JVP’s Core Values

Accountability to Palestinian Partners

Our accountability to Palestinian partners is a set of principles, commitments, and structures that serve as the foundation of our work. It is an ongoing process: of deep listening, continual relationship-building, and genuine re-assessment. We commit to building and maintaining close relationships with local, national, and international Palestinian leadership of the movement for Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality, as well as with our partners in the US movement for justice in Palestine. We are accountable to Palestinian-led organizations and coalitions that represent, and are themselves accountable to, Palestinian communities and who share the values of freedom, justice, and equality for all people.

We understand that our voices and actions are needed because the Zionist movement and the state of Israel purport to speak for and act on behalf of all Jews. We maintain accountability by centering this understanding and let it guide our work as anti-Zionist Jews taking responsibility in and for our communities. We work to answer the call of our Palestinian partners to build a mass movement of Jews that can effectively interrupt the U.S. state and institutional support that sustains Israeli settler-colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. Rooted in the understanding that systems of oppression are interconnected, we work to build with allied U.S.-based movements for justice towards liberation in Palestine and everywhere.

In doing this work, we remain open to criticism of our goals and methods, and a willingness to change our actions, tactics, and plans in response. In our daily organizing with our partners, we strive to identify and address unequal power dynamics and remain vigilant in navigating the privileging of Jewish voices. As a Jewish organization in a Palestinian-led movement, we continually ask ourselves if, when, and how our work is needed, and to take action consistent with our principles and structures of accountability.

Commitment to Jewish Communities

We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve. We are fighting for a thriving Judaism and Jewish communities, for a multiplicity of Jewish cultures and for the future of the Jewish people.

We gain strength from the long lineage of Jewish freedom fighters. Behind us are Salonican socialists, Warsaw Ghetto fighters, Israeli Black Panthers, labor organizers, Civil Rights veterans and many more ancestors who worked tirelessly for liberation – of Jews and all people.

We know our communities are under threat. We commit to dismantling antisemitism in the most effective way possible: as part of our struggle against all forms of oppression and bigotry. Our struggles must be united to succeed and we intend on succeeding.

We refuse to see the safety of our communities threatened so the Israeli government can continue to evade accountability for perpetrating atrocities against Palestinians. There is no real freedom on stolen land, no real safety with a boot on the neck of your neighbor. We fight for a different future for Israelis and all of us. We’re fighting for true safety and will accept nothing less.

Far too often, our families and our communities distance themselves from us over our support for Palestinian freedom. Jewish legacy institutions make supporting Zionism the price of entry. Therefore, we commit to stewarding a political home where we tend to the pain of estrangement, build vibrant communities, and reclaim our histories and traditions.

If you aren’t yet with us, but you are heartbroken or confused, questioning or searching for a justice-centered Jewish home, come as you are. We have a sacred offering and an urgent invitation for you: Come build new kinds of belonging with us. Zionism is a false and failed solution to our safety. Let’s grieve together. Let’s name our fears but not freeze. Let’s choose another path. Let’s win real safety and create new kinships along the way – kinships that will help us weather the storms ahead and will outlive supremacy in all its forms. Join us. We need you with us.

Racial Justice & Collective Liberation

Our commitment to racial justice is a core praxis in our work, by which we mean an ongoing cycle of action and reflection within which we are striving to dismantle racism–both outside and within the organization–while also working to grow a liberatory culture for our organizing.

We understand that racism shapes everything in the US, Israel and beyond. Racism dictates who lives and dies, who has the resources they need to survive, who has the power to govern, who faces the most violence, who has the freedom to stay in or move from their homes, whose stories are told and believed.  As a diverse, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of Jews we also understand that white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, colonialism, militarism, and capitalism are intertwined at the roots, and that we can’t fully address any of them without addressing all of them. Our commitment to Palestinian liberation is fundamentally a commitment to fight against racism and for a world where everyone lives with dignity, power, love, community, beauty, and justice.

For us to win, we must be a political home that provides connection, wholeness and belonging to all Jews who want to fight for Palestinian liberation. We are committed to building an organizing home where Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, SWANA/Mizrahi, and Sephardi members feel welcome, home, and whole. Where white Jews feel supported to build their anti-racist praxis and bring their full selves. Where all of our work embodies the multiplicity of Jewish histories, lineages, stories, and traditions. Where each of us can name and fight out of our own specific stakes in building Jewish futures beyond nationalism, white supremacy and Zionism.

This work requires us to actively combat discrimination, marginalization, erasure and tokenization–in our workplace, our organizing, and our partnerships. We do this work best when we cultivate cultures of care and collaboration rather than critique and ideological purity. Our practices include listening deeply across lines of difference, acknowledging dynamics of power, taking risks to reach for one another, and willingness always to work toward repair.