Fighting Side by Side in Israel-Palestine
There is a long and noble history of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians resisting Israel’s crimes together.
Codirectors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land. (Hi Gloss Entertainment, CPH:DOX)
When the Palestinian-Israeli coproduction No Other Land won the Academy Award for best documentary feature film in early March, jubilation was palpable. It brought to global attention yet again Israel’s crimes as occupier and violator of Palestinian rights and showed how progressives from across the national divide collaborate to achieve common objectives.
This week, this reality was brought again into sharp relief with the assault and arrest of one of the film’s directors, Hamdan Ballal, after Israeli settlers attacked his community.
No Other Land follows the struggle of the people of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of nineteen Palestinian communities in the south of the occupied West Bank. It chronicles their ongoing fight against Israel’s attempts to dispossess and displace them through military decrees, the repeated demolition of homes and community structures, settler violence, destruction and deprivation of access to their resources, and court rulings. It also documents community struggles between 2019–2023, making use of home videos, interviews, and archival footage to tell the story of the people of Masafer Yatta’s decades-long fight for their homes, land, and lives, while also shedding light on the Israeli activists who joined and documented that struggle.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli officials, journalists, public figures, and others launched an assault on the film, frequently while stating that they have not seen it nor do they intend to. But counterintuitively, No Other Land was also attacked by some participants in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
While many lauded its role in exposing Israeli colonial practices and centering Palestinians’ steadfastness, others argued it reproduced colonial dynamics in which Palestinians required Israeli permission to narrate their story. The debate brought into focus the whole question of cross-national activism for Palestinian justice, and “co-resistance,” or joint struggle, against Israeli occupation and Jewish supremacy.
Rather than relitigating the definition of normalization or summarizing the debate, we focus here on the practice of co-resistance, its viability, and historic meanings in Israel-Palestine by examining several key historical examples of Jewish-Palestinian co-resistance from the period of British rule until the early 2000s. This is by no means an exhaustive list of such struggles. But it illuminates the historical dynamics, challenges, and limitations of co-resistance.
These examples show that co-resistance was historically practiced in a wide range of ways in the region, from political parties to direct action, depending on the particular circumstances. What unites these instances is the principle of shared and active opposition to the colonial order, first under the British and subsequently under Israeli rule.
Co-resistance focuses on protecting Palestinian existence on the land, exposing Israeli colonial crimes, and making inroads within the Jewish community to oppose Israeli repressive mechanisms, pushing Jewish activists to use their structurally privileged position in the region to aid Palestinian rights and liberation. It is of particular value in the context of Palestine/Israel because of the settler colonial context in the land. As multiple Palestinian scholars and activists have noted, the way Zionist settler colonialism developed in Palestine/Israel renders the expulsion of the settler population neither practical nor moral. Co-resistance offers a politically sound strategy toward substantive decolonization, along with independent struggle within the respective communities.
In the long run, through co-resistance, a growing number among the settler population can embrace a decolonial future in the land, expanding the fissures within Israeli society and providing fertile ground for international mobilization to end Israeli occupation and injustice.
Side by Side
Since the British Mandate period, Jews and Palestinians have repeatedly joined forces in resisting colonial structures. In the 1920s, Palestinian Arabs and Jewish immigrants joined forces in the Palestine Communist Party (PKP). The party’s history is far from an ideal for co-resistance. Yet the Communist experience kept the possibility of imagining a democratic, anti-colonial alternative alive.
The party was unevenly reconstituted as a single party — which Jewish leaders dominated — the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI), in the wake of the Nakba in 1948. Despite the unequal structure within the party, MAKI provided the main space for the struggle of Palestinians who became citizens of Israel to remain in their homeland in subsequent decades, when Israel imposed a military rule on Palestinian citizens. Acts of solidarity and resistance led or supported by MAKI members radicalized a core of Jewish activists to continue anti-colonial struggles over the following decades.
In the early 1960s, Israeli authorities’ plans to establish a new Jewish town, later dubbed Carmiel, in the Palestinian-majority area of the Shaghur galvanized resistance among a broad coalition. It also introduced a new generation of Israeli-Jewish activists who worked alongside the Shaghur’s Palestinian residents. The latter’s role in the struggle attracted considerable media attention in the Israeli press and helped generate support for the Shaghur residents among a then nascent international antiwar and nonproliferation movement.
The 1970s and ’80s witnessed another wave of joint activism. Founded in 1974, the student movement CAMPUS (the Hebrew acronym for Groups for Social and Political Student Involvement) brought together Palestinian and Jewish students in Israeli universities. The movement joined Palestinian protests against the occupation. Another organization, the Committee for Solidarity with Birzeit, was founded in 1981 as an Israeli group in solidarity with the Palestinian struggles at Birzeit University, then a hub of the Palestinian left’s anti-occupation struggles.
The movement, “Down with the Occupation,” was a continuation of the Committee for Solidarity. With the start of the Palestinian Intifada in 1987, its members vocally expressed solidarity with the uprising. These groups worked on using their privileged status as Israelis to defend Palestinians, bring Palestinian opposition voices to Israelis, and shape Israeli public opinion.
After Jewish Supremacy
The Oslo years were mostly a retreat from co-resistance and saw the emergence of dialogue groups, which consisted of meetings between Israelis and Palestinians mostly devoid of a clear political project and glossed over the deepening occupation, segregation, and inequality in the region. Palestinian critics rightly called out these dialogue groups and the cottage industry of programs, which uncritically espoused co-existence without challenging the status quo and normalized the Israeli state’s colonial practices. The collapse of the Oslo process with the beginning of the Second Intifada led to a reexamination of previous modes of resistance and a clearer concept of what joint struggle, or co-resistance, entails.
In 2001, Palestinian and Israeli activists established Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. Part of Ta’ayush’s innovation was that the movement explicitly framed its struggle as a decolonial struggle in a settler colonial setting by developing a model that could challenge the very structures governing Palestinians’ lives.
This was, in part, a response to the shortcomings of previous co-resistance and coexistence endeavors. Ta’ayush’s founders understood these earlier efforts as reproducing existing power disparities between the two communities, as a result prioritizing Jewish perspectives and concerns. Palestinian communities shaped and led the movement’s direct action practices, while Israeli Jews were called to use their privilege to protect Palestinian communities. This formula sought to bring the colonial reality into focus while also resisting it.
Ta’ayush was consolidated at a dire moment: the Israeli assault on and reoccupation of the West Bank’s urban centers, in which Israeli forces laid siege to cities, laid waste to entire neighborhoods, and deprived Palestinian communities of basic needs such as food, water, and security. As the group sought to respond to these needs, it worked to develop a political project against occupation and for social justice.
It pursued the widest possible platform to allow greater participation by Israelis, while adhering to a clear political line: Ta’ayush defined its work not as humanitarian action but as shedding light on Israeli crimes and presented an alternative future based on living together, through justice and equality.
Ta’ayush’s approach to co-resistance played an important role in developing the forms of joint struggle which Masafer Yatta’s local communities continue to lead in their now over two-decades-long struggle against ethnic cleansing.
Following Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, this struggle has intensified. Increasing attacks by Israeli settlers backed by the police and army have led to the displacement of two local communities in Masafer Yatta out of a total of twenty West Bank communities, which state and settler violence have displaced since then. Throughout, co-resistance has retained an important role in Masafer Yatta’s strategies of sumud (“steadfastness”). During this period, No Other Land documents Masafer Yatta’s residents’ ongoing resistance to these attacks, with the support of Israeli activists.
No Other Land demonstrates that in Masafer Yatta, as elsewhere, co-resistance has been a crucial way to carry out anti-occupation struggle and envision a society after Jewish supremacy. Running through its history is a common thread: the refusal to accept the separatist logic of colonialism, while working to upend the hierarchies it imposes.