Standing Together co-director Alon-Lee Green's statement on the 2nd anniversary of 7 October 2023
"Peace is the only way forward"
Reposted from Twitter.
On October 7, exactly two years ago, we experienced a horrific massacre by Hamas, which invaded Israeli communities, murdered, kidnapped, abused, and launched thousands of rockets. 1,200 people were killed that day, 250 people were abducted to Gaza.
As Nir Hasson from Haaretz wrote, the sun still has not set on October 7, 2023. Hamas’s war crimes and crimes against humanity still burn in the hearts of Israeli citizens, the trauma has never been addressed, and due to the Israeli government’s refusal to act—48 Israeli hostages are still being held by Hamas in tunnels in Gaza.
There is no way to deny the trauma we endured on October 7. We will live with it forever as a nation and as individuals. But alongside the trauma we suffered on October 7 from Hamas’s attack, we began, on that very same day, a second trauma that will accompany us for the rest of our lives: the Israeli response to Hamas’s attack, which started that very day with the first calls from government ministers and coalition members to wipe out Gaza, “to send them back to the Stone Age,” “to flatten Gaza,” to starve it, and to destroy it. The seeds of orders for genocide and the destruction of Gaza appeared on that very day, and since then, we as a country have been busy carrying them out.
Two years later, Gaza has been destroyed. And with it—the Israeli society. Two years later, not only have nearly twenty thousand children in Gaza been killed, murdered, along with tens of thousands of adults, but the future of both peoples in this land has also been murdered. Two years later, we have never been deeper in darkness, closer to the bottom of the abyss.
In the Israel of October 7, 2025, the most basic human compassion—is under attack. Solidarity, humanity, thinking of the other—all these are considered foreign, taboo. In the Israel of two years after October 7, the Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs rule without political competition, even the opposition does not challenge them.
Two years later, and we still have not learned as a nation, as a society, that our future is inseparable from the future of the Palestinians. That if they lose and are crushed—we will lose and be crushed. Two years later, and we still have not understood that a zero-sum game is simply not possible in our land. Either both peoples prosper together, in peace and coexistence, or both peoples will swim in rivers of blood.
Two years later, and we are still waging a war of destruction in Gaza but also in the West Bank. Two years later, and we are still trying to strangle and crush the aspirations of the other human beings living with us in this land, the Palestinians, for independence and a life of dignity. Two years later, and we are still afraid of the words “Palestinian state” and still refuse to say the word “peace.”
Two years later, and the world has run out of patience, and Israel has become a pariah state, ostracised. It is easy for us to say “antisemitism.” It is even easier to dismiss all criticism. But the very countries that stood by Israel’s side immediately on October 7 are the ones trying to shout at us in the face of the atrocities we are committing in Gaza—and simply say, “Stop.”
Two years later, and we must understand: the reality in Israel and the Palestinian territories has changed forever. We will never return to October 6. And in some ways, that is a good thing. For too many years, we lived in denial, refusing to look reality in the eye. For too many years before October 7, we lived as if there were no Palestinians beside us living under occupation and apartheid, under decades of violent military rule, without citizenship, without human rights, without freedom. For too many years, we lived as if this would not one day explode in our faces. And then it exploded. In the most violent way imaginable. So now, two years later, it is our duty to look reality in the eye.
To understand that not only must we stop the destruction in Gaza, the daily killing of men, women, and children, the abandonment of the hostages—but it is our duty to move forward from here. From a complete ceasefire and withdrawal from Gaza, we must continue toward a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace.
A peace whose meaning is very simple: every person living in this land, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, from the Galilee to Eilat—every person, whether Jewish Israeli or Palestinian—will live in freedom, security, equality, and be a citizen of an independent state, Israel or Palestine. This is the only way forward.
We are, once again, in dramatic days. The chance for a ceasefire and an agreement to release the hostages is real. But the one thing we must pray for, demand, on October 7, 2025, two years later, is to end this horrific chapter in the history of this place, of our land. To overcome the trauma of October 7 and the trauma of the response to October 7. To let the sun set. And then, from these traumas, we can rise to a completely new dawn, to a morning when there will finally be Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Alon-Lee Green (above, right) is the national co-director of Standing Together, along with Rula Daood (above, left)