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Biden plan to combat antisemitism demands reforms across the executive branch and beyond
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden unveiled a multifaceted and broad strategy to combat antisemitism in the United States that reaches from basketball courts to farming communities, from college campuses to police departments.
“We must say clearly and forcefully that antisemitism and all forms of hate and violence have no place in America,” Biden said in a prerecorded video. “Silence is complicity.”
The 60-page document and its list of more than 100 recommendations stretches across the government, requiring reforms in virtually every sector of the executive branch within a year. It was formulated after consultations with over a thousand experts, and covers a range of tactics, from increased security funding to a range of educational efforts.
The plan has been in the works since December, and the White House has consulted with large Jewish organizations throughout the process. The finished document embraces proposals that large Jewish organizations have long advocated, as well as initiatives that pleasantly surprised Jewish organizational leaders, most of whom praised it upon its release.
Among the proposals that Jewish leaders have called for were recommendations to streamline reporting of hate crimes across local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, which will enable the government to accurately assess the breadth of hate crimes. The proposal also recommends that Congress double the funds available to nonprofits for security measures, from $180 million to $360 million.
One proposal that, if enacted, could be particularly far-reaching — and controversial — is a call for Congress to pass “fundamental reforms” to a provision that shields social media platforms from liability for the content users post on their sites. The plan says social media companies should have a “zero tolerance policy for hate speech on their platforms.”
In addition, the plan calls for action in partnership with a range of government agencies and private entities. It says the government will work with professional sports leagues to educate fans about antisemitism and hold athletes accountable for it, following instances of antisemitic speech by figures such as NBA star Kyrie Irving or NFL player DeSean Jackson.
The government will also partner with rural museums and libraries to educate their visitors about Jewish heritage and antisemitism. And the plan includes actions to be taken by a number of cabinet departments, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the USDA.
“It’s really producing a whole-of-government approach that stretches from what you might consider the obvious things like more [security] grants and more resources for the Justice Department and the FBI,” said Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union. “But it stretches all the way across things that the Department of Labor and the Small Business Administration can do with regard to educating about antisemitism, that the National Endowment of the Humanities and the President’s Council on Sports and Fitness can do with regard to the institutions that they deal with.”
An array of Jewish organizations from the left to the center-right echoed those sentiments in welcoming the plan with enthusiasm, marking a change from recent weeks in which they had been split over how the plan should define antisemitism. Still, a handful of right-wing groups blasted the strategy, saying that its chosen definition of antisemitism diluted the term.
Despite the relatively united front, there are elements of the strategy that may stoke broader controversy: Among a broad array of partner groups named in the plan is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose harsh criticism of Israel has led to relations with centrist Jewish organizations that are fraught at best. The call to place limits on social media platforms may also upset free speech advocates.
Biden recalled, as he often does, that he decided to run for president after President Donald Trump equivocated while condemning the neo-Nazis who organized a deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“Repeated episodes of hate — including numerous attacks on Jewish Americans — have since followed Charlottesville, shaking our moral conscience as Americans and challenging the values for which we stand as a Nation,” Biden wrote in an introduction to the report.
The administration launched the initiative last December, after years during which Jewish groups and the FBI reported sharp spikes in antisemitic incidents. The strategy was originally planned for release at its Jewish American Heritage Month celebration last week, but was delayed, in part because of last minute internal squabbling over whether it would accept a definition of antisemitism that some on the left said chilled free speech on Israel. Some right-wing groups were deeply critical of the new strategy for not accepting that definition to the exclusion of others.
Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) praised the breadth of the plan, and said the delay seemed to produce results.
“The White House has taken this very seriously. The phrase that something is still being worked on can often be a euphemism for a lack of concern,” he said. “In this case, it seems to have resulted in an even more comprehensive and hopefully more effective result.”
Some of the initiatives in the plan focus less on directly confronting antisemitism and more on promoting tolerance of and education about Jews.The Biden Administration will seek to ensure accommodations for Jewish religious observance, the accompanying fact sheet said, and “the Department of Agriculture will work to ensure equal access to all USDA feeding programs for USDA customers with religious dietary needs, including kosher and halal dietary needs.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League CEO who was closely consulted on the strategy, said promoting inclusion was as critical as fighting antisemitism. “Is FEMA giving kosher provisions after disasters going to solve antisemitism?” he said in an interview. “No, but… it’s an acknowledgement of the plurality of communities and the need to treat Jewish people like you would any other minority community, and I think I’m very pleased to see that.”
In the months since Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, convened a roundtable to launch the initiative, the Biden administration has pivoted from focusing on the threat of antisemitism from the far-right to also highlighting its manifestation in other spheres — including amid anti-Israel activism on campuses and the targeting of visibly religious Jews in the northeast. Those factors were evident in the strategy.
“Some traditionally observant Jews, especially traditional Orthodox Jews, are victimized while walking down the street,” the strategy said in its introduction. “Jewish students and educators are targeted for derision and exclusion on college campuses, often because of their real or perceived views about the State of Israel.”
The proposal that may provoke controversy beyond American Jewry is the Biden Administration’s calls to reform the tech sector, which echo bipartisan recommendations to change Section 230, a provision of U.S. law that grants platforms immunity from being liable for the content users post. Free speech advocates and the companies themselves say that if the government were to police online speech, it would veer into censorship.
“Tech companies have a critical role to play and for that reason the strategy contains 10 separate calls to tech companies to establish a zero tolerance policy for hate speech on their platforms, to ensure that their algorithms do not pass along hate speech and extreme content to users and to listen more closely to Jewish groups to better understand how antisemitism manifests itself on their platforms,” Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s top Homeland Security adviser, said during a 30-minute briefing on the strategy on Thursday. “The president has also called on Congress to remove the special immunity for online platforms and to impose stronger transparency requirements in order to ensure that tech companies are removing content that violates their terms of service.”
Neo-Nazis and white supremacists encircle counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 11, 2017. (Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In the weeks before the rollout, a debate raged online and behind the scenes amid Jewish organizations and activists about how the plan would define antisemitism. Centrist and right-wing groups pushed for the plan to embrace the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition. Among its examples of anti-Jewish bigotry are those focusing on when Israel criticism is antisemitic, including when “double standards” applied to Israel are antisemitic.
Advocates on the left say those clauses turn legitimate criticism of Israel into hate speech; instead, they pushed to include references to the Nexus Document, a definition authored by academics that recognizes IHRA but seeks to complement it by further elucidating how anti-Israel expression may be antisemitic in some instances, and not in others. Others sought to include the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which rejects IHRA’s Israel-related examples.
In the end, the strategy said the U.S. government recognizes the IHRA definition as the “most prominent” and “appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”
A number of the centrist groups pressed for exclusive reference to IHRA, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Those groups praised the strategy and focused only on its embrace of IHRA. So did the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog.
“I would like to congratulate the Biden administration for publishing the first ever national strategy to combat antisemitism,” Herzog wrote on Twitter. “Thank you, @POTUS, for prioritizing the need to confront antisemitism in all its forms. We welcome the re-embracing of @TheIHRA definition which is the gold standard definition of antisemitism.”
Some center-right groups like B’nai Brith International, StandWithUs and the World Jewish Congress, praised the strategy while expressing regret at the inclusion of Nexus. Right-wing groups, such as the Republican Jewish Coalition and Christians United for Israel condemned the rollout.
RJC said Biden “blew it” by not exclusively using the IHRA definition. The Brandeis Center, which defends pro-Israel groups and students on campus, said the “substance doesn’t measure up.”
Groups on the left, however, broadly praised the strategy. “We call on our Jewish communities to seize this historic moment and build on this new strategy to ensure that the fight for Jewish safety is a fight for a better and safer America for all,” said a statement from six left-leaning groups spearheaded by Jews For Racial & Economic Justice.
Greenblatt said it was predictable that groups on the left would take the win and that groups on the right would grumble — but that it was also beside the point. IHRA, he said, was now U.S. policy.
“This document elevates and advances IHRA as the way that U.S. policy will be formulated going forward and across all of the agencies,” Greenblatt said. “That is a win.”
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This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize?
In 1926, New York City police arrested Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who ran a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, for the crime of being gay.
The formal charges were more euphemistic. Officially, Adams was charged with disorderly conduct — that is, flirting with an undercover police officer who had entrapped her, and obscenity, for writing and possessing the book Lesbian Love.
The following year, the U.S. government deported Adams to Poland, in what was effectively a death sentence: 16 years later, Adams would be murdered at Auschwitz.
Now, a century after Adam’s arrest, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal — the first openly gay person to hold the elected position — is urging New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to formally recognize the city’s role in Adams’ persecution.
He sent a letter to Mamdani requesting that the city issue a formal declaration acknowledging Adams’ conviction in 1926 “was unjust and rooted in discriminatory law enforcement and affirming that New York City failed her as a pioneer of LGBTQ+ life, as an immigrant, and as a Jewish woman who was ultimately deported to her death.”
“Adams’s story is among the most unjust in our city’s history,” the letter reads. “One hundred years after her arrest, we have the obligation and the opportunity to say plainly that she deserved better.”
In a statement to the Forward, the Mayor’s office said they are reviewing the request.
“The Mamdani Administration is deeply committed to uplifting the stories of New Yorkers that have gone unheard throughout history,” deputy press secretary Sam Raskin said.
A pioneer
Born with the name Chawa Zloczower in Poland in 1891, Adams immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island at age 20.
In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.
“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”
Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.
In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.
“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”
Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.
But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.
Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.
She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.
Adams’ legacy
Over the years, Adams has come to be recognized as a Jewish LGBTQ icon. Her life inspired the play The Great Lesbian Love of Eve Adams, and she was the subject of a New York Times obituary published as part of the newspaper’s “Overlooked” series, which chronicles the lives of notable people throughout history whose deaths went unreported.
Hoylman-Sigal said he was inspired to commemorate Adams by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, a nonprofit that documents local queer history, which asked him to send the letter to Mamdani. The Sites Project also offers historic walking tours of the city featuring Adams’ story.
“Their jaws drop when we tell them these stories, standing in front of the building where her tea room was,” said Ken Lustbader, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
On Wednesday, the centennial of Adams arrest, the Sites Project is hosting a performance and vigil in Adams’ honor at the former site of Eve’s Hangout — today, home to La Lanterna, an Italian cafe and pizzeria.
The site of Eve’s Hangout has also been recognized by the National Park Service as part of a roundup of Greenwich Village landmarks significant to LGBTQ history.
New York City, however, has never formally acknowledged the injustice of Adams’ arrest, conviction and deportation.
A posthumous apology would be unusual, though not without precedent: In 2019, the NYPD formally apologized for its 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn, describing the department’s actions as “discriminatory and oppressive.”
“I would love to see the mayor do it, but we could have one from the police department — an apology for sort of framing her,” Katz said. “They sent in a plainclothes policewoman to entrap her, and so that was really beyond a democratic process.”
The NYPD did not respond to the Forward‘s request for comment.
Whether or not the city issues an official acknowledgement, Hoylman-Sigal said he hopes the campaign will help keep Adams’ story alive.
“It’s an extremely poignant story, sorrowful, outrageous, sad — and one that most people don’t know about,” he said. “So I thought bringing attention to it was a righteous cause.”
Jacob Kornbluh contributed reporting.
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Ever the restless spirit, Tel Aviv-born architect and designer Ron Arad is still reinventing himself and his art
When the announcement was made on June 12 that Ron Arad, 75, has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), it marked another step in the Tel Aviv-born architect, artist and designer’s remarkably varied journey. Arad’s mother was the painter Esther Peretz-Arad and his father Grisha was a sculptor and photographer. After industrial design studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Arad traveled to London to become an architect, and has remained based there ever since. Yet although he won early fame with his piquant, witty concepts for chairs, Arad has proven anything but sedentary over the past half-century. Indeed, a 2010 retrospective at London’s Barbican Art Gallery was titled “Restless.”
Despite this seemingly permanent shpilkes (restless agitation), humane consideration for the pathways of others has been a constant in Arad’s public projects. His design for Beit Shulamit (2025), a cancer treatment center at the HaEmek Medical Center in Afula, northern Israel, intended to serve Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze communities in Israel and Palestine, deliberately freed patients and visitors from “horrible hospital corridors,” Arad told an architectural periodical. Patients walking around the site are given views of nature outdoors at every turn, in a facility that is the first to offer specialist cancer treatment for residents of West Bank conflict zones, including the cities of Jenin and Nablus. Named in honor of Dr. Shulamit Katzman, a pediatrician, the building’s gently curved lines embrace the public.
This awareness of social cohesion is also present in an Arad sculpture on the Tel Aviv University campus. “Kesher” is dedicated to the estimated 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died from adverse conditions in transition camps on the Sudanese border while trying to emigrate to Israel between 1979 and 1990. Composed of dynamically soaring, interwoven metal tubes, the artwork, wrapped around two live palm trees, a ubiquitous symbol of the Middle East, evokes an expedition. A repeated figure-eight symbolizes the endless continuity of the immigrants’ route and the resolve that it communicates.
In England, Arad assisted the National Health Service (NHS) in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. A flock of UK Jewish celebrities posed for photos wearing Arad-designed cotton masks, including actor Stephen Fry, comedian David Baddiel, and television host Natasha Kaplinsky. Despite lively colors, the masks, intended to be sold for fundraising, retained a somewhat tragic aura, like the grotesque permanent smile of Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Man Who Laughs.
Potential tragedy inherent in triumph likewise radiates from another Arad project, the Totzeret HaAretz (ToHA) tower, an office skyscraper in central Tel Aviv which was inspired by the shape of an iceberg. Its angular glass, built as the polar ice caps are rapidly melting and the fate of the passenger liner Titanic’s collision with an iceberg is particularly relevant, the ensemble when complete will include an 80-floor companion tower, Tel Aviv’s tallest building.
Similarly, Arad is aware of the agony of defeat as well as artistic victories he has experienced over the years. When his codesign for a National Holocaust Monument Ottawa in Canada failed to win a competition, Arad published the concept anyway. The result is a highly literary, theological rumination on the impact of the Shoah on modern Jewish history. Ever conscious of the pedestrian’s progress, Arad’s design featured concrete walls framing 22 narrow passageways, one for each country in which Jewish communities were decimated. These walls, spaced around a meter apart, would have allowed only one visitor to fit through at a time. The solitude would have been lessened by an architectural allusion to the covenant of the pieces (Brit Bein HaBetarim), the first of a series of covenants between God and the Patriarchs. In this narrative, God revealed himself to Abram (later Abraham), promising that his descendants would inherit the Land of Israel.
Less loftily or weighty with destiny, Arad’s chief promise as an artist is to his own creativity. He was so inspired by a melody by the American Jewish songwriter Jonathan Richman about shedding personal inhibition and pretension by accepting new, unfamiliar surroundings and contexts, that in all seriousness he informed an interviewer in 2005 that he wanted Richman’s tune, “I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar” to be played at his funeral. Another impeded project where dancing might have been at least delayed was a London Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre design, initially approved in 2017, but later bogged down by objections about its proposed site, Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament. However, in January, a Holocaust Memorial Act 2026 received Royal Assent, officially clearing a legal hurdle blocking the construction of Arad’s UK Holocaust Memorial; the recent conferral of a CBE by Charles III, known to take particular interest in Jews and Holocaust victims, represents further establishment endorsement of Arad and his work.
Despite this authorized approval, Arad looks likely to remain an offbeat spirit, drawing inspiration from a wide range of predecessors, including the Czernowitz-born Austrian Jewish creator Friedrich Jacob Kiesler who innovated with 1965’s “Shrine of the Book” in Jerusalem to house the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, among other texts. Kiesler was also responsible for an unbuilt architectural concept, the Endless House, a biomorphic, continuous form with no beginning, end, or even boundaries between floor, wall, and ceiling. Some Arad projects resemble completed versions of things Kiesler and his fellow Jewish surrealists might have only dreamed of.
When it is built, Arad’s Holocaust Memorial will pay tribute to several minority groups targeted by the Nazis, in addition to the Jews. The Learning Centre is intended to explore antisemitism, but also extremism, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice in today’s society. Much of it will be underground, drawing visitors down narrow stairs into the exhibition space and learning center, in yet another example of Arad’s obsession with peregrinations, like a modern-day architectural Benjamin of Tudela, a medieval Jewish traveler. Ever shedding past identities, Arad told the 2005 interviewer that the living person he most admired was Bob Dylan, for “reinventing himself and for reinventing us.” In a comparable way, Ron Arad has also reworked his own optic to express modern Jewish identity in a variety of forms, as an excursion hampered by tragedy and ominous echoes at times, but also with the possibility of quick-witted celebration.
At last year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Arad presented a bronze sculpture titled “I doubt therefore I think” (Dubito Ergo Cogito). Inviting museumgoers to sit on it, the artwork likely referred to a time-honored Jewish tradition of doubt as the mitzvah of questioning. This mitzvah has accompanied Arad’s career-long odyssey in the arts.
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New Jewish-Arab political party debuts in Israel, aiming to topple Netanyahu
A newly established Jewish-Arab political party debuted Tuesday and is joining the crowded field vying to take down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s next election, slated for October.
Makom Lekulanu, which translates to A Place for Us All, ( is led by Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, co-founders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizing group. Other Standing Together leaders will also join the party, including Haifa City Council member Sally Abed; Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian peace and women’s rights activist; Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council member; and Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, well-known peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri.
According to Daood and others who spoke at a press conference in Nazareth publicly launching the new party, Makom Lekulanu’s platform will focus on many of the same issues that Standing Together has organized around for years: peace, social justice, soaring violence and crime in Arab communities, the cost of living and climate justice.
Party leaders say they are running not only to oppose Netanyahu and his coalition, which currently includes far-right extremists National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but to offer a fundamentally different vision.
“We are doing this because this is the last moment to save our society,” Daood told the modest crowd, many of whom were clad in the telltale purple that has become synonymous with Standing Together. “We are being abandoned, murdered; our future is going up in flames. And I know that in order to repair things, it is not enough to say only what we oppose. We also have to say what we support.”
“So today I am saying: no to Netanyahu, to Ben-Gvir, to Smotrich,” she continued, to enthusiastic applause. “But I am also saying yes. Yes to Israeli-Palestinian peace, yes to national and civil equality, yes to social justice.”The press conference took place at the scenic Rose Cafe in Nazareth, a choice that underscored the message its founders are trying to send. This is not, they insisted, a Jewish party with token Palestinian representation or an Arab party with a couple of Jewish allies, but what Daood called “a truly shared party, one of genuine partnership between Jews and Arabs.”
According to Abed, this means tearing down the arbitrary dividers that have been built around Jewish and Arab leadership.
“I have always been told, ‘You will be responsible for Arab society, and we will be responsible for Jewish society,’” she said. “But I want to lead and take responsibility for all of society, together with my Jewish partners.”
“That’s what A Place for Us All will be: taking responsibility for all of society, together, on the path to ending the occupation, to peace and to real equality.”
A decade organizing
The party grew directly out of Standing Together, the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement founded in 2015. Since the Oct. 7 attack, and the ensuing wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Standing Together has become one of Israel’s most visible anti-war and anti-occupation organizations, growing its membership more than tenfold and emerging as a prominent voice on the international stage as well.
Inside Israel, the movement has organized ceasefire protests and rallies calling for a hostage deal, protected aid convoys headed for Gaza from right-wing attacks, raised funds for bomb shelters in Bedouin communities and provided protective presence for Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.
For Zeigen, the decision to join the slate is rooted in personal loss as well as political conviction.
“For years, I worked with people battling poverty, marginalization and trauma — the overwhelming majority of them as a result of institutional abandonment,” he said at the press conference. “On Oct. 7, I experienced that abandonment firsthand. My mother, Vivian Silver, did not survive the massacre at her kibbutz.”
“Out of the devastation of losing her, I made a decision,” he continued. “I left my job as a social worker, and since then I have dedicated my life to one thing: Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Zeigen described his grief now intermingling with another emotion: fear for the future his children will inherit.
“That is why I insist on turning despair into action,” he said. “Because I refuse to accept bereavement as fate — not for Jews and not for Arabs, not for Israelis and not for Palestinians.”
The new party’s leaders have been careful to stress that Standing Together is a separate entity from A Place for Us All. In a joint statement issued ahead of the launch, Daood and Green said the movement would remain active and independent, with a “full and substantive separation — organizational, legal, financial and political” between Standing Together and A Place for Us All. Both Daood and Green said they will take unpaid leave from their leadership roles in the movement in order to run.
Daood said the move into electoral politics is a natural progression of what she and Green have helped create over the last decade.
“For 10 years now, we have been effecting change right where it was needed most. We know how to build this kind of power on the ground,” Daood told the Forward. “Now we want to take that power and translate it into votes so that we can effect change from within the Knesset.”
While rumors of a political run have swirled around Standing Together for months, Green said he and Daood felt they had finally reached a now-or-never moment.
“I truly believe we are at a critical juncture,” Green explained. “This is the point where the Israeli people either keep going down this path of ethnic cleansing and endless war and occupation and terrible quality of life, for both Palestinians and Jews living here — or we can turn around, right now, and go in the other direction, in the direction of life and peace and security for all.”
“The right wing in Israel very much understands we are at this juncture,” he added. “And they have been very clear about what they are offering. I could not live with myself if I didn’t offer an alternative to Israeli voters.”
Seeking an edge
A Place for Us All will face an uphill battle from the start.
Any party led by Standing Together’s founders is likely to intensify the criticism the movement already faces from right-wing Israelis who have branded them as traitors for speaking out against the occupation and the suffering in Gaza. Posters featuring images of Gazan children have been torn down, and activists, Green included, have been harassed by right-wing agitators, in some cases outside their own homes.
A Place for Us All is also already drawing criticism from within the Israeli left, where some fear that the addition of a new party could split an already fragile anti-Netanyahu camp. In Israel’s electoral system, any party that fails to cross the electoral threshold — currently set at just over 3% of the vote — receives no seats, meaning it cannot take part in the post-election negotiations that determine who will build the 61-seat coalition needed to form the next government.
Green strongly rejects this concern.
“Every poll makes clear that winning without Jewish-Arab partnership is impossible,” he argued. “The only path to replacing Netanyahu is to maximize turnout among Jewish and Palestinian citizens and ensure that they vote for the same political bloc.”
According to Green, only one in four Palestinian citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 is currently planning to vote. “But with our party running, that statistic jumps up to two out of four,” he said.
If the scene outside the cafe was any indication, the party’s message may already be resonating with at least some of the young people it hopes to bring into politics. As the press conference unfolded, groups of teenagers passing by stopped to cheer on the speakers.
Inside, excitement was also running high. At one point, activist Galit Mass-Ader openly wept as she embraced Ghadir Hani who is joining the party’s list.
“For me, this is a decision that has been years in the making. I’ve been working for peace and coexistence nearly my whole life,” Hani told the Forward. “But since October 7, there have been so many difficult moments of pain and despair.”
“This party is the exact opposite of that,” she said. “It is the embodiment of hope — hope that belongs to both Jews and Palestinians, and to all those who are ready to reject the old, stale politics in favor of a new, shared political system.”
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