“We’re terrified, but we must act.”
Standing Together writes to supporters.
We woke up today after a terrifying night of sirens and running to the bomb shelter to news that eight civilians were killed in Israel overnight. Yesterday, 12 people were killed in Iranian missile attacks, including an entire family. And the day before? Three people. Dozens of residential buildings have been completely destroyed. Hundreds wounded. Our hearts are broken. We have never experienced something like this in our homeland.
War is always bad news – and we know that this war, led by extremist leaders who have only their political survival in mind, cannot make us safer. Yes, we are afraid of the threat of a nuclear bomb, but we are more afraid of our corrupt leadership pushing us toward endless war and turning us all into “collateral damage.”
Netanyahu, along with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, are not just abandoning the hostages and distracting from their war of annihilation in Gaza, they are now dragging us into war with Iran. Netanyahu has proven time and again that he does not care to protect us, Jews and Palestinians. He only cares about himself. For him, we are just collateral damage in his mission to continue a forever war to keep his government in power and advance its messianic agenda. This isn’t what safety looks like. Real long-term safety will only come with diplomatic agreements.
No one deserves to live in constant fear of dying from a missile. We deserve to live in true safety, free from attacks from fundamentalist regimes. While our leaders sit in bunkers, we, the people in the Middle East, pay the highest price. And for Bedouin in the Negev/Naqab living in unrecognized villages without protection from drones and missiles, and many neighborhoods across the country lacking shelters and safe rooms, the risk is even higher. Our government doesn’t care about our safety, but we do. That’s why we’re campaigning for our government to build safe rooms in areas that don’t have them.
Alongside this, we’re resisting our extremist leaders by strengthening our solidarity with one another. We know that in times like this, community is more powerful than ever. We’re organizing Zoom calls to hold space for shared fear and grief, establishing solidarity networks across all our local and student chapters to assist with cleaning bomb shelters and damaged apartments and helping with childcare, and we’re connecting community members who don’t have safe rooms with those who do.
All of us deserve better. And we can have better. Instead of eternal war, we can reach agreements that will ensure real safety for us, that will end the war, and that will guarantee us lives of dignity, with no more nights of anxiety and horror.
