Tel Aviv CNN –
When human rights activist Ziv Stahl was awakened by rocket fire while staying at her sister’s home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, she did not for a moment suspect the magnitude of the terrorist attack unfolding around her. She also couldn’t imagine the horror she would feel when she later called the police, who “basically told me no one was coming.”
That day, Hamas militants murdered her sister-in-law and several prominent peace activists living in the kibbutz, one of the communities that bore the brunt of the attack on Israel.
Stahl, the executive director of the human rights organization Yesh Din, says she is neither calling for revenge for the events of that day nor taking a pacifist position on Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza against Hamas. “I’m not saying a ceasefire at any price,” she said. “Israel has the right to defend itself and protect Israeli citizens,” she declared, but not indiscriminately or at the expense of thousands of Palestinian lives.
Her position, which she described as “complicated,” highlights the challenge facing the Israeli peace movement in dealing with the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Jewish Israelis, lifelong committed to coexistence with Palestinians, have had to reconcile their concerns about the cycle of violence stirred up by the Israeli war and the security needs of Israelis in the face of great personal loss.
As Palestinian solidarity protests take place across the West, some of Israel’s small groups of leftists, peace activists and human rights activists like Stahl have chosen to take a step back from the public debate about a permanent ceasefire. Others say it is more urgent than ever to find an end to the war and forge a two-state solution, even if that may be an unpopular opinion in the country that has drifted politically to the right over the decades.
Some activists complain that authorities are trying to equate peace activism with support for Hamas. It was nearly impossible to get permits for anti-war protests, with the exception of a protest in Tel Aviv by the left-wing Arab and Jewish Hadash Party. And in early November, four senior Palestinian politicians were arrested in Israel for taking part in a silent anti-war demonstration.
In a left-wing community room in Tel Aviv decorated with a red banner reading “A nation that occupies another nation will never be free,” a group of young Israelis discuss their newly formed anti-war group that they have co-founded the name “Gen Zayin”, which means Gen Z.
The group’s members asked CNN to use pseudonyms for them, citing the dozens of people arrested in Israel since Oct. 7 for allegedly inciting violence and terrorism. Many of those arrested are Palestinians, and activists say their arrests and detentions are being carried out without proper legal justification and solely to show support for the Palestinian people.
Tara John/CNN
“A nation that occupies another nation will never be free,” reads a banner at a left-wing community space in Tel Aviv on November 27, 2023.
While in the West young voters are often more liberal than their grandparents, the opposite is true in Israel, Rafael, one of Gen Zayin’s co-founders who uses a pseudonym, told CNN. A 2022 survey by the Israeli Democracy Institute found that 73% of Jewish people between the ages of 18 and 24 surveyed identified themselves as right-wing, compared to 46% of people surveyed over the age of 65.
The group’s anti-war position is not currently welcomed by the majority of the Jewish population, they say, which is why members of General Zayin hang posters in the middle of the night and secretly distribute pamphlets promoting their anti-war position. Anti-government manifesto in high schools.
Rafael, 24, passionately supports a two-state solution and accuses the country’s right-wingers such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of encouraging Hamas in its attempt to suppress a Palestinian state. “The situation is untenable and the only way to live in a just, equal and democratic society is peace, the end of the occupation, the expulsion of settlers” from the West Bank and the right of return of an estimated 5.9% million Palestinian refugees around the world, he said.
Members of General Zayin are fearful of Israeli public opinion, but also feel abandoned by parts of the Western left movement who, in their view, advocate the abolition of the Israeli state. Rafael was angry about an anti-war slogan he saw online: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract concept or as a tangible event?” it read. This “tangible event” refers to the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and led to the outbreak of war, he said.
“They don’t understand that there are 7 million Israelis living here and not going anywhere, and many Israelis don’t know that there are 7 million Palestinians.” [in Israel and the territories] “We’re not going anywhere either,” he said. “The only way forward is together.”
Insulted and threatened
Public sympathy for the Palestinians can get you into trouble. Some Jewish Israelis have lost their jobs or been publicly punished for speaking out in favor of Gaza, activists say. Ofer Cassif, a Hadash member of the Knesset, told CNN he was suspended for 45 days in October because he said “the Israeli government wants confrontation.”
He was also accused of comparing Israel’s plan for Gaza to the Nazis’ Final Solution, he said. “That’s not what I said. But they didn’t really care because this committee was interested in political persecution, in the political suppression of the opposition and the voices of dissidents who raise their voices against the war,” he said.
Tara John/CNN
Maoz Inon speaks about his peace activism at the Abraham Hostel in Tel Aviv on November 26th.
The left-wing, ultra-Orthodox journalist Israel Frey tells how he, his wife and two children were threatened by right-wing extremist football ultras and chased from his house in Jerusalem on October 15th. It happened over a video in which he recited Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, in which he prayed for the people slaughtered by Hamas and for Palestinian women and children under fire in Gaza.
“Little by little the street filled up. They arrived at my house. I tried to look through the viewfinder (in the door) but they closed it. Knocking and trying to hurt me. Two months later I talk about it with some amusement, but in reality it was very scary. “Hundreds of people came (and) tried to hurt me,” he told CNN from an undisclosed location as he is currently in hiding.
He said that riot police who tried to escort him out of his apartment also tormented him, with one of them spitting on him. CNN has reached out to Yasam, the Israeli police special unit, for comment.
Over a hot cup of tea filled with herbs he picked from the rooftop garden of a Tel Aviv hostel he co-owns, Maoz Inon told CNN that he was a week after his parents died in the attack on September 7th. October became a peace activist. At that moment he realized that “peace is the only thing that can bring security to all those who live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean,” he said.
He was not sanctioned in the same way as other people in the peace movement. This is because he is one of the families affected by the Hamas attack. “I use my privilege and my 15 minutes of fame as a victim to prevent others from becoming victims,” Inon said.
Tara John/CNN
Elana Kaminka speaks from her home in Tzur Hadassah on November 27th.
Not many Jewish peace activists are willing to speak out loudly for peace “because everyone is traumatized — but I have the words,” Inon said.
Israeli-American Elana Kaminka, speaking from a suburban community near Jerusalem, just meters from the Green Line to the occupied West Bank, told CNN she used to buy vegetables in a small Palestinian village across the border. But everything changed after Oct. 7, when her 20-year-old son Yannai was killed while heroically defending the Zikim training base near the Gaza border, she said.
Since then, the metaphorical and physical walls have been built around their stretch of the Green Line. Checkpoints have been tightened and many Palestinians living in the West Bank have had their work permits revoked in Israel, says Kaminka, who has not visited the village since her son’s death.
If Israelis “really understood what was happening in the territories – the real practical significance of the occupation – I think their opinions would be different,” she told CNN from the home she shares with her husband and three other children. “And it is also very easy for Palestinians to demonize Israelis and every Israeli soldier as a terrible person. It’s super easy to live in a bubble where you don’t have any interaction with the other side.”
Tara John/CNN
Elana’s house features pictures of Yannai Kaminka, who was killed in the Hamas attack on October 7.
The grief over the loss of her son is all-encompassing. She found it difficult to write or continue her volunteer work, which includes supporting victims of racist violence and transporting sick Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals.
Kaminka does not take a clear position on the war and, like Stahl, says there are major security concerns at play, particularly if more than 100 hostages remain in Gaza. She is certain: in the long term, Jewish-Palestinian coexistence is the only way forward.
While pointing to the Palestinian village she visited earlier, she said: “We have to find a way to build a shared society that feels fair and just for as many people as possible.”