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A Global Jewish Manifesto for Collective Liberation – Global Jews for Palestine
July 3, 2025
Introduction
Founded in 2019, Global Jews for Palestine is a coalition of 25 Jewish groups in 19 countries that are part of the rapidly growing Jewish movement for Palestinian rights. Our condemnation of Israel’s apartheid regime and its genocidal war on Gaza is unconditional. We stand in full and unequivocal solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination. Our position is a vital counterweight to the full-throated support for Israel voiced by legacy Jewish organizations worldwide. As Jews, we feel a unique responsibility to challenge Jewish organizations whose alliances and actions seek to crush the struggle for Palestinian human and national rights, promote Jewish exceptionalism, and undermine deeply-rooted Jewish social justice traditions.
The vision of a viable and ethical Jewish alternative to the regressive, racist, and undemocratic forces that have controlled Jewish life for decades is within sight. We believe that now is the time to aggregate the voices and actions of Jews who dissent from the Zionist consensus, so that we may fight together for a viable and just future for all.
Israel’s destruction of Gazan lives, communities, schools, universities and centres of culture, and the accompanying campaign to defeat the global movement for Palestinian freedom, have changed our world. The response to these atrocities has been extraordinary. Millions have marched weekly to condemn the genocide and to end Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Jews around the world have joined these protests and swelled the ranks of dissident Jewish organizations in unprecedented numbers.
As the death toll in Gaza and the West Bank skyrockets, we are sickened by expressions of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia which flow unceasingly from pro-Israel Jewish institutions. Legacy Jewish groups continually launch vexatious lawfare attacks against activists, and unabashedly collaborate with McCarthyite efforts to silence pro-Palestinian voices on campuses and in civil society. Dissident Jews, many of whom are deeply involved in Jewish life, are not exempt from these assaults and have endured public harassment, expulsion from Jewish institutions, and personal attacks.
In too many Jewish institutions, a craven loyalty to the Jewish state has displaced both Jewish religious practice and the Jewish ethical tradition as the only test of who is an “authentic” Jew. As a result, many Jews who are horrified by Israel’s decimation of Gaza remain silent for fear of being labelled as antisemitic or as traitors to their community. Notably, this silence has been broken by many (mostly young) Jews who oppose the political project of a state dedicated to Jewish supremacy. Dissenting Jews are uniting to denounce the organizations and all those offering unconditional material and ideological support to Israel as it annihilates Palestinian life.
For many of us, our Jewish identity is the wellspring of our progressive politics. We cannot cede the future to those Jewish institutions that embrace violence, hatred, and genocide as core Jewish values. Now is the time to build inclusive, ethical Jewish institutions and to nurture alliances with oppressed, colonized and marginalized peoples.
Global Jews for Palestine offers this manifesto in that spirit.
- Dissent from the institutional Jewish community’s uncritical pro-Israel stance is an ethical and fundamentally Jewish response to Israel’s violations of international law and its abrogation of Jewish values. There is no possible justification for the genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing being carried out in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
- We affirm and honour the historical and contemporary variants of Jewish life, some of which flourished even under the shadow of annihilation. Jewish dispersion has been central to Jewish intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development and to multidirectional flows of knowledge in every sphere. This dynamic is tragically diminished when the State of lsrael claims dominion over Jewish political, emotional, and intellectual life.
- Ideologically and materially in thrall to Israel, an elite donor class in some countries and state-funded bodies in other countries, dominate Jewish life and narrow the political and cultural borders of Jewish life worldwide. In the absence of democratic communal structures, no Jewish institution can credibly claim to speak for all Jews. While democracy and inclusion should be foundational precepts for Jewish communal institutions, the opposite is the case. Legacy Jewish and Zionist organizations are unlikely to cede power by embracing inclusive structures and justice-based politics. Therefore, we welcome and encourage the creation of new communal formations that centre justice-oriented Judaism, Jewish social and ideological diversity, collective liberation and solidarity with Palestine. We need to ensure financial support for a wide spectrum of Jewish initiatives, including schools, camps, and other cultural, spiritual and political institutions that offer alternatives to an Israel-centred Jewish life.
- Jews and our institutions worldwide need to learn, acknowledge, and teach their communities about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) – the displacement, dispossession, and dispersion of much of the Indigenous Palestinian population as a result of the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. Jewish history includes similar atrocities. Understanding the parallels between these histories can help us gain moral clarity in the present. Jews need to come to terms with the ways we are implicated in this history through our willful ignorance, material support, and an appalling and uncritical endorsement of Israel’s actions. Reckoning with this history is key to achieving justice for the Palestinian people and creating justice-oriented Jewish communities.
- The near-total domination of Jewish communal life by a wealthy donor class has diminished our capacity for critical thinking. We must listen to the voices of Palestinian, Jewish and other scholars and communal leaders who are sounding the alarm about the ethical failures and deadly consequences of Zionism and Jewish supremacism. We must acknowledge the intense debates currently raging among Jewish studies, Holocaust, and genocide scholars about issues such as Holocaust commemoration, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish identity.
- Antisemitism is rising around the world. We disagree with those who view antisemitism as an exceptional form of hatred, separate and distinct from other forms of racism. The foregrounding of antisemitism as the paradigmatic form of racism, and of the Holocaust as an exceptional form of genocide, undermines the possibility of Jewish solidarity and co-resistance with the struggles of Palestinians and other marginalized, colonized and racialized groups. Antisemitism must be opposed on general anti-racist principles, in solidarity with other antiracist struggles and in concert with the principles of human rights and equality for all people. Jewish safety will only be achieved through solidarity among those who face injustice.
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