Emet
TruthTruth is not tribal property or ammunition. It asks us to see Jewish history, Palestinian life, power, fear, ideology, responsibility, and uncertainty without making any of them disappear.
A first-person Jewish covenant
What does it mean to advocate in a Jewish way?
I am a Jew. I was born in Israel. I am the grandchild of Holocaust survivors.
I know why Jews need advocacy—not as an abstraction, and not only because of what happened long ago.
Read the covenant01
Persistence
Jewish life is still threatened. The need for protection is not a moral failure.
But survival is not the whole of Jewish life.
We are a people of memory, argument, return, creation, responsibility, and stubborn hope. We have persisted not only by defending ourselves, but by asking what life requires of us.
Not moral superiority
Reclaiming
moral agency.
01Jewish life deserves protection.
02Defense does not confer impunity.
03Palestinian suffering and agency cannot disappear.
04Truth is not a tribal possession.
02
A promise worth pursuing
Israel’s Declaration of Independence · 1948
A founding promise is not proof of perfection.
It is a covenant against which advocacy can ask the country to keep becoming.
“Freedom, justice and peace”
“Complete equality of social and political rights”
“Full and equal citizenship”
“Peace and good neighborliness”
Read the declaration at the Knesset ↗
A living values tradition
What Jewish advocacy asks of me
Not a checklist of virtues. A set of disciplines that can hold protection, accountability, grief, and hope in the same moral field.
Tzedek
JusticeJustice is something we pursue, not something we possess. It requires protection without impunity and accountability without collective delegitimization.
Shalom
Peace · WholenessPeace is more than quiet. It is the difficult work of joining truth and justice to a future in which neither people must vanish for the other to live.
Pikuach nefesh
Preserving lifeJewish life is worth defending. Palestinian civilian life is also infinitely valuable. The value does not answer every hard question, but it tells us what those questions are about.
Teshuvah
Return · RepairMoral agency includes the capacity to acknowledge harm, change direction, and return to our deepest commitments without surrendering who we are.
Truth and freedom
False stories trap both peoples.
A future built on erasing Jewish history will not free Palestinians.
A future built on erasing Palestinian life, loss, dignity, or agency will not make Jews safe.
Clarity does not guarantee peace.But confusion, propaganda, and selective humanity repeatedly make peace less possible.
Particular roots · Wider freedom
Jewish identity can travel with us into the freedom of others.
Heschel’s presence at Selma does not make the Black freedom struggle a Jewish achievement. It offers another image: bringing a particular history and tradition into solidarity without needing to own the movement.
View the Library of Congress record ↗From I to we
This is the Jewish advocacy I want to practice.
Advocacy that protects Jewish life without erasing Palestinian life.
Advocacy that can name antisemitism without turning every criticism into hatred.
Advocacy that can confront Israeli failures without treating Jewish self-determination as a crime.
Advocacy rooted in truth, persistence, dignity, and peace.
This is what collective liberation means here: neither people secured through the permanent subjugation or disappearance of the other.
Explore the evidence and voices