How the Jewish Left can lean into its privilege: Why I am running in the WZO elections and supporting the Joint Arab List
One night in the summer of 2011 I sat in a backyard in the West Bank village of Bil’in, drinking coffee with Mohammed Khatib, one of the leaders of the village’s struggle against the wall. As we sipped our thimble-sized coffees, he said something I have never been able to forget.
“You are always welcome here — ahalan wa-sahalan,” he said. “I appreciate you coming to protest with us. But I hope that you are also doing this work back home, in Israel and the United States, with the Jewish communities. You have real work to do there — it is your people who need to hear your voice and know that you believe in equality and justice for us.”
I hadn’t been a particularly good frontline activist. I scare easily. I have sensitive skin. I have a low tolerance for pain. Stun grenades and tear gas were not things I ever got used to. So, Mohammed’s words came as a relief. He was right, I knew. My role needed to be different. I was in possession of something that he did not have: the privilege of being able to walk in spaces he could not enter, speak to people who might not listen to him.
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I grew up knowing that I was left wing, that I was a “red-diaper baby.” My dad’s side were Bundist non-Zionists and my mom’s side were Labor Zionist pioneers, members of Kibbutz Hazorea. That I was a leftist was one of the first things I knew about myself and I have worn it proudly my whole life. It is this legacy that led me to do two things that some might find oddly paired — I am running for the World Zionist Congress elections on the progressive Hatikvah slate, and I am personally supporting the Arab Joint List in the Israeli Knesset.
When I moved to Israel, back in the early 2000s (for love), I quickly threw myself into solidarity activism and human rights work. I went to protests in the West Bank villages of Bil’in, Nabi Saleh, and others. But when, after a few years of attending protests, Mohammed reminded me that I could use my privilege to go inside the structures of power, I decided he was right, and that was what I should be doing. From the inside, I could insist on an end to the occupation and a commitment to the principles of equality and democracy. The decision brought with it a sense of mission. That mission became a defining thread of the last ten years of my life.
This is why I am both running for the World Zionist Congress elections on the Hatikvah slate and why I am personally supportive of the Joint Arab List in Israeli politics. I view these two systems — one Jewish-only, one not — as linked. In both, I, as a Jew, am offered the privilege to be on the inside and have power to shift a very unequal power dynamic.
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It is true that the World Zionist Organization is an amorphous, archaic body. It was founded by Theodor Herzl himself in Basel in 1897 at the first ever World Zionist Congress to promote Zionism as the movement that would advocate for a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Today, it is an entity that offers Jews, and only Jews, decision-making power to allocate resources in the State of Israel and to Jewish communities around the world through a group of organizations called the “National institutions.”
The Jews who are offered a seat at this table are — with the exception of a group of Israeli expats — not citizens of the state. And Palestinians, millions of whom are citizens of that same state, and millions of others who are subjects of a military government run by that state, are offered no voice whatsoever.
Do I think a system that offers non-citizens and non-residents decision-making power while residents and citizens have none is wrong? I do. But the system still exists.
And it has been embraced by the pro-settlement, ultra-nationalist Jewish right, and manipulated to make Israel a more unequal and unjust place.
What if Jews from around the world had insisted, back in 1948, that all future State-affiliated organizations — like the Jewish National Fund, founded to purchase land in mandatory Palestine for Jewish settlement — must adhere to principles of equality enshrined in its Declaration of Independence? What if, instead of expansionism, settlement, and land theft, those organizations had demanded that the state they were building recognize the human rights of all under its control?
This is hard to imagine given where these institutions are today. The JNF frequently violates the human rights of Palestinians by evicting them from their homes to move settlers in and enabling land theft across East Jerusalem and the West Bank. On the left, we have so feared complicity in such actions that we have ceded the seats at the table. Instead of walking into the halls of the WZO and using the power we have to make sure that funds didn’t cross the green line, we handed the keys of power to the Jewish right.
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About a year ago, before the first round of Israeli national elections, Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar released a music video to persuade undecided Arab voters in Israel to turn out on election day. It was an effort to combat the voices in Palestinian society arguing for a boycott of Israel’s elections. In the video, he stands in a boxing ring across from a double of himself, and debates — in rapid-fire Arabic — the pros and cons of casting a ballot as a Palestinian citizen in Israel.
One Tamer is cynical. “It’s our land, their state,” he says, “the Knesset’s not for me — the majority is racist, we’ve lost.” But second Tamer won’t have it: “Do me a favor, put the laziness aside, the pessimism aside — at the moment there is a threat to us and our children — I wanted to boycott but I don’t want to stay outside…” And eventually that Tamer wins. So, when it comes to the WZC elections — and Israeli elections — that Libby should win too.
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Israel’s political arena is unlike the WZO in that it is not a Jewish-only space. There, “leaning in” does not mean using privilege to speak for those who cannot, it means showing up in support of those voices speaking up for a better, more equal future for all. And in this last Israeli election, that has meant supporting Arab-Israeli leadership.
The fundamental shift in power dynamics that I want to see in Israel is not only a shift from right to left in any traditional sense, but a shift in the way Israelis — on all sides of the political spectrum — speak and feel and imagine full equality for all citizens. They must be able to imagine a world — as I do — where Ayman Odeh, the head of the Arab Joint List could be Prime Minister. A world that does not serve one segment of society, or lift up Jewish citizens at the expense of Arab citizens, but one that envisions Israel as a place where everyone has equal rights and equal opportunity.
In the last weeks before Election Day, the Joint List launched a campaign in Russian, Yiddish, Amharic as well as English and Hebrew. In Yiddish they touted their opposition to the mandatory draft, appealing to ultra-Orthodox voters. In Amharic, they reiterated their opposition to police brutality, telling Israelis of Ethiopian decent that they stood with them. Through this campaign, the Joint List was saying to Israelis: we want a future that is better for all of us. The Joint List was the only party having a conversation about fighting for true civic equality — and it made me excited to support Palestinian leaders in that fight.
Over drinks in Jaffa a few months ago, Tamer mentioned to me that originally his video was meant to have three Tamers in the ring: one who sought change from inside the system, the one pushing to boycott the elections and a third, complacent Tamer — lazy and disenchanted. In the process of making the video, that third Tamer was cut.
In truth, that third Tamer was never an option — not for him and not for me. I see no path forward without making explicit choices about power and privilege, and their impact on the future. Working with the privilege you have in a problematic system when possible is as important as being out in the streets and villages protesting. And as long as my Palestinian comrades are willing to get in the ring and fight for equality, so am I.
