In mid-June 2026, top leaders of Standing Together announced the launching of “A Place for Us All,” a new Jewish-Palestinian political party in Israel.
Standing Together is made up of Jews, Palestinians, and others. It is one of the most prominent organizations in Israel that have campaigned against Israel’s war in Gaza and for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
“Ending Israeli control over Palestinians and forging a society in which everyone is free and equal between the river and the sea is in the interest of both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis,” read a January 30, 2024, statement by the Palestinian members of Standing Together’s national leadership. “Our long-term goal is to create a new majority in Israeli society, composed of both Palestinian and Jewish citizens, who are united in the fight to end the occupation and advance equality and justice, and ultimately, liberation — a sustainable and just peace.”
According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, the movement’s membership has grown from a few hundred members to close to 7,000 by the end of 2025. Two of Standing Together’s leaders have been elected to city councils in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
The launching of this new political party has received significant media attention in Israel, the United States, and beyond. It has also come under fire by some left-wing Israelis who argue that its emergence will divide the anti-Netanyahu vote in the upcoming elections for Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and allow the right/ultraright parties to maintain control of the Israeli government.
Because this development is at a minimum newsworthy, we publish the following for the information of our readers: a statement by two of the central leaders of Standing Together explaining their reasons for participating in the launching of A Place for Us All; and an article that first appeared in the June 16, 2026, edition of Haaretz reporting on the new party’s formation.
The headlines, text, and photos below are from the originals.
— World-Outlook editors
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Announcement by Standing Together Leaders Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green
We are writing to you today to share a significant decision that we both reached after a long period of reflection, discussion, and deliberation.
In light of the deep political and social crisis we are living through, in the reality that followed October 7 and the devastation of Gaza, we have come to the conclusion that alongside building grassroots power — which is what Standing Together has done for the past decade — there is also an urgent need for our values to be present not only in protests and grassroots organizing, but also in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. To truly succeed in creating the change we need, there must be a force within the political system that is genuinely and deeply committed to Jewish-Arab partnership, Israeli-Palestinian peace, full equality, and social and environmental justice. These are the values we fight for every day, yet they have no home in a political party.
The political establishment offers us more of the same, and there is no force in the Knesset trying to offer a hegemonic project for Israeli society — one that seeks to build a majority around our worldview.
For this reason, the two of us, together with other friends from within Standing Together and beyond, have decided to work toward establishing a new political party that will run in the upcoming Knesset elections.
We want to emphasize as clearly as possible: Standing Together is not the new party, and it is not becoming a party. Standing Together has been and will remain an independent and powerful grassroots movement, made up of members with diverse political views, some active in various political parties and some not affiliated with any party at all.
In order to preserve the movement’s independence and comply with Israeli election law, there will be a full and substantive separation — organizational, legal, financial and political — between the movement and the party being established. The party will have its own institutions, separate activities, independent infrastructure, and a separate budget.
Out of a deep sense of responsibility to the movement and its ability to continue growing and organizing, we are announcing that as of today we are taking unpaid leave from our national leadership roles in the movement. This is a decision we made out of commitment to the necessary principle of separation, out of a desire to protect the movement, and out of the need to dedicate ourselves seriously to this effort.
We are taking this step because we deeply believe that building people power on the ground and fighting for political power within institutions do not replace one another — they complement one another. Standing Together will continue to lead struggles, build communities, and organize broad civic power during the election period and beyond. There is no substitute for that.
The values that guide all of us — the belief that in this land there are millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians, and that no one is going anywhere; the understanding that all of us here call this place home, and that there is no place for either separation or supremacy; the conviction that the economy and society should serve the great majority of people at the bottom, not the small minority at the top — these values are the compass by which every action is measured, whether organizing in a non-partisan movement like Standing Together or acting in the partisan political arena ahead of the Knesset elections. These are two distinct and separate arenas of action, but in both of them it is possible, and necessary, to act on the basis of the same values and principles.
The party we are establishing will launch an exciting and inspiring election campaign, one that speaks in Hebrew and Arabic about the issues that are critical to our lives and our future, and that no one else is talking about. We intend to be something different, not more of the same, and to run a campaign that is optimistic, principled, and full of hope.
While we will be dedicating our personal efforts in the coming period to the election campaign, it is important for us to say that we are proud of this movement, that it will always be our home, and that we have full confidence in the current leadership to continue leading the movement forward during this complex period.
In partnership,
Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green
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Jewish-Arab Movement Standing Together Launches Knesset Run With Party Built on ‘Politics of Hope’
Co-founders Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood will lead A Place for Us All, a Jewish-Arab party seeking to mobilize voters who would otherwise abstain, and which pledges equal representation for Jews and Arabs, and for men and women
Haaretz, June 16, 2026
Activists from the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement Standing Together have founded a political party ahead of Israel’s upcoming election. The movement’s co-founders, Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood, will head the newly founded “A Place for Us All” party — Makom Lekulanu — and run as its two top candidates for Knesset in October.
“For years, politics has been conducted separately for Jews and separately for Arabs,” Daood tells Haaretz. “We offer a different vision: partnership.” The campaign is meant to build on hope – “politics of hope,” as Daood calls it — for people who have felt left out of institutionalized politics and lost their belief that the system can bring about actual change.
The hope, she says, stems from the work Standing Together has done over the past decade. “We are not asking the public to believe promises about the future – we ask them to look at what we have already accomplished.”
Alongside Green and Daood — who are taking a leave of absence from the movement to run in the election — four other candidates will join them in leading the new party’s Knesset slate.
Two are former members of Standing Together’s national leadership, Itamar Avneri and Sally Abed, who also served as elected officials in the city councils of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa; as well as Jewish peace activist Yonatan Zeigen, son of activist Vivian Silver who was killed on October 7; and Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian peace and women’s rights activist who also used to be a member of Standing Together’s national leadership.
“We want to show by example the change we want to bring to Israeli society,” Uri Weltmann, who worked as Standing Together’s national field organizer and will lead the new party’s election campaign, tells Haaretz. “The new party’s leadership and slate of candidates is set to equally represent men and women, as well as Jews and Arabs.”
“There is no political party in today’s Israeli politics that is led by a woman,” Weltmann emphasizes. The new party intends to mobilize two key demographic groups within the Arab community: women and young people. “We know that only 40 percent of Arab women intend to vote for the Knesset,” Weltmann says. “That’s due to various causes, but I think that the lack of representation is one of them.”
We know that only 40 percent of Arab women intend to vote for the Knesset. That’s due to various causes, but I think that the lack of representation is one of them.
– Uri Weltmann, ‘A Place for us All’ campaign manager
While organizationally, financially and legally independent from Standing Together, the new party will put forward many of the ideas the movement has rallied for since its founding in 2015. “Our vision is grounded in equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel, peace and opposition to war and occupation, and a strong focus on social justice and climate justice, because we consider these issues interconnected,” Weltmann says. “The new party will be in the Standing Together brand, in the purple brand, and people might confuse the two.”
The announcement for the new party ends a period of rumors surrounding Standing Together’s future. Since October 7, the movement’s membership has grown from a few hundred members to close to 7,000 by the end of 2025. Daood and Green have gained some international recognition as the faces of a joint Jewish-Palestinian struggle for peace amid the war and destruction in Gaza, and questions about their political future kept coming up.
Still, the emergence of an additional party in the 2026 election carries the risk of further fragmenting the opposition parties — which share the goal of ousting Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister — and could ultimately have the opposite effect.
Each party must pass the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent to gain Knesset seats, otherwise, its votes are lost. In this way, “A place for Us All” could take away votes from the center-left Democrats, or Arab-Jewish party Hadash, if competing for the same voters.
“Every meaningful change in Israeli politics began as an idea that once seemed impossible,” says Daood. The party leaders hope that the radical nature of their ideas, which they say are absent from the Israeli political system and discourse right now, will attract disillusioned voters. “For years, Israelis have been offered more of the same: the same parties, the same disputes and the same stalemate.”
“We hope not to divide the cake more, but to enlarge the cake and bring in more voters, rather than taking them away,” emphasizes Weltmann, referring to the campaign’s main strategy to mobilize voters, especially within the Arab-Israeli population, who, according to polls, were planning to abstain from voting.
Weltmann said that according to polls conducted by an external agency on behalf of the party, “we currently poll close to three seats in the Knesset,” he says, which is one seat short of the necessary number to pass the threshold. “That is a great start for a party that has not yet launched its election campaign and is not yet campaigning on the streets and on social media.”
The movement’s activists across the country are ready to go, and the election platform is set to be launched. “The deadline to officially submit the slate of candidates is in three months,” Weltmann says. “That is an eternity in Israeli politics and many things are possible.”
Weltmann says the new party will stay committed to the strategic goal of the election: to oust the far-right Netanyahu government, even if that means accepting a center-right coalition led by Naftali Bennet, Yair Lapid and Gadi Eisenkot. “We don’t want to be vote spoilers,” he says. “We are not going to be on the ballot on election day if we are not certain that the support we have from Arab and Jewish voters will translate into ending Netanyahu’s rule.”
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Categories: Palestine/Israel