Erudite Partner and I have long traded the sardonic observation that being an Israeli citizen might be one of the few conditions in the world which are equally morally compromised with being an American citizen. If you care about peace and justice, your own home-place is the cause or, at best a great part, of the problem -- and what we do here, if only urging restraint, must also be part of the solution. Knowing this is to live in permanent pain. After our 9/11, our kind struggled to find our bearings. It is worth remembering that the cruel stupidity of our democratically elected rulers eventually enabled us to reclaim some ground against our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Israeli peace movement, the Israeli left, has become a feeble thing. Once capable of gathering masses, the right wing strategy of imprisoning the Palestinian inhabitants of the land behind walls in Gaza and the West Bank has worked. Palestinians? What Palestinians? Only Hamas -- religiously-inflected terrorists -- and right wing Israeli settlers -- who aim to expel the remainder of the Palestinians -- occupy the public field.
But, since Israel is actually for many of its people a multifaceted fragment of a wider world of humanity, there remain more complex remnants trying to invent and sustain a vision of peace and justice between the river and the sea.
Dana Mills is a former director of the Israeli movement Peace Now and a human rights activist. In the wake of the 10/7 massacres and the Israeli assault on Gaza, she provided an annotated catalogue of efforts within a very isolated -- and grieving -- Israeli context. Such efforts keep hope of a better future alive. I excerpt her October 18 post:
... there is an active witch hunt within Israel society against Israeli human rights defenders. I only write from my own perspective, and write about what I know, so I want to take a moment and write about defending human rights in the midst of something that can move between a war, genocide or self defense or ethnic cleansing, depending who you ask and where you're looking from.
... we are very lonely in here on the Israeli left, and as much as it can sometimes comfort hearing people abroad reiterating our messaging, at first point, we need our voice to be heard, as we are here, witnessing up close, and paying prices of various magnitude for that.
The oldest and biggest human rights organization is B'tselem. ... They have been doing extraordinary work since 7 October, noteworthy as their director, Yuli Novak, gave birth two weeks ago!! B'tselem employs Israelis and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and one of their field researchers in Gaza lost 15 family members in Israeli bombardment on the Strip. ...
Breaking the Silence is an organization that gives a platform for soldiers to talk about the occupation. It acts as an educational organization, not specifically a human rights organization; but in its essence it documents war crimes. ... This is true of many of the orgs cited here; so you see, we have an optimism that motivates us, we gather information so that when things get better we'll have a record of the dark times. Anyway, it is an amazing organization as in a very militarized society it gives voice to those who are critical and at the same time gives platform to those soldiers carrying deep trauma committing crimes they didn't plan or want to execute. [You can find English and other language articles by former Israeli soldiers here.] Because you see, not all us Israelis are murder-hungry beasts; it takes time and privilege to be able to disengage the founding ethos of your society and to be able to fight it. So this organization is incredibly important in Israel.
Yesh Din is an organization that focuses on demanding accountability from Israel to crimes executed against Palestinians, especially settler violence. ... The director of Yes Din, Ziv Stahl, is a native of Kibbutz Kfar Azza. She was held at gunfire by Hamas terrorists and lost many family members and friends in the 7 October attacks. You can read their report, in downloadable pdf form, Settler Violence Against Palestinians in the West Bank Under the Cover of War in Gaza.
Standing Together is a grassroots socialist Israeli-Palestinian organization that aims to organize on a local level Israelis and Palestinians against racism, the demise of the welfare state (Israel has been hurled into a neo-liberal privatization over the past two decades), and generally supply solidarity work on the ground. It has been doing invaluable work recently, especially as the Minister for Interior Security is a genocidal pyromaniac who is seeking to incite a civil war between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish Israelis.
If you were to seek some light in this huge darkness, I can tell you of joint Israeli-Palestinian work to help people from the South who've been displaced (including, by the way, Bedouin who live in unrecognized villages), Jews and Palestinians who have organized a joint self-defense unit in Yaffa, ensuring they don't turn against each other, and more. ...
Mills' full archive of outrage, grieving and resistance is available here.
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