Portside

This past June, the news of a merger between two veteran Israeli political parties on the left of the Zionist spectrum, Labor and Meretz, passed without much fanfare. With the once-hegemonic Labor Party occupying only four of the Knesset’s 120 seats, and Meretz having been wiped out altogether in the 2022 election, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Lacking a compelling alternative vision to the perpetual subjugation of Palestinians under the boot of the Israeli military, Israel’s parliamentary left — now led by Yair Golan, yet another former army general, who led the calls over the summer for an invasion of Lebanon — has been condemned to irrelevance.

“There is no left-wing politics in Israel; this is a reality many people overlook,” Palestinian activist Hamze Awawde tweeted in July. His remarks came after the Knesset passed a resolution opposing Palestinian statehood by 68 votes to nine, with only lawmakers from Palestinian-led parties voting against it. “While there are some grassroots left-wing movements, left-wing politics as a political force simply doesn’t exist in Israel.”

The question of how leftists can best shift Israeli policy from the inside, in the absence of leftist political leadership, provokes endless debate among activists on the ground. Since the Oslo peace process, conventional wisdom both within and outside the left has dismissed any political potential for Israeli leftists — due to the camp’s small size, its electoral weakness, its infighting, and its abandonment of Palestinian solidarity and leadership.

The left’s complete marginalization, enforced by Israel’s politicized police, has only accelerated since October 7. Even family members of Israeli hostages, who call for a ceasefire in order to free their relatives, are harassed and smeared as leftist traitors. The increased suppression of Palestinian society, too, has radically limited the horizon for dissent or collective political action over the past year. Since just days after the Hamas attack, Palestinian citizens have faced a government-backed campaign of intimidation, persecution, surveillance, and harassment.

Nonetheless, this past year has seen left-wing Israeli activists persist in their efforts to build power in pursuit of a more peaceful, just, and equal future for Israelis and Palestinians.

The more mainstream “peace camp” — which is closer to the Zionist left, largely represented by NGOs and funded by international philanthropy — is currently reconstituting itself following the shock of the October 7 Hamas attacks and the despair of Israel’s subsequent onslaught on the Gaza Strip. Further to their left is a smaller network of organizers who receive less international attention, and who often find themselves sidelined even by the peace camp. Ranging from anti-Zionists to non-Zionists to those who refuse such categories altogether, these activists are at the far-left margin of Israeli society, sometimes identified as the “radical left.”

Demonstrators protest calling to end the war in the Gaza Strip, at Habima Square in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Unlike the mainstream peace camp, they have unequivocally opposed the current war from its very outset — and they call for the dismantling of Israel’s regime of occupation, apartheid, and Jewish supremacy. They emphasize bottom-up organizing, strengthening Jewish-Palestinian joint struggle, and highlighting the links between Israel’s colonial domination over Palestinians and ethno-class inequality within Israeli society.

Most days, these activists can be found planning or participating in anti-war protests, or engaging in “protective presence” — physically supporting Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank that are at risk of expulsion through settler and army violence. Many of them have served jail time for refusing mandatory military service, and they regularly join Palestinian-led protests both in the West Bank and inside Israel.

None are under any illusions that internal leftist pressure will be the decisive factor in forcing Israel to end its carnage in Gaza; instead, all of them call on foreign governments to stop sending weapons to Israel. Subdued resignation and despair are the prevailing sentiments. But they see their activism as the bare minimum from their position of relative privilege, even while recognizing the limited material impact of their actions.

Conscientious objectors demonstrate outside the IDF Recruitment Center at Tel Hashomer, in central Israel, August 5, 2024. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

The nearly two dozen such activists who spoke to +972 also recognize that a ceasefire in itself wouldn’t change the political structures in Israel and the US — those that made it possible for people in both societies to participate in starving and murdering Palestinians on a mass scale. Even if a deal is reached, the process of reckoning with being part of an eliminationist society, one that has crossed new thresholds in its dehumanization of Palestinians, is just beginning.

“So many people here are in a fascist frenzy,” activist and podcaster Yahav Erez told +972. “I ask myself, ‘You’re living in a genocidal state, almost everybody around you has zero empathy toward anyone who’s not ‘their’ people, and you’re still in contact with them — how can you be giving them legitimacy?’ But on the other hand, I was once just like them.”

Facing these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Israel’s radical leftists have set their sights on long-term political change. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not immortal; the militaristic center and messianic far-right currently appear to be his most likely successors. Leftists’ goal is to lay down the groundwork that could make them a viable political force once the war ends. To do so, they are now compelled to re-examine how they understand their own power, their base, and their ability to create change.

Pulling to the left

For the past two decades, the Israeli center and right have pushed for “managing” or “shrinking” the conflict — the idea that Israel can violently control Palestinians and enforce occupation and siege with its high-tech military, while simultaneously pursuing normalization agreements with Arab countries.

For a while, this appeared to work. Activists in both the radical left and the broader peace camp struggled to generate popular urgency and crisis around Palestinian rights, and most Jewish Israelis were able to go about their daily life as “normal” without giving the Palestinians too much thought. “I will be very honest: we were stuck,” Sally Abed, a leading Palestinian activist in the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together, said. “No one talked about the occupation, no one talked about peace. The attitude was, ‘Who cares?’”

Despite the astronomic government and military failures on and since October 7, Israeli leaders have not altered their approach. For Abed, politicians across the spectrum have continued to present the public with only different shades of the same policy. “Even if you go all the way to the left [in the Knesset], no one is offering anything to the Israeli public beyond, ‘Let’s bomb some more. Oh, that’s not working? Let’s bomb some more.’”

Outside the halls of power, growing opposition to the war has led to occasional bursts of energy in the Israeli peace camp, symbolized by the July 1 gathering “It’s Time – The Big Peace Conference.” This has marked a potential opening for leftists, who have sought to push the ceasefire protests to articulate an explicitly anti-occupation agenda. Abed explained that Standing Together, which occupies a space somewhere between the traditional peace camp and the radical left, aims to act as “the weight that pulls [to the left] those who are just to our right, who are mostly with us but don’t have the edge to say what we’re saying.”

Israeli-Palestinian peace conference calling for an end to the war and a solution to the conflict, Tel Aviv, July 1, 2024. (Oren Ziv)

But to avoid the fate of the Israeli peace camp since Oslo, organizers told +972 they will have to learn from the left’s failures throughout its history — and most recently from the weaknesses of the mass protests against the far-right government’s judicial overhaul.

Those demonstrations, which occurred on a weekly basis from January 2023 until October 7, saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis take to the streets in the name of democracy. Yet leaders of the pro-democracy protests tried hard “to limit the scope of the debate to judicial reform and Netanyahu’s corruption charges,” according to Noa Levy, secretary of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa branch of the Communist-led Hadash party, and legal advisor and co-founder of the army refuser network Mesarvot.

Against these attempts, Levy and other activists formed an “anti-occupation bloc” within the wider protest movement, emphasizing apartheid and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians as core to any discussion of Israeli democracy. The mainstream protest movement generally treated the anti-occupation bloc — which sometimes amassed several thousand demonstrators — as an irritating pariah, with its Palestinian flags, Arabic chants, and slogans like “No democracy with occupation.” Yet even within this bloc, there were strong disagreements.

Israelis protest against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul, in Tel Aviv, on September 30, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

The Radical Bloc, a collective of a few hundred far-left Israelis that formed alongside the anti-occupation bloc, soon emerged as an independent force, and has become a fixture at ceasefire demonstrations since October 7. Unlike the broader anti-occupation bloc, this collective understands Zionism as a settler-colonial project, and struggles for an equal society for everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — as well as for Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

From “This is not a conflict, it is a genocide,” and “Pilot, stop murdering children,” to “Grandma, where were you during the Gaza genocide?” their slogans and chants at the ceasefire demonstrations have represented more than just an irritation for the mainstream protesters — but rather a total repudiation of them.

‘If we think things can’t be fixed, we are not doing politics of change’

These factions’ disagreements cannot be dismissed as leftist splintering or petty infighting. They reflect their different answers to the same fundamental question: can Israeli society change — or is it stuck in a permanent state of violent anti-Palestinian rage?

Israeli leftist opinion is mixed. “I don’t think we can change people’s opinions from within,” said M., an activist with the Radical Bloc who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of being doxxed. “We’re not convincing anyone who’s not with us already.” The goal, she said, is not to change Israeli minds, but rather to be a voice of truth in a society that is in an almost compulsive state of denial about the violence it is inflicting.

“There is ‘David and Goliath syndrome’ here,” M. continued. “We [Israeli Jews] always cast ourselves as David, and there always has to be a Goliath who is attacking us. Even if we kill more than 40,000 people — we’re always the victim.”

Left wing activists protest calling to end the war in Gaza and Lebanon, outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, November 20, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)

Yahav Erez sees things differently. Zionism is not an innate identity for Israelis, she argues, but rather a political ideology that can be challenged like any other — and doing so remains an essential task for Israeli leftists. “I talk to people whose stories are living proof that you can change,” she told +972. “Zionism is not something you’re just born with, and then that’s who you are for the rest of your life.”

Yeheli Cialic, an activist with the Israeli Communist Party and a past coordinator with the army refuser network Mesarvot, concurs. “I don’t want [Israelis] to be painted as [being different from] any other assholes in the world,” he said. “If we think people are stagnant and things can’t be fixed, we are not doing politics of change. And this is irresponsible, because we are dealing with human lives.”

The different approaches to the Israeli public tend to surface around language choice — whether in protest signs, group chats, or social media posts. In November 2023, the occasional partnerships between the Radical Bloc and the broader anti-occupation bloc ended over the latter’s reluctance to use the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Their strategy was to speak to the mainstream as much as possible,” M. explained. “Our strategy was to be uncompromising in our statements; if the mainstream public can’t [name genocide for what it is], at least we are speaking the truth.”

Cialic, in contrast, describes the use of uncompromising language within the Israeli left and among activists abroad as evidence of a “loser” mentality. “It’s the politics of self-expression and not the politics of building power or playing to win,” he argued. “When you are holding a sign in the street in Hebrew, you are in conversation, trying to communicate something to the Israeli public. If your message straight away makes people close up, or they don’t even understand it and get angry, then you have failed in your act of communication and you have failed in this political action.”

Activists who try to appeal to the Israeli public grapple with the current Israeli government’s total imperviousness to popular pressure. Even if ceasefire protests were to grow, they are unlikely to impact Israel’s military actions. And this is true not just in Israel, but across the world: from the United States and Germany to Egypt and Turkey, huge protests have flooded the streets to call for justice in Palestine, with little impact on their governments’ policies. This problem leads to a broader feeling of aimlessness among activists, where it is virtually impossible to gauge whether their efforts are making any difference.

“There isn’t a single element within the government that’s worth trying to pressure,” Amjad Shbita, secretary general of the Hadash party and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said. “Even under Netanyahu’s previous governments, when we would go out to the streets we would say, ‘Okay, Bibi is not going to listen to us, but there are other more moderate elements that the pressure will work on.’ This is not our current situation.”

With meager results for bottom-up protest, Israeli leftists are left to count on external forces: diplomatic pressure and bids for Palestinian statehood, international courts, boycott movements, and sanctions. At the end of October 2024, more than 3,500 Israeli citizens signed an open letter calling for every possible form of global pressure on Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. “Unfortunately, the majority of Israelis support the continuation of the war and massacres,” they affirmed, “and a change from within is not currently feasible.”

A fractured partnership

With little recourse to pressure their government or persuade their fellow citizens, many Israeli leftists have tried to sustain a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle. Yet the October 7 attacks and the subsequent mass violence in Gaza have pushed Palestinian-Jewish organizations close to a breaking point.

“In the beginning of October, no one imagined how you could even sit in the same place and acknowledge mutual pain. It was unimaginable,” Abed, of Standing Together, recalled. “A lot of Jewish Israeli leftists changed their basic view of who counts as ‘us,’” Hadash’s Levy explained. “They now think of ‘us’ as Jews, and ‘them’ as Arabs who need to prove they are ‘our’ partners. Suddenly, partnership itself became a question.”

Palestinians and Israeli left-wing activists protest against an illegal settlement outpost on the land of Al-Makhrour, near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, September 3, 2024. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

Nisreen Morqus, the general secretary of the communist-affiliated Movement of Democratic Women in Israel (known by its Hebrew acronym “Tandi”), sees these tensions as a natural part of joint struggle, resurfacing during each escalation of violence. “Nationalistic feelings can overtake our shared principles and ideology,” she said. “When that happens, we have to hear everyone’s perspective, but we also have to keep working to impact the policies of the government and the public. For that we need a joint struggle, not a separate one.”

Joint struggle does not mean partnering on every initiative, Hadash’s Shbita explained; rather, activists must discern when joint action is most strategic. For Shbita, “Arabs and Jews protesting together publicly has a drastic added value; people see us together and they feel hope.” But in municipal or national elections, where Jewish-Arab parties tend to underperform and face additional political and bureaucratic hurdles, he argues “too close a Jewish-Arab collaboration can sometimes be much less effective.”

Regardless of whether some tactics are pursued jointly or separately, Shbita concluded, “what is important is that people have their heart in the right place, which means being open and seeing this as a single unified struggle.” And to convince their base that such a unified struggle exists, activists value the ability to show that Jewish and Palestinian interests are complementary and intertwined — that Jewish-Israelis have something to gain from Palestinians acquiring freedom and rights.

This point is not obvious to most Israelis outside the left. Instead, peace is often seen as something akin to “generosity” toward Palestinians, that would come at a cost to Jewish-Israeli society.

Against this dominant view, the left asserts that Israeli Jews actually have an interest in giving up the privileges of Jewish supremacy, since these privileges rest on a false bargain. Palestinian subjugation requires increasing levels of dehumanization and violence which do not spare its presumed beneficiaries; the regime of Jewish supremacy can only be maintained by a militarized society that demands uniformity and obedience from all its members, directing its violence inwardly as well, towards immigrants, women, queer people, the disabled, the poor, dissidents, and all of Arab culture.

Israeli police officer at a left wing protest march against the war in Gaza, in Jerusalem, November 22, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Appealing to Jewish Israelis’ own interests makes many uncomfortable; talk of Israelis’ fears can be cruel or detached while Israel’s genocide in Gaza creates new horrors every day, whose full extent is still not known. Moreover, amid a tug-of-war within the global left between opposing views of the meaning and practice of solidarity, some insist that the privileged party — the settler — should not be motivated by its own self interests to support the oppressed, and do so unconditionally.

In another view, solidarity is not simply a discursive expression of support from one group to another. Rather, it is a process of social and political transformation which replaces the logic of separation and relations of violence with new political alliances through joint political struggle. Such solidarity begins with recognition that the fates of all those living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are materially and irrevocably intertwined.

‘The occupation is fed by economic and material considerations’

An enduring weakness of traditional anti-occupation spaces has been the frequent derogatory dismissal of half of the country’s Jewish population as irrelevant for building leftist political power — that is, Mizrahim, who trace their heritage to the Middle East and North Africa, and who have been historically marginalized in Israel at the hands of Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Europe. This stems from the popular notion that Mizrahim are wedded to right-wing politics, and Netanyahu’s Likud party in particular.

“There is a stereotypical view that Mizrahim support the right which supports the occupation — that if it wasn’t for the Mizrahim, maybe there wouldn’t be an occupation,” Professor Moshe Behar, co-founder of the Mizrahi Civic Collective, explained. This view endures in anti-occupation spaces, despite studies showing that the difference between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi right-wing voting fluctuates widely over time, and that education is a more significant indicator of voting than ethnicity.

According to Behar, the anti-occupation left sees ethno-class divisions among Israeli citizens as a “second-order or marginal issue” in the fight for Palestinian rights. Yet the two cannot be separated, he continued, because “the question of Palestine doesn’t only rest on political problems within two nations, one Jewish and one Palestinian; the occupation is fed by economic and material considerations.” And it was “precisely the traditional left disconnecting ethno-class divisions from the political rights of occupied and stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza that has weakened the left since 1967,” he added.

This weakness was blatantly evident in last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations, which failed to mobilize or even try to appeal to Mizrahim. The protests overlooked how the far-right’s judicial reforms would impact Israel’s poor, working class, and disenfranchised communities — an oversight that galvanized a response from Mizrahi activists and movements from the left.

As Behar explained, the democracy protests made “no mention of the welfare system, unionization, labor rights, or how the judicial reforms would completely dismantle public education and health systems.” This made it easy for the right wing to mobilize populist resentment and revanchist Mizrahi identity politics against the Ashkenazi elite, the constituency that dominated the protests.

According to Sapir Sluzker Amran, a human rights lawyer and co-founder of the Mizrahi feminist movement Shovrot Kirot (which recently announced that it would cease its operations at the end of the year), the right successfully caricatured the protests as “privileged, left-wing, rich Ashkenazim who were in control [of the country] all these years, and now they’re crying because someone is trying to touch their privilege.”

Palestinian single mothers from Jaffa protest alongside activists from Shovrot Kirot outside the home of then-Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar, holding a banner that reads “Women of Jaffa demand housing”, November 27, 2021. (Oren Ziv)

By emphasizing distributive justice alongside the dismantling of the occupation, the Mizrahi Civic Collective and Shovrot Kirot challenge the populist and conservative co-optation of the whole Mizrahi struggle. In this, they represent a reinvigorated materialist approach to Mizrahi activism.

According to Behar, in the last 15 or so years, “a lot of what used to be the Mizrahi left was channeled into issues of culture, representation, music and art,” sidelining both Palestinian and socioeconomic issues. “It is the abandonment of its material basis that made it so easy for the right to co-opt the Mizrahi struggle.”

For Netta Amar-Shiff, a lawyer and co-founder of the Mizrahi Civic Collective, Israeli leftists must stop treating opposition to the occupation as a marker of class, status, or education. “Support for peace is not a cultural asset,” accessible only to Israelis of a certain background, she emphasized. “We are offering something that doesn’t currently exist in the peace camp: a broader understanding, a wider spectrum of political approaches. And if you choose to listen to us, then all of us together, maybe, will be able to confront inequality and war.”

The battle for the periphery

By linking the anti-apartheid and ethno-class struggles, Israeli leftists may be able to capitalize on small cracks in the regime’s support in what Israel calls its “periphery” — the regions around the Negev/Naqab in the south of the country and the Galilee in the north. This is particularly true among the Bedouin, Mizrahi, and working-class residents of the areas surrounding the Gaza Strip, who were among the communities most severely harmed by the Hamas-led October 7 attack. Their abandonment by the government that day, as well as in the rehabilitation plans that followed, was a clear continuation of a long history of institutional discrimination.

Now more than ever, the political sympathies of neglected and vulnerable communities appear to be up for grabs — a fact that has not gone unnoticed on the right. Omer Rahamim, the head of the Yesha Council, an umbrella group of settler municipal councils, warned that right-wing polling shows that “the largest public that has always voted for Likud but would abandon it is the traditional-Mizrahi public.”

Meanwhile, new initiatives, like Shovrot Kirot’s “Okef Israel,” are aiming to build an alternative political infrastructure through which representatives from cities and unrecognized villages in the periphery can engage in joint fundraising and policymaking.

“There is an opening to new approaches [among the residents],” Amar-Shiff said. But the right is more prepared to capitalize on these openings. “I can come to Ofakim [a mostly Mizrahi city in southern Israel, which saw one of the most significant battles of October 7] as a nice lady and offer my help to the community in achieving its political goals, but there is also the Garin Torani [a religious-Zionist network of new missionizing communities aiming to “Judaize” more neighborhoods and towns]. And they have more than just nice words.

“They can offer weapons, housing, childcare, and after-school programs,” she continued.

“And they bring their own version of Judaism, which is a Judaism of hate.”

The Mizrahi Civic Collective, on the other hand, practices what it calls “mutual rescue,” the idea that different materially vulnerable communities in the region — the residents of Israel’s geographical and social “peripheries”, for example, and Palestinians in rural areas of the West Bank — have the power to save each other from violence and dispossession, and that such mutuality is highly political.

Many on the left, wary of depoliticized coexistence initiatives and critical of any assertions of equivalence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, reject this idea. But as Amar-Shiff explained, it does not propose that Jews and Palestinians operate on a level playing field. “Mutuality does not in itself dismantle hierarchy between Israelis and Palestinians or the hierarchies within those societies,” she said. “There is [still] a hierarchy; there is no symmetry.

Protesters march in A-Rakeez in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills after Israeli soldiers shot 24-year-old Harun Abu Aram in the neck, January 8, 2021. (Keren Manor/Activestills.org)

“I am not saying the Jewish people are currently facing existential threat,” Amar-Shiff affirmed. “I am saying that I carry within me this threat, both because I am from Yemen where we had our own atrocities, and as a Jew. We cannot let the right wing be the only ones who ever talk about this [fear], because the right carries it to a violent place of mutual annihilation.”

Indeed, the horrors of October 7 revealed the power of mutual rescue to most Jewish-Israeli activists +972 spoke to, who recalled moments when Palestinian friends or comrades expressed solidarity and concern immediately after the attacks. More than anything else, their political relationships with Palestinians deepened their resolve and commitment to resisting the Israeli regime, cutting through prevailing despair and powerlessness. 

Hadas Binyamini writes about Jewish politics and conservatism in American history. She is a doctoral candidate at New York University. Twitter: @hadasbinyamini

+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine. The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine.

Our core values are a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information. We believe in accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid, and that showcases perspectives often overlooked or marginalized in mainstream narratives.

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