How Standing Together Is Keeping Hope Alive After More Than 6 Months of War

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After Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the leaders of the grassroots Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together knew they had to act. Since 2015, Standing Together has been bringing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel together to campaign for equality, peace, and social justice for everyone living on the land. By and large, that has meant working to end ongoing violence and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Now, Alon-Lee Green, national co-director of Standing Together, tells Teen Vogue that the goal is “to stop the war, reach a ceasefire, release the hostages, and stop the killing in Gaza.”

“It’s not only out of solidarity towards the Palestinians; it's also in the self-interest of all the citizens of Israel to live without occupation, without the violence, [and] without this reality that is of course bad for the Palestinians, but it's also bad for us,” he says.

To achieve these goals, Standing Together operates within the legal borders of Israel — not within any settlements, Green notes — to mobilize communities across the country; train people to be leaders; and build regional, local, and student chapters. Beyond the direct context of war, members also organize and campaign for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and workers’ rights.

But when the October 7 attack occurred, Green says, Standing Together leadership immediately shifted focus to operate in an “emergency capacity” — and they knew their approach moving forward would require “radical empathy.”

“As a collective of a lot of different people, we all immediately felt isolated, even from our families. Within a second, our society entered this state of trauma and fear that made a lot of people say very scary things,” Green says. “It was a very, very lonely thing to say that the war is not the right answer [to]...the terrible massacre Hamas committed on October 7th.”

And when the Israeli military began its bombardment of the Gaza strip immediately after the attack, “we knew immediately that every person on this land is afraid,” Green says. “We needed to speak, we needed to expand the spaces [to communicate], and it was an urgent mission.” It’s clear that the mission has resonated with people near and far. Since October 7, Standing Together’s membership has grown steadily, the Standing Together English Instagram account has surpassed 100,000 followers in a matter of months, and the number of student chapters has more than doubled.

Six months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Teen Vogue spoke with Green about how he maintains hope, Standing Together’s recent efforts, and the group’s expanding student chapters.

Teen Vogue: You mentioned the ongoing occupation is bad not only for Palestinians, but also for Jews in Israel. Why is that?

Alon-Lee Green: We recognize the power indifference; we recognize that Israel is the hegemonic force on the ground. Israel has the army [and] the control over the entire land — within the borders of Israel, but also outside of the borders of Israel. We have people who are citizens of Israel and they get all the civil rights and human rights. We get the right to vote, to get elected, to move freely. But Israel is also controlling millions of people who live in the Palestinian territories controlled by the Israeli army and are not citizens of Israel. Therefore, they don't have any rights [granted to Israeli citizens] — not human rights and not civil rights.

And foreign soldiers [from] a different country are patrolling their streets, their cities, their neighborhoods. And those soldiers are also doing what they're doing right now in Gaza, and [have been doing] in the West Bank and in Gaza for so many decades already.

TV: Can you share more about the Standing Together campus chapters?

AG: Campuses and universities and colleges in Israel are [often] the very first meeting of Palestinians and Jews in our society. Israel has [approximately] 80% Jewish citizens and 20% Palestinian citizens. We have … mixed cities in Israel, [but] we live in a very segregated society [with] different schools [and] different towns. All of a sudden, you sit in the same class, you go to the same tests, you listen to the same lecturers, you exist for years on the same campus. But even though on paper you are supposed to be equal, the inequality rises up [and] affect[s] the way you study. It affects the way the university treats you. It affects what you believe you are allowed to do.

We're trying to create a platform in universities of working together, acknowledging the inequality [and] differences, but also acknowledging [other issues] — [like] for women, it can be unsafe and you can [face] sexual harassment, [whether you’re] Palestinian or Jewish, so we can work together to change this reality. When you live in the dorms and they raise the price of the dorms, you can work together, Palestinians and Jews, to fight it. When there's a campaign of a right-wing group on campuses against LGBTQ[+] communities, you can work together to try and change it. And ultimately, because of this initial meeting between Palestinians and Jews, you can politicize the campuses and say that, as young citizens in our country, we work together to end the occupation, to end apartheid in the West Bank, and to end the war and try and build a reality that is better for all of us — of peace, of equality, of independence and freedom for all people.

TV: The number of campus chapters has grown exponentially since October 7. Why do you think that is, and what does that signal to you?

AG: Most every young person in Israel under the age of 30 grew up knowing only one reality — one prime minister [and] one dominant idea [and] narrative that is controlling our lives — and it's depressing. It's saying to us, nothing is going to change. It's telling us that it's going to only get worse and worse, and that we're moving from one violent escalation to another, from one nation-state law — racist laws that are being legislated against Palestinians — to the other.

I think people are extremely fed up after the war, after we hit the darkest moment of our history together. People need something completely different — not more of the same, not a different shade of the same idea, but a competitive idea. We're talking about equality, we're talking about freedom, we're talking about oppression, we're talking about the fact that it's not good for the Palestinians [or] for the Jewish people. We feel a void. And I think that most of the other groups or forces in Israeli politics are political parties. We're not a political party. They will look [to] campuses only as, ‘We need to have [student members] within those campuses so when there's an election, we can activate them.’ No, [Standing Together cares] about training our members and providing them with the tools to become a leader, to become active, to become a person who can organize other people around them. I think [that] is something that makes us very much alive next to other movements or parties that are just surviving.

TV: You talked about using “radical empathy” in the wake of October 7. How else has Standing Together’s work changed in the past six months?

AG: We started with solidarity work and created Jewish-Palestinian solidarity groups across the country. In the beginning, we were cleaning bomb shelters together, collecting aid and support for the people who were impacted, [like] the Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev [desert] or the Jewish communities across the Gaza envelope, showing that we're in this together.

Then we started to recognize that, within the hours of October 7th, our government started to try and navigate the society toward losing our humanity. We created a campaign saying that only we can choose what kind of a society we will be. Hamas will not choose it for us. We need to make this decision. There are innocent people in Gaza; most of the people in Gaza are innocent…. Bombing them indiscriminately and killing innocent people will not bring back the ones who were killed on October 7th.

We also created a hotline to support Palestinian citizens, mainly students, who were persecuted because of their identity or beliefs. It was a scary moment. You could write on your Instagram, “Don't kill the Palestinian children, they're innocent,” and get expelled from university for supporting terrorism. It was really written in letters [from the universities]: “supporting terrorism.” We recruited lawyers and social workers, and we had a hotline [with] dozens of cases a day.

The campaign and the struggle has grown since then, to say that we need to stop the war, we need to stop the killing in Gaza, the destruction in Gaza, the starvation in Gaza, and to release the hostages. And that can only be done by achieving a ceasefire agreement, one that will stop the killing and destruction and that will bring back the hostages. These deals save lives.

TV: How do you maintain hope in the face of everything that has happened and continues to happen?

AG: It was a challenge in the beginning. The first few days, it felt like the world collapsed, and it felt like anxiety and fears taking over. Every 10-to-20 minutes, news came and you learned about something else [terrible] that was happening. Since then, actually until now, it feels like a free-falling. But in the second week, we started this campaign to gather Jews and Palestinians. Every third day, we moved to a different locality in Israel and we tried to just be together and show solidarity, but also say, “Don't go in the direction [Israel is] going.”

In Haifa, nine days after October 7th, there was a huge gathering in the mosque we organized with 900 people. And Sally Abed, one of the leaders of our movement [who is] Palestinian, was standing on the stage to give a speech, and the room was packed — you couldn't move. She started crying and said, “I don't know what to say.” And she just cried. She spoke about her mom being a Palestinian, working for the Social Security Service in Israel, dealing with the hostages’ families, not [being allowed] to say that she's Palestinian, and then coming [home] in the evening and seeing the news on Al Jazeera [about] what [was] happen[ing] in Gaza. [Abed] just cried, and the entire room cried with her. In that moment, I really felt that what we're doing gives me hope. The fact that we can feel those feelings together in probably the most polarizing moment of our history, where all the Palestinians have one set of feelings and all the Jews have [another], but still we can create a space of us being together and holding this together, was very powerful.

TV: Have you also seen an increase in international support since October 7th?

AG: Yeah, definitely. We have an Instagram page that just reached 100,000 followers. We have hundreds of messages [and] emails a day of people in the world [asking] how they can help [and] what can they do? It's amazing because we feel we met a very polarized discussion, a very dichotomous discussion — it's either you need to stand with Israel or you need to stand with Palestinians, and you cannot find this mutual ground — [and help people] understand that if you stand with Israelis [or you’re a] Jewish person in the world and you want to stand with Israelis, you must also support Palestinians, because this is the only solution of achieving a reality where we are all free, and all safe, and all equal and independent. And if you want to stand with Palestinians, you need to take into account that there are also 7 million Jews living on this land and they also deserve to have a safe life, and massacring them is not an answer.

We do want you to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. We do want you to say, “Free Palestine” because we support it. We are fighting for it every day. We are paying a very high price in our society for saying the things we're saying against the war and against the occupation. But in the same breath, [we’re] also saying that the only solution can be based on this understanding that there are [millions of Jews and] Palestinians living on the same land. None of them is going anywhere.

TV: How can young people in other countries support Standing Together and your goals?

AG: Be engaged around the topic, [and] be engaged around your own politics. It matters. It is important. The world has a lot of countries, they have a lot of influence on what's [happening] on the ground here, whether they supply weapons [or] a diplomatic umbrella that allows the occupation and the oppression of Palestinians to continue. Being engaged in your own politics means making sure that your politicians are accountable for what is happening, your governments are accountable, [and they’re] making the right choice in who to support and how to support.

The second thing is to learn [and] be curious about the reality here. Don't be satisfied with seeing a TikTok of someone saying, “all Jews are complicit” and then take it as [fact] — because not all Jews [in the world] are complicit. A Jewish person living in France, or a Jewish person living in Canada or in the U.S., [has] nothing to do with what the Israeli government is doing. Blaming them is not the right thing.

The third thing is, focus your efforts [and] your energies around the solution. We can shout and curse reality as much as we want, but changing reality means understanding what is the pragmatic and practical solution we're working for. It means [asking], how are we building power to achieve this solution? What are the coalitions we're building around it? Who are we working with? Are we expecting to have a closed club saying only people ticking the boxes of the buzzwords I want them to use are entering the club? Or are we aspiring to build a broad coalition to achieve the power needed to tackle those things that are backed by very important, wealthy, and powerful forces in the world.

And lastly, you can follow us [and] share our content. We try to bring forward voices of Palestinian and Jewish activists on the ground [and share the stories of] people who have skin in the game, but we also share our collective story of Jews and Palestinians working together to find a way to end occupation, end the war, [and] end these years of suffering of Palestinians, but also of Jewish people living here. And [we try] to bring forward a solution where all people are equal, and free, and independent.

TV: We've recently seen some tides turning, with U.S. lawmakers taking increasingly firm positions on a ceasefire. Why is it important to not let up on the pressure?

AG: I never heard about the president, or a prime minister, or parliament member waking up one day and saying, “Today's the day I want to end slavery.” Or, “Today's the day I want to grant women the right to vote.” The only way to change reality is by forcing the change you want to see upon the political system, and by people organizing and building the change they are working for. I think that, in so many ways, we are seeing now the political system in the U.S. responding to the pressure, responding to the very big group of young people in the U.S., and Palestinian people, and Arab Americans demanding change in the administration on the way they handled this issue until now, and it's amazing to see. But it's not enough. Of course, it's not enough. The aid to Israel should be at least conditioned, if not completely canceled, in this moment where Israel is doing what we're doing there in Gaza.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue