Lennaart van Oldenborgh reports on opposing Netanyahu’s “Forever War” from the inside.
Every Saturday since early March, growing crowds have filled squares in cities across Israel to protest against what they call ‘the Forever War’ on Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. On April 4th, police violently dispersed up to 3,000 protestors in Habima Square in Tel Aviv, arresting and injuring leaders of one of the main organisations behind these protests, Standing Together, a grassroots movement of Palestinian and Jewish citizens.
The head of its International Department, Nadav Shofet, said: “Our goal is to expand opposition to the Forever War. We know many people feel the war is unjust, and it’s not helping us. Our task is to organise these feelings into effective collective political action.”
This made Shofet and his fellow activists a target for the police on March 28th: “Thousands of people came, so the opposition [to the war] was growing, energy was high.” But soon the police moved in to break it up: “They just pushed forward through the crowd, beating everyone who wasn’t moving fast enough. They were extremely violent, but I think it created the opposite response to what they wanted, because it just re-energised the protest movement.” Indeed, the next week, on April 4th, an even larger protest was again attacked by the police, who continued confronting protestors in the underground carpark when an air raid alert sent everyone down for shelter. Images of the arrest of Alon-Lee Green, national co-director of Standing Together, along with Rula Daoud, went viral on social media and were reprinted in newspapers.
Standing Together was formed in 2015 as a grassroots Arab-Jewish movement to campaign for social justice and full equality for the Palestinians who comprise about 20% of Israel’s citizens. The Hamas attack on October 7th 2023, widened their struggle. They formed solidarity committees in mixed cities and set up hotlines and support groups for Palestinian citizens who suffered ‘revenge attacks’ for the massacre. They were one of the first groups in Israel to call for an immediate ceasefire, and became a leading voice of internal resistance against the genocidal war on Gaza.
Standing Together’s “Humanitarian Guard” physically protected aid trucks bound for Gaza from attacks by settlers. The movement’s own “Aid to Gaza” campaign sent 400 trucks filled with donations, mostly from Palestinian-majority areas. Since the ’12-day war’ on Iran in June 2025, Standing Together has campaigned for public bomb shelters in Palestinian communities, which are often deprived of any shelters or even early warning systems. This was tragically demonstrated when four members of the Khatib family were killed in an Iranian missile strike on their home in Tamra in June 2025. Thirty-two bomb shelters have since been installed by Standing Together, mostly in unrecognised Palestinian-Bedouin villages in the Negev.
Palestinians make up about half the leadership of Standing Together, and about two-fifths of their 7,000-strong membership. The organisation has a relatively young profile, spread across a range of local and student chapters. Its statutes include quorums for Palestinians and women in its leadership bodies, but, according to Shofet, all elections have returned well-balanced results without procedural intervention. As a result, Palestinian voices are prominent in all layers of decision-making.
At the same time, there is recognition that it is far riskier for Palestinians to participate in more visible or confrontational direct actions. While a Jewish member may be arrested and released the next day, a Palestinian member could face prolonged detention, and risk torture or murder in police custody. However, this hasn’t stopped Palestinian members being front and centre of protests in mixed cities like Haifa, taking a leading role in the Humanitarian Guard, and taking part in ‘protective presence’ actions in the occupied West Bank, where activists from Israel help protect Palestinian communities against settler terror.
Standing Together has been one of a number of organisations involved in ‘protective presence’ mobilisations. Shofet said: “Settler terrorism [is] part of a state project, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, expel them from their land and destroy any option of having a future of peace”.
According to Standing Together, this is also part of the ‘Forever War’ designed to keep the current far-right government in power. Shofet: “I think our government is doing everything it can to collapse the ceasefire with Iran, increasing authoritarian laws inside of Israel, making sure that people can’t protest against the government. They’re destroying thousands of lives around the Middle East.” Apart from the Palestinian-led party Hadash-Ta’al, there has been virtually no opposition in official Israeli politics against the war on Iran, or to the narrative that Israel’s security depends on militarism. Even the most left-wing Jewish opposition party, the Democrats, has been supportive throughout. Standing Together argues that only a just peace with the Palestinians will bring security. The movement advocates the confederative model of “two states, one homeland”, developed by the Palestinian-Israeli thinktank A Land For All. Standing Together puts widespread pro-war sentiment amongst Jewish Israelis down to the failure of political opposition, arguing that if peace is not on the political menu, people can’t choose it.
