Samah Watad
+972 Magazine / December 19, 2025
The Jewish-Arab movement is celebrating its 10th anniversary after a period of rapid expansion. But as it grows, so do questions about its political stances, its electoral ambitions, and the limits of binational organizing.
At the entrance to Haifa’s International Convention Center, bereaved Palestinian families sat in silence holding portraits of their children killed as a result of the spiralling criminal violence plaguing Arab communities in Israel. Meanwhile, a few meters away, young Israeli activists handed out stickers bearing slogans that were buoyant and even hopeful, such as “Only together we can,” and “Let’s build power together.”
The contrast was disorienting. Grief, optimism, and ideological fervour coexisted uneasily at the convention marking 10 years since the establishment of Standing Together in late November.
Founded by members of the Israeli Communist Party, including former Knesset member Dov Khenin and the organization’s current national co-director Alon-Lee Green, Standing Together positions itself as a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement built on street-level organizing, bilingual messaging, and coordinated mass action that aspires to reconstitute the long-stagnant Israeli left. Having grown steadily during its first eight years, the movement’s visibility has skyrocketed amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has brought renewed scrutiny both locally and internationally over its role in the struggle for a just future in Israel-Palestine.
Standing Together’s rapid expansion over the past two years — the movement now boasts almost 6,000 members, and its website lists nearly 80 employees — has been fuelled in part by its growing appeal among young Palestinians in Israel who are disillusioned with traditional party politics. But as the movement grows, so do questions about its electoral ambitions, its stance on thorny issues like Zionism and Israel’s Jewish character, and its capacity to meaningfully engage the contradictions facing Palestinian citizens of Israel under an increasingly fascist Israeli government.
A vehicle for action
To understand the movement’s recent surge in popularity, you first need to understand the uniquely fraught position that Palestinian citizens of Israel found themselves in during the war.
Over the past two years, Israeli authorities aggressively suppressed virtually all political activity related to Gaza. Hundreds, including prominent Palestinian public figures, were arrested for as little as social media posts in solidarity with Gazans under attack; protests were policed with an iron fist; and political bodies were threatened with closure. Into this void stepped Standing Together, whose binational demonstrations offered Palestinian citizens a shield of protection to express their grief and rage.
At the same time, the authorities also suppressed campaigns to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, effectively shuttering established Arab aid organizations (including the Al-Rahmoun Association and Igatha 48) in the weeks following October 7. In this climate of fear and helplessness, Standing Together launched a large-scale campaign in the summer of 2024 that called on members of the public to donate food and humanitarian aid to Gaza amid Israel’s policy of starvation.
Offering a rare public channel for Palestinian citizens eager to contribute, the movement organized food drives across at least 15 Arab towns and cities, from Nazareth to Wadi Ara, and said it collected enough aid to fill 400 trucks — half of which reached those in need in Gaza before the Israeli government blocked any further deliveries from entering the Strip, forcing the movement to distribute the rest among vulnerable communities in the West Bank.
Standing Together was not alone in trying to fundraise for the humanitarian needs of Palestinians in Gaza. Other political actors, including the Arab-Jewish party Hadash, ran parallel campaigns — often opting for cash transfers through local or international NGOs to circumvent Israeli restrictions — but these efforts were smaller in scale and organizers intentionally refrained from promoting them on social media out of fear of government crackdowns.
Standing Together’s campaign raised persistent questions among Palestinians in Israel: How did such a large-scale operation avoid legal repercussions when others were prevented from even getting off the ground? How was the aid actually delivered? And was the impact more symbolic than material? Still, hundreds of people put their doubts aside to support a campaign that may well have saved lives in Gaza.
For other Palestinians who attended the 10th anniversary convention, though, and particularly the middle-aged and elderly among them, what primarily drew them to the movement was the need to address the explosion of gun violence and organized crime that has claimed 248 lives in the past year alone, turning daily life in Arab towns into a constant negotiation with danger.
“Crime and violence are the most urgent issues in our community, but activism around them is usually fragmented and limited to policy circles,” Rawyah Handaqlu, who founded Eilaf–The Center for Advancing Security in Arab Society, told +972 Magazine. “Standing Together stepped into that vacuum, especially by reaching the crime victims’ families and turning their grief into visible, sustained action, both on the ground and online.”
Some have questioned whether Standing Together’s visibility in protests against criminal violence reflects a long-term commitment to policy change or whether it is merely using grief for symbolic gains. But the movement’s consistent focus on this issue — showing up at funerals, organizing protests, and accompanying bereaved families — has resonated in places where state institutions have retreated and Arab political parties and leadership organizations have been unable to find solutions or organize impactful activism.
Standing Together has also hired a designated member of staff to coordinate these efforts in northern Israel, reaching out and maintaining relationships with bereaved families over the long term, with the eventual goal of drawing them into the movement to lead the fight for change.
Rula Daood, the movement’s Palestinian national co-director alongside Green, who spent her time at the convention moving seamlessly between grieving families, volunteers, and journalists with a mix of urgency and pride, sees all of these factors together as contributing to Standing Together’s growing popularity among Palestinians in Israel. “Our presence in relief efforts for Gaza, and in confronting crime and violence, made people see the movement as something tangible, not just rhetoric,” she explained.
Indeed, while for many Jewish members, especially younger activists, the movement’s appeal lies more in advancing social justice, Jewish-Arab coexistence, or the hope of reviving a progressive Israeli identity, for the Palestinian activists it represents one of the last remaining spaces to confront structural violence and organized crime.
That gap was patently evident at the convention center in Haifa. Veteran Jewish activists expressed joy, even relief, at the sight of a binational movement after two years in which racism has pervaded everything — cherished proof that the Israeli left still had life in it. For many Palestinian participants, the atmosphere was heavier, tinged by a sense of urgency that had little to do with political nostalgia and everything to do with survival.
Strategic ambiguity
Standing Together aims to collapse the traditional distinctions within Israeli society and build “a new political majority” on the basis of shared material interests — a broad camp that would include Palestinians and Jews, and both self-professed leftists and those who have not traditionally identified as such.
As Sally Abed, one of the movement’s leaders and a member of Haifa’s city council, explained: “We’re not trying to put everyone in the same room. We’re organizing a critical mass of people who can convince others of [the need for] a strategic bloc around [issues like] housing, justice, equality, and freedom.”
Abed contrasted this with the Arab political parties in Israel — which, she said, have held obsessively onto abstract revolutionary ideas. “From a sociological perspective, you see that people in Tel Aviv are different from people in the Negev, and I think it’s possible to hold revolutionary ideas while engaging people through less explicitly ‘political’ problems like crime and violence. We’re trying to build something living: a political project that’s not just a slogan, but a structure.”
Yet even among veteran activists who are fully committed to the movement’s principles, the imbalance of power between Jews and Palestinians (who comprise around 60 percent and 40 percent of members, respectively) is impossible to ignore. Within this reality, one subject remains especially fraught: Zionism.
Among Standing Together’s leadership, the issue of Zionism is often described as “complicated” and the movement’s relationship to it left deliberately undefined. The fear among many Jewish activists is that any attempt to do so could alienate potential members. But for Palestinians, the subject is unavoidable and not something confined to the abstract; rather, it cuts to the heart of who feels like they can belong to this movement.
This tension surfaced publicly during a recent interview with Green and Abed on Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo. Green emphasized that “the movement is committed to complete equality between all the people who live between the river and the sea,” while repeating the familiar line that they don’t “stand at the gate” asking people whether they are Zionists before letting them in.
Abed, meanwhile, spoke about how Palestinians experience Zionism — not as an identity or label but as a system of domination responsible for “ethnically cleansing my people” and keeping Palestinians “under the boot” — while maintaining that Palestinians cannot afford the luxury of ideological purity: “If we want to be able to create … a critical mass in Israeli society to end the military control, the apartheid, the siege … we need to understand how we [can] create a conducive conversation.”
Abed’s position reflects a difficult calculation: a rejection of Zionism both as an idea and structure, paired with a realpolitik acceptance that people who still identify as Zionists will be welcome inside the movement — not because she is comfortable with this arrangement, but because Palestinians cannot afford to turn away potential partners who share some but not all of their vision for a just future.
Still, this approach, while pragmatic, raises a deeper question: How can a movement claim to fight injustice while still welcoming people who are committed to the system that underpins it? For many Palestinian citizens, this reflects the deeper limits of binational activism that refuses to name the structures of oppression. The lack of a clear stance against Zionism and settler-colonialism is also partly what led PACBI, an official arm of the BDS movement, to denounce Standing Together on grounds of normalization.
For Jewish activists in the movement, meanwhile, the question of Zionism is often resolved through a slow, internal reckoning. Several described a gradual process of “unlearning” Zionism. At the convention center in Haifa, one Jewish activist in her 50s told +972 Magazine: “I was raised to believe Zionism is the right way. It took me a few years to move from Meretz [Israel’s left-most Zionist party] to Hadash, and I can understand why it’s difficult for people to let go of it, especially as Israeli society shifts further toward the extreme right.”
Many of the Jewish activists I spoke with asked not to be named. They described backlash from family and friends, and a sense of isolation even within their own social circles. That reality begs another question: If supporting Standing Together already carries social costs for Jewish Israelis, how far can the movement realistically expand beyond its current base?
Among the Palestinians I interviewed, the strategic ambiguity was harder to swallow. Rabea Alasam, a Bedouin activist from the Naqab/Negev and a member of the movement’s national leadership, pointed out that while Jewish activists can afford gradual ideological journeys, Palestinians are forced to live with the consequences of Zionism on a daily basis — in law, on their land, and in their bodies.
It is in this space between Jewish gradualism, Palestinian urgency, and the movement’s strategic ambiguity that both the promise and limitations of Standing Together come into clear focus.
Yet for many of the movement’s Palestinian members, including those who are uncomfortable with these ambiguities, Standing Together’s big-tent politics has simultaneously provided a much-needed vehicle for politicization of an identity that Israel has worked relentlessly to suppress. Angela Mattar, a Palestinian student at the Technion in Haifa, described a long, uneasy journey into political activism. “I didn’t grow up in a political home,” she said. “But I knew I wanted to change things.”
She eventually found her way to Standing Together after facing backlash for supporting Arab students on campus who protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “It was the only place that allowed me to speak freely, feel safe in my Palestinian identity, and not be asked to compromise it.”
Joining a Jewish-Arab movement was not easy for her. “I was afraid people would say I’m normalizing,” Matar admitted. “But I realized I wasn’t giving anything up. I could talk about Gaza, about the Nakba, and feel supported. That’s not something I take for granted.”
Alasam similarly described Standing Together as his first political home. “It was only through Standing Together that I started to say I am Bedouin, and I am Palestinian,” he said. But still, the questions in his mind persist. “What kind of partnership is this? Is it fair? Every night I go to sleep with that question.”
The movement’s leaders argue that embracing these contradictions is the only honest way to build a truly shared political project. “No real movement in history was ever 100 percent ideologically aligned,” Abed said. “People come for different reasons. Some because of crime. Some because of war. Some because of rent. That’s not a flaw. That’s reality.”
These tensions — between solidarity and structural inequality, shared struggle and unequal stakes — are not new to Standing Together. But they have become harder to paper over as the movement has grown. As one Palestinian activist at the convention put it to me privately: “We are here because we have no choice. They are here because they want to believe in something.”
Contesting the space
Among members of the main Arab political parties in Israel — particularly Hadash and Balad, which have traditionally been at the forefront of the struggle for the rights of Palestinians both in Israel and the occupied territories — Standing Together is generally viewed with a mixture of scepticism and unease.
Given the history of the movement’s founders with the party, some in Hadash see overlap, or even competition. One party member who requested anonymity criticized the movement’s “visibility” tactics. “They come to demonstrations wearing their official shirts, even though there’s a shared agreement between all the parties not to raise flags or wear party branding, and to stick to shared slogans,” he said. “They even go to mourning tents for victims in those shirts. For us, that’s inappropriate and unacceptable.”
He also pushed back against the idea that Standing Together is more active in the field than the parties. “That’s just not true. We chose, based on the situation at the time, to raise money for Gaza, not food, [because] we knew the Israeli government wouldn’t let food through. The impact of October 7 is still felt deeply. People are afraid to be politically active.”
Still, he conceded that “there has been a decline and retreat from the parties, and maybe we failed to make space for young people. And it’s also true that Standing Together is filling a gap that we didn’t take advantage of the way we should have. They clearly invest a lot in media and visibility.”
Balad, which takes a more explicit line against Israel’s ethnocratic character, does not see the movement as a direct competitor. The party’s political message, which calls for a “state of all its citizens,” doesn’t align with Standing Together’s deliberate avoidance of the issue.
Green, in the Zeteo interview, criticized what he describes as an oppressive or supremacist Jewish state and shifted the focus toward equality, but stopped short of explicitly rejecting the Jewish state framework — another case in which the movement’s strategic ambiguity becomes a central point of contention when it enters Palestinian political spaces, where many view that framework itself as inherently unequal.
A senior Balad member who asked not to be named also dismissed Standing Together’s reach: “Outside of political circles and online activism, many people wouldn’t even know who they are, except maybe as the group that collected donations for Gaza. And that’s where it ends.”
The Balad member also questioned what will happen when the movement’s funding dries up; unlike political parties in Israel, Standing Together has access to international resources that enable the movement to build its infrastructure, coordinate campaigns, and elevate its public profile.
Tensions between Standing Together and the parties came to a head during the recent election for the High Follow-Up Committee, the non-partisan leadership body for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Daood, Standing Together’s national co-director, ran to become the body’s new leader. This marked the first time in years that someone outside of the traditional political structure contested the election, and was perceived as an unwelcome challenge.
Despite broad support for Daood online, the bodies comprising the High Follow-Up Committee whose endorsements she needed to stand ultimately succumbed to pressure, leading to her disqualification from the race. Jamal Zahalka, the former head of Balad who served in the Knesset for many years, came out the winner. The episode exposed an important faultline: Standing Together is pressing to enter Palestinian political life more seriously, and meeting quiet resistance from those who still control its gates.
For now, despite growing speculation — fuelled in part by the movement running candidates, like Abed, in local elections, in addition to Daood’s candidacy for leader of the High Follow-Up Committee — Standing Together’s leaders insist that it is not planning to make the jump into national politics anytime soon. “We don’t believe in shortcuts,” Abed told +972. “Real change requires infrastructure, it requires institutions, and it takes time.”
According to pollster Yousef Makladeh, director of StatNet, a polling center surveying Palestinian communities in Israel, there is no political space right now for a new Arab party. “We didn’t even include [Standing Together] in our recent polling,” he explained. “We don’t see any chance that they could pass the electoral threshold.”
Still, Makladeh argued, the movement’s influence can be felt in other ways. Polls show that after years of fragmentation and political fatigue, most Palestinian citizens of Israel want one unified Arab party. Even without running, he suggested, Standing Together’s presence — especially as a binational project — could help restore a sense among Palestinians in Israel that political organizing has meaning. That alone, he said, could motivate more people to vote when next year’s election comes around.
Back in the convention center in Haifa, the social activist Jumana Khalaileh opened proceedings on stage by recounting the story of her brother’s murder at the hands of violent criminals. As she cried, the audience cried with her.
The organizers’ decision to invite Khalaileh as the first speaker reflects an understanding that the Palestinian public in Israel is desperate for a movement that will stand with them in what has become a battle for their very survival — one that their Jewish-Israeli partners will never know. As the crowd listened attentively, the stark gap in privilege between these two national groups loomed heavily in the background.
Samah Watad is a Palestinian journalist and investigative researcher based in Israel, covering politics and social issues
