Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper that is an invaluable source of news and opinion. It harshly criticizes the Netanyahu government and publishes articles critical of the war in Gaza. I began subscribing after the October 7 attacks by Hamas because I wanted to read the news firsthand from an Israeli source, especially one that did not parrot the government’s line. I have not been disappointed. The articles about Netanyahu are far more scathing than anything I read in the American media. And there are sometimes inspiring stories of Jews and Muslims who together seek understanding and peace. The following is one of those stories. This group—Standing Together— has participated in anti-war demonstrations. May they prosper.

It begins:

“You’re not alone,” said the Jewish woman to the Arab woman. Shedding tears, the two Israelis, who were meeting for the first time, embraced. The scene played out in the modest Lod apartment of the Arab woman, Isra Abou Laban Oudi. She’s a single mother, and her 3-year-old son, Tareq, scampered merrily among the 14 strangers, Jews and Arabs, who were guests in his home.

From the beginning of the school year, Oudi says, her son, who speaks only Arabic, had attended a municipal Hebrew-speaking preschool. After October 7, when the children returned to school, Tareq too was happy to reunite with his friends after what had been a two-week break. However, Oudi says, when she heard him speaking Arabic, his teacher hit him and demanded he not use “that language.”

Oudi filed a complaint with the police, which is still under examination, but since then, for some weeks, Tareq hasn’t been going to nursery school. The teacher, who denies hitting Tareq and claims that she only scolded him, also filed a complaint with the police, alleging that Oudi was accusing her falsely. She is still employed in the preschool.

The whole situation left Oudi feeling helpless and very much alone. That is, until the solidarity encounter that took place in her home, when members of Standing Together – an Arab-Jewish social movement that seeks to advance a beneficent, egalitarian society in Israel through joint grassroots activity – came to show their support.

Three days after that visit, Oudi and her toddler son attended an event organized by the movement in the nearby city of Ramle which, like Lod, has a mixed population. There, in a banquet hall that had no banquets to host, Arabs and Jews were working side by side to prepare food packages for Jewish, Muslim and Christian families whose source of livelihood had been truncated because of the war.

Oudi and her son did not join in the activity of Standing Together (“Omdim Beyahad” in Hebrew) by chance. It’s part of the “recovery plan” that the movement recommends for people who have been hurt by racism: to transform the affront into constructive activity. “It gives people the strength to translate the hurt into joint activity, restores a renewed sense of control and also brings us new and highly motivated members,” explains Omri Goren, 24, who oversees the movement’s activity in the Ramle-Lod area and also heads its student division.

After the volunteers finished packing all the food products, and just before the care packages were dispatched to addresses across the city, the 30 volunteers gathered in a dialogue circle. Goren asked them to introduce themselves and describe how they were feeling at this tense time.

One man, an Arab, related that his wife was frightened about the war’s implications for Israel’s Arab citizens and had gone abroad with one of their children, while another son, an electrical engineer, had been fired from his job because of “the situation.” A Jewish man sitting next to him said that for three decades he had been the proprietor of a store in Ramle where Jews, Christians and Muslims shopped, and that he had warm, close relations with all of them. “We are like brothers,” he said. “There is respect and genuine love. I am proud to be a Ramle resident who has friends in Ramle.”

A Jewish woman told the others that her niece was killed on October 7, and that she was worried about the shared future in Israel. “And that’s why I am here.”

Although many may be surprised – though the movement’s leaders are not among them – demand for Standing Together’s message of solidarity and vision of a shared future has been on a constant rise since the war started. Those who thought that the uptick in mutual suspicion between Arabs and Jews is causing the fragile fabric of Israeli society to unravel, is invited to take part in the movement’s activity and discover that they are wrong.

Standing Together, which was founded in 2015 and espouses values of equality, peace, social justice and socialism (and in normal times, is involved in environmental, educational and social issues, in a number of different campaigns), is currently gathering momentum. Its membership is growing daily. The purple color associated with the movement, and its newly minted slogan, “Together we will get through this,” can be seen in more and more places in both the real and online worlds. Most of the new joiners are young people, Arabs and Jews, the movement’s directors note. Since October 7, a dozen joint Arab-Jewish groups, dubbed “solidarity guards,” have been established across the country, joining the eight already active branches. Eleven student chapters have also been created, besides the nine that previously existed…

Tamar Asadi is someone who joined the movement in the wake of October 7. Asadi, 28, is from the village of Deir al-Asad, in the country’s north. She’s a homeroom teacher for 12th-graders at a Jewish high school in the area, where she’s worked for the past six years. She too says she has been “very worried” since the start of the war. “I also knew some people at the [Nova] party and in the Gaza border communities, and in general I was concerned about what would happen,” she says.

“In the social media,” she continues, “all the posts were dark and frightening, and suddenly I saw a purple-colored post, which said something about partnership, in both Hebrew and Arabic. I felt like someone had thrown me a lifebelt of grace. I wrote to the people behind the post, who were from Standing Together, to ask whether the movement had a branch in Deir al-Asad.

“They said they didn’t, so I decided to take the initiative and set up a solidarity guard of Arab and Jewish communities in the Galilee. Within hours, we had 350 new members. We held our first meeting via Zoom, and the feeling was so good that we decided to continue with a face-to-face meeting.”

Asadi continues: “We invited everyone to us, to the community center in Deir al-Asad. One of the people who came, from Kibbutz Tuval [nearby], apologized for having to leave early, because he had guard duty at the kibbutz – ‘to protect us from you,’ he said – and everyone laughed. I haven’t stopped talking about that remark, and I understood how important what we are doing in Standing Together is.

“Since then, my activity has only picked up momentum. We visited joint medical teams of Arabs and Jews at health-care facilities; we paid a solidarity visit to Maayan Sigal-Koren, five of whose relatives were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, two of whom are still being held in Gaza; I invited friends for an encounter at my place, which left me very emotional; and much more.

“Standing Together gives me a place to be who I am,” she explains, “along with the hope I have been searching for for a long time. My activity in the movement is also a message to my students. They see an Israeli homeroom teacher, an Arab woman, a Muslim, a Palestinian, who on the one hand identifies with Israel, yet is not ashamed of her [Arab] identity. The change has to come from the public. Our generation is confused about its identity, and is sad and fearful, but Arab society is behaving with solidarity, dignity and empathy at this time – not only out of fear, but mainly because of a shared destiny.”

Sigal-Koren, a resident of Kibbutz Pelekh, in the Misgav region, describes the solidarity visit that movement members paid her as “the most powerful and most hopeful I have experienced since all this started. The encounter touched me in a way that no other meeting in this period has,” she tells Haaretz.

The Standing Together activists asked Sigal-Koren how they could help her and other families of the captives, and suddenly it occurred to her to that the campaign being conducted online and via posters and billboards calling for the captives’ release should be translated into Arabic too. That was in fact speedily done with the aid of members of the solidarity squad. Sigal-Koren was subsequently invited to tell her story at a meeting of Standing Together in the Arab town of Nahaf. Speaking before an audience of 300 Arabs and Jews, she called for the return from Gaza of her uncle, Fernando Marman, and Louis Har, her mother’s partner (her mother, Clara, was released on November 28).

Since that hellish Saturday, the movement has conducted more than a hundred activities, including joint conferences for Arabs and Jews in Hebrew and Arabic in Tamra, Nazareth, Abu Ghosh, Lod, Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, Tel Aviv and other venues. They have visited hospitals to meet with wounded soldiers and speak to Jewish and Arab medical teams; cleaned out public shelters; sent food packages and other things to families whose source of income has dried up; monitored cases of racist violence in Israel; and made solidarity visits like the one in Oudi’s home.

One of their significant actions is the setting up of an emergency hotline, offering assistance to anyone who’s been harmed by racism or requires physical accompaniment in order to get to their place of work, the local clinic – or the police station in order to file a complaint about racism. The hotline, which operates seven days a week, has taken hundreds of calls from people whose cases are in various stages of treatment.

The hotline is currently being staffed by 90 volunteers, says Oded Rotem, their coordinator. Many more wanted to join, he notes, but the movement has declared a hiatus on accepting new volunteers, as it’s unable to meet the pace of training.

* * * 

Some 700 people showed up for Standing Together’s Haifa conference, held on November 4. Not unusually in these parts, the event took place only after an alternative was found to the original location, which they were forced to abandon following pressure by right-wingers. At the event, Sally Abed, who directs the movement’s resource development team, spoke about her mother, who works for the northern district of the National Insurance Institute (social security administration), which deals with the social-welfare needs of bereaved families and the families of the Gaza hostages. She related how, after a hard day of emotionally draining work, her mother comes home, turns on an Arabic news channel and sees what is being perpetrated against members of her family in the Gaza Strip.

“We’re told that we have to take a side,” Abed said. “But that choice inevitably denies the humanity of the other side. I refuse to have my humanity robbed. I refuse to be deprived of my Israeliness,” she declared, to the applause of the audience. After the meeting, Abed was approached by an elderly Jewish man wearing a kippa, who had tears in his eyes. Embracing her, he said, “Thank you, this is the first time I’ve breathed since October 7. You made it possible for me to feel pain for the other side and to feel like a human being again.”

The story continues. I hope you are able to open the link and finish reading. Standing Together is a candle in the darkness, an effort to bridge differences and build an awareness of common humanity. It has 5,000 members at present, with another 2,000 who join their activities. May their candle create light and hope.