Israelis ‘stand together’ to alleviate starvation in Gaza

For the past 10 months, members of Israel’s Palestinian minority and Israeli Jews who are sympathetic to Palestinians have felt boxed into a corner by the far-right government and the majority over the war in Gaza.

Last week some found a way to help, joining the Jewish-Arab organisation Standing Together to collect food for Palestinians facing bombardment and hunger in Gaza.

Those taking part in the “Campaign to Halt Starvation in Gaza” seemed to be gaining as much relief as they were giving.

The act of loading the parcels on the trucks is simultaneously a way of helping those in need, protesting the war and non-violently boxing back at the far-right government, participants said in interviews as they lifted and taped cartons of tomato paste, sugar and vegetables for a waiting truck.

Most were Palestinian Israelis who yearned to find some way to express solidarity with their fellow Palestinians. They feel coerced into silence about Gaza, facing dismissal from university or work and police action for alleged incitement — in many instances for just identifying with Gazan suffering according to rights lawyers — if they speak out about the death toll in Gaza, which the Hamas-run health ministry claims has reached 40,000.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel on October 7 that killed about 1200 people, mostly civilians. Leaders of the ruling Likud party say the war atmosphere has created a need for tough steps against incitement.

“I feel anger, I feel sadness, I feel frustration, I feel disgust. We want the killing of women and children to stop,” said Nawras Hourani, a student from the Galilee town of Majd al-Krum who travelled four hours to the Negev Bedouin town of Hura to join the Standing Together event.

According Standing Together co-director Rola Daood, the collections, held in Arab towns and communities across the country during the first three weeks of August, have vastly exceeded expectations, with some 200 truckloads of canned foods and other supplies being garnered.

“There’s been a huge campaign to silence us and now people are coming out en masse. This is a demonstration,” she said.

In Hura, even low-income residents dug into their pockets to help Gazans. The collection site was abuzz with hundreds of Palestinian Israelis, mostly young people, volunteering by carting and forklifting packages or just showing support by being there. About a dozen Jewish Standing Together volunteers helped.

For a minority that feels marginalised, especially during wars, there was a palpable buzz of positive energy. But it vied with feelings of sadness at the massive human toll which continued to mount. Last week, news agency reports quoted Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza saying 10 people were killed in an airstrike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City. Israel said it was used as a base by Hamas.

It was a further injection of pain that is usually not expressed publicly. “You can’t speak about this war. You can’t post about this war. Standing Together is the only place you can talk about the war,” explained Hourani, who has travelled cross country to help out at collection sites in Sakhnin, Deir al-Asad, Nazareth, Um al-Fahm, Tira and Rahat.

“Some [Jewish Israelis] ask me ‘why do you care about the people in Gaza?’ I find that disgusting,” she said.

“I’m an Arab Muslim who lives in Israel but I am part of the Palestinian people. This campaign is an opportunity to express myself as a Palestinian. This is the time to help.”

Jewish Standing Together volunteer Julian Zuker, a student who immigrated several years ago from Argentina, termed the food collection “very meaningful and very important. This is really emotional. Bringing food to Gaza is some way of helping people who are in grief”.

For him, it is also a way of reducing the loneliness of opposing a war that has been characterised by general indifference of Israeli Jews towards the plight of Gaza civilians, and polls showing most of the public opposes humanitarian aid to Gaza while Hamas is holding hostages. “Here you see lots of people who want to make a difference and not just sit at home. It’s inspiring,” he said.

A student from Hura, who asked not to be identified, voiced bitterness that the Israeli media and public, in his view, has turned a blind eye to mass killing by their army. Showing pictures on his phone of bloodied infants, he asked: “In which war is this allowed? This is genocide, not defence”.

“We respect the people in Standing Together, but the majority of Jews in Israel support the war,” he said. The IDF says it tries to minimise civilian casualties but that Hamas uses the population as human shields. Embarrassingly for the IDF, an investigation by Haaretz published last week revealed the broad use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in IDF search operations.

Military tactics such as that and air strikes that kill entire families, along with hunger and now the emergence of polio, have had an enormous emotional impact on Israel’s Palestinians. “We feel for them. Stop what you are doing to them and let them live and eat,” said Amani Hamdan, 41, an activist in Standing Together from Tira.

Hamdan said that since the beginning of the war, she has been afraid to go to demonstrations or otherwise express herself publicly, but she felt safer doing so within the framework of Standing Together.

“People are afraid of writing a post or a poem,” she said. “It pains me that in a democratic country you can’t speak. But this is the best way of going about it, it’s best to take action rather than speak,” she said of the campaign.

Standing Together leaders insist they are optimistic the food will get to the needy in Gaza. They are working with a UN body that has secured permission from the IDF, said Suheil Diab, former deputy mayor of Nazareth. They are relying on the UN group to make sure the food doesn’t fall into the hands of Hamas.

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has condemned food collections for Gaza, threatening to strip the citizenship of anyone who participates, according to a local media outlet, News of Beersheba and the Negev.

“The Bedouin population has good and loyal people who fight with us shoulder to shoulder. But there are also some whose first loyalty is to Gaza and these people have to be thrown out of Israel,” he said

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