A message from JVP Director Stefanie Fox.

_{Photo: JVP members gather for Tashlich in Detroit, Michigan (Andrew Mullin)}

I keep reminding myself that the overwhelm we feel is by design. 

During his first weeks in office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank. He issued a slew of executive orders aiming to dismantle the fundamental rights of trans people. He expanded ICE’s power and ramped up raids across the country, threatening immigrant communities. He began trying to implement his plans to deport non-citizen student activists because they stand up for Palestinian freedom. 

The attacks on our communities and our movements are designed to swamp us: to make us feel isolated, panicked and powerless. Fascist strongmen — from the U.S. to Israel — want us to feel defeated immediately so that we give up and don’t fight back. 

So our first task is this: We must refuse to cede one inch before we’ve lost it. 

Revolutionary Jewish transgender writer and activist Leslie Feinberg said it clearly: “Surrender is unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival.”

Refusing to be erased

While Trump was proudly announcing his plans to ethnically cleanse and “own” Gaza last week, Israeli troops were doing the same in the Occupied West Bank: bombing and laying siege to Palestinian communities. Since January, the Israeli military has killed at least 70 Palestinians and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

This is the longstanding blueprint of Zionism: Maximum land, minimum Palestinians. But in Gaza, and throughout the Occupied West Bank, and around the world, Palestinians are extremely clear: Palestine is not for sale. Palestinians in Gaza are sweeping the rubble out of the homes that Israel has destroyed with U.S. bombs. In Masafer Yatta, Palestinians start rebuilding after every pogrom, where Jewish supremacist settlers work hand-in-glove with the Israeli military to attack them, burn down their homes, and destroy essential infrastructure. 

No bulldozer can erase the enduring presence of Palestinians on their own land. Amid the death and the devastation, every sprig of life is a powerful symbol of Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness. Palestinians belong to Palestine. 

Our solidarity must be just as tenacious.

Struggle starts right here

As Jews, we have many lineages to draw from to find our resolve. I connect to the land of my ancestors in Eastern Europe, and the tradition there of the Jewish socialist anti-Zionist labor bund. Bundists lived a deep commitment to resistance, to struggle, to staying put, to fighting for justice, equality, and freedom alongside their neighbors. They encapsulated this commitment in the yiddish term doikayt, or “hereness.”  

In the time of the Bund, Tsarist Russia waged a vicious campaign to kill and displace Jewish communities. Yet the Bund rejected Zionism because many of them understood that Palestine was a land with a people, and that Palestinians had a right to their land. By the same token, they rejected Zionism because they believed that Jews had the right to stay right where they were. They believed that where you live is where you deserve safety, freedom and belonging — and where you must fight for a better future. 

Being rooted in place and fighting from there might sound like a small view of the world, but for Bundists in the Pale of the Settlement — as for Palestinians staying put in Gaza and Masafer Yatta — the struggle for justice against the forces of ethno-nationalism, colonialism, and fascism in one place strengthens those struggles everywhere. 

In the U.S. today, fighting for justice where we are requires us to understand that U.S. support of Israeli apartheid and genocide has helped lay the groundwork for this authoritarian rise at home. 

As Noura Erakat wrote in the Boston Review last week:

“For fifteen months, Palestinians and their allies protested relentlessly and, at times, heroically, not only to stop a genocide but to salvage and preserve core humanitarian principles governing life within the United States, insisting that genocide is suicide. Surviving this next chapter demands that we see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us too.” 

The U.S. has shredded international law by providing the Israeli government with unconditional funding to commit a live-streamed genocide and shielding it from any form of accountability. This created the perfect conditions for an authoritarian like Trump to dismantle everyone’s rights and democracy itself here at home, with complete impunity. 

Now, the blatant viciousness of the far-Right in both countries is leaving their alliance ripe for mass opposition. JVP has a vital role to play at this moment. The terrain for our organizing has shifted significantly, but the crux of our work remains the same: Building a mass base of U.S.-based Jews organizing for an end to U.S. support of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. 

Our work has never been more critical — and never more connected to the fights for justice and freedom here at home. We are one essential part of the winning majority coalition needed to fight for democracy, freedom, justice and equality, from the U.S. to Palestine.  

So how are we going to do that, in this deeply overwhelming moment?

1. Gathering our people

Fascists gain power when they isolate us and make us feel completely alone. The answer is to get organized. Leadership comes from regular people, finding each other, and finding strength to take action, one by one. 

Who do you know? Invite them in — even if they’re late to the party. We are going to radically welcome new people, and we’re going to have to build across differences. That means being comfortable with being wrong, trying new ideas, asking questions, being vulnerable, and taking risks. That means staying in relationship with folks with whom we disagree. JVP members are organizing in over a hundred local communities, in identity-based networks, and in our virtual community at daily online Power Half Hours. Find your place and your people in this movement. And bring your cousins.

2. Committing to solidarity: It’s all of us or none

MAGA will seek to divide and conquer us, but there is no one we are willing to sacrifice. It is hands off Gaza, Jenin, and Masafer Yatta. Hands off trans kids, immigrants, social safety nets and our right to tell the truth. Hands off student protestors, our reproductive rights, and our democracy. We will defend and protect one another. It’s not ‘me or you’, it’s ‘They are going to have to come through me to get to you.’ 

JVP has a critical role to play in ensuring that our progressive coalitions are strong. We refuse to let anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism — real and weaponized — carve division. We will keep defeating flawed and dangerous definitions of antisemitism, introduced to shield the Israeli government from accountability. We will continue to push schools, news agencies, policy makers, and progressive organizations to stop working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which uses the banner of Jewish safety to protect right-wing antisemites and defend Israeli apartheid and genocide. 

We will continue to protect our communities against the real antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism and white supremacy of the MAGA forces coming after all of us. We will keep collaborating with our partners at PARCEO, offering educational resources that restore a clear understanding of antisemitism and how to fight it in a framework of collective liberation. If we’re successful, the MAGA forces and right-wing Zionist organizations that pretend to care about Jewish safety will be supplanted by our broad front of Jews and allies that understand the fight against white supremacy and antisemitism is inextricably linked with the struggle for Palestinian freedom. 

In this time, each of our movements will not have the capacity to win alone. We will need to join forces in a new way. Together, we will find the fissures in the power structure and we will run cross-movement campaigns that pry open these cracks, while building a wider base of people who are invested in each others’ freedom.

3. Taking on the billionaires

Everyday Americans are struggling to pay their bills while billionaires stage a coup. Trump claims he will “own” Gaza, and weapons manufacturers rake in record profit from the genocide. It’s clearer than ever that the farthest right forces in both Israel and the U.S. are accelerating their supremacist, violent agendas through shared strategy, profit, and funding. 

That’s why we’re organizing to expose the defense contractors making billions off of U.S. support for genocide. We shut down business as usual on Wall Street last October, and we’ll continue calling out the influence of weapons manufacturers over U.S. foreign policy, and pushing for divestment from these corporations at universities and in cities across the country.  

We’re also demanding that our state and local governments divest from Israel Bonds: unrestricted loans to the Israeli government and military that take money right out of our local communities to fund the oppression of Palestinians. There are now at least 20 Break the Bonds campaigns across the country. We’re building off of the wins achieved by community campaigners over the last year, as more and more municipalities across the country pledge not to reinvest in Israel Bonds, and as major institutions like the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church — which together hold tens of billions in investments — vote to divest, too.

Economic pressure campaigns have shifted seemingly immovable political conditions time and again — from Apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South — and now is the time to escalate these campaigns.

4. Ending U.S. weapons to Israel

JVP’s sibling organization, JVP Action, is ensuring that Palestinian rights are a core part of the progressive, anti-Trump agenda in Congress. That means keeping up the pressure on Congress to stop arming and funding the Israeli military. 

The U.S. government has been unconditionally funding the Israeli military for decades, and while the path to ending complicity is long, our movements cannot and will not stop using our power to force our elected officials to end these deadly policies. 

The Palestine solidarity movement is also on the frontlines of the fight to defend our fundamental rights and freedoms. The Trump administration has clearly laid out their plans to dismantle democracy and civil society by sharpening their repressive tools on the groups organizing for an end to the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.  

We will do everything we can to defeat and defy this agenda, and turn the attacks into an opportunity to bring more people into the fight for Palestinian rights and freedom.

5. Refusing to comply

The state will demand compliance and punish those who refuse. We must collectively refuse to comply with authoritarian demands, and do so en masse. As anti-Zionist Jews, we know well that there is no cost for speaking out as terrible as complicity with fascism, ethno-nationalism, racism, and genocide.  

They will try to make us shrink or surrender. Instead, we will get bolder every day. Repression’s silencing effect can spread fast, but courage is also contagious. When your voice rises, mine does too. The last 16 months have been utterly excruciating, and this next era will only deepen the interlocking crises before us. We may not feel ready for this fight, but I know we are. Because I know we will meet this moment with conviction, persistence, and love.

Like the Bundists and so many others before us, we’ll struggle with and for each other, and for our vision of a world where all people — from the U.S. to Palestine — are free and equal and thriving. There’s nowhere else to be but right here, finding our courage together.

Tell Congress: Protect students’ freedom of speech.

Congress is once again pushing a dangerous bill aiming to silence and censor students and faculty who support Palestinian rights. 

The so-called “Anti-semitism Awareness Act” would codify the controversial and discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism in order to more easily attack those on college campuses that speak out for Palestinian freedom. 

Tell Congress: End U.S. weapons to Israel.

The Trump administration is picking up where the Biden administration left off: moving to authorize another billion-dollar weapons shipment to the genocidal Israeli government. 

Use this tool provided by our sister organization, JVP Action, to email your members of Congress and demand an end to U.S. military funding to Israel.

Tell University of California: Take action to protect your students.

On January 29, Trump signed a blatantly authoritarian Executive Order that lays the groundwork for a wave of deportations of non-citizen student activists, in retaliation for exercising their right to freedom of speech, under the guise of “fighting antisemitism.”

As the largest public university system in the U.S., the UC administration has the opportunity to set a precedent for protecting students nationwide.

Email University of California regents right now to demand that they commit to taking concrete action to protect students and free speech on their campus.

What we’re reading: ‘Fertile ground’ for fascism.

Noura Erakat writes for Boston Review about how U.S. support for Israel’s genocide is laying the groundwork for authoritarianism here in the U.S.

What we’re reading: ‘The war on memory’

Writer Molly Crabapple explores the history of the Jewish socialist anti-Zionist labor bund and its opposition to Zionism.

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