In this critical moment, our voices — one a lesbian rabbi raised in suburban New Jersey, and the other, a gay professor raised in Ramallah — draw upon the legacies of Jewish and Palestinian peace activists who have come before us, to call for a new path forward rooted in nonviolence. We reject the binary choices presented by so many in each of our communities – the struggle for Israel/Palestine is not a sports game in which only one side can win and that requires the other to lose.
There is no way forward in which the other is dehumanized. Our commitment to nonviolence means that language and actions both must be nonviolent and infused with the commitment to see the humanity in each other. As the great American pacifist Rev. AJ Muste said, “there is no way to peace, peace is the way.” And peace is not sustainable without justice and equality.
Neither of us is naïve. Neither of us imagines this is a kumbaya moment for simplistic slogans about peace. We are each horrified and shattered by the attacks of Oct. 7. We are crushed and outraged by the decades of occupation, the endless targeting of citizens, and state-sponsored violence and daily humiliations. We demand and pray for the return of the hostages. We are outraged by the destruction of Gaza in the spasms of revenge. We are horrified and mourn the death of so many innocent civilians both in Gaza and in Israel in this ongoing cycle of terrible violence. We see and call out and object to the daily violence against Palestinians on the West Bank, the unchecked violence in Arab Israeli communities abandoned by the government, the displacement of Israeli Jews terrified about the attacks from Gaza, from Lebanon, from Iran and from the Houthis.
We can hold all the suffering of both peoples. We cry out and mourn and scream. We can also acknowledge the profound asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinian nation under its control.
We don’t necessarily agree on everything. But we do know that the way forward is
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