On April 4, hundreds of Israelis went out to protest the war with Iran in Tel Aviv. The enduring image of that day was that of a Jewish Israeli activist, Alon-Lee Green. “We’ll continue resisting this war. This is a futile war!” he screamed into a camera as the police dragged him away.
Mr. Green is known for his work with Standing Together, a group he runs alongside his Palestinian counterparts Rula Daoud and Sally Abed. It’s a grass-roots activist movement of young Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens that began organizing in 2015, focused on principles of anti-occupation, antiracism and social justice.
Voices like Mr. Green, Ms. Abed and Ms. Daoud that call not only for an end to war but for peace and reconciliation, and insist on the humanity of Palestinians in Israel and occupied territory alike, are on the fringe among Jews in Israeli society. Most Jewish Israelis support the wars in Iran and Lebanon, and the vast majority of all Israeli adults — certainly Jews, and to a lesser extent Palestinians — do not think a two-state solution is possible.
It is into this gaping void that a new joint Israeli-Palestinian political party lands ahead of the watershed elections set to be held in Israel this fall. Called A Place for Us All, and headed in part by the three leaders of Standing Together, the party is unlikely to have enough votes to run in the election. And that is precisely why it is a critical and defiant voice entering the political arena.
Arab-Jewish parties have struggled to gain a foothold in Israeli politics. There have been Arab parties in Israel with Jewish members, and Jewish parties with a few Arab members, but these are outliers. For nearly 50 years, the only functional Arab-Jewish party in the country has been Hadash, founded in 1977, which wants an end to the Israeli occupation and a two-state solution. But most of its members and supporters are Palestinian citizens of Israel, not Israeli Jews. Another party, Da’am, was established in 1995 as an Arab-Jewish party focused on workers’ rights and the creation of a welfare state, but it has never had enough votes to secure a seat in the Knesset.
A Place for Us All was born out of joint Jewish-Palestinian activism and organizing focused on the daily realities on the ground, not grandiose policies. These are young Palestinian and Jewish Israelis who are friends, and witness one another’s pain, struggles and hopes. Its very existence challenges the long-held idea that it is normal or makes sense for Palestinians to vote just for Palestinian parties or for Jews to vote just for Jewish parties, regardless of the issues at stake.
“I’ve never felt truly represented by the existing parties,” said Yonatan Zeigen, a peace activist and member of the new party whose mother, Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. “We aim not just to impact reality from within the establishment but to change it altogether.”
The activists from Standing Together came into public view particularly after the attacks of Oct. 7. Their firm stance against the war in Gaza from the very start and their provocative protest actions — such as storming a live broadcast of “Big Brother” wearing T-shirts that said, “Get out of Gaza,” and organizing to protect aid trucks into Gaza that were being sabotaged by right-wing Israelis during the height of what the organization I work for has identified as a campaign of starvation by Israel in Gaza — put them on the radar of mainstream Israelis.
During the Iran war, they have raised money to purchase mobile shelters for Palestinian Bedouin communities in Israel’s south that lack bomb shelters due to state negligence. They participate in protests against rising organized crime in Palestinian-Israeli communities. In the occupied West Bank, they send Israelis to accompany Palestinians to try to prevent settler and military attacks, as well as document the violence.
Standing Together has also worked to embolden Palestinian citizens politically. An estimated 75 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel ages 18 to 25, as well as about 60 percent of Palestinian women overall, said they did not plan to vote, according to a 2025 survey by the pollster Yousef Makladeh. Sally Abed, a Palestinian leader of Standing Together who is also on the City Council in the Israeli city of Haifa, says one of the goals of the new party is to reach those Palestinian citizens. “They want to see themselves represented in politics,” Ms. Abed said.
Mr. Green says Israel needs a new political party that sets out a clear path to offset the right’s explicit policies of — as he described it — “destruction, ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and even territorial expansion in Syria and Lebanon.” Mr. Green criticized the center and left parties for continuing to manage the conflict and evade or stave off the Palestinian issue. “We are at a historical juncture: Jewish and Palestinian citizens need to be offered a decisive plan that champions life, equality and Israeli-Palestinian peace,” he said.
For many in Israel, the coming election, expected to be held in early fall, is shaping up, once again, to be a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu. Will Israel vote out its longest-serving, domineering prime minister, the one who presided over the country during the deadliest attack in its history on Oct. 7, and who has since kept it in a constant state of war and failed to deliver either victory or security? Despite many Israelis’ dissatisfaction with and distrust of Mr. Netanyahu, at best, and their detestation of him, at worst, polls show voters still don’t see anyone more suitable to lead the country. His political survival, whether he manages it by cobbling together enough votes to form another coalition or by blocking the opposition from doing so, is entirely plausible.
The driving forces behind the opposition’s inability to unseat this unpopular leader are intertwined. One is the fact that on core issues regarding the Palestinians and Iran, opposition parties aren’t offering an alternative to the status quo. The other is the refusal by almost all Jewish Israeli parties to consider a coalition with Palestinian Arab parties, at least publicly. This, too, is an extension of the consistent exclusion of the Palestinian minority from political and civic spheres in Israel.
Israeli political polling is a stark illustration of the problem. In most mainstream polling, voters are funneled into three distinct groups: those who support coalition parties, those who support opposition parties and “the Arabs.” But Arabs, who make up 20 percent of the population, are just as politically diverse and fragmented as Israeli Jews. Thus a key division in Israeli politics runs along ethnic and national lines, rather than civic or policy lines.
This election is much more than a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu. It is a referendum on whether Israelis will continue to choose being Jewish over being democratic. For many Jewish Israelis, the focus will fall on the Netanyahu government’s war on liberal institutions, the news media and the courts, as well as the country’s growing isolation and pariah status.
For Palestinian citizens, the moment is existential. They have endured an unchecked spike in homicides, in large part because of organized crime in Arab cities inside Israel, that has undermined people’s sense of personal security; experienced exclusion, censorship and persecution in Israeli society as structural inequalities inside Israel harden; and watched their compatriots in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza try to survive the aggression of a government on an apparent mission to destroy or hinder Palestinian life.
A Place for Us All understands its limits to have a direct political impact in the election. Its members don’t want to compete over the same small pie of leftist, anti-Netanyahu votes. Instead, this is a party that is trying to reframe the conversation. The very basic concept that Palestinians and Jews who live and share space in Israel can and should work together is a compelling and necessary response to the hate, racism and violence that have become all too familiar in the daily Israeli landscape.
“I see our mission as trying to redefine what it means to be a patriot,” Ms. Abed said. “I want to figure out how to reconcile my love of this place with a love of the people.”
Mairav Zonszein is the senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to conflict prevention.
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