Radical empathy is the key… We need to stop talking about ‘pro-Israel’ and ‘pro-Palestine’ — we need to be pro-people. We need a new story
Sally Abed’s peace work begins in the space where many people are told they must choose only one truth.
As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Sally lives inside a reality full of contradictions. This place is home, and yet Palestinian identity is often treated as suspect. Hebrew and Arabic share the same streets, but not the same power. Jewish and Palestinian citizens live in the same society, vote in the same elections, and pass one another in the same public spaces — yet again and again, they are pushed toward fear, silence, and separation.
Sally chose not to disappear inside that contradiction. She chose to organize from it.
Through Standing Together, Sally helps build a movement of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel working for peace, equality, social justice, and an end to occupation. The movement’s work is not coexistence as a polite slogan. It is a demand for shared civic power: the kind that can challenge racism, oppose war, defend democracy, and insist that safety for one people cannot be built on the denial of dignity to another.
After October 7, this work became almost unbearably difficult. In Haifa, only days after the attacks, Sally stood before a room of Jewish and Palestinian citizens who had gathered in grief, fear, and uncertainty. She spoke about the impossible position of Palestinian citizens of Israel: expected to absorb Israeli pain, often forbidden from naming Palestinian pain, and forced to carry both while the country around them hardened. The room cried with her.
That moment reveals something essential about Sally’s leadership. She does not offer easy comfort. She insists on political honesty, emotional courage, and the discipline of staying in relationship when everything is pushing people apart. She knows that dehumanization is not only a moral failure; it is a political dead end.
In 2024, Sally was elected to the Haifa City Council, becoming the first Palestinian woman to lead a joint Jewish-Palestinian slate in Israel. But her work remains rooted in the same conviction that brought her to Standing Together: that the people who live in this land are not going anywhere, and that no future built on domination, exclusion, or revenge will bring real safety to anyone.
For B8 of Hope, Sally’s work reflects the force of a new generation of Palestinian and Jewish organizers who are building power from the ground up. They are not erasing their identities or pretending the realities of Palestinians and Israelis are symmetrical. They are choosing shared struggle because equality, safety, freedom, and justice must be built together.