February 28, 2025
As long-time non-violent resisters “on the ground” to Israel’s occupation and apartheid, we welcome our nomination by Norwegian MP Ingrid Fiskaa for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. We also share a vision for a just and inclusive future for our peoples in a shared homeland. The nomination represents not only recognition of our joint efforts to confront Israeli repression, violence, displacement and denial of Palestinian national rights, but of the collective resistance the entire Palestinian people have sustained over the past century and more – supported, as our nomination signifies, by Israeli Jews of conscience willing to stand up for Palestinian rights in opposition to their own government and society.
I, Issa Amro, the Palestinian nominee, am an electrical engineer by profession, living in Hebron, in the West Bank. Amnesty International and the United Nations have recognized me as a Human Rights Defender. In 2007, I founded Youth Against Settlements, a direct-action group which seeks to end the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements through non-violent popular struggle and civil resistance. In the face of Israel’s regime of forced evictions, curfews, market and street closures, military checkpoints, random searches, detentions without charge and rampant settler violence and the harsh application of military law on the city’s residents, we also help Palestinians resist their violent displacement from the Hebron area.
Youth Against Settlements trains youth in peaceful direct actions, documents the human rights violations, leads tours of Hebron and the vicinity for international delegations and offers political briefings for diplomats and journalists. For all this I have been arrested and tortured by the Israeli occupation forces but prosecuted as well by the Palestinian Authority when I take to social media attacking its inaction and corruption. Beyond resistance to colonization in Hebron and throughout Palestine, I lead my organization in the spirit of strategic cooperation with local and international actors to achieve justice for my people and a shared political future for all.
I, Jeff Halper, am an Israeli anthropologist, Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a founding member of the One Democratic State Campaign. ICAHD focuses on resisting Israel’s ongoing demolition of Palestinian homes, farms, mosques, churches and community buildings communities, some half million since the Nakba in 1948. Working with the families and their communities, ICAHD has rebuilt 190 Palestinian homes demolished by Israel. We use our documentation of demolition as a way of exposing Israel’s intent to transform Palestine from an Arab country into an exclusively Jewish state.
Opposition, protest, resistance, education and campaigning are not enough, however. Only a vision and a political program in which the country in which we Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are destined to live together will enable us to forge a shared future. This requires the transformation of Israel and its apartheid regime into a democratic state of equal rights for all its citizens. Towards that end, I engage in international advocacy and have written a number of books, most recently Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State. In 2008, I participated in the first (and successful) attempt of the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli siege by sailing into Gaza.
For all our travails in the dark, violent, unjust conditions in which we work for human rights, an end to occupation and the apartheid regime being imposed on us and a shared future of equality and justice for our peoples, we take great encouragement from the support of peoples of conscience in Palestine, Israel and internationally that we will be successful in achieving our goals. Our nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize will both protect us as we confront the military and settlers in the West Bank and provide a powerful platform for advancing a just peace between our peoples. At this political moment, when colonization, occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide and the prospect of internationally-sanctioned apartheid and permanent war is upon us, nominating a Palestinian Muslim and a Jewish Israeli for this year’s Peace Prize sends a powerful and timely message indeed.