This letter began as an initiative by alumni of the NIF/Shatil Fellowship, the Dorot Fellowship and the Bronfman Fellowship as a call for our North American Jewish communal leadership to take strong action against impending annexation. When hundreds of alumni of these fellowships signed on in just days, we realized that this call had resonated across the North American Jewish community. We decided to open the letter more broadly to alumni of all Jewish institutions and programs.

We hope that by demonstrating widespread support for our Jewish communal leadership to act in every possible way to oppose this disastrous step and to hold Israel accountable, we will allow our community to move beyond simply making statements condemning annexation, and towards taking meaningful action. In the days leading up to Israel's move to formal annexation, we will publicize the letter. To those who indicate interest, we will also continue to keep you updated on how to take action together as North American Jews.

Thank you for joining with us, adding your voice to the call, and refusing to stand idly by in this moment.

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To the leadership of the North American Jewish community,
 
We write to you as North American Jews who are deeply invested in our community, who have spent time in Israel, and who grew up connected to North American Jewish institutions. Our work and personal commitments have been driven by a conviction that all Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live with dignity and equality. As Israel’s newly elected “emergency government” proceeds with its plans to formally annex territory in the West Bank as soon as July 1, we write with grave concern about the risks such a move would pose to a future of democracy and equality for all Israelis and Palestinians.

Annexation threatens to formalize and make permanent the unequal and deeply unjust system of occupation that Israel has maintained for 53 years. In the West Bank, Israel currently maintains two separate systems of law: civil law for Israeli citizens and military law for Palestinian non-citizens. Now, with the encouragement of the Trump Administration, Israel’s leadership is announcing that it intends to maintain permanent control over the territory it has occupied since June 1967, denying the millions of Palestinians who live there citizenship and basic civil rights in perpetuity.

We have seen the proposed maps for annexation presented by the Trump Administration and Prime Minister Netanyahu, which relegate Palestinians to isolated, non-contiguous city-states reminiscent of the bantustans of apartheid South Africa. These fractured islands of autonomy being offered to Palestinians make a mockery of the just demand for independence and self-determination that all peoples deserve. Annexation will lead to further violations of the rights to property, equality and dignity of the Palestinians living in the West Bank, and entrench a system of discrimination between Israeli citizens and Palestinian subjects.

It is unthinkable that our own Jewish community will stay silent as Israel formally dismantles its democracy in favor of such a system. That is why we are alarmed by the silence of major institutions and leaders in our community as Israel announces its intention to carry out a historic abandonment of its stated commitments to pursue peace.

For decades, we have watched our communal institutions proclaim their support for a two-state solution as the only way to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state. Yet in word and deed, those very same institutions have done everything in their power to shield Israel from accountability and to prevent any reckoning with its decades-long occupation. They stood idly by as the settlement project strategically overtook large swaths of the West Bank in order to prevent the emergence of an independent, contiguous Palestinian state, while marginalizing voices of conscience warning about the moral crisis of a permanent occupation.

We have borne witness to the injustice of this occupation in various ways. Many of us have spent significant time living in Israel, and some of us are in relationship with Palestinians who will endure the consequences of annexation. Those of us who have been to communities in the South Hebron Hills and Jordan Valley in Area C, and large Palestinian cities like Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, know what permanent occupation looks like. We know that Palestinians living in places like Susya and Umm al-Kheir live under military law -- with no rights -- while their Jewish neighbors in settlements next door live under civilian law, with the full rights and privileges that citizenship affords. Each time we visit those places, we are reminded of how far the deeply unequal and oppressive reality on the ground is from the consciousness of those in leadership in our own community.  

As America comes to terms with the scope of systemic racism in our country, and as we commit ourselves to dismantling it, it is unconscionable that North American Jewish institutions refuse to speak out and take action against the formalization of a system of subjugation and discrimination in Israel.

We urge the leadership of our community to act in every possible way to oppose this disastrous step and to hold Israel accountable for its actions.

Major institutions and organizations are doing the work of examining the ways in which we are part of upholding unjust systems of white supremacy and racism in the United States -- and how each is accountable to dismantling it. We ask you to commit to the same process of interrogating how our communal institutions are part of upholding racist and exclusionary systems in Israel. How is your organization part of shielding the injustices of Israel’s occupation from accountability, and what steps are you committing to take to dismantle it?

As we learn from the wisdom of our sages, shtika kehoda’a damya -- silence is complicity. That is true especially now. Now is a time when your voice matters and when your actions will be counted. We refuse to be silent as our communal leadership and institutions stand idly by as Israel's government takes steps that are antithetical to both Israel's future as a democratic state and to the prospects of a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.


Signed,