As the mass solidarity movement against apartheid Israel’s genocide becomes more mainstream in the West, Israeli Zionist “grassroots” groups are making considerable attempts to co-opt the movement and steer it away from the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people as stipulated in international law and from holding Israel accountable for its unspeakable crimes.
Last year, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the BDS movement, called on people, organizations, and unions of conscience not to engage with a Zionist Israeli organization, Standing Together, particularly because of its insidious normalization and whitewashing of Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip.
Since then, over a dozen “Friends of Standing Together” and other affinity groups have popped up in Europe, Canada, and the US –– necessitating a reiteration of PACBI’s call to boycott Standing Together. In addition to fundraising for the main Israeli Standing Together organization, these Zionist groups organize around Standing Together’s harmful agenda, actively striving to push Palestine solidarity groups, union organizers, and government officials away from the two basic solidarity demands on which a Palestinian consensus has existed for at least two decades:
- Recognition of the comprehensive rights of the Indigenous people of Palestine as stipulated in international law—at the very least, an end to occupation and apartheid and the right of refugees to return and receive reparations; and
- Ending all forms of state, corporate, and institutional complicity with Israel’s 77-year-old regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and now genocide.
To be clear, the BDS Movement was founded on anti-racist principles and welcomes all conscientious people, including those struggling for racial, economic, indigenous, climate, social and gender justice, as well as principled anti-Zionist Jewish-Israelis who affirm the full rights of the Palestinian people under international law. One example is Boycott from Within, a group of anti-colonial Israelis which formed in response to the BDS call.
Standing Together is no such group, as the detailed research below affirms. Its feel-good common ground messaging, leftist posturing, and claim to represent “both sides” may seem seductive to some in the West. Yet a closer examination of its dishonest principles, its complicit Zionist partners, its leadership’s anti-Palestinian racist rhetoric, and its aggressive attempts to undermine meaningful solidarity with Palestinian liberation in the West reveal a dangerous propaganda operation.
Regardless of the intentions of some of its individual members, Standing Together ultimately serves to shield Israel from accountability and deter or undermine meaningful solidarity efforts to end complicity with Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, military occupation and now genocide against the Indigenous Palestinian people. Furthermore, the group cynically tokenizes Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to exploit Western identity politics, and it builds on the ultimately racist urge to platform Palestinians only so long as they have Israeli co-sponsorship or to favor “good Israelis” over any Palestinian voice at all.
PACBI reiterates the call to boycott Standing Together and its affinity groups.
A False Symmetry
Reducing Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians to “the occupation,” meaning of Gaza and the West Bank, Standing Together deceptively tries to shift attention to “hatred between Israelis and Palestinians” as a primary focus. This attempts to turn the spotlight away from the increasingly exposed Israeli regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against all Palestinians, including its denial of Palestinian refugees’ rights. Even B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization, in 2021 recognized Israeli apartheid in a report titled, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”
Standing Together’s “Theory of Change” is that “peace” can be achieved mainly through “open minds… and hearts filled with compassion and empathy” — rather than through abolishing the pillars of structural oppression based on justice, freedom, equality and adherence to international law. Making a false symmetry between the colonized and the colonizer and failing to acknowledge fundamental Palestinian rights, as Standing Together does, are not only dishonest and unethical, but also normalize oppression.
Standing Together is a relatively sophisticated upgrade on failed Israeli normalization initiatives of the past that have attempted to make Israel, a settler-colonial apartheid state built on the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians, seem normal, albeit with some problems. Similar normalization attempts were made and utterly discredited during the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa. A post from UK Friends of Standing Together’s X account, for instance, is one of many that demonstrate this dishonesty. It claims that there can be no “freedom” without “acknowledgement” of both “opposing narratives of 1948” — equating the Nakba, the mass ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous Palestinian people, with a cynical “Israeli Independence Day” – celebrating the establishment of the Zionist settler-colony. Another post offers a visual representation of the group’s both-sidesism, with homophobic undertones.
While Standing Together pays lip-service to ending “the occupation” and “war,” it mainly blames the current “far-right government” or its leaders, as exceptional figures in an otherwise normal, if not noble state. This deliberately obscures the reality of the systemic and foundational features of Israel’s decades-old settler colonial apartheid since 1948. For example, in early 2025, the group launched a petition titled “Saving the Abductees, Refusing the War,” which calls on the Israeli public to “refuse to cooperate with Netanyahu and Ben Gvir's war,” with a disclaimer excluding the Israeli soldiers directly perpetrating the genocide: “It is important for us to emphasize—the call is not to the soldiers.”
Rejection of International Law
Despite its alleged focus on Israeli society, Standing Together has yet to officially name and commit to ending Israel’s genocide against the people in Gaza and Israel’s crime against humanity of apartheid, both of which have been well-established by United Nations human rights experts, Amnesty International, and many international law scholars, including world authorities on the study of the Holocaust and genocide and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, among others.
Crucially, the group also refuses to recognize the full rights of the Palestinian people under international law—chiefly the right of refugees to return, the most important of all as it pertains to the absolute majority of Palestinians. This right, enshrined in customary international and human rights law, has been repeatedly affirmed by the absolute majority in the UN General Assembly.
Standing Together’s “theory of change” further dismisses “human rights rhetoric” and “abstract principles of justice” as “polarizing,” “arrogant,” and “moralizing,” even arguing that international law is “elitist.” This chimes well with the Israeli settler-colonial modus operandi of dismissing international law as “irrelevant.”
Complicit Funders & Partnerships
Standing Together and its affiliates have routinely collaborated with racist anti-Palestinian organizations in the West, including Israel lobby groups, that are irrefutably complicit in funding, whitewashing, and/or advocating for Israel’s crimes.
In the US, Standing Together co-sponsored an “Arab-Jewish leadership program” with the Charleston branch of the Jewish Federation, an Israel lobby group, and a militant organization that runs Mechinat Rabin, one of Israel’s many “pre-army” programs.
In the UK, Standing Together has collaborated with prominent pro-Israel lobby group BICOM, which featured the organization in its in-house magazine Fathom Journal. Standing Together was also endorsed by the Jewish Labour Movement, a pro-Israel lobby faction of the UK Labour Party and member of the World Zionist Organization, which has been instrumental in the repression of Palestinian solidarity in the UK. It has even lobbied the British government to support the International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, coordinated by the anti-Palestinian Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), which funds normalization projects and whose endorsers are predominantly Zionist organisations. The US Congress adopted a version of this fund in 2020 with support from leading Israel lobby groups like AIPAC. The US iteration includes a clause that conditions funding on a commitment not to submit evidence of Israel’s crimes to the International Criminal Court and allows for Israeli settlers with factories on illegally occupied Palestinian land to receive funding as “peace initiatives” if they hire Palestinians.
A Pattern of Anti-Palestinian Racism
Several members of Standing Together’s leadership have expressed racist anti-Palestinian views and repeated propaganda justifying Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In a post on X, for example, the group’s National Co-Director trolled elderly Gazan doctor Mustafa Elmasri, who later died after crossing the Rafah border. In another post, he attacked Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi as a “neo-Nazi” the same day she was taken hostage by the Israeli army. He has also spread debunked Israeli propaganda, accusing UNRWA of “war crimes” in a post he later deleted.
The editor of Standing Together’s “alternative media platform” has expressed more solidarity with and understanding for the reservist soldiers committing the Gaza genocide than with those who are angry at and criticize the genocidaires. This is a structural issue with Standing Together. Another member of the group, a contributor to the same media platform, and a reservist who served in the genocide, claimed that Israel’s Nuseirat massacre, which killed at least 276 Palestinians, was “necessary” in the absence of a “hostage deal.”
This reveals a troubling organizational culture of anti-Palestinian racism that seems common among Standing Together members. In one example, a member posted that Israel’s “sterile” method of killing “at the push of the button” during its genocide is a morally superior form of violence as opposed to a “barbaric” form, implicitly attributed to none other than Palestinians. In another instance, an Israeli protester was pushed away at a Standing Together action for a sign critical of Zionism.
Undermining Meaningful International Solidarity with Palestinian Rights
Though at its peak Standing Together’s membership constitutes a negligible percentage of the Israeli population, the group alleges to “speak for the majority” and claims that the majority of Israelis “hold a genuine interest in an equal and just society,” without presenting any verifiable evidence. During a major press effort that included CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, and TIME, Standing Together’s leaders have repeatedly claimed that Israel’s assault on Gaza goes “against the will of the people.” And yet, a July 2025 poll found that 79% of Jewish Israelis say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the genocide in Gaza. Another public opinion poll reported in the Israeli media in May 2025 revealed that 82% of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and 56% support the forced expulsion of even Palestinian citizens of present-day Israel.
Israel lobby and anti-Palestinian groups in Europe have deployed Standing Together to undermine support for BDS as the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, particularly in major trade unions, including in Sweden and the UK.
It is curious that Standing Together, which is supposedly focused on issues within Israeli society, would suddenly seek such an extensive, well-oiled international platform, with more than a dozen affiliates lobbying western institutions on its behalf. Then again, the global Palestine solidarity movement has never been stronger, and Standing Together, with its liberal façade and absurd claim to represent “both sides,” falters once its insidious agenda is exposed, just like similar normalization initiatives in the past. Their messaging plays a key role in Israel’s propaganda strategy of whitewashing the systems of oppression baked into the state in order to “save the soul” of genocidal Israel.
Standing Together is only the latest, most insidious normalization outfit produced by the almost extinct (and inherently oxymoronic) Zionist “left” to reclaim its past gatekeeping role and to undermine meaningful and impactful solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, with BDS at its core. It should be boycotted by all who truly value justice and support fundamental human rights.