Leaders of Jewish-Palestinian Peace Group ‘Standing Together’ Speak in New York

By Mark Satinoff

BROOKLYN, New York, November 12, 2025 — Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green, two national leaders of the Israel-based Jewish/Palestinian antiwar group Standing Together, spoke today at St. Ann’s and the Holy Trinity Church here as part of a multi-city tour in the United States.

Abed is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and member of Haifa’s city council. Green is a Jewish Israeli and the Standing Together national co-director.

They are touring this country to share a simple message, which can be summed up by the title of their talk: “The Fight Ahead: From Ceasefire to a Just Peace.”

As Green told CNN in an interview on October 10, the day the current ceasefire in Gaza went into effect, “The only way to really solve it [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is not just to have a ceasefire, which is important, but to really end the occupation in the West Bank, end the occupation in Gaza, end the reality of apartheid. Another reality is possible.”

The Standing Together leaders shared the platform here with New York City comptroller and friend of Standing Together Brad Lander.

Friends of Standing Together (FOST) organized the event. FOST has 24 chapters on three continents. Tamara Gayer, director of FOST US, welcomed the more than 700 people who attended the meeting.

Standing Together is the largest progressive grassroots movement organizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian lands and for peace, equality, and social and climate justice. Its nearly 7,000 dues-paying members are organized into 12 chapters throughout Israel and 14 student chapters.

The group has mobilized tens of thousands in street actions and organized hundreds of aid trucks for Gaza. Standing Together also runs the Solidarity Guard, which tries to protect those deliveries and Palestinians in the West Bank from state-backed settler violence. It has continuously brought to the attention of the Israeli public the Israeli government atrocities in Gaza — while the mainstream Israeli media have largely ignored it.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has subsided. After two years of a relentless slaughter, the ceasefire presents a new reality in which to operate. Standing Together describes the ceasefire as fragile and incomplete. The Israeli army still controls more than half of Gaza, at least 240 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire went into effect, essential aid remains blocked, and starvation continues. At the same time, the end of the daily bombardments is a step in the right direction for the more than 2 million Gazans trapped in a tiny territory the Israeli military has largely turned into rubble.

Since its founding in 2015, Standing Together has been a consistent voice for peace and an end to the occupation.

The organization now describes its task as twofold. First, to secure a full ceasefire that ends the daily killing, forces the Israeli military to completely withdraw from Gaza, and begin the mammoth process of reconstruction. And second, to build a shared struggle against occupation in the West Bank, for full equality of Palestinians and Jews, and an end to Jewish supremacy.

Standing Together also advocates for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel as a necessary step toward Palestinian self-determination and peaceful co-existence with Israel.

Personal story and political journey

The two Standing Together leaders described their political evolution.

Abed, 34, grew up in a small Palestinian town in Western Galilee. She said she had the privilege of finding herself on a U.S. campus in 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“For the first time I felt I had a safe space to be Palestinian, which I didn’t have growing up,” she told the audience at the November 12 event. She was exposed to and became engaged in a broad range of political issues for the first time.

“When I went back home, I had zero space, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to engage in civil society and  political movements,” Abed continued. “And not only that, but to exist as a Palestinian, to ache as a Palestinian, to grieve as a Palestinian. And that is why I’m in Standing Together. We are imagining a new kind of society in which Palestinians and Jews form a new majority around peace, justice, and freedom.”

Green, 37, grew up in Tel Aviv in a single-parent household that struggled financially. During his last year of high school, he was working full time in a coffee shop waiting tables. His boss cheated him out of pay he was entitled to.

“When you work in the dining industry the laws are basically just a recommendation. They try to get you to work for free because they say you can get tips,” he noted.

When Green demanded his pay, the boss told him he’s free to quit and work in another café. “It’s Tel Aviv, that’s how we do things here,” his boss quipped.

But Green didn’t quit. He helped organize the workers, who struck for six weeks. The waiters successfully formed the first dining industry union in Israel and signed a collective bargaining agreement. This was a defining moment in Green’s political development. He said he learned two lessons from this struggle. One is the power of collective action around a common interest. The other was recognizing that one of the strike leaders was a Palestinian citizen of Israel — who led Jewish workers.

“Something clicked and from then on everything I did in my political life was always Palestinian and Jewish together,” Green remarked.

Challenges in organizing

“One month from the so-called ceasefire we are still witnessing bombardments. We are still witnessing innocent people, children, being killed. We are still seeing people being starved and sick without any infrastructure, with over 50 percent of the Gaza Strip controlled by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces],” Abed told the meeting participants.

“We are seeing an unprecedented, historic level of settler violence in the West Bank. The West Bank is on fire. The West Bank is screaming,” she continued.

“And we are seeing a doubling down on discrimination and persecution and very dangerous legislation that is happening within Israel. And though we come here to acknowledge the joy that we felt a month ago with seeing the hostage families being reunited and seeing the kids in Gaza celebrating amongst the rubble — the fact that they probably will not be bombed when they go to bed — one of the hardest things for us as a movement is to not only acknowledge the pain and the fears… but also acknowledge the joy,” she said.

Abed described the special challenge she faces as a Palestinian Israeli. “How do I convince, organize, and mobilize Jewish Israelis in a society that is exhibiting historic levels of dehumanization, racism, and hate towards Palestinians? The very fact of presenting myself as Palestinian and talking about my pain and my grief is already provocative, illegitimate, at best, and at worst, criminal,” she explained.

“I cannot lecture or protest or demand liberation and solidarity from the outside. I need to understand and be part of Israeli society,” she added.

“That does not mean we should excuse the Israeli public and their stances on the genocide, on apartheid, on the settler violence. As organizers we have to understand the fears, the trauma, that happened from the massacre on October 7. We have to understand the perceived existential threats and real threats that Israelis are experiencing. That’s not to excuse it, but it is necessary to understand and provide them with an alternative.”

Standing Together “imagines a new way to look at Israeli society, at Israel-Palestine,” Abed stressed. “We raise the radical idea of a peace that is just, that is equal, that guarantees freedom and independence for everyone, for the 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians, from the river to the sea. Not only out of a moral stance, but out of the collective self-interest of the Israeli people.”

The Israeli political system

Abed described the Israeli government as a spectrum that spans the “fascist extreme right settler Kahanist, to a very mild center. The dominant voice calls for breaking the ceasefire, to ethnically cleanse, to settle and to do the same in the West Bank — full on apartheid. The more moderate side demands an investigative committee to see what went wrong, as if it’s purely an intelligence failure. They want to wind the clock back to October 6 and just do better.”

Green asked the audience to imagine those running the Israeli state as “one spectrum that has only one color but with many shades. It is very shiny in a very terrible light, and the shine of that strong light is positioned in the very far right side of the Israeli spectrum of politics. And this is the idea that says, if you want to be safe you need to control them, that your life as a Jewish person is worth more than the life of a Palestinian. It’s an idea that says that in order to survive and keep living on this land it must be either them or us.

“And when you look to the other side of the political spectrum, you don’t see a strong, shining, competing idea that says that if you want to survive, you need to have peace, because peace is the only way for security. You don’t see that. You don’t hear that. It has been many years since an Israeli politician on the center, or the left, spoke about Israeli Palestinian peace.

“Imagine looking at a menu at a restaurant. Peace and an end to the occupation is not on the menu for Israeli people. We take it upon ourselves to put it on the menu.”

Standing Together is not a political party. It is a grassroots movement that provides a “shared home” for all — Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, and Arabs — to unite and act, Green explained. It is a movement in which to organize and mobilize people on a mass level.

But in order to challenge the political system, Green said, “Israel also needs a peace and equality political party. It is unfathomable that the Jewish people vote in one ballot and Palestinians vote in a different ballot. It does not make any sense. And tonight, I will commit to doing that, to building a political party in Israel that represents both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.”

Most Israelis view the Israeli left as being dominated by professional non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which can never be a political home for the masses, Green noted. And they see Israel’s leftist political parties as no longer capable of mobilizing large sectors of the population.

The situation in Gaza/West Bank, and ongoing campaigns

“There is a leadership crisis within the Palestinian community,” Abed said, reflecting on the political situation in Gaza and the West Bank. “It is engineered; it is intentional. Any legitimate leader that might be able to build any kind of grassroots opposition is either incarcerated, assassinated or exiled. Resistance movements against Hamas do exist, despite the very brutal, dangerous, and sometimes fatal conditions of doing that.”

In the West Bank, she added, “there is the Palestinian Authority, which cracks down on any kind of resistance. And then there is the ever-threatening presence of the IDF.”

The Solidarity Guard (formerly the Humanitarian Guard) was formed in May 2024 to protect aid trucks en route to Gaza from settler attacks.

“They set them on fire and looted them, spilling flour or rice to the ground,” Abed explained. “Standing Together organized thousands of our members to come to the border and protect the aid trucks. It’s a long story. It took weeks but eventually we managed to force the police to ensure the safety of the Palestinian drivers and allow the aid to enter Gaza.”

One of the main campaigns of Standing Together right now is defending Palestinians in the West Bank during the olive harvest season.

This is how Green described the situation.

“We are seeing historically unprecedented levels of extreme settler violence,” he noted. “People come from the settlements to Palestinian villages with sticks and stones and rifles and try to prevent Palestinians from approaching or reaching their land or their olives. And we hear the leaders of the settler movement and members of the Israeli parliament saying, ‘If we are not allowed to continue the daily killing in Gaza, the revenge will come in the West Bank.’ That’s what they say, and that is how they act. So, every day we take busses from Israeli cities to the West Bank as part of one of our major projects — the Solidarity Guard.”

The Guard not only protects Palestinians. It is also a way to mobilize Jews and Palestinians in a joint struggle against extremists.

Another project of Standing Together is building a collaborative movement of Jewish and Palestinian youth. “There’s no alternative for young people in Israel,” Green pointed out.

“If you’re under 30, all you know is [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the refusal to say the word occupation, to acknowledge the reality of people living around us who are not Jews. A lot of young people are being deliberately pushed into places in which they are losing their humanity. You can see it on TikTok. Videos that celebrate people dying in Gaza. You can see how the racism of the government is trickling down to the youth of Israel.

“So, we want to bring Jewish and Palestinian youth together. Not in a lovey-dovey kumbaya type of way. Not to preach the narrative. But around a shared struggle for a shared future — to end the occupation, to name the tough things. And to effect this change we need to start building from a young age.”

With 14 campus chapters and its growing influence in college student unions, Abed said Standing Together is the strongest political force on Israeli campuses today.

“We see you,” Abed stated, addressing students organizing on U.S. campuses. “We thank you for everything that you have done. We know how difficult it was to navigate the discussions and the conversations and fighting the university.”

But in a frank criticism she added that the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States “needs to let go of the ‘gatekeeping,’ especially on the campuses.”

Standing Together is trying to counter the paradigm of an either or, a binary choice that “often offers the simple comfort of pro and con, or right and wrong,” Abed said.

Strategy for change

Abed asked the audience to consider some basic questions: “How do you change reality? Not just condone it, not just condemn it, not just say how ugly it is.”

Both leaders of Standing Together have emphasized this point in this and previous U.S. tours: There is a desperate need for a new Israeli and Palestinian leadership, which includes leaders willing to work together.

“Our lives are not part of a football match,” said Green. “We are not teams in which you need to pick a side — either the Palestinians or the Israeli Jews. If you believe you must pick a team, then it means that if you stand with Palestinians, you stand against Israelis. Or you if you stand with Israelis, you stand against Palestinians. You will end up losing your humanity. You dehumanize the ‘other.’

“Our lives on the land are intertwined. They cannot be separated. And the political project we need to push is not canceling the other side but making a pathway in which we are all free. This part of the movement was lost. The only possible solution is a political solution in which everyone is seen. That’s not to excuse the occupation or the genocide. But next week we all deserve safety. We all deserve to be human. And if your politics is a politics of canceling the humanity of the other, you’re part of the problem.”

“There are millions of people living on this land,” Green said in a previous interview on CNN, “some of them Palestinians, some of them Jewish. No one is going anywhere and we need to be able to live in this land together.”

Hope and vision for the future

Abed described her vision for a shared homeland.

“I want to live in Haifa, my homeland, and farm my land,” she said. “And I want to have a safe life. And I want my daughter to be able to party in Beirut and to be given back her heritage that was stolen from her — geographical, cultural, linguistic, cuisine. I want the children in the West Bank to enjoy the sea. I want the children in Gaza to see Jerusalem. And I want the Jewish people to experience what it really means to be part of a native land. Not as something where we have to fight for our existence.

“Hope is not this optimistic, light, amazing, joyous, pure feeling. It can feel very heavy. Hope stems from the belief in our collective ability to change reality. History teaches us people can change. Political stances fluctuate overnight. People want safety. They want a normal life. If you give them an exciting alternative that guarantees them what they need, they will choose it. And I take hope from the resilience of my people, the Palestinian people.”

 “After two years of dealing with videos that will never get out of our heads, of dead babies and children, after spending so many nights with the families in Hostage Square [in Tel Aviv] or at demonstrations getting beaten by the police, after being arrested and spending a week in jail, after getting death threats, after experiencing all the forces in our society pushing us in the opposite direction as a Palestinian, as a Jew, after all these terrible rivers of blood on our land I think that there is literally a mini miracle that Sally and I are sitting here tonight — together,” said Green.

“That our movement is able to sit in the room — together, to cry together, to feel the trauma together, to be analyzing together, to ask the tough questions together, and then to struggle and act together. That gives me a lot of hope. Not because I’m certain we’re going to win next week, or next month, or next year. Maybe not even within the next decade. I don’t have that certainty.

“But I believe that where there is struggle, there is hope. It gives me a lot of hope that future generations will be born into a reality where they are free, they are safe, they don’t need to run to a shelter in the middle of the night, they don’t need to be begging for food or separating from a man that was killed in a bombing. These future generations will sit on the shoulders of the many amazing, good people of Israel and Palestine that are here fighting now.”

As Green emphasized in a New York Times interview during a Standing Together U.S. tour in 2023, “We have only one home. She’s Palestinian [Abed] and I’m Jewish, but the only home we both have is the same home.”

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