of the narrative. This has a profound impact on policy. “Members of Congress we bring to the West Bank return home determined to ensure US opposition to settler violence. Speaker Johnson, by contrast, reportedly pledged that when he returns, he will lead efforts to bar the federal government from calling it the West Bank.” Read more >>
- Reflections from the Region: “Only 8% of Democrats and 25% of Independents support Israel’s policies in Gaza. Israel is as isolated internationally as it has ever been. Yet you wouldn’t know this from talking to the Israeli government or the IDF. During our visit, the Netanyahu government doubled down on plans to occupy nearly all of Gaza,” wrote J Street Chief Policy Officer and Senior VP Ilan Goldenberg, who also joined the J Street policymaker delegation. Read more >>
🌾 The Reality of Gaza’s Man-Made Humanitarian Catastrophe
- 🎬 Witnesses to Gaza’s Aid Crisis Speak Out: On Thursday, we were joined by courageous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation whistleblower Tony Aguilar and a leading Israeli advocate to get aid into Gaza, Tania Hary of Gisha, for an unfiltered reality check on the devastation on the ground. Watch here >>
- 🔍 Gaza Humanitarian Aid – Myths and Facts: J Street Policy Fellow Larry Garber fact-checks myths promulgated by the Israeli government and other organizations to show “that widespread starvation was entirely foreseeable, and that flooding Gaza with humanitarian aid would alleviate the starvation, eliminate the killing at or near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution sites and end the looting and reselling of aid.” Read more >>
⚠️ Former IDF Spokesperson on Why Reoccupying Gaza is a Dead End: “Israeli society will have to ask itself, what does it mean to be a Zionist after Gaza?” said former IDF Spokesperson Peter Lerner. “When we look at the consequences of this war on the international community, inside Israeli society, vis-a-vis our relationship with Palestinians and also the relationship with the Jewish diaspora – when you put all of those together – Israel has a very, very big challenge.” Watch the full Word on the Street Live video >>
🏠 Help a Violently Expelled West Bank Community Return Home: On October 12, 2023, Wadi a Seeq residents were told at gunpoint by settlers backed by the army that they must leave within an hour or die. The Israeli Human Rights NGO, Torat Tzedek, is looking for international and Israeli volunteers to provide a protective presence and allow the community to return home. A few people can make a major difference. Learn more, apply to be a volunteer here and spread the word >>
📖 This Week’s Must-Reads/Listens:
- [Podcast] Recognizing Palestine? 'It May Be a Punishment for Netanyahu, but It's a Big Prize for Israel'
J Street Israel Executive Director Nadav Tamir joins the Haaretz Podcast to say “that a Palestinian state is first and foremost an Israeli interest. There is no way Israel could remain the homeland of the Jewish people and a democracy if there will be no Palestinian state."
- [Podcast] When Is It Genocide?
Ezra Klein writes, "One reason I have stayed away from the word genocide is that there is an imprecision at its heart. When people use the word genocide, I think they imagine something like the Holocaust: the attempted extermination of an entire people. But the legal definition of genocide encompasses much more than that. So what is a genocide? And is this one?"
- Don't Be Fooled Again: Netanyahu Is Planning a Full-blown Occupation of Gaza
Dahlia Scheindlin writes for Haaretz, "Maybe sealing water wells is someone's idea of security for Israel, but the false separation between security and civilian control – like the temporary, limited, pragmatic and humanitarian occupation of Gaza City – is a lie. Put the Israeli government's words through the filter of reality past and present, and the future becomes painfully clear."
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