Translating Solidarity: Jewish Organizing for Palestinian Liberation
In a recent contribution to Jewish Currents (2025), Jon Danforth-Appell reflects on the fact that the most prominent and powerful US-based organizing against Israeli apartheid and now genocide has been led by Jewish-identified groups, particularly Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. These groups dispute perpetual US government claims that concern for Jewish safety is the basis for maintaining its unconditional support for the state of Israel, and refuse as American Jews to be so enlisted. They recognize it’s not the love of Jewish people but rather the imperative to project American power throughout the Middle East, considerations of geopolitics and the global arms trade, that sustains this support. Thus by Danforth-Appell’s lights, to organize as Jews overemphasizes Jewish responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians: Materially the role that Americans, Jewish or otherwise, play as taxpayers and voters is much more impactful in keeping that oppression going. Being American, not Jewishness, is the more relevant axis of complicity here, and wouldn’t it make more sense, he asks, for organizing to proceed from this recognition.
In the way of many a materialist analysis this is technically true but leaves out, as the saying goes, the subjective factor—in this case, the emotional basis for political organizing. While one can try to imagine what Americans’ qua Americans taking their measure of responsibility here might look like (as, with a few notable exceptions, little of such has ever existed in the history of anti-Israeli apartheid work), on the ground one can observe a thriving, vibrant and ever-growing Jewish movement, working in relationship with Palestinian and Palestinian-American organizations, for Palestinian liberation. Danforth-Appell overlooks something ineffable, almost spiritual, in solidarity that motors organizing, lending it a numinous power. What is it that makes Jews organizing for Palestine so emotionally compelling, including and increasingly, for non-Jews like me? I will argue that when we act in solidarity, when we stand with others who are not us, and perhaps especially when Jews stand with and for Palestinians, something more than conscious political intentions are working on us, that we are being compelled to reach for a place in our self that can never quite be touched in an effort to come into fuller possession of ourselves.
Sarah Schulman (2025) offers a succinct definition of solidarity when she writes, “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter. Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams” (pp.3-4). Since its formation in the 1990s JVP has striven to enact solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the aftermath of October 7, JVP’s national membership has grown many times over, drawing people in with the power of its ethical demands: “Never again, for anyone;” “Not in our name;” the call to end the blockade (now genocide) of Gaza, the continual army and settler violence that enforce the occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank; and the basic insistence of equal rights for all those living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Especially powerful in engaging members and attracting new ones have been a series of spectacular actions, including (in NYC alone), large protests featuring coordinated messaging (slogan-inscribed t-shirts worn by participants, banner drops, planned and unplanned arrests) at iconic and heavily symbolic sites like Grand Central Station, Wall Street and Trump Tower, that have the effect of making standing up for Palestinian rights appear daring, thrilling and for people of conscience simply the right thing to do. These have been “gathering(s) enacted by bodies in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance, [enacting] a form of social solidarity both joyful and mournful” (Butler, 2015, p. 23).
Where does the impulse toward solidarity come from, and what do people “get” from expressing it? One study approached this question empirically, in the Israeli context. Using a qualitative psychoanalytically informed approach, Israeli researcher Aner Govrin sought to delineate what psychic structures distinguished “Jewish radical Israelis” engaged in Palestine solidarity work from other Israelis. He conducted this study during the most violent phase of the second intifada (2003-2004), when feelings among all Israelis were intensified and the position of Palestine solidarity activists became even more marginal than usual. His study participants were 40 Jewish Israelis who during this period worked with organizations that supplied food and medicine to Palestinian villages under siege and demonstrated against human rights violations by the government and the IDF.
Based on extensive open-ended interviews about his participants’ lives, Govrin discovered that many but not all (29/40) of them recalled nonoptimal experiences of various sorts in their childhood, which for purposes of category construction Govrin assimilated into “difficult childhood experiences” (2006, p. 640). One particular experience that was recalled with some frequency was of feeling like strangers to their caretakers. Abstracting from his data, Govrin theorized the existence of “2 powerful and universal schemas” (p. 626): a “we-ness” schema, that he presumed to characterize those Israelis (not studied here) who held to their Jewish Israeli group identification; and an “underdog” schema “linked to a propensity to favor the underdog over in-group members” (p. 646). By Govrin’s characterization, for his Jewish Palestine solidarity activists, “the underdog schema dominates the we-ness schema” (p. 631).
By not including a control group of “nonradical” (presumably Zionist-identified) participants, Govrin had no way of establishing base rates for “difficult childhood experiences” as a basis for knowing that these were more prevalent among his group of Palestine solidarity activists. His choice to not include such Israelis also suggests an attitude that implicitly problematizes the activists’ solidarity work as a curiosity in need of explanation.. While more prevalent and perhaps more intuitively understandable, the we-ness identification he presumes for most Israelis is just as worthy of psychoanalytic understanding.
Govrin was also operating with a particular bounded notion of the self, which while following a common convention has also been challenged throughout the history of both philosophy and psychoanalysis. It’s also at odds with the way at least some activists experience themselves. For instance, and shifting now to the American context, here’s Aurora Levins Morales, Puerto Rican Ashkenazi Jewish feminist writer and JVP member on how she understands her pro-Palestine activism:
I am a child of two traumatized tribes and when I fight for justice in Palestine…I am not supporting a faraway people out of an abstract and benevolent idea of doing the right thing for someone else. I am fighting for myself. For an end to this recycling of pain. I am fighting for my deepest source of hope, the belief in human solidarity, in our ability to decide that we will expand our hearts and our sense of kinship to include each other and resist the urge to contract in fear to bare our teeth and lash out. When I speak out for the humanity of Palestine I am defending the humanity of everyone, including all Jews. (2017, pp. 108-109).
Levins Morales gives voice here to a view of the self as constituted by others that has received increasing theoretical elaboration in recent years. For instance Judith Butler (2003) has delineated how the experience of mourning offers access to this constitutive otherness within the self, in a moving and much-cited passage:
(W)hen we undergo what we do undergo, is something about who we are revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us? It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is neither merely myself nor you, but the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. (p. 12)
Levins Morales and Butler offer us a conception of a self in moments of awareness of its interimplication with an other as the basis of its very formation. The analyst Peter Shabad (2022) does something similar when he considers what permits movement beyond the “group narcissism of “loyalty to one’s own kind” (p. 393). For him, this must entail a “reach[ing] out to the difference of strangers” in order to “grow toward the different person we will be in the future” (p. 393). To me, Shabad’s words—the “reaching out to the difference of strangers”-- suggest solidarity as a privileged mode of taking fuller possession of ourselves: When we take action in the world with and on behalf of others we create the opportunity to access and potentially transform (translate) the otherness in ourselves.
By this notion I evoke Jean Laplanche’s idea that subjectivity itself emerges through a process of translation, an effort to make sense of enigmatic messages, the “foreignness” implanted in the psyche of the child from the unconscious of the adult caretaker. Laplanche’s increasingly influential theory of the enigmatic message represents a fundamentally different model of the unconscious from that of Freudian psychoanalysis. Rather than a repository of repressed instinctual drives, Laplanche’s unconscious is formed through the child’s encounter with messages from the adult—especially the caregiver—that are charged with unconscious sexual meanings. These messages are “enigmatic” because they are not fully understood even by the adult who transmits them. Saturated with the adult’s own repressed unconscious, they unintentionally seduce or overwhelm the child. The child, unable to process these messages cognitively or linguistically, is compelled to translate them into their own psychic terms using codes absorbed from the social surround, initiating the formation of the unconscious.
In this model, the unconscious arises not from within the self but from the outside—from the other. Laplanche describes this dynamic as “general seduction,” contrasting it with Freud’s later rejection of seduction theory. According to Laplanche, this enigmatic message is not merely traumatic but also foundational to subjectivity: the need to translate and retranslate these messages underlies psychic development, symptom formation, and the ongoing work of analysis. Throughout development, and perhaps at particular moments that may be sought out for the purpose, one is driven to translate what had previously been untranslatable. (For a fuller explication of Laplanche, see Fletcher, 2007, and Saketopoulou, 2023.) Translation can thus be understood as an (always partial, never completed) process of reclaiming one’s mind, coming into further possession of oneself, a way of fostering a more complex identity.
Saketopoulou (2023) has suggested that certain erotic and aesthetic experiences, as intensified forms of relating to others, may make us receptive to the otherness within our self and thus have a special power to potentiate efforts at translation. Here I propose actions taken in solidarity as another avenue. This process may operate on several levels. When we act in solidarity, we turn toward others’ suffering, not simply to help, but to respond to something that perhaps evokes the enigma within ourselves. The other’s call to us may mirror that early foreignness, and the act of standing with them can be a kind of translation, a working through of our own internalized untranslatable residues. In this way what could not be responded to in infancy—the foreignness introduced by the caretaker’s unconscious—can be given a new symbolic framing through collective struggle and empathy. Solidarity becomes a kind of reparation, on both personal and political levels, a deferred reckoning with the other’s intrusion. Understood thusly, solidarity isn’t a noble act from one full subject to another, but a recognition of shared vulnerability and exposure to foreignness.
Perhaps the other’s suffering resembles something buried and untranslatable in the self; solidarity then becomes a scene of unconscious recognition. To stand with others who are not me, not of “my group,” is a way to engage them without hierarchy or mastery. Just as we could not master the adult’s message in childhood, we do not master the other in solidarity. We stay with them, in shared vulnerability and incomprehension. By this understanding, solidarity is one moment of a lifelong process of making meaning from the foreign elements that structured the self, and in this way keeps the self open to transformation. Considered psychoanalytically, solidarity offers the opportunity to touch the mystery of one’s own formation, not alone but in the company of others just as enigmatically constituted.
The public protest—the rally, the march, the strike, the picket, the sit-in—is the exemplary site for the expression of solidarity as one joins with and exposes oneself to other bodies. Though JVP-led actions are carefully planned and choreographed (as far as possible), with safety teams and jail support teams prepared in advance, we put our bodies in play without knowing what will happen: what other bodies we may encounter there (comrades, strangers, counterprotesters and cops of unpredictable disposition), and how these other bodies may act with us or on us, and without knowing what the short-term or long-term impact of our protest will be. Butler (2015) refers to this as the “unchosen” dimension of solidarity; our choice to participate is always something short of a “deliberate agreement we enter knowingly” (p. 152). In this way, participation in protest is a willful revisiting of the unchosen circumstances of our formation as subjects. By exposing ourselves to the other bodies there, we open ourselves to encountering the otherness in ourselves.
This risk we take in joining the protest is a necessary element in making contact with the part of the self in need of translation. Perhaps especially when we act in solidarity, when we act on behalf of another who is not me, one who does not share my nominal identity, “we endure the rousing of something in ourselves that does not have the character of calculation or strategy…[and that] requires that one can risk putting oneself blindly into play” (Saketopoulou, 2023, p. 12). Surely Jews acting on behalf of Palestinian liberation risk ostracization by family members and others in the Jewish community. Such risk-taking recognizes that exposure to difference, which if done open-heartedly may challenge one’s self-understandings and defenses, is necessary to create change, both inside and out. It also recognizes, as Stephen Frosh (2025) writes, that complete security is only possible if one takes no risks; taking no risks, one will be blindsided when made finally to face reality. Such was the lesson of October 7, when the “safety” procured at such a high financial and moral cost was shown to be illusory. One thinks too of the complaints made by or on behalf of certain Jewish students on college campuses made to “feel unsafe” by mere exposure to Palestinian speakers and perspectives and the pretextual use of this claim by university administrators and government officials to shut down protests altogether.
Owing to the traumas of Jewish history, Jewish solidarity with Palestinians has a particular poignancy and symbolic power, with the potential to become a charged site of political and psychic retranslation on both individual and collective levels. This history is inculcated in young people through direct teaching, and as has now been established by a vast psychoanalytic literature on the transgenerational transmission of trauma, by more inchoate communications from parents to children. Galit Atlas (2022) writes movingly of “the experiences we unknowingly carry with us…the memories, feelings and traumas that we inherit from previous generations” (p. 7). Enigmatic communications, suggesting danger, are conveyed by curious silences, pauses, omissions, unspoken understandings about what can and cannot be spoken about. While this describes the histories of many families marked by hardships and tragedies of all kinds, the paradigmatic example (and certainly the most frequently described in the literature) concerns Holocaust survivors. Children and later descendants of Holocaust survivors often grow up amid these kinds of enigmatic, emotionally saturated communications, which convey messages about victimhood, danger, survival, and moral duty. We might think of the implantation of such messages by caregivers as an (unwitting) colonizing of the mind of the child.
Organizing and rendering such material into a particular worldview,, parents and institutional authorities (rabbis, leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations) offer what are often ideologically inflected lessons about safety and belonging. This is where JVP performs a number of crucial translations, inspired by the recognition of the resonances between Jewish historical suffering and Palestinian dispossession, oppression and dehumanization. To the insistence, “Never again,” JVP answers “Never again—for anyone.” To the idea that Jewish people need a Jewish state in the world in order to feel safe, JVP answers that Jews and everyone should be able to feel safe, right where they are. To the assertion that the state of Israel acts in the interests of all Jews everywhere, including in its military actions against Palestinians, JVP answers, “Not in our name!” To the assertion that Jewish history has been one long unbroken history of oppression and that in order to avoid being eternal victims Jews must defend “our own” at any cost, JVP answers that Jews can be victimizers as well as victims—and furthermore, that “our own” includes those who Jews oppress. In doing this, JVP offers not just a set of political positions, but a radical psychic reorientation. It listens to the ghosts of trauma, but holding the other in mind, it answers differently. It refuses to reproduce the structures of domination that permitted those traumas to occur.
Is there a visible manifestation of this work of translation? How might we know where to look for it? While translation is an ongoing process that happens over time, there may be particular moments of heightened intensity when the self becomes “passible,” in Laplanche’s idiom, that cause that process to lurch forward. I think of a friend’s experience related to me a few days after her arrest at the Trump Tower protest in February. She was exhilarated, adrenalized, in particular by the bond she felt among her fellow arrestees as they waited together in their cell for processing. In other cases, this transformation may appear as a deepening commitment to the work of organizing and care for comrades.
I’m aware that in describing my friend’s exhilaration, in addition to the “gains” obtained for the self through solidarity, I risk overlooking Palestinian pain. For all the surging pro-Palestine activism that has erupted across the world since October 7, Israel’s genocide has continued unabated; Gazans have not been spared a shred of suffering at the hands of the IDF and the government of Israel.. In the context of the ongoing bombing and starvation of Palestinians, it could seem tone-deaf or worse to write about American activists enriching their sense of self through their activism. The very correlation suggests the existence of a kind of world economy of well- and ill-being, in which the suffering of some is the condition for the self-enhancement of others. (Of course the mechanisms of capitalism often ensure that things will operate in exactly this way. For one egregious example, consider how Israel tests its weapons on the residents of the Palestinian territories, which becomes the basis for a thriving national weapons industry–as documented in the film The Lab.) At worst, activists could start to resemble those Mohammed El-Kurd inveighs against in his 2025 book Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, the “savvy and sinister” who use Palestine as “currency for social capital,” “not to push for structural change or collective emancipation but to achieve individualistic victories at the expense of the underprivileged classes who are unable to game the system in the same way” (pp. 165-66).
Before subscribing to such a cynical, skeptical view of solidarity, one must reckon with the implacability of Israel’s determination, demonstrated over 77 years and most obviously over the last 21 months, fulsomely abetted by all manner of support from the US, to crush the Palestinian people’s efforts to achieve self-determination. From this perspective, what Palestinians and their supporters have achieved in this recent period has been remarkable. For instance, in the US, awareness of and sympathy for the Palestinian cause as reflected in public opinion surveys have burgeoned. Last fall, 19 senators voted for the Resolutions of Disapproval, which if passed would have cut off US weapons transfers to Israel, an unprecedented occasion in a body that historically has voted in near-unanimity in supporting the interests of the Israeli government. Further, the organizers of the BDS movement itself recognize how the challenging terrain in which organizing for Palestine takes place must temper expectations for quick results, even in promising moments such as the period of the campus uprisings. In an advisory addressed to student protesters published in May 2024, they reminded activists that “the only path to justice is an incremental, strategic approach with patience and ethical commitment” (quoted in Schulman, 2025, p. 117). None of these considerations undercut the urgency of the need to end the genocide, by whatever means.
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In performing the translational work that it does, JVP opens a space to recall nontraumatic aspects of Jewish history, as these may open onto a differently imagined future. For instance, many Ashkenazi non-and anti-Zionist Jews trace a political and spiritual lineage back to the Bundists, a Jewish socialist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century that combined working class politics, secularism, and Jewish political and cultural autonomy. A central tenet was Doikayt—a Yiddish term meaning 'hereness', referring to the concept that Jews have a right to live and organize where they already are. This put them at odds with the Zionist movement that was drawing adherents during the same period, which made for a lively, often emotionally heated culture of disputation. The fate of this argument was largely decided by the Holocaust, although a few strains of Bundism persisted in some quarters after the war. JVP, and more so If Not Now have revived interest in this prematurely foreclosed history, exploring the ethical possibilities of diaspora. It’s evoked quite movingly in the words of the songs we sing at their protests (“Here we are…”)!
The work of translation operates at the organizational level as well, as through dialogue JVP strives to deepen solidarity and achieve greater alignment with the needs of Palestinian partners. In 2015 JVP members voted to endorse the BDS movement, and a few years later issued a statement declaring opposition to Zionism as a Jewish supremacist ideology, as necessary and morally consistent positions to take as Jews in support of Palestinian liberation. (Vilkomerson and Wise, 2024). These decisions would be consequential in guiding the work of the organization. They at once were acts of defiance against mainstream Jewish organizations that offer blind support to Israel, and acts of reparation towards Palestinians who have been victimized by the actions of that state. They also underscore translation as an ongoing process, one that is always unfolding and that never reaches a final resting place. For as much translation as can be performed in any human life or collectivity, we are haunted by the other till the end.
To return to Danforth-Appell’s argument, perhaps Jews organizing as Jews for Palestinians offers opportunities for work on the self that might not be possible in the same way as organizing under the banner of “Americanness,” however much Americanness is the main vector of complicity in Palestinian oppression. When we engage in activism in solidarity we are motivated not just by the righteousness of the cause but also by the opportunity for an ethical self-(re)fashioning: Through contact with an other, we can attempt to translate the otherness that’s been placed in us as part of our formation as subjects. While many on the left relate to being American in a mode of disidentification, it is also the case that the identity itself may be too “thin” to compel efforts at translation, compared with a Jewish identity. Consider that one identity is 250 years old, the other thousands of years old, and with crucially different attitudes toward the past: the American tendency toward repression and denial, as with regard to slavery and the massacre of Indigenous people; as against Judaism’s continual invocation of memory of the past as a call to responsibility and moral duty in the present. Obviously this is a gloss that can’t fairly characterize the way these identities are inhabited in any individual life, but is one way of thinking about why present-day organizational life takes the shape that it does.
And what of my place here, as a non-Jewish member of a Jewish organization? I think my participation in JVP goes some way to answering Danforth-Appell’s critique, as it follows from my recognition of how I, as an American, am implicated in the structures of power that maintain the oppression of Palestinians: white supremacy and American imperialism. Certainly Jews alone should not have to bear this responsibility, I and other non-Jewish members are saying. Responding to JVP’s call from my position of adjacency carries its own enigmatic aspects, which draw on my queerness; my relations with Jewish people in my life, people of varied dispositions with regard to Israel and Palestine; and the history of my involvement with other left organizations. But that’s a translation, still underway, whose explication awaits another day.
References
Atlas, G. (2022), Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma. New York: Little, Brown.
Butler, J. (2003) Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4:9-37.
Butler, J. (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Danforth-Appell (2025), On Zionist Realism. In Jewish Currents. Jewishcurrents.org/against-zionist-realism. April 9.
El-Kurd, M. (2025), Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. Chicago: Haymarket.
Fletcher, J. (2007), Seduction and the vicissitudes of translation: The Work of Jean Laplanche. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 1241-1291.
Frosh, S. (2025) (In)security. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 106:184-190
Levins Morales, A. (2017), Who Am I to Speak? In On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Pp.103-110.
Saketopoulou, A. (2023), Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: NYU Press.
Schulman, S. (2025), The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. New York; Thesis.
Vilkomerson, R., and Wise, A. (2024), Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing. Chicago: Haymarket..
