Since January, every Sunday, a group of Israeli citizens gather around Union Square in New York City to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the hostages held by Hamas. At these gatherings, the Israeli activists are also joined by Palestinians and people from other backgrounds to promote a shared Israeli-Palestinian future. As mentioned in their call for the protest shared on social media, they believe in diplomatic solutions, lifting the siege and ending the occupation. They welcome all but discourage bringing flags to the protests. Israelis for Peace gatherings and protests have also caught the attention of prominent newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times.
When I was casually wandering in New York a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly saw many banners with the words “Israelis say: Let Gaza live” and “From the river to the sea we all deserve equality”. One of the anti-occupation activists at the gathering, Adi, noticed my curiosity and invited me to join them. I listened to several powerful speeches by Israeli activists, some of whom lost family members at the October 7 attack, demanding an immediate ceasefire. Tamar Glezerman and Noa Fort, two of the organizers of the ‘Israelis for Peace’ protests in NYC, were among the speakers on that day. As I haven’t met any Israeli anti-occupation activists before, I wanted to reach out to them, later on, to talk about their personal stories leading them to activism, the conflicts they experience in their personal lives due to their political stance and their opinions on the future of Israel-Palestine. I leave the word to Tamar and Noa…
“I found myself where I started out, doing a lot of anti-occupation work.“
LM: Can you briefly introduce yourselves? Where did you grow up in Israel? And when did you move to NYC? Why did you move; for personal or political reasons? And what are you doing in NYC currently?
TG: My name is Tamar Glezerman. I’m from Tel Aviv. I grew up in Beersheva and Tel Aviv. I moved here in 2010, and I actually moved here for political reasons. I’m a filmmaker, and I realized that if I stayed in Israel, I would have to devote every part of my career to anti-occupation work. I moved here and did a lot of work that has nothing to do with politics, and then I found myself where I started out doing a lot of anti-occupation work.
NF: My name is Noa Fort, and I grew up in a small place outside of Tel Aviv. It’s called Neve Monosson, but because even Israelis don’t really know the place, I usually say that I’m from Tel Aviv. I moved to New York unofficially in 2013 and then more officially in 2014. It was a mix of reasons and it was never an official move like that’s it I moved and I’m never coming back. It was more like, oh, I need to live somewhere else. I’m a musician, so trying out different music scenes was my main goal, and generally just living somewhere else.
LM: So how did this Israelis for Peace initiative start? How did you two meet, and how did this idea develop? Was it after October 7th or before?
TG: Israelis for Peace started actually right after October 7. It came out of a wider Israeli leftist community called the Anti-Occupation Block, which had started as a solidarity movement with the Anti-Occupation Block in Israel, which was a part of the anti-judicial protests. Once October 7 happened, a group of us decided that we needed a space to grieve and to demand both ceasefire and hostage release, which were already being pitched to the public as opposing causes and not as one and the same. We needed a place to mourn and to protest as Israelis, who some of us have lost people. Everybody knows somebody who’s lost someone, it’s a small place as you know very well. We didn’t really find ourselves in the protests that had banners like by any means necessary. On the other hand, we didn’t really find ourselves in protests that completely omitted Palestinian suffering and focused on Israeli suffering, so we decided to create a space to hold both. In November and December, we held two vigils that had music that were similar to the October 7th (one year) vigil. At the very beginning, Noa joined as a musician and then became an organizer. When January came around, we figured out that the war is actually going to take much longer than we had hoped and that we have to move to a more sustainable model. But we also had to move to a regular model so we decided to do weekly protests, which we’ve been doing since.
NF: I joined first as a musician. Before that, I was one of the organizers of the protests against the judicial overhaul. So yeah, Yael reached out to me to ask if I would join and organize this. And I think it might be interesting to mention that I was in Israel on October 7, I just happened to be visiting my family and I was there for the whole first month of the war. So when I got back and Yael reached out to me about organizing this first vigil that called for ceasefire, I was still in a mindset that was almost struggling with the concept. I knew that I’m getting there, but I was still really, really traumatized. And I knew what the word ceasefire meant for everyone back in Israel at that time. I was struggling to officially be one of the organizers, but after the first vigil I think I was like, okay, this is the right message. This is the only message I feel like I can really carry so I joined as an organizer.
“I also don’t understand who exactly I’m bringing back to life by killing more people.”
LM: You said many of the members of this community have lost their family members or friends in October 7th attacks. I don’t know if you personally did, if you want to talk about that, but also just generally what made you fight for peace instead of taking revenge as the Israeli government would want you to do.
TG: I lost my aunt. My aunt was murdered October 7th. She was elderly, she was 88. She was murdered in the Kibbutz Be’eri. Her full name was Hannah Kritzman. That would be my personal connection. Also, one of my closest friends’ brother was killed. I didn’t know him personally but I know her very well. And as for revenge, to be honest, it didn’t occur to me. It just isn’t where I went. I don’t understand the goal, I guess. I mean, revenge is a really good policy if the goal is revenge, but for nothing else.
But also I can share a personal story with you that came up for me this past year that I didn’t really think about that much before October 7th or for a long time. When I was 14, I was in a bombing in Tel Aviv. Nothing happened to me physically, but I saw everything. I heard everything. And maybe 10, 15 minutes later, in less than 15 minutes, almost immediately while the ambulances were still there, while the police were still there, while the bodies were still there -there’s a lot of bodies, 13 people were killed- there were already a mob of people yelling death to Arabs and revenge and kill them. As the streets were still covered with blood, you could still smell it. And it really crystallized for me that moment that this is the only way this will go. If you look backwards in time, if you look forwards in time, like this is a cycle, it’s always going to be like this. There’s no piece of revenge that’s the last revenge. So it’s not really where my mind goes, but I also don’t understand who exactly I’m bringing back to life by killing more people.
NF: These protests grew out of the anti-occupation block and there are a lot of people who have personal connections to people who were murdered on October 7 but most of the people there were activists and were concerned about the situation and the occupation and everything in Israel way before October 7. Maybe their personal connection was that they served in the army and then they saw how messed up things are or maybe they didn’t, they were just very politically aware and maybe left Israel because of that. Everyone has their own story. It’s not necessarily that they experienced something like this that could have brought them to a moment of deciding whether it’s revenge or not, but they all have decided to be part of this movement.
LM: So if I understand correctly, you were already politically aware about the occupation in Palestine before even coming to the US. How do your friends and family in Israel react to your anti-occupation stance and peace activism? And did your relations with your family and friends in Israel change after October 7?
NF: This one is really hard to answer, actually. I come from a family that identifies as leftist, but in the last couple of years, even before the war, but especially since the war began and since we started these protests, I had difficulty talking to my family about these things. It took me a while to come out in front of my family and share with them that I’m organizing those things because yeah, they’re all in Israel. I am viewed at least by some of them as radical left. We just ignore and not talk about it to keep some peace in relationships. Sometimes I do push those buttons and try to have conversations, but then it usually doesn’t end very well so most of the time we choose not to talk about it. I think eventually we all share the same values, but this moment is just… how do I put it into words? There’s a lot of things that are somewhat easier to see when you’re not in Israel right now. The media is definitely not objective. There’s a lot of truth that is not told and not known to many people in Israel so I want to keep my compassion to everyone that I know that might not know exactly what is going on. The fact that I’m far away and not under constant threat makes having conversations harder. Maybe Tamar can take it from here. Your story is pretty different than mine.
TG: Yeah, I’m kind of privileged in that sense because I come from a very small group of Israelis; I am a second-generation anti-occupation activist. My parents met at a protest. So, I just didn’t rebel and just stayed in line with my parents’ values. I’ve had some conversations that were slightly different with my sisters that hadn’t happened before, although like the family itself is all considered radical left. To be honest, I’ve always been the most radical in the immediate family. Because that’s been my life even before I left Israel, I have protected myself from having horrible conversations after October 7. I remain within the group of people whose opinions I shared most of the time when I’m there. I’m sure that I’ve burned some bridges that I really didn’t want to burn but I also know that in the grand scheme of things, I don’t want to be saying I don’t want people to be mad at me and that’s what dictated my life choices. So it’s very painful. My mandate is not to lecture people in Israel. My mandate is to amplify people doing good things in Israel and Palestine and get support from them from people here who want to support something good.
“Even some people who survived those horrible massacres and still keep the same views and maybe for some of them, their stance on peace even got stronger.”
LM: As the writers of Avlaremoz who have been critical of Israel’s military action and live outside Israel, we received comments from Jews in Israel saying ‘it is easy to call for ceasefire from the comfort of your houses abroad, you cannot understand the existential threat that we are facing in the Middle East. I invite you to come to Israel and then let’s see if you’re going to think the same way’. You’re from Israel but now you live in the US, how do you respond to that?
TG: My point is that I said the exact same things when I was living in Israel and I was told that if I don’t like it, I can fuck off and move so I fucked off and moved and I’m saying the same things and I’m being told, oh, come here and say it to our face. So the bottom line is even if I’m going to be on the moon, I’m going to say the exact same things. There’s no proper place to tell people things they don’t want to hear.
NF: Yeah, and as I said, I happened to be in Israel on October 7 and the first month of the war. And I was already thinking and feeling the same things that I feel today, not knowing how much worse things are going to get, obviously, back then. When people tell me this, I rely on the fact that there are people in Israel who share those views, who are the people I really admire. And even some people who survived those horrible massacres and still keep the same views and maybe for some of them, their stance on peace even got stronger. Of course, there’s also the other side. There are the people who were all leftists before October seven and now they’re saying there’s not going to be peace. But there are also people whose voice for peace became stronger as they realized that a military solution is never going to be the solution.
TG: So yeah if you think I don’t have the right to say it, first of all, fuck off. But let’s say I don’t have the right to say. There are people who are actually from there right now, who’s been through this hell and still hold these views. So even people who lost their parents became vocal peace activists. I also reject this kind of axiom that you need to buy your right to an opinion with blood if you’re Israeli. Because there is nobody who’s not affected. I don’t know a single Israeli who didn’t witness a bombing, lost a friend, lost a family member. It’s a tiny country and it’s been nonstop war. The perception that Israel was safe before and Israeli safety has been shaken after October 7 is not correct. But yeah, people will shut you up if they don’t want to hear what you want to say. Nothing’s going to be good enough so you might as well be authentic.
“Sometimes I’ll post something that’s a little too pro-Palestinian, I’ll get a thousand people calling me Kapos, and the following day I’ll post something that acknowledges Israelis as human beings and get a thousand red triangles calling me a genocider who should die. But for the most part, I get support.”
LM: I assume you have been called a self-hating Jew or a traitor on social media or even in person because of your political views. Do you care about these insults? Did you ever feel like you were doing something wrong or questioned your own Jewish identity? And how did you cope with that?
NF: I actually do care when that happens. It does bother me. I think I’m less immune to it because well, Tamar has been getting this backlash for a long time. And also you really go for that, Tamar, the way I perceive it. You may even enjoy it slightly I don’t know, there’s a reason why you’re engaging in Twitter and writing certain things that you know are all going to bring you the fire, right? And you know, the trolls are going to be after you.
TG: Haters gonna hate.
NF: I’m not as cold-blooded as you are in that sense but I also don’t engage as much out there. To be honest, my relationship with social media has changed a lot in the past year. In the beginning of the war, I was still on Facebook and as I mentioned, I’m a musician, so I mostly used it for professional reasons, to announce music stuff and for political stuff. And I always got a lot of shit for that. And during the war I was using social media to collect donations for evacuated families from one of the kibbutzim who were all sheltering in Tel Aviv. I was also sharing all these posts, exactly like I mentioned before, from people who have been through this hell and are still saying, let’s not go into war. let’s not make it worse and the fire that I got back was really terrible. At some point, I said I’m just not doing this anymore and I stopped. I haven’t really used Facebook since then because I hate it, it’s not making me feel good.
TG: Yes, I’m less bothered by that but it’s not like I’m not bothered at all. I’m bothered in a slightly different way. I’m not on Facebook so that’s a good thing in my life. But to be honest, the first time that someone called me a kapo and spat on me, I’m pretty sure I was six years old so something hardens you with time. When it’s somebody that I know who feels deeply disappointed or says something really terrible, then of course it stings. On social media I also do direct aid work with Gaza, for eight years. I sometimes post about that because I collect micro donations. And as I said, I’ve been kind of vocal. But when the war started on October 7, I was heartbroken by the responses of the progressive left community around me, some of which were really, really close friends that I lost the first week of the war for not supporting Hamas myself. Like that was the bar and I wrote this post about how is it that my friends from Gaza are checking in with me and asking me how I’m doing and people in Brooklyn are supporting war crimes in their (friends in Gaza) names. I started getting a lot of attention on Twitter from people who actually agree with us. On Twitter I get so many shares by people who wanted to voice this kind of third narrative. I also got so many horrible comments… if you think Capo was bad consider the inverted red triangle brigade, those people will horrify you. Today, for the first time I checked what lists I’m on. I am added to like 200 lists; rapist, pedophiles, Hitlers…really terrible shit. You know, it’s the cost of doing business. What can you do? Sometimes I’ll post something that’s a little too pro-Palestinian, I’ll get a thousand people calling me Kapos, and the following day I’ll post something that acknowledges Israelis as human beings and get a thousand red triangles calling me a genocider who should die. But for the most part, I get support. People on your phone, if you don’t know them, they live on your phone. That’s the secret. Shut down your phone and they don’t exist.
LM: Before we end, I want to also talk about the future, your expectations and hopes. Now that Donald Trump is the new president how do you expect the relations in the Middle East will change? Do you see an end to this war in the near future?
NF: Yeah, I have no idea. I do want to say that we are Israelis for Peace and we meet every Sunday in Union Square in New York City just to put it out there if we’re using this platform in any way to share what we do. We’ve been doing it since January every week, so I don’t know how many weeks that is already. And we’ve been trying to do other events as well. When there are peace activists who are visiting, we have events and fundraisers with them. Also, we have both Israeli and Palestinian activists. Maybe you saw on our Instagram, we have a lot of videos from those events and we try to use our page to amplify their message.
As we were preparing for the protest that took place yesterday as every Sunday, we were really struggling with the message and our call to action. Where do we direct our demands. I think we still have a big question mark about it. And tomorrow you can say a lot more probably but right now is a moment for reevaluations. We’re waiting to see what’s going to happen but what we do know is that a year of community building is something that is holding a huge meaningful space for a lot of people right now. Keeping them sane, especially during these weeks. We got so many responses from people just saying thank you for keeping this space to know that we have our people that we can organize with and share this horrible moment with.
TG: You want the good news or the bad news? Just kidding, there’s only bad news. I think it’s not very mysterious what’s going to happen in the Middle East with Trump. I think if somebody says multiple times how they feel about something and is clearly one of the biggest Islamophobes the modern world has seen…We have the plan of a deal of a century, that is David Friedman deal for basically annexing the West Bank that Trump tried to push through before, in his first term. Jared Kushner and David Friedman’s baby, basically. We can already see that the Israeli government is psyched at the results of this election. We’ve had super happy tweets from Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Today, Smotrich said we are going to annex the West Bank. He wouldn’t say that if Kamala won right now. Or maybe he would, but it wouldn’t feel like it had the same kind of teeth. I think the number one order of business in this country is to make sure that there are more elections, that there is a possibility to vote out, Trump in four years. I don’t take that for granted at all as an Israeli. As a Turkish person, I don’t have to explain to you how you can hollow the system from within and just stay. So that’s where we’re at.
How does it change our actions? Not fundamentally, because what are we going to do? Give up, stop fighting for the only just future that is possible in the region? But in the very immediate term, of course we don’t really know who we’re addressing. We might focus on the next few months on trying to push Biden as a lame duck president, because presidents have used their lame duck presidency to push through things that they weren’t able to or couldn’t get the votes for within their term. That might be a focus for the next few months. And then once Trump is in power, we’re headed towards genuinely dark times. And at least we have community. So we’ll keep building that community. In the next few months, I’m going to devote some time to refresh my readings on anti-fascist movements and revolutions. I just got Arash Azizi’s book about the woman life freedom revolution. People have kept fighting in the darkest, darkest, darkest hours.
“If you’re pro-Israel, be pro a future that is worth living, be pro-peaceful future, be pro not making us kill and die in wars.“
LM: I’m also curious about your ideal solution. Are you supporting one state where Palestinians and Israelis live together or two states? What is your ideal solution?
TG: We don’t have a prescribed solution. We have people who support one state, confederation, two states. The entrance bar is to demand an equal solution. You have to be anti-occupation, anti-apartheid and anti-seige. At the end of the day, we all have our personal preferences but it’s not something that we define. We define it as a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible and that is the solution that we will support.
LM: And any last messages or comments?
TG: I just want to add that we’re trying to have an open tent, a big tent and to be inclusive. Inclusive means that it’s really important for us to meet people where they are around this, because we’re aware of the fact that, and this is particularly about American Jewry but it might also apply to the diaspora of Jews in other places, a lot of the connection with Israel is emotional, has guilt in it, has historical trauma in it, is deep and emotional. And we want to also reach American Jews to very simply say that we are not our government. If you’re pro-Israel, be pro a future that is worth living, be pro-peaceful future, be pro not making us kill and die in wars. We do want to reach out to people who are maybe more conservative than us and then to people who are, I don’t want to say more progressive but maybe see themselves as more radical and say to them that 15 million people between the river and the sea and not one of them is going anywhere. We can help the forces trying to bring a better future to the 15 million or we can be in the way. And I think that that’s a big part of our message. We also have to look at our own activism all the time and ask is it helping the reality I want to change or is it helping me feel better about myself. We are trying to keep ourself on the helpful side and help people be more helpful, basically.
NF: To add to that, if we’re talking to the American Jewry, unconditional support is not actual support right now. On the contrary, unconditional support of Israel right now is a detriment to the future of the country. This has to be really, really clear, and it has been really hard to deliver that message even before the war when we were fighting against the judicial overhaul. That was a big thing, connecting with the Jewish community and making them understand that them supporting us in these protests doesn’t mean that they’re against Israel. It’s actually the opposite. The same is true right now with this war. Supporting the war is not helping anyone in Israel right now, except Bibi. That’s it.
LM: Thank you so much for sharing your stories and opinions!
Photo: George De Castro Day
Since January, every Sunday, a group of Israeli citizens gather around Union Square in New York City to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the hostages held by Hamas. At these gatherings, the Israeli activists are also joined by Palestinians and people from other backgrounds to promote a shared Israeli-Palestinian future. As mentioned in their call for the protest shared on social media, they believe in diplomatic solutions, lifting the siege and ending the occupation. They welcome all but discourage bringing flags to the protests. Israelis for Peace gatherings and protests have also caught the attention of prominent newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times.
When I was casually wandering in New York a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly saw many banners with the words “Israelis say: Let Gaza live” and “From the river to the sea we all deserve equality”. One of the anti-occupation activists at the gathering, Adi, noticed my curiosity and invited me to join them. I listened to several powerful speeches by Israeli activists, some of whom lost family members at the October 7 attack, demanding an immediate ceasefire. Tamar Glezerman and Noa Fort, two of the organizers of the ‘Israelis for Peace’ protests in NYC, were among the speakers on that day. As I haven’t met any Israeli anti-occupation activists before, I wanted to reach out to them, later on, to talk about their personal stories leading them to activism, the conflicts they experience in their personal lives due to their political stance and their opinions on the future of Israel-Palestine. I leave the word to Tamar and Noa…
LM: Can you briefly introduce yourselves? Where did you grow up in Israel? And when did you move to NYC? Why did you move; for personal or political reasons? And what are you doing in NYC currently?
TG: My name is Tamar Glezerman. I’m from Tel Aviv. I grew up in Beersheva and Tel Aviv. I moved here in 2010, and I actually moved here for political reasons. I’m a filmmaker, and I realized that if I stayed in Israel, I would have to devote every part of my career to anti-occupation work. I moved here and did a lot of work that has nothing to do with politics, and then I found myself where I started out doing a lot of anti-occupation work.
NF: My name is Noa Fort, and I grew up in a small place outside of Tel Aviv. It’s called Neve Monosson, but because even Israelis don’t really know the place, I usually say that I’m from Tel Aviv. I moved to New York unofficially in 2013 and then more officially in 2014. It was a mix of reasons and it was never an official move like that’s it I moved and I’m never coming back. It was more like, oh, I need to live somewhere else. I’m a musician, so trying out different music scenes was my main goal, and generally just living somewhere else.
LM: So how did this Israelis for Peace initiative start? How did you two meet, and how did this idea develop? Was it after October 7th or before?
TG: Israelis for Peace started actually right after October 7. It came out of a wider Israeli leftist community called the Anti-Occupation Block, which had started as a solidarity movement with the Anti-Occupation Block in Israel, which was a part of the anti-judicial protests. Once October 7 happened, a group of us decided that we needed a space to grieve and to demand both ceasefire and hostage release, which were already being pitched to the public as opposing causes and not as one and the same. We needed a place to mourn and to protest as Israelis, who some of us have lost people. Everybody knows somebody who’s lost someone, it’s a small place as you know very well. We didn’t really find ourselves in the protests that had banners like by any means necessary. On the other hand, we didn’t really find ourselves in protests that completely omitted Palestinian suffering and focused on Israeli suffering, so we decided to create a space to hold both. In November and December, we held two vigils that had music that were similar to the October 7th (one year) vigil. At the very beginning, Noa joined as a musician and then became an organizer. When January came around, we figured out that the war is actually going to take much longer than we had hoped and that we have to move to a more sustainable model. But we also had to move to a regular model so we decided to do weekly protests, which we’ve been doing since.
NF: I joined first as a musician. Before that, I was one of the organizers of the protests against the judicial overhaul. So yeah, Yael reached out to me to ask if I would join and organize this. And I think it might be interesting to mention that I was in Israel on October 7, I just happened to be visiting my family and I was there for the whole first month of the war. So when I got back and Yael reached out to me about organizing this first vigil that called for ceasefire, I was still in a mindset that was almost struggling with the concept. I knew that I’m getting there, but I was still really, really traumatized. And I knew what the word ceasefire meant for everyone back in Israel at that time. I was struggling to officially be one of the organizers, but after the first vigil I think I was like, okay, this is the right message. This is the only message I feel like I can really carry so I joined as an organizer.
LM: You said many of the members of this community have lost their family members or friends in October 7th attacks. I don’t know if you personally did, if you want to talk about that, but also just generally what made you fight for peace instead of taking revenge as the Israeli government would want you to do.
TG: I lost my aunt. My aunt was murdered October 7th. She was elderly, she was 88. She was murdered in the Kibbutz Be’eri. Her full name was Hannah Kritzman. That would be my personal connection. Also, one of my closest friends’ brother was killed. I didn’t know him personally but I know her very well. And as for revenge, to be honest, it didn’t occur to me. It just isn’t where I went. I don’t understand the goal, I guess. I mean, revenge is a really good policy if the goal is revenge, but for nothing else.
But also I can share a personal story with you that came up for me this past year that I didn’t really think about that much before October 7th or for a long time. When I was 14, I was in a bombing in Tel Aviv. Nothing happened to me physically, but I saw everything. I heard everything. And maybe 10, 15 minutes later, in less than 15 minutes, almost immediately while the ambulances were still there, while the police were still there, while the bodies were still there -there’s a lot of bodies, 13 people were killed- there were already a mob of people yelling death to Arabs and revenge and kill them. As the streets were still covered with blood, you could still smell it. And it really crystallized for me that moment that this is the only way this will go. If you look backwards in time, if you look forwards in time, like this is a cycle, it’s always going to be like this. There’s no piece of revenge that’s the last revenge. So it’s not really where my mind goes, but I also don’t understand who exactly I’m bringing back to life by killing more people.
NF: These protests grew out of the anti-occupation block and there are a lot of people who have personal connections to people who were murdered on October 7 but most of the people there were activists and were concerned about the situation and the occupation and everything in Israel way before October 7. Maybe their personal connection was that they served in the army and then they saw how messed up things are or maybe they didn’t, they were just very politically aware and maybe left Israel because of that. Everyone has their own story. It’s not necessarily that they experienced something like this that could have brought them to a moment of deciding whether it’s revenge or not, but they all have decided to be part of this movement.
LM: So if I understand correctly, you were already politically aware about the occupation in Palestine before even coming to the US. How do your friends and family in Israel react to your anti-occupation stance and peace activism? And did your relations with your family and friends in Israel change after October 7?
NF: This one is really hard to answer, actually. I come from a family that identifies as leftist, but in the last couple of years, even before the war, but especially since the war began and since we started these protests, I had difficulty talking to my family about these things. It took me a while to come out in front of my family and share with them that I’m organizing those things because yeah, they’re all in Israel. I am viewed at least by some of them as radical left. We just ignore and not talk about it to keep some peace in relationships. Sometimes I do push those buttons and try to have conversations, but then it usually doesn’t end very well so most of the time we choose not to talk about it. I think eventually we all share the same values, but this moment is just… how do I put it into words? There’s a lot of things that are somewhat easier to see when you’re not in Israel right now. The media is definitely not objective. There’s a lot of truth that is not told and not known to many people in Israel so I want to keep my compassion to everyone that I know that might not know exactly what is going on. The fact that I’m far away and not under constant threat makes having conversations harder. Maybe Tamar can take it from here. Your story is pretty different than mine.
TG: Yeah, I’m kind of privileged in that sense because I come from a very small group of Israelis; I am a second-generation anti-occupation activist. My parents met at a protest. So, I just didn’t rebel and just stayed in line with my parents’ values. I’ve had some conversations that were slightly different with my sisters that hadn’t happened before, although like the family itself is all considered radical left. To be honest, I’ve always been the most radical in the immediate family. Because that’s been my life even before I left Israel, I have protected myself from having horrible conversations after October 7. I remain within the group of people whose opinions I shared most of the time when I’m there. I’m sure that I’ve burned some bridges that I really didn’t want to burn but I also know that in the grand scheme of things, I don’t want to be saying I don’t want people to be mad at me and that’s what dictated my life choices. So it’s very painful. My mandate is not to lecture people in Israel. My mandate is to amplify people doing good things in Israel and Palestine and get support from them from people here who want to support something good.
LM: As the writers of Avlaremoz who have been critical of Israel’s military action and live outside Israel, we received comments from Jews in Israel saying ‘it is easy to call for ceasefire from the comfort of your houses abroad, you cannot understand the existential threat that we are facing in the Middle East. I invite you to come to Israel and then let’s see if you’re going to think the same way’. You’re from Israel but now you live in the US, how do you respond to that?
TG: My point is that I said the exact same things when I was living in Israel and I was told that if I don’t like it, I can fuck off and move so I fucked off and moved and I’m saying the same things and I’m being told, oh, come here and say it to our face. So the bottom line is even if I’m going to be on the moon, I’m going to say the exact same things. There’s no proper place to tell people things they don’t want to hear.
NF: Yeah, and as I said, I happened to be in Israel on October 7 and the first month of the war. And I was already thinking and feeling the same things that I feel today, not knowing how much worse things are going to get, obviously, back then. When people tell me this, I rely on the fact that there are people in Israel who share those views, who are the people I really admire. And even some people who survived those horrible massacres and still keep the same views and maybe for some of them, their stance on peace even got stronger. Of course, there’s also the other side. There are the people who were all leftists before October seven and now they’re saying there’s not going to be peace. But there are also people whose voice for peace became stronger as they realized that a military solution is never going to be the solution.
TG: So yeah if you think I don’t have the right to say it, first of all, fuck off. But let’s say I don’t have the right to say. There are people who are actually from there right now, who’s been through this hell and still hold these views. So even people who lost their parents became vocal peace activists. I also reject this kind of axiom that you need to buy your right to an opinion with blood if you’re Israeli. Because there is nobody who’s not affected. I don’t know a single Israeli who didn’t witness a bombing, lost a friend, lost a family member. It’s a tiny country and it’s been nonstop war. The perception that Israel was safe before and Israeli safety has been shaken after October 7 is not correct. But yeah, people will shut you up if they don’t want to hear what you want to say. Nothing’s going to be good enough so you might as well be authentic.
LM: I assume you have been called a self-hating Jew or a traitor on social media or even in person because of your political views. Do you care about these insults? Did you ever feel like you were doing something wrong or questioned your own Jewish identity? And how did you cope with that?
NF: I actually do care when that happens. It does bother me. I think I’m less immune to it because well, Tamar has been getting this backlash for a long time. And also you really go for that, Tamar, the way I perceive it. You may even enjoy it slightly I don’t know, there’s a reason why you’re engaging in Twitter and writing certain things that you know are all going to bring you the fire, right? And you know, the trolls are going to be after you.
TG: Haters gonna hate.
NF: I’m not as cold-blooded as you are in that sense but I also don’t engage as much out there. To be honest, my relationship with social media has changed a lot in the past year. In the beginning of the war, I was still on Facebook and as I mentioned, I’m a musician, so I mostly used it for professional reasons, to announce music stuff and for political stuff. And I always got a lot of shit for that. And during the war I was using social media to collect donations for evacuated families from one of the kibbutzim who were all sheltering in Tel Aviv. I was also sharing all these posts, exactly like I mentioned before, from people who have been through this hell and are still saying, let’s not go into war. let’s not make it worse and the fire that I got back was really terrible. At some point, I said I’m just not doing this anymore and I stopped. I haven’t really used Facebook since then because I hate it, it’s not making me feel good.
TG: Yes, I’m less bothered by that but it’s not like I’m not bothered at all. I’m bothered in a slightly different way. I’m not on Facebook so that’s a good thing in my life. But to be honest, the first time that someone called me a kapo and spat on me, I’m pretty sure I was six years old so something hardens you with time. When it’s somebody that I know who feels deeply disappointed or says something really terrible, then of course it stings. On social media I also do direct aid work with Gaza, for eight years. I sometimes post about that because I collect micro donations. And as I said, I’ve been kind of vocal. But when the war started on October 7, I was heartbroken by the responses of the progressive left community around me, some of which were really, really close friends that I lost the first week of the war for not supporting Hamas myself. Like that was the bar and I wrote this post about how is it that my friends from Gaza are checking in with me and asking me how I’m doing and people in Brooklyn are supporting war crimes in their (friends in Gaza) names. I started getting a lot of attention on Twitter from people who actually agree with us. On Twitter I get so many shares by people who wanted to voice this kind of third narrative. I also got so many horrible comments… if you think Capo was bad consider the inverted red triangle brigade, those people will horrify you. Today, for the first time I checked what lists I’m on. I am added to like 200 lists; rapist, pedophiles, Hitlers…really terrible shit. You know, it’s the cost of doing business. What can you do? Sometimes I’ll post something that’s a little too pro-Palestinian, I’ll get a thousand people calling me Kapos, and the following day I’ll post something that acknowledges Israelis as human beings and get a thousand red triangles calling me a genocider who should die. But for the most part, I get support. People on your phone, if you don’t know them, they live on your phone. That’s the secret. Shut down your phone and they don’t exist.
LM: Before we end, I want to also talk about the future, your expectations and hopes. Now that Donald Trump is the new president how do you expect the relations in the Middle East will change? Do you see an end to this war in the near future?
NF: Yeah, I have no idea. I do want to say that we are Israelis for Peace and we meet every Sunday in Union Square in New York City just to put it out there if we’re using this platform in any way to share what we do. We’ve been doing it since January every week, so I don’t know how many weeks that is already. And we’ve been trying to do other events as well. When there are peace activists who are visiting, we have events and fundraisers with them. Also, we have both Israeli and Palestinian activists. Maybe you saw on our Instagram, we have a lot of videos from those events and we try to use our page to amplify their message.
As we were preparing for the protest that took place yesterday as every Sunday, we were really struggling with the message and our call to action. Where do we direct our demands. I think we still have a big question mark about it. And tomorrow you can say a lot more probably but right now is a moment for reevaluations. We’re waiting to see what’s going to happen but what we do know is that a year of community building is something that is holding a huge meaningful space for a lot of people right now. Keeping them sane, especially during these weeks. We got so many responses from people just saying thank you for keeping this space to know that we have our people that we can organize with and share this horrible moment with.
TG: You want the good news or the bad news? Just kidding, there’s only bad news. I think it’s not very mysterious what’s going to happen in the Middle East with Trump. I think if somebody says multiple times how they feel about something and is clearly one of the biggest Islamophobes the modern world has seen…We have the plan of a deal of a century, that is David Friedman deal for basically annexing the West Bank that Trump tried to push through before, in his first term. Jared Kushner and David Friedman’s baby, basically. We can already see that the Israeli government is psyched at the results of this election. We’ve had super happy tweets from Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Today, Smotrich said we are going to annex the West Bank. He wouldn’t say that if Kamala won right now. Or maybe he would, but it wouldn’t feel like it had the same kind of teeth. I think the number one order of business in this country is to make sure that there are more elections, that there is a possibility to vote out, Trump in four years. I don’t take that for granted at all as an Israeli. As a Turkish person, I don’t have to explain to you how you can hollow the system from within and just stay. So that’s where we’re at.
How does it change our actions? Not fundamentally, because what are we going to do? Give up, stop fighting for the only just future that is possible in the region? But in the very immediate term, of course we don’t really know who we’re addressing. We might focus on the next few months on trying to push Biden as a lame duck president, because presidents have used their lame duck presidency to push through things that they weren’t able to or couldn’t get the votes for within their term. That might be a focus for the next few months. And then once Trump is in power, we’re headed towards genuinely dark times. And at least we have community. So we’ll keep building that community. In the next few months, I’m going to devote some time to refresh my readings on anti-fascist movements and revolutions. I just got Arash Azizi’s book about the woman life freedom revolution. People have kept fighting in the darkest, darkest, darkest hours.
LM: I’m also curious about your ideal solution. Are you supporting one state where Palestinians and Israelis live together or two states? What is your ideal solution?
TG: We don’t have a prescribed solution. We have people who support one state, confederation, two states. The entrance bar is to demand an equal solution. You have to be anti-occupation, anti-apartheid and anti-seige. At the end of the day, we all have our personal preferences but it’s not something that we define. We define it as a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible and that is the solution that we will support.
LM: And any last messages or comments?
TG: I just want to add that we’re trying to have an open tent, a big tent and to be inclusive. Inclusive means that it’s really important for us to meet people where they are around this, because we’re aware of the fact that, and this is particularly about American Jewry but it might also apply to the diaspora of Jews in other places, a lot of the connection with Israel is emotional, has guilt in it, has historical trauma in it, is deep and emotional. And we want to also reach American Jews to very simply say that we are not our government. If you’re pro-Israel, be pro a future that is worth living, be pro-peaceful future, be pro not making us kill and die in wars. We do want to reach out to people who are maybe more conservative than us and then to people who are, I don’t want to say more progressive but maybe see themselves as more radical and say to them that 15 million people between the river and the sea and not one of them is going anywhere. We can help the forces trying to bring a better future to the 15 million or we can be in the way. And I think that that’s a big part of our message. We also have to look at our own activism all the time and ask is it helping the reality I want to change or is it helping me feel better about myself. We are trying to keep ourself on the helpful side and help people be more helpful, basically.
NF: To add to that, if we’re talking to the American Jewry, unconditional support is not actual support right now. On the contrary, unconditional support of Israel right now is a detriment to the future of the country. This has to be really, really clear, and it has been really hard to deliver that message even before the war when we were fighting against the judicial overhaul. That was a big thing, connecting with the Jewish community and making them understand that them supporting us in these protests doesn’t mean that they’re against Israel. It’s actually the opposite. The same is true right now with this war. Supporting the war is not helping anyone in Israel right now, except Bibi. That’s it.
LM: Thank you so much for sharing your stories and opinions!
Photo: George De Castro Day
Paylaş: