Not everyone in Israel has fallen in line with Netanyahu’s government

Earlier this month, a delegation from 60 Israeli peace and reconciliation groups travelled to Ramallah in the West Bank to meet representatives of the Palestinian authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas. The so-called It’s Time coalition pledged support for Palestinian statehood and presented an invitation to a People’s Peace Summit in Israel scheduled for May 2026.

“Hope begins today, and now we must ensure that we continue to implement peace,” said Abbas. “Every Israeli who believes in peace is our brother.” He also expressed his sympathies to Yonatan Zeigen, son of the peace activist Vivian Silver who was killed during 7 October 2023 Hamas massacre.

Zeigen was representing the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organisation of more than 800 bereaved family members who have lost loved ones during the conflict.

The visit was an indication that Israel’s beleaguered peace movement, though battered by years of stalemate, is not yet dead. Israeli civil society has been under direct attack from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and activist organisations find themselves characterised as “foreign agents”.

A law introduced in 2016 requires all NGOs which receive more than 50 percent of their funding from foreign sources to declare that fact and there are plans to introduce an 80 percent tax on foreign funding. A new ICC Cooperation Bill would make providing testimony on war crimes to the International Criminal Court an offence.

And yet, throughout the war in Gaza, thousands took to the streets of the Israeli capital Tel Aviv to demonstrate their opposition to the Israeli government, an end to the conflict and the return of the hostages.

Among the most high profile organisations taking part in the peace delegation to Ramallah was Standing Together, whose activities Index reported on at the beginning of the latest conflict. The NGO was founded in 2015 to mobilise Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality and justice.

In May this year Standing Together director Alon-Lee Green was arrested for blocking a road at a demonstration on the Gaza border. Protesters wore t-shirts with the slogan “Stop the horrors in Gaza” and carried pictures of babies killed in air strikes. Green told the BBC from house arrest: “I think it’s obvious that you can see an awakening within the Israeli public. You can see that more and more people are taking a position.”

Following the ceasefire, Standing Together has turned to supporting Palestinians under threat from settlers in the West Bank and the Israeli military that protect them. In particular, the organisation has worked with Palestinian villagers to bring in the olive harvest.

In an account in UK far left newspaper The Morning Star, Uri Weltmann, national field organiser for Standing Together described how activists had witnessed settlers beating Palestinians gathering olives in the village of Deir Ammar. He wrote: “While the world has its eyes on the Gaza Strip and the atrocities that our government commits there, we mustn’t let go of the fact that settler violence is on the rise in the West Bank, and action is needed to be taken there as well.”

Daniel Randall, a British member of the steering group of UK Friends of Standing Together told Index that Standing Together’s visit to Ramallah in the aftermath of the ceasefire was an important symbolic act. He believed activists represented the real opposition while politicians voted though plans for the annexation of occupied Palestinian land.

“The visit demonstrates that Israelis campaigning against occupation are the real partners for peace,” he said.
He added that it was important to show the world that there were Israeli citizens opposed to what Netanyahu’s government is doing.

“There is an ideologically constructed idea that Israeli society is a monolith. We are trying to disrupt that. There are dissenting voices that have a radical vision.”

Standing Together has its critics on the radical left who do not believe it goes far enough. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) for instance has issued repeated calls to no-platform Standing Together, which it accuses of the “insidious normalisation and whitewashing of Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip.”

In a statement in January the Palestinian members of Standing Together’s leadership said in riposte: “The fight for Palestinian liberation is multi-faceted. As a movement operating within Israel, we took upon ourselves a specific role: to shift Israeli public opinion away from supporting policy that maintains and deepens the subjugation of Palestinians.”

Index does not support the academic and cultural boycott, but respects the free speech rights of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.