Beinart is a junior in high school. He lives in New York City. Bittar is an artist, educator, writer and California organizer for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. She lives in North Park.
The media often portrays Jews and Arabs as adversaries, especially when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We think the opposite is true given our growing and influential work together. From different life experiences, Arab and Jewish Americans are building a movement to ensure that everyone in Israel and Palestine is safe, equal and free.
At his family’s Orthodox synagogue, Ezra helps run a children’s program. He keeps kosher and loves eating his mother’s home-made challah bread every Friday night. His community sees Israel as a second home, a country welcoming Jews to return to their ancestral land. Many believe Jews will never be entirely safe anywhere but in Israel. His friends have exclaimed, “Israel’s the only Jewish country. Don’t we deserve one country of our own?” Ezra loves his community and understands where these attitudes come from, but there’s another side to the story young Jews rarely hear.
Many young Jewish Americans have never heard Palestinians talk about their experiences. That’s why Ezra organized a group of students to listen to Palestinians via Zoom, which led to him later meeting Doris. We heard from Issa Amro, a Palestinian nonviolent activist who opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Amahl Bishara, an anthropologist who studies U.S. media’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Amro told the group that when he was a teenager he wanted to be an engineer but couldn’t finish his studies because Israel’s occupation made it too difficult. Afterwards, one of the participants asked him how they can combat anti-Palestinian bigotry in their community.
Last summer, Ezra interned at the Jerusalem Fund’s Palestine Center in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit s Palestinian charities and creates educational programming for Palestinian rights. The experience made him realize how fortunate he is to visit Israel and Palestine as often as he likes and how extremely difficult the same journey is for Palestinians, even if they grew up there or if their families live there.
Many Jews assume that Palestinians are antisemitic, but the people at the Palestine Center were kind and welcoming even though Ezra was the only Jewish person working there. It made him realize how much Palestinians are dehumanized, not just in the Jewish American community, but in the United States as a whole.
Doris is an Arab American interdisciplinary artist and a mother of two young men. She met her husband, who is Jewish, in a New York suburban high school. Together, they migrated to California and eventually organized four Jewish-Palestinian dialogue groups and co-facilitated two of them for nearly seven years. The groups became friends and when the dialogues ended, other t projects began. To this day, they continue to share, strategize and socialize together. She has been actively learning about Palestine since she was young, though not as young as Ezra. Her hope is that a humane resolution will occur in her lifetime. If not, then in Ezra’s and her children’s lifetimes.
Our stories may seem unusual, but maybe that’s because the media often ignores positive stories like ours and instead covers the people in our communities who enjoy the most power — whether it’s the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or dictatorial Arab regimes. How many people know that in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries voters in some of America’s most heavily Arab American communities overwhelmingly favored a progressive Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders? Or that nearly twice as many American Jews under the age of 30 rated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership as fair or poor as opposed to excellent or good last year? Writing consistently about factual events is vital. The New York Times recently wrote a story about how West Bank Palestinians are forced to live in caves after home destructions.
Not everyone wants Arabs and Jews to build coalitions to champion democracy and equal rights. This summer, AIPAC spent millions of dollars to unseat targeted Rep. Andy Levin, D-Michigan, a former synagogue president, who is friends with Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan. The Trump istration’s problematic if not absurd idea of Arab-Jewish cooperation was presented in the Abraham Accords in 2020. In brief, the accords allow the Israeli government to continue its attacks on Palestinians, and other Arab dictatorships like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to continue oppressing their people — while the United States sells all of them weapons!
Treating Palestinians equally and guarding their safety is the best way to ensure that Israeli Jews remain free, safe and accepted across the region. What most Arab and Jewish Americans realize is that our future rests on the U.S. being a country based on equality under the law, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity. We fight for that in the entire Middle East as well.
We’re not as unusual as you might think. Across the United States, Arabs and Jews cherish the same principles. From our different life journeys, we believe that the freedom of Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis and Jews is inextricably interconnected.
