I strongly recommend that you Read the full article instead of my little snippets below:
"It has been almost a decade since a handful of them (Israeli Activists) started taking part in unarmed Palestinian demonstrations against the occupation. Their number has risen steadily, as has hostility from mainstream Israeli society. Their actions are considered a breach of the old ways of the Zionist left, which for the most part preferred rallies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, attended by a predominantly Jewish crowd and carried out with police approval and protection. Those rallies targeted government policy and right-wing settlers. But the methods of this younger breed of activists, which involve protesting side by side with Palestinians and confronting the IDF—still the most sacred of Israeli institutions—are seen by most Israelis as breaking a taboo, as no less than betrayal. ...
'The participation of Israelis in demonstrations, unfortunately, does make a difference,' says Jonathan Pollak, one of the first activists to take part in the demonstrations and now media coordinator of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, a Palestinian umbrella organization of local committees [for more on Pollak, see Rebecca Vilkomerson's interview with him]. 'It makes a difference because of the racist nature of our situation. Open-fire regulations, for instance, are a lot more stringent, officially, when Israelis are present. It is, however, important to remember that we are not much more than a side note in the movement, and that it is the Palestinians who are at its center.' ...
With the territories practically sealed off by Israel, the Israelis carry out all kinds of tasks for their Palestinian partners: buying much-needed prescription medicine, maintaining video cameras used to film the rallies, even carrying boxes of organic zucchinis grown by a local farmer to one of Tel Aviv’s fashionable restaurants. Some of the Israelis have been learning Arabic to better communicate with their partners in the struggle." ...
Before they participate in the protests the Israeli's are given a briefing: "how to deal with tear gas, how to avoid injuries, what to say if you get caught by the soldiers. 'Don’t be afraid to get arrested,' he tells his listeners, some of them first-timers and clearly nervous. 'Make sure someone knows where you are. You will probably be released within a few hours. Only Palestinians are kept in jail for long periods.'" ...
Later in the article:
"Barak brought us back to the days of Golda Meir, who denied there is such a thing as a Palestinian people.” At the same time, the closures on the West Bank—introduced by Israel in the early 1990s and vastly tightened with the second intifada and construction of the separation wall a decade later—ended the daily direct contact, much of it commercial, that was common between Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Today most Israelis don’t travel to the West Bank except as part of their military service or on settler-only bypass roads, while a new generation of Palestinians knows Israelis only as soldiers in uniform or as settlers. ...
The protests usually start over the issue of land confiscation—in most cases, farmland being taken for the construction of the wall, which cuts deep into Palestinian territory, passing through private land, villages and even neighborhoods. In some cases, the trigger is house demolition orders or the seizure of land for nearby settlements. ...
When local (Palestinian) leaders want to involve Israelis in the protest, they usually turn to Anarchists Against the Wall. The term “anarchist” is somewhat misleading; though some in AATW follow anarchist ideology, in practice the group focuses on the occupation and violations of Palestinian human rights. AATW, which has a few dozen activists and a somewhat larger support circle of nonmembers who occasionally take part in protests, does not have a political platform. They see themselves as a collective who believe their privileged status as Israeli Jews should be used to assist unarmed Palestinian resistance movements. While it seems that most members of AATW support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) and a one-state solution to the conflict, the group has never taken a position on such issues, nor does it take a stance on Israeli electoral politics."...
There was a lot of mistrust from the Palestinians about the Israeli "Activists" -- there was a great fear that they were undercover for the Israeli JDL.
"The key turning point (to the mistrust) occurred when protests erupted in 2003 in Budrus, west of Ramallah. The proposed route of the wall would have resulted in the loss of nearly forty acres of the village’s farmland, crucial to its survival. As Israeli bulldozers started destroying the ancient olive trees, Budrus residents held a series of nonviolent demonstrations, drawing on a long Palestinian tradition of civil disobedience and popular protest. This led to the formation of a committee of village leaders, who decided to invite activists from AATW. From 2003 to ‘05, dozens of Israelis and internationals joined the demonstrations in Budrus and surrounding villages. Despite a fierce response by the IDF, including the use of live ammunition, nightly raids on the villages and curfews, the protests grew stronger. Eventually, the Israeli military decided to request a different route for the separation barrier, one that would not annex any Budrus farmland. The joint popular struggle had its first victory. ...
The activism has certainly re-energized elements of the Israeli left. Since 2009 the joint struggle model has been used with great success in Jerusalem, after the city’s police started enforcing evacuation orders on Palestinian families in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, north of the Old City. As religious settlers, financed by a radical right-wing organization with deep US connections, took over Palestinian homes, a few left-wing Israelis joined protests. Some of them even kept watch around the clock and slept with the Palestinian families so they could report harassment by settlers and be present in the event of further evictions. Eventually a series of Friday demonstrations, in the tradition of the West Bank protests, was established. ...
As the Sheikh Jarrah protest grew, representatives of the old Zionist left started showing up, among them Meretz Knesset members, leaders of Peace Now and public figures like author David Grossman and former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair. Sheikh Jarrah reopened the Israeli debate on the future of Jerusalem ...
demonstrations led to the creation of a Jewish group called Solidarity Sheikh Jarrah, which in recent months has joined protests in other Jerusalem neighborhoods where settlers have seized Palestinian property. Solidarity has also attended rallies in Israel proper, including support for an unrecognized Palestinian village not far from Tel Aviv, and against the repeated destruction and evacuation of the unrecognized Bedouin village El-Araqib, in the southern Negev Desert near Beersheva. (There are dozens of “unrecognized” villages in Israel—Palestinian communities whose inhabitants were not expelled in the 1948 war but that the Israeli government has refused to accept as legitimate municipalities, thus depriving them of routine public services like water, sewage, electricity, transportation links, etc.)
“We are going to places where the occupation and expulsion actually take place, and we do it together with the local community,” says Avner Inbar, an activist with Solidarity Sheikh Jarrah. “We are not that interested in large rallies in Tel Aviv, where Jews stand on their own and declare that the occupation is wrong. We want to confront racism and discrimination where they happen. This joint effort, together with the local Palestinian communities, is something new for everyone involved in it, and for many people it becomes a transformative experience.”"
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