What These Palestinian & Israeli Activists Need Us to Know: Standing Together’s Sally Abed & Alon-Lee Green

March 21, 2024

Amanda Doyle:

Hello Pod squad, Desmond Tutu talked about how we need to pull people out of the river and we also need to go upstream to find out who’s pushing them in. Today we’re talking to two devoted activists for justice and peace in Palestine and Israel. They share their lived experience, who is profiting from the horrors going on there, the stories that have led to this disaster and the new story that needs to be told, so that the people on the land can live in dignity and peace. We hope that you’ll learn about and get involved with their organization standing together. And while we look upstream, we are not going to stop pulling people out of the river. Together Rising has been partnering with Palestinian organizations since 2021, funding more than $1,178,000 in boots on the ground organizations like Mecca and [inaudible 00:01:07], providing food, medical care, and clean water.

7,000 of you have contributed to this work this year alone. Thank you. So with relentless hope, let’s continue to be people who do what needs to be done, downstream and upstream. In thinking about this conversation, I was thinking about how Glennon and I are descended from the Irish diaspora, which because of the occupation of Britain, our great-great-grandfather was put on a boat when he was six by himself because of the starvation that they were facing because the British were taking the food off the island. And growing up, we would sing IRA fight songs, we would valorize the martyrs of the fight. We would feel righteous about it.

And when I was in college, I met Betty Williams, who was a receptionist in Ireland, and two went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and I was so excited to meet her with all of my righteousness and she humbled me so much because she made it very clear that my big feelings from thousands of miles away in the safety of where I lived, we’re not helping her and her children survive every day. And that is the harder thing to do than be righteous and it is the more important thing to do and that is why we’re very, very grateful to be talking to both of you today.

We have with us the honor of Sally Abed. She is an elected national leader at Standing Together, the Jewish Arab grassroots movement that mobilizes people around issues of peace, equality and social justice. In recent years, she has become a prominent progressive Palestinian voice in Israel. Sally is a recurring guest on the Promised podcast and the co-host of the new podcast Groundwork, a miniseries about Palestinians and Jews refusing to accept the status quo and working together for change. Alon-Lee Green is the national co-director and founder of Standing Together. He got his start organizing Israel’s first trade union of waiters in a chain of coffee shops and went on to found Israel’s first national Waiters Union. Alon-Lee emerged as a prominent leader of Israel’s social protest movement in the summer of 2011 and subsequently served as political advisor in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Glennon Doyle:

Welcome, you two.

Alon-Lee Green:

Thank you.

Sally Abed:

I love that opening. I think that was probably one of my favorite interview openings, your story. Thank you for sharing it and thank you for having us.

Glennon Doyle:

Sister and I were talking about how we’re all told so many stories and then we all operate from the idea that the story we were told is the truth and everybody else is operating from the story that they heard when they were little and thinking that they have the truth. And can you two talk to us about the stories you came from? What were the stories that you were told and how do they differ being the different people that you are, about what’s happening right now?

Sally Abed:

Well, my story is I think a story that is not often told in a way that Palestinians in Israel, the 20% of the population of the Israeli society, which are Palestinian, in many ways, we are the narrative of the Palestine that was never told. Palestine is always the narrative of the occupation, the siege, the exile, and it’s never about the staying after the Nakba. How do you actually navigate staying with your occupier after the Nakba, after majority of your people left and were exiled and were displaced and where forcibly evacuated and then you stay, you remain as a minority. And in many ways, the Palestinian society in Israel was the very first one that was controlled by the Israeli military. After ’48, the West Bank was under Jordanian rule. Gaza was under Egyptian rule and the ones that remained within the Israeli borders were under Israeli rule, military rule.

We were under curfews. We were under many, many limitations and that really shaped the way that we tell stories and the way that even my grandparents tell us our stories. I of course grew up on the stories of the Nakba, of the attacks. I grew up in Mi’ilya, which is a Palestinian village in the north near the Lebanese borders, beautiful, beautiful place in the Western Galilee. And I grew up with the Nakba as something that happened to my village that happened to the villages around us that I heard about [inaudible 00:06:40] which we had some… All these ethnic cleans, displaced villages within Israel that some of them were my neighbors, they were internal refugees. These stories were never politicized. They weren’t allowed to be politicized. One of my very first political memories was my grandma shouting at me, “We don’t tell these stories to Jews.”

When I asked her to tell the story of her and my grandpa going on a donkey to Lebanon, fleeing and succeeding to come back before the war ended and before the borders closed. And that was my first time of otherness of the conditioned existence that we have and that we can’t tell our story. It’s not something that we can tell. And in many ways, our experience was erased methodologically throughout the years or at least attempted to be erased.

But we see that that’s not really working, and I do think that now the story that we are trying to tell, especially our generation, the third generation is a different kind of story. We refuse to be erased and we refuse to be erased as Palestinians, but in many ways, I also think we refuse to not be part of the society that we are in, that we live in, which is the Israeli society. We speak fluent Hebrew, we are assimilated. They’re our neighbors and our peers and our colleagues, and it’s a very, very impossible dynamic within Israel. With that being said, we are immensely privileged as Palestinians relatively to other groups and it’s a very, very complex nuanced story that are more than happy to explore later as well.

Glennon Doyle:

Beautiful. Thank you.

Alon-Lee Green:

I think that the narrative and the stories that I learned while growing up are the ones of the school teachers telling us that building the state of Israel is an act of survival, is an act of finding a true home to the ones that don’t have a home anywhere else in the world. There’s this one sentence that we were told again and again and again that really stayed with me because later on in my life I understood how problematic it is, but it says, “People with no land to a land with no people.” That’s a famous quote of Ben-Gurion, the first leader of Israel, the one that founded Israel. And we are taught that we just could come to a land that was empty and just found and build our home there and you are taught that it’s the necessary thing to do after the Holocaust.

It’s the only possible way of survival for Jews in a time where no one else wants us in the world, but you’re not taught about how there were people in this land, living there for ages before we came. There were people living in the same spots that we live today, but some of the houses still exist, but the previous owners do not exist on this land anymore. Sometimes it’s really the same building itself and I think that this narrative is something that works on you really strongly because when you are taught that it is all about safety and survival and it’s the first need in your diagram of needs, it comes before intellectual questions, it come before issues of exploring questions of solidarity in your position in the society. It comes as the basic need of life, of survival. So it’s very difficult for you to expand your horizons and to ask the questions of how do we live in a place that has this complicated history?

It has another people that is not Jewish living on the same land, the same numbers. By the way, 7 million Palestinians live on this land, 7 million Jews lives on this land. And then it takes you a lot of time to really come to a place of growing your understanding and to a place of yes, this is the history. Yes, we need to acknowledge it. We need to acknowledge that what we call the independence War is called the Nakba, the disaster in Arabic by the Palestinians and that we need to find a way to not only acknowledge the past, but to build a future that acknowledges that we are all here to stay despite of the past and it is good for all of us together and that’s some self-work.

Sally Abed:

We need a new story.

Alon-Lee Green:

Yeah, exactly. A lot of people understand that you can call it the way you want, but you still have a neighbor that is not Jewish or you still work in a hospital that 40% of the staff in this hospital are Palestinians and you need to build this story, this new kind of state in a way that there’s a place for all of us in it, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Amanda Doyle:

What is the new story that you’re telling together? What is the new story that you so desperately need?

Sally Abed:

I’m going to be very honest with you, Amanda. We don’t know. I think we are building it. I think what we need is such a deep shift in paradigm, in culture, in imagining what this new protagonist looks like, right? And I think it can only happen through social movements and through community organizing and through real people’s politics on the ground. And it definitely cannot happen in these narrative wars and theoretical fantasies of wars abroad, which is why I really liked your introduction. I think many people think that if we shout the loudest, if we become more righteous and we become the purest and we insist on it and we condemn louder and louder and louder or very ugly reality, very ugly reality and history that we somehow one side will win and then the other will just say, okay, you won. What we need to understand is that we need to build the political will.

We need to build the political capital, to build that new story. And it starts with people and it starts with people who live on the land in many ways, the Israeli society out of recognizing the hegemony, out of recognizing the control and the power dynamic and the power differential of the Israeli society, we understand that it needs to start from there. We need to build a new leadership that demands and has the intention for equality and justice for Palestinians, out of self-interest and not only out of solidarity. And that’s where the new story will start.

Alon-Lee Green:

I will also say that I think that we’re looking on the problems that we have on this land in a way that we understand that if there is a polluting industry in a big city, for example like Haifa and you have a big complex of polluting factories and they pollute the air. Who polluted the air in Haifa, which is a mixed city of Palestinians and Jews, both Palestinians and Jews breathe the same air. Both Palestinians and Jews face the same economic problems in Israel. They face the same problems of the war and occupation of the Palestinians because we live on the same land and living on the same land and understanding we will continue to live on the same land, that brings us to the understanding that we need to build a new story where there is a majority of people that are not only Palestinians or only Jewish, but the majority of people that live on the land that can benefit together from the reality if it’ll be better for us and that are losing together right now from the status quo and the way things work in Israel.

Sally Abed:

I think when we talk about shared interest in ending the occupation and the fact acknowledging that the Israeli public is actually paying the price contrary to the idea that they are benefiting somehow from the status quo and from the decades long oppression of Palestinians, it doesn’t actually mean that it’s the same price. It’s very obvious to us and through this new story that needs to be acknowledged, it needs to be acknowledged that the Palestinian people, my people, have paid an unimaginable unacceptable, unfathomable price that we are still seeing now life today with tens of thousands of deaths of children dying, misplaced, starving. And I think we really need to acknowledge that while we move forward. However, if we don’t acknowledge the fact that the Israeli public has an interest to end occupation, we’re not only dismissing them as a crucial part of the occupation, we’re also strategically preventing ourselves from actually building any kind of solution going forward. And that’s the point. That’s the new story that needs to start.

Amanda Doyle:

Thank you. Because the other part of story is that it really matters when you start telling the story, what date you pick for the story to begin. And so thank you for recognizing that, although Palestinians and Israelis have so much to gain from a new future, they have not paid equally for the pain. That is a very, very, very important part of the story. Who is profiting from this now and how do you expose that?

Glennon Doyle:

And also what are the intentions of the leadership now? Because when I heard you say, “We need leadership with the actual intention of peace,” what are the actual intentions of the people in leadership right now which is always so different than the intention and wishes and dreams of the masses?

Alon-Lee Green:

So one of the very first things we’re trying to do is to separate between the Israeli leadership and the government and the Israeli people, both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish citizens of Israel, because we understand that opposite to what people can think from outside of the world is if all Jewish people in Israel are somehow benefiting from the occupation and the war, this is not true. We pay a price as well, a very different price from the Palestinians, a very, very different price of the Palestinians that are losing tens of thousands of people right now, 11,000 children. But we also understand that a mother, that her son is being sent to the war right now and she sits next to her phone and she’s worried to get the worst phone call of her life, declaring him dead. This is an interest to end this war.

This is an interest to also be in a position of not wanting this reality for herself. And we understand that there is a way to build this new majority of masses of Jews and masses of Palestinians benefiting from a different kind of reality, but we are not doing it in a naive way because we also understand that there is a small, small minority right now that actually benefits from reality as it is today. A minority that benefits from the war industry, weapons industry. Israel is a country of 9 million citizens, but somehow since as such a small country, we are number five, six in weapon exploitation to the world, very strong industry. Israel has a minority of settlers doing everything they can to try and keep the land that they control where they are a minority in the West Bank, but they control a majority who has no rights or no rights like them.

That’s an interest. So we understand also that Netanyahu and his peers like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich fascists, ministers, people that are extremely, extremely far right, they believe in Jewish supremacy and racism. They understand that the minute this war ends, they go for elections and they lose. That’s an incentive to keep the war. And this project of eternal war is trying to also control the people by saying this is a survival mechanism. We have no other choice, but there is another choice. And standing together as Jews and Palestinians working together, we’re trying to put this other choice in the menu. And this choice is a choice of ending the occupation, ending the military control over millions of people that are not the citizens of Israel but are controlled by the military of Israel, ending this eternal war and turning in the direction of Israeli-Palestinian peace where all the people on the land are free and equal and independent.

Sally Abed:

I wanted to get us a little bit here as well. I think there’s obviously a minority here within the American politics that are also making sure and very, very, very viciously protecting the state of Israel, right? And then you ask yourself, these people who are really supporting, who are sending billions and billions and billions of dollars from American taxpayers while you have… I don’t even want to go into what you have here and the problems that’s needed to be attended here, and who are they protecting? Really we should ask ourselves who are they protecting when they say they want to protect the state of Israel, are they actually protecting the people in Israel?

Are they actually interested in protecting the people in Israel? Are the lunatic, fascist, messianic people in our government interested in the safety of the people in the land? We should ask ourselves these things. And I think it’s very, very safe to say that they are not, they don’t have the intention nor the ability to actually provide us with safety. And we know that and it needs to start there. And that disconnect needs to happen right now. It needs to happen.

Glennon Doyle:

What are we protecting? What are we doing? We know what we’re saying we’re doing. We know we say we are sending money, weapons, standing with Israel to protect Jewish people. That’s the story we’re told. What does America actually intending there?

Alon-Lee Green:

You’re protecting extremism. The US support to Israel is just protecting extremism, protecting extreme settlers sitting on a Palestinian land. Sometimes you can get a settlement really on the verge of a Palestinian village. The settlers will have the right to vote to get elected, to move freely, to have the protection of the army, but their neighbors, which are the majority on the land, will not have even the right to vote to get elected, to move freely, to have protection. They will not even have the rights to protest against this reality because protests and demonstrations are not legal in the West Bank. And you can get shot and dead when you do that. And I think that we need to understand that the US aid or the US automatic support to Israel is at this point a blank check policy. No matter what the Israeli government do, no matter what the extreme settlers will do, the aid will continue to come.

And we are told in Israel that this is the best friendship we have. This is the biggest ally we have, and you will always be there for us. We need to understand that this game ended, that this game of providing us with the support and help to maintain this extreme reality, it does not help us as Israelis. It does not help the Palestinians. It does not create a reality on the land that allows us to move forward from this messianic synthesis of controlling the land because it was somehow granted to us by God or something. We need to be practical, pragmatic and to move to a place to say, no. No more support for the settlements, no more support for killing innocent people in Gaza. No more support for controlling militarily, millions of people and no more veto on the UN when people are trying to somehow say, stop the killing in Gaza and the US will put the veto in the security council. That doesn’t work for the Palestinians. That’s obvious, but it also doesn’t work for us.

Sally Abed:

Glennon, I think you asked also what is the US… What the American are protecting. And again, I really think it’s a very conspiracy to say America, right? I don’t really agree with that. I don’t think that’s constructive. I do think obviously there are very, very powerful lobbies who are bending the arm in these things and advancing these things. And again, I think they are a minority, however, they are very, very powerful resource minority, which we need to understand. And they are providing this rhetoric that is getting a lot of support, popular support from people from years. But I think that conception is kind of shattering right now. And if you really think about it, when people here talk about extremism, for example, about terrorism, and they talk about Hamas, they need a Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. I think we all can agree very, very comfortably that all of these extremists, powers and organizations need to go.

I think we all can agree on that. Why is that the eradication of these kind of forces is justifying one of the most horrifying human catastrophes of the centuries, trying to eradicate them while completely overlooking and in fact, aiding with billions and billions of dollars the other extreme on the other side. And I think we really need to look at it like that and understand that they need each other. Extremism needs each other. And in many ways, I think the lobbies, the powerful lobbies here in the US need the extremism from the Middle East to actually stay and remain and justify their presence, their military presence and their military control. And if you don’t have the extreme in Hamas, you can’t justify… It cannot feed the extremism in Israel. They feed each other, they need each other. And that’s extremely problematic and we need to dismantle that.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, you got to have a big, scary, bad guy to justify your control and your power. That’s the way every government scares everybody into backing a war. You’re not safe. Your kids are not safe. Nobody’s safe. So we have to do this.

Sally Abed:

Look what happened in Afghanistan, $2 trillion. That’s not even an amount that it’s fathomable by the human brain. 4.5 million deaths, they left. What happened? Taliban is back, gender, apartheid, theocracy, human catastrophe. And somehow that’s not bothering them at this point, right? They have other extremists that they can rely on that can justify their presence, extremely problematic.

Glennon Doyle:

I’m also trying to understand why the response from so many people in America is, “That’s too complicated. I can’t deal.” Is there something in us that knows if we reckon with that we’re going to have to reckon with our own land? Because when you’re saying, “Oh wait, I was told this story that we needed this land, and then all of a sudden I learned there were already people here.” You could be talking about my story in America. Do we just have to say, “No, no, no, it’s okay?” Because if we started to unravel it, we would also have to unravel the land we’re on and our own stories and who we’re occupying

Alon-Lee Green:

Most definitely. I’ll start from something that I find at least funny. It’s not very funny, but so many times from this kind of more woke progressive pro-Palestinian movement, in the last five months I got this response on Twitter or on Instagram, “Leave the country, go back to Poland or something.” My family is not even from Poland, right? But go back to Poland. And it’s funny because if I want… I don’t, I can answer the same, “Go back to England or go back to whatever.” And those people that think that you can do a freeze on time and say, “This is the moment when you become a settler or colonialist. And before that, I don’t care.” I think we need to understand that yes, we live in a very, very, very problematic realities where we live a lot of times over the expense of other people that paid an unfathomable price for the resources, the fruits of the land that we are enjoying right now.

But that doesn’t mean we need to somehow create politics that aspire to cancel the past in a way that removes millions or billions of people from their homes right now. We need to work hard together, first of all to recognize the past, to acknowledge the wrongs, to acknowledge the terrible crimes that have been committed, but then to work together to create a better future that acknowledges that this is the reality right now. Jewish, people live in Israel right now. My family, me, we don’t have a different home. We don’t have a different citizenship. There’s nowhere in the place I can go to and this is my home, but it’s also the Palestinians home. And the Palestinians are in so many ways, the natives, the people that are… It’s their only homeland. And we need to find a way to work together to create this home as a home where there’s ownership for all of us.

That there is a prosperity for all of us, that there is safety for all of us. And I think that it’s something that works. Acknowledgement, yes, but the acknowledgement does not worth a lot if you don’t take on the other hand, the hard work of convincing your society that you need to make space not only for yourself, even there is a very famous Jewish kind of myth about this piece of wood in the ocean that is floating and your people is in the ocean and you cling and you hold very tight this piece of wood, so you will not drown, but there’s enough room on this piece of wood for another person. And if you will only hold it for yourself, you will live, but the other will drown. And I think we need to make this piece of wood big enough for all of us to survive.

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Sally Abed:

I want to add another thing if that’s okay.

Glennon Doyle:

Please.

Amanda Doyle:

Of course.

Sally Abed:

I think in many ways, I think many Americans, if you ask them today, Israel for them is the only democracy in the Middle East. That’s the myth, right? And I say myth intentionally. You cannot be a democracy while controlling millions of people since your establishment. That’s just not possible. And we saw that in 75 years, fascists are in the government, there is a judicial reform, they want to dismantle everything and it just doesn’t work. And I think for many Americans, that’s exactly why they need Israel. They need it because it’s the only refuge for the Jewish people. Also, delusional because Israel has never been actually safe for the majority of the Jewish people, especially non-white Jews, that it is the only democracy in the Middle East that is going to fight all the extremists and all the terrorists around, also a myth.

And we just debunked that a minute ago, and I think that that really needs to change, and I think it is kind of changing in a way that we understand that these myths are not really true. These conceptions have really kind of being shattered. The idea is how do you capitalize on those ideas, on those conceptions being shattered here in the US and back home for us? And it’s very saddening to see the fragmentation between the Jewish progressive and the pro-Palestinian leftist progressive camp. It’s extremely sad to see that fragmentation, that divide over the ideation of things. While we understand that we are at the historic junction where we can capitalize on what’s happening and on this paradigm shift and consciousness shift globally, and it’s not only hurting you guys here and probably going to elect Trump this divide, it’s also hurting us. It’s hurting us as people on the land, as community organizers, as citizens who are actually trying, who are doing the hard job of not just condemning reality but actually changing it.

How do you capitalize on this moment to change reality, to move the needle, to build more political capital and tip the scale, in many ways? It’s also very, very hurtful for me as Palestinian to see that I am seen as someone who is… Oh, you’re working with Israelis, you’re working with the rapists and the killers and the occupiers and the oppressors. They are unredeemable. They are unredeemable. And on the other side, obviously I am the Palestinian who is the terrorist? So where do we go? If we as people, as community organizers, both Palestinian and Jews, don’t have the legitimacy, don’t have the space in the American politics right now to speak up, then what are we doing?

What are we doing? If we don’t have our voices being legitimate, then you’re not having the right conversation in the US and you’re definitely not leading the actual change that needs to happen in order to stop the massacres, stop the killing, return the hostages back home and actually have a permanent just peace agreement, diplomatic relations. This is my call for the American public and whoever’s listening to us, ask yourself, are you just condemning reality or are you trying to change it?

Amanda Doyle:

Sally, I know that this is a hard thing to discuss, but you’ve just been talking about fragmentation and even the fragmentation of your own identity. I know that standing together has gotten recently from those very purist positions, I don’t know if purist is the word to use some pushback on that. I wondered if you could speak to Sally specifically as being Palestinian and living in Israel and yet people saying or suggesting you’re not Palestinian enough to represent your people, which is sort of what I hear them saying. If they’re not using those words.

Sally Abed:

I don’t think anyone would come and tell me I’m not Palestinian enough. I do think there is a certain disconnect and we had disconnect, intentional disconnects in narratives, even physical disconnect. Literally we have been disconnected from each other for decades and we have been kind of not part of all of it, just trying to navigate living with the Jewish Israelis. I think what is being told is that I’m being conditioned. If you want to be Palestinian, if you want to speak for the Palestinian people, you have to refuse your part in Israeli society.

You have to relinquish your responsibility of trying to change that society. What a privilege. I don’t have that privilege. I don’t have the privilege to relinquish my one responsibility, my one ability to actually make a change in Israeli society. And I think this is the conditioned partnership of the Palestinians inside with the Palestinian diaspora in many ways. Or if you want to partner with the Jewish Israelis, they have to relinquish themselves from their societies. And I don’t want that. I don’t want Alon-Lee to be outside of his society morally lecturing them, telling them how horrible they are without any ability to actually change them, to convince them, to organize them. I don’t want that. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in that because that’s performative and we don’t have the privilege to perform.

Glennon Doyle:

We heard you say there’s a difference between being a friend of Israel or Palestine versus being a friend of the people who are living in Israel and Palestine. What do you mean and how does someone who would prefer to not just be a friend of or choose a side and perform our identity, activate, do what is necessary to be a friend of the people who are living in Israel and Palestine?

Alon-Lee Green:

I want to actually be very clear about it and say something direct.

Glennon Doyle:

Great.

Alon-Lee Green:

In order to have Jewish safety, we must must have Palestinian freedom. There’s no other way around it. And if you consider yourself as a friend of Israel, if you want to support Israelis, if you want to work for the benefit of our people back home of the Jewish people even, you must also work for the sake and the benefit and the liberation of the Palestinians on this land. There’s no way to play this game of choosing a side and saying, “I’m only standing with Israel and I support them in the fight against Palestinians. Because this fight against Palestinians is actually putting my safety on the line. My family’s safety on the line.” And Jews in Israel cannot be safe, cannot be safe when Palestinians live under military occupation or they face this ongoing eternal war that are costing lives of tens of thousands of people.

What Israel is doing right now in Gaza is creating generations of hatred, generations of destruction, generations of even people that would be willing to do something violent to the ones that they see as the entity that brought their destruction. So I do need to stress that these things are interdependent. Palestinian freedom is interdependent on Jewish safety, but Jewish safety is interdependent on Palestinian freedom. And to those in the US, to those in the administration, to the people that really want to support us, start working for the benefit of all the people on this land, start acknowledging the price that Palestinians are paying and start understanding that this price will not allow Jewish people to walk safely in the streets of Jerusalem or to live safely on the border of Gaza or even in the entire Middle East. Because when you have war, there are always the direct victims that are paying the biggest price, but then everyone else pays a price for this war. And this is the reality our government is trying to preserve on the land. And this reality is just not good for any of us.

Sally Abed:

Yes, I think for many Palestinians it’s a very difficult thing to hear. We’re trying to convince people that Palestinians are only worth liberating because Jewish people need to be safe. It’s a very sad reality that we have. That’s how we have to convince people who are not convinced right now. No, but that’s how you get Jewish safety. That’s more urgent and more superior than the decades of oppression. And [inaudible 00:38:01] once said, “The biggest tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they were colonized by refugees.” And I think that’s when it started, right? It’s like we linked it because when the idea that the Jewish people needed a refuge in the land of Palestine, that’s when we intertwined and we can talk about that. We can talk about the complexity of that and how complicated that is and how western centered that is and how colonial that is and how Western imposed that is.

We can talk about these things and it really is heartbreaking that we are at a point where really our liberation as people right now is dependent on Jewish safety. And it doesn’t mean it’s not a just truth. It’s not the absolute truth. It’s not the moral truth. It’s not the historic truth that Palestinian people deserve freedom. And I think that’s something that is starting to become the truth, right? For many years it wasn’t. And I think everyone around the world, hundreds of thousands, millions of people going around the world saying something and we should listen.

And I think the world is listening. No but, and we absolutely got to a point where with that recognition, with that momentum that we are receiving as Palestinian people, we also have the responsibility to not only shout our ugly, ugly, ugly truth, which we should shout it. Of course, we’re going to shout it. Finally, someone is hearing us, but we should also ask ourselves what needs to happen? How can we change this? How can we move the needle? And that has to go through the Israeli public. There’s no way around it. There’s no way around it, period.

Glennon Doyle:

Why do you find it important? I know that there must be a reason that you are spending your precious important time talking on a podcast to what is mostly an American audience. Why is that important? And for the people who are believing what their eyeballs are seeing with what’s happening to Palestinian people on the ground right now and who are speaking up and then the response is a silencing. You are antisemitic. You are antisemitic. How would you respond to that?

Alon-Lee Green:

Yesterday, we had… We are right now in the US and we are touring here, trying to appeal to Jewish communities, to Palestinian communities, to American Arab communities, and to talk with representatives of your political system. And we have a lot of events. And yesterday someone came to me after one of the events and he said, “You said the word ceasefire and it’s triggering for me.” Actually, I’m sorry for that, but I lost my patience. And I said, “You know what’s more triggering, 30,000 people that lost their lives in Gaza right now?” I think it’s something that is a bit… It’s worth more than our fragile feelings right now. And I’m not dismissing the fact that there is antisemitism. There is a lot of racism that is directed at Jewish people and people associate the Jewish people of this country who has nothing to do with Israel. They’re somehow associated with the crimes, the war crimes, the things that are happening on the ground in Israel, and they make them pay a price in a way that they shouldn’t because they are not connected and they are not to be blamed.

And it’s something terrible, and I do understand, but trying to portray every criticism on Israel as if it’s criticism against rules in general or as if it’s antisemitism. This is something that has been weaponized to silence criticism against occupation, to silence criticism against this war and to try and also break the unity in the progressive world here in the progressive camp in the US that can work towards a solution that takes under the account the Palestinian lives, that somehow are worth less than the Jewish life.

And I think that we need to be able to be very clear about our messaging, very clear about our values, and to say, yes, we work very hard and very directly towards a Palestinian freedom, towards a Palestinian state, towards ending the war, ending the occupation. And we do so in a clean way that takes a value of the lives of Jews and communities here also in the US, but also the lives of Jews living on Israel because it’s not a zero-sum game saying, I support a ceasefire agreement to end the killing and destruction in Gaza and to bring back the hostages alive to their family.

It is not against Jews, it’s actually for the Palestinians and for the Jews together. And I think that we are doing a work here in the US and talking to you, talking to the communities, trying to break those two narratives as if you have to somehow either hashtag stand with Palestine or hashtag stand with Israel and cannot live together. It can live together under the same message, under the same action and working to end this miserable reality is also seeing us as Jewish people in Israel. I feel so many times unseen and I don’t want to come here and complain during a war. People play with their lives. But it’s disturbing. It’s disturbing to see people wave here, the Israeli flag or seeing [inaudible 00:43:50] supporting this thing and saying, “Israel need to have this complete victory.” And they don’t see the misery and the sorrow and the fact that most Jewish people right now are thinking of immigrating out of the country.

They are sure that we are not going to have a future in this land. So what is it worth when you support automatically something that is not even good for the Jews living on this land? Maybe people should also ask themselves, okay, you support the Jewish state, but do you support the Jews living in this state? Do you support, what life do we have on this state? You asked the question of are we okay economically? Do we make enough money? Do we have marginalized communities within the Jewish majority in Israel? People coming from Ethiopia that are Jews are heavily discriminated in Israel, Soviet Union Jews are facing a lot of racism in Israel. If you really want to support us, support a just state support, a just reality for all of us.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, it’s a lot easier just to support an ideology than people.

Sally Abed:

Supporting people is hard work.

Glennon Doyle:

It’s hard work.

Sally Abed:

Building people’s politics is hard work. It means you have to work with people.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes, that’s the thing, Sally. That’s the thing

Sally Abed:

It’s really very, very, very hard. And I think one of the reasons we come here is because we are not just community organizers, we talk about peace ending the occupation. We also talk about social justice and equality, and I think you cannot separate those things. You have to be relevant to people’s lives. And Palestinians, we don’t only deserve to survive and not to be killed and incarcerated. We also deserve to prosper. We deserve to prosper. Our women, our queer communities, our marginalized, our workers class, we deserve to prosper. And it’s so much more. And when we come here, I think that’s also a message to Americans, especially when you talk about antisemitism. Very, very real. We understand it. Of course we do, and we understand that people even lost their lives due to antisemitism here in the US.

But if you take this and you take all the other issues in the US that are these billions of dollars sent to fight antisemitism in a foreign land, “fight antisemitism,” yes? And you have hundreds of trans women being killed on this country. You have hundreds of black people being incarcerated and killed in this country. We are here in San Francisco. It’s dystopian. It’s dystopian to see so many homeless people on the streets in the richest country in the world sending all of these billions of dollars to kill tens of thousands of people in a foreign land for a mission that is unachievable. And I think that’s a message that needs to be heard from the people on that land that are supposedly being helped and supported by this tax money. And we’re not. We’re getting hurt. We’re getting hurt deeply by this money and by the support. And that’s a message that we came here with

Amanda Doyle:

A lot of Americans who see themselves as wanting to be in solidarity with the plight of the Palestinian people are very, very disappointed in the actions of this administration that we have right now. You referenced the upcoming election, and a lot of people I think are considering either sitting out this election or a sort of protest kind of a vote. From your perspective of where you sit, what are the stakes for your lives depending what Americans decide to do in November?

Sally Abed:

Back in recent elections in Israel, there were billboards in Palestinian towns and Palestinian cities in Israel calling to boycott the elections in Israel for the Knesset, for the Israeli parliament. And then it was actually found out that it was heavily funded by extreme right-wing, American companies, funded for Palestinians to boycott the Israeli Knesset elections. And the only reason I’m saying this is because I feel like exactly the same thing is happening here. And if you are promoting boycotting these elections, not voting for Biden, you are literally promoting Benjamin Netanyahu right now who is working very, very, very hard right now here in the US to make sure he’s not elected again.

And no, we don’t think Biden is perfect. In fact, he is extremely problematic and we are extremely critical against him. With that being said, we need to understand what’s on the line here, and we have four years that are going to be critical for Israel. And I don’t even need to convince you why Trump is going to be disastrous for the American public and the American people. But it’s going to be extremely disastrous for the Palestinian people and for Israel and these extremists that we’re fighting back home, they’re going to only get stronger with Trump. And I really hope that people will be able to overcome. And I know it’s difficult. I know it’s difficult to vote for Biden right now, but it needs to happen.

Glennon Doyle:

Thank you. How do people who are listening right now who are feeling a sense of hope listening to you two and wanting to be involved in the story that you two are helping, right? How do they do it? Where do they find you? Should they not find you? Tell us what they should do?

Alon-Lee Green:

No, no, no. People that support our work or the message we’re saying now should really find us, should really go on the Standing Together website in English and do really everything you can to support us because we are here also to gather support, to gather support to the message. We want this message and story of Jews and Palestinians working together under the understanding that we need to end this reality, to end occupation and the war to work together for peace and equality. We want this story to be told also in places where a different story is told of one winning and other losing. And we want also the support of people wanting to see us succeed. The right wing in Israel right now, they have billboards all across the country saying, occupy, expel, resettle. And they are able to control the narrative. They are able to control the story because they get a lot of funding here from the US that is allowing them to be the only option in the menu.

When people don’t see another option in the menu, they cannot choose it. And we need to be able to come back to Israel with the ability to fight back, to put an option in the menu, which is a patriotic option, choosing a different path. And you need to see it with your own eyes and you need to be able to hear it, and we need to be able to fund it. And this is a call for support. You can do it on our website, but we also need to be able to get support for the message whenever a politician here in the US, whenever a community that can have a platform of voice. Whenever people like you that have a lot of listeners and followers, whenever you say that something needs to work differently, that a Palestinian state is working for the Jewish safety on the land, for example, this makes our work back home more reasonable. People don’t think that we are overtone or that we’re crazy ones that are talking about peace on a time of war. So it really helps us and we need every support we can get right now.

Sally Abed:

Yeah, you can also join, we have local chapters here, friends of Standing together that are starting to organize in various cities. So you can go into the website as well and actually join people on the ground that we’re working with, synchronized with and helping them spread our message in the communities physically on the ground here in the US.

Amanda Doyle:

We’ll put all of that information on the show notes, all of those links to give to join all of it. Please, please look at that. I hate to end on something so tactical and practical, but one of the stories that we are told in the US is, I swear from birth that over there will never be solved. It will go on forever. There’s no way to ever fix it. And we are sold that so much that it kind of disengages us from any accountability to move it forward. And I was listening, I think it was you Alon-Lee who was talking about the example with Egypt. Can you just tell us real quick?

Alon-Lee Green:

Yeah, sure. I mean it is a reason for hope and it’s a reason for us to keep believing that Egypt was the most dreaded enemy of Israel. The generation of my parents. They really faced wars with Egypt. They faced an Egyptian president that was vowing to destroy our country. And 73, the war of 73 was the biggest trauma of Israelis up until the massacre of Hamas in 2023. And soldiers lost their lives. Every family had someone they knew that died in this war with Egypt and people were really afraid. And then three and a half years, within the end of this war, in 78, a plane lands on the [inaudible 00:53:40] airport, the hatch opens and the Egyptian president comes out sad that, and he comes to address the Israeli parliament. And within one night, the Israeli public opinion flipped from resisting to give back Sinai to Egypt for the price of peace.

And there was all of a sudden a majority of people supporting a peace agreement with Egypt that was signed actually within two and a half years after this speech in Parliament. And it’s very different from the Palestinian story. Of course, Palestinians do not have a state, Palestinians live under our military occupation. But it does show that you need to have those moments of trust and you need to work hard to create the belief because people are thirsty for this belief. People are thirsty to imagine a different kind of reality and it just needs to become a possible thing for them. And again, an option on the menu.

Sally Abed:

And I want to add one more thing. Last week, I was elected to the municipality, Municipal Council of Haifa, the third-largest city in Israel. The first joint list or any list in the history of Israel that was led by a Palestinian woman.

Glennon Doyle:

Wow.

Sally Abed:

And I was-

Glennon Doyle:

Wait, say that again. The first list… Say that again.

Sally Abed:

Led by a Palestinian woman during the war, during the darkest times of our lives, uncompromised politics, almost zero money, and we were able to actually build the hope on the streets, grassroots work, people’s power, door to door and actually convince people and get me elected to the council. Now, that’s not an easy thing to achieve. I’m not bragging, honestly, I’m not bragging. This is the work of the collective. It’s the work of hundreds of people that worked tirelessly for months under a very deep conviction of our shared fate and our shared society and our joint struggle for peace, equality, and social justice. And we were able to get thousands of people to the polls to actually elect me in. And I think that that is something, it doesn’t erase the problematic and concerning trends that we see in Israeli society right now, but we also understand that with people’s politics, with persistence, with people’s power, we can actually change reality.

Glennon Doyle:

And with that, thank you both.

Sally Abed:

Thank you.

Glennon Doyle:

Thank you for the work you’re doing. I mean, everybody that I know a buzz with what you two are doing, it’s so hopeful. I cannot imagine how hard it is. So just for every hard moment and your persistence and imagination and love for your people, each other’s people, the world, thank you.

Sally Abed:

Thank you so much for having us and for an amazing conversation. Yeah, good luck to all of us.

Glennon Doyle:

Good luck to all of us. We will freaking need it. Okay.

Alon-Lee Green:

We all need it. Thank you.

Sally Abed:

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Glennon Doyle:

Thank you both. Thank you Pod Squad. See you next time. Bye.

Alon-Lee Green:

Thank you. Bye-Bye.