Jews and Palestinians are modelling the cohesion Australia seeks
In September 2023, I travelled to Israel as Chair of New Israel Fund Australia. One day was spent in the West Bank with a Bedouin herding community near the illegal settlement in the north Jordan Valley of the West Bank, only days after they were attacked by these settlers.
I was one of three international volunteers on a Rabbis for Human Rights protective presence action, walking alongside Bedouin shepherds as they searched for grazing land under the relentless desert sun. About two hours into the day, Hebrew voices echoed across the valley. Six or seven settlers emerged, far more people than any flock required, spreading themselves along the ridge overlooking us. Our Rabbis for Human Rights coordinator quietly asked us to stand together and make ourselves visible. For the next three hours the settlers shadowed us, periodically moving closer in an attempt to intimidate the shepherd. Thankfully, the day ended without violence.
What I participated in was not exceptional. For more than two decades, Rabbis for Human Rights has organised Israeli volunteers to accompany Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest and Bedouin shepherds as they graze their flocks, providing a protective civilian presence in areas where settler violence is common. In the past year alone, more than a thousand volunteers have worked across more than thirty villages, at a time when the United Nations estimates there are, on average, more than four settler attacks each day.
I recount this experience not because Israel’s current government looks to support this work equality or human rights—it plainly does not—but because the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has been tasked with recommending practical ways to strengthen trust between communities. Those models already exist. They are being built, imperfectly and often at great personal risk, by Israelis and Palestinians themselves. If people living through one of the world’s most entrenched conflicts can sustain them, Australia should be able to learn from them.
Consider Standing Together, Israel’s largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement. It is jointly led by a Jewish and a Palestinian citizens of Israel, embodying shared leadership rather than symbolic partnership. Since the war began, it has organised a Humanitarian Guard in which Jewish and Palestinian volunteers have physically prevented extremists from blocking humanitarian aid bound for Gaza. The movement also conducts protective presence operations in the West Bank alongside Palestinian communities facing settler violence. What distinguishes Standing Together is that these are not separate acts of solidarity between two organisations. They are undertaken by one movement, with one leadership, representing both communities together.
The Parents Circle–Families Forum offers a different model. Established in the 1990s, it brings together more than 800 Jewish and Palestinian families who have each lost an immediate relative in the conflict. Governed jointly, with co-directors from each community, the organisation advances an uncomfortable but powerful proposition: profound grief need not produce perpetual vengeance. Properly held, shared bereavement can become the foundation for reconciliation. It is perhaps the clearest answer to one of the Royal Commission’s most difficult questions: how do societies rebuild trust after genuine and enduring harm?
In Jerusalem, Feel Beit demonstrates that culture can become another form of shared civic space. Located deliberately on the seam between West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, it began as a Jewish Israeli cultural institution before spending more than a decade consciously transforming itself into a genuinely shared Jewish-Palestinian organisation. Its directors speak openly about the years of trial and error required to balance ownership, programming and decision-making. Since 7 October 2023, despite assumptions that such a space could not survive, it has welcomed around 20,000 visitors. Culture, when built on genuine partnership, has proved more resilient than politics.
Not every model requires joint membership. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, founded in 1972, demonstrates that cohesion can also be built through the consistent application of universal rights. Whether representing Jewish or Palestinian citizens or Palestinians living under occupation, the organisation applies the same legal principles. This year it successfully secured a fast-track medical crossing for approximately 100,000 Palestinians from Kufr Aqab needing access to hospitals in Jerusalem, and later helped restore Red Cross visits to more than 9,000 Palestinian prisoners. Its lesson is straightforward: trust grows when institutions are demonstrably fair, even where politics remains deeply contested.
Other organisations build cohesion around shared experiences rather than shared nationality. The Aguda, Israel’s largest LGBTQ rights organisation, operates an Arabic-language support service and assists Palestinian LGBTQ people, including asylum seekers fleeing the West Bank and Gaza. Here, solidarity emerges from a common vulnerability that transcends ethnic and national identity.
Meanwhile, the Tzedek Centers pursue perhaps the least visible but most organic work of all. Across around two dozen local hubs, Arab and Jewish residents collaborate on practical neighbourhood issues—from housing to public services to local advocacy. In cities including Haifa, Ramla and Akko, shared civic leadership develops not through grand political agreements but through solving everyday problems together. It is slow, unglamorous work, but it creates relationships capable of surviving political change and nurturing the next generation of leaders who know personally the benefits of collective action.
The New Israel Fund supports each of these organisations because together they represent different answers to the same question: how can trust be sustained in a society marked by profound conflict? It does so from a clear belief that Israel’s long-term security and Palestinian self-determination are inseparable, and that ending the occupation through a negotiated two-state outcome is ultimately essential to achieving both peace and genuine social cohesion.
These seven organisations embody seven distinct theories of change. One expresses religious obligation through physical protection. Another builds shared political leadership. Another transforms grief into reconciliation. One creates cultural institutions with genuinely shared ownership. Another insists on equal rights under the law. Another builds solidarity through shared identity. The last develops trust neighbourhood by neighbourhood through practical cooperation.
None of these approaches has ended the war. None is romantic. Yet all have preserved something precious: the belief that even amid violence, people can choose cooperation for a common purpose over division.
Our work supporting NGOs fighting for social justice and human rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories has taught us that safety for one group cannot be secured at the expense of another’s rights. There is always nuance in how discrimination is experienced and addressed — but social cohesion still depends on protecting every community’s dignity equally.
These are the lessons Australia should follow.
The Royal Commission should not attempt to import any one overseas model — there is no single blueprint. Instead, it should recognise the common thread running through all of these organisations: social cohesion is rarely built through political mandate. It is built through civil society — by resourcing and funding the people and organisations who create opportunities for communities to work on tangible things together, whether a harvest, a neighbourhood issue, a legal fight, art, or a shared loss. Repeated often enough, those acts of cooperation make trust stronger than fear.
If groups of Jews and Palestinians remain committed to building that trust in the midst of years of on-going conflict, surely Australians can do the same.
