INSIGHTS: What Makes Partners for Progressive Israel Great?

INSIGHTS

What makes Partners for Progressive Israel great?

By Iky Salinas

Many of you whom I have spoken with will recall that I have asked you this question. During my first month as Partners for Progressive Israel’s Executive Director, I have had the pleasure of getting to know this community more deeply. Through conversations with our board members, activists, donors, longtime supporters, and others, I have gained a much deeper understanding of the many answers to this question.

While many organizations take pride in the clarity of their positions and the consensus they cultivate within their communities, I have come to believe that PPI shines for almost the exact opposite reason. Within Partners for Progressive Israel, we have a wide array of ideas and ideologies. Within our community, there are very different views of Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the broader Middle East. Our community includes people who identify as Zionists, non-Zionists, post-Zionists, and even anti-Zionists.

Partners does not shine because we share a common understanding of these terms. Rather, we shine because we look past the need for agreement on these terms in order to build a community around shared values. What brings us together is not agreement on every question, but many of the values that lead us to wrestle with these questions in the first place: a commitment to social justice and human rights, a desire for peace and a shared society, and a belief in a future in which all people who live between the river and the sea can live with dignity and security. PPI’s strength lies in its ability to hold these differences alongside the values that bring us together. At a time of tremendous polarization, both within the Jewish community and in American society more broadly, the ability to work across differences is essential.

It is this ability to look beyond dichotomous positions, to hold multiple truths at once, and to constructively engage with complexity that makes PPI such an incredible organization, and one that deserves to grow. During my time as Executive Director, I intend to create spaces where we can move beyond the binary of Zionism versus anti-Zionism and instead engage seriously with the complexities of Israel and Palestine.

Our task is not to eliminate disagreement, but to build and grow a community capable of engaging with it constructively. In a time when many conversations about Israel and Palestine are defined by polarization, I believe PPI can offer something different: a community rooted in progressive values, capable of engaging complexity and disagreement, and contributing to a broader American conversation about Israel and Palestine grounded in mutual respect. I believe this is what PPI has always done at its best, and it is what I hope we can continue to build together.

Iky Salinas is the Executive Director of PPI and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is researching Impact Measurement in the Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Field.