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Never Again Action, Immigrant Solidarity, and Palestine Solidarity

Never Again Action began in 2019 in a moment of collective outrage over the many families being torn apart by immigrant detention and deportation, evoking memories of concentration camps and forced removals during the Holocaust. Our movement grew out of the relationship between organizers working on immigrant solidarity and Palestine solidarity, even though we did not have a clear and public stance on Palestine in the beginning. So, let us be clear: our opposition to ethno-nationalism extends beyond our fight against the white Christian nationalism driving the U.S government, and includes an opposition to Zionism’s prioritization of Jewish life over Palestinian life.

A World Without Borders

While our work is focused on immigration in the U.S., our movement has always been defined as a mobilization against detention and deportation systems because we are deeply grounded in values of freedom of movement and a world without borders. This means we must be willing to unpack how the same surveillance, carceral, and racist forces create violent borders and lead to genocide both here and abroad. In this statement, we hope to clarify Never Again’s official stance in how these values relate to Palestine-Israel.

Our Response Since 2023

Since October 2023, Never Again has responded to significant events of escalation or protest that felt urgent in various ways, through several social media posts (including on 10/9/2023, 10/13/2023, 1/26/2024, and 5/9/2024) and, by vote of the NAA National Strategy Team, signing onto this solidarity letter with the Palestinian people by the Immigrant Rights Movement. Since then, many NAA affiliates - chapters, individual members, and staff - have continued to make connections between the immigration system in the US and Palestine solidarity work. As a member-led solidarity organization, we move together on important issues, prioritizing the needs and voices of the Immigrant Rights Movement and secondarily centering the experiences of our members.

Surveying our Base

In 2024, NAA leaders and staff convened an ad hoc committee which released a public survey in January 2025 after consulting with organizers who work within Muslim, Palestinian, Southwest Asian and North African, and Arab communities, ascertaining the perspectives of NAA partners and members. The survey was open for four weeks and included both Likert scale and open-ended questions and recruitment for the survey ensured demographically diverse responses. We received more than 300 responses; the full results can be viewed here. While some respondents mentioned concern that NAA’s mission could drift in the wake of this survey, an overwhelming majority - 91.8% - of respondents agreed with the statement: “It’s important that Never Again Action speaks about Palestine and/or Israel.”

graph reiterating abovementioned statistic

Results

With that in mind, we consolidated the survey results and found that more than 9 in 10 respondents agreed with the following statements:
Please note definitions for terms used in the survey can be found here.

  1. Addressing racism and xenophobia in the Jewish community must include reckoning with anti-Palestinian bias. (96.1% agreement)

  2. Everyone should have a right to freedom of movement, including everyone in Palestine-Israel. (95.4% agreement)

  3. The State of Israel's settler colonialism has harmed Palestinians and other Arab people. (94.7% agreement)

  4. Criticizing Israel and opposing Zionism are not equivalent to anti-semitism. (94.1% agreement)

  5. Any abolitionist politics must include opposition to Israeli administrative detention, which includes indefinite and unjustified detention of people of all ages, including youth. (93.1% agreement)

  6. In various contexts over time, Jewish people have both benefited from and suffered from white supremacy. (92.8% agreement)

  7. The State of Israel is occupying Palestinian lands and the lands of other Arab people. (91.1% agreement)

  8. The State of Israel has engaged in ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, from before and during the Nakba to the current violence in the region. (90.8% agreement)

More than 8 in 10 respondents agreed with the following statements:

  1. "Apartheid" is an appropriate term for the State of Israel's policies and practices against Palestinian and Arab people. (88.8% agreement)

  2. The Israeli government, like the U.S. government, operates within white supremacist systems. In the case of Israel, this means the prioritization of Jewish, and especially but not exclusively white and Ashkenazi Jewish people's lives, welfare, and citizenship over those of non-Jews, particularly Palestinians. (87.6% agreement)

  3. Israel is committing or has committed genocide against Palestinians. (87.2% agreement)

  4. Zionism is a harmful nationalist political ideology that prioritizes a majority ethnic group. (82.4% agreement)

Statement

With these results and a deep understanding of our values, we now must say: The central tenet that brings our movement together- a vision of free movement without borders - absolutely extends to Palestinians and Israelis.

No “Second-Class Citizens”

This is not a new stance but a clarification of our values. When we choose to stand up for immigrant rights in the US, we do so because we know that one group of people holding power over another is wrong - no government should have the right to reduce a person to a legal status, keep them separated from their families, or restrict people to a second-class citizenship based on ethnicity. Many of us do this work because we remember the oppression done to our Jewish ancestors; some of us do this because we are simply people who care about building a more just world.

Rooted in the generations who came before us, we can state collectively, with a full chest:

  • Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and other Arab lands, its genocide against the Palestinian people, and apartheid policies are just some examples of how the state of Israel, like the U.S., operates through a deeply-embedded systematized white supremacist ideology.

  • Our opposition to ethno-nationalism, a political ideology prioritizing one ethnic group, extends beyond our fight against the white Christian nationalism driving the U.S government, and includes an opposition to Zionism’s prioritization of Jewish life over Palestinian life.

  • Our abolitionist vision does not stop at the doors of U.S. prisons and ICE detention centers, but extends to Israeli systems of detention (particularly the detention of youth under ‘administrative detention’), recognizing that Israelis have turned Gaza into an open air prison

  • We are committed to following the lead of people directly impacted by the detention and deportation system, and we know this must include the voices and leadership of Palestinians.

  • The fact that we, as Jews, have suffered from white supremacy does not excuse the oppression of another people.

  • Criticism of the oppressive systems enforced by the state of Israel is not antisemitic; it is, in fact, out of our our love for Jewish people and for Judaism that we reckon with the anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias that undergirds our communities’ resistance to that criticism. Our reluctance to do so has allowed the fascist right to use the Jewish community as an excuse for attacking immigrant communities.

There is no version of solidarity with immigrants or any justice movement that can exist without a recognition of the full humanity of Palestinians and Arabs, and without centering their voices in our movement.

When our future generations look back at the horrors committed with shame in the name of protecting us, they will also see us resisting and fighting back with all that we have. What does that resistance look like for Never Again Action? We will continue to proudly partner with immigrant-led and Jewish organizations focused on Palestinian solidarity. We will support members of our communities to listen to Palestinian voices and to further explore how the detention and deportation machines we are combatting here in the U.S. relate to the violence in Palestine. We have developed a toolkit that will help chapters engage in Palestinian solidarity work in alignment with the values as outlined in this statement.

While the release of this statement may likely lead to losing additional members and stakeholders, our hope and intention is for NAA to become a place where more people of color, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and Queer people can be heard, and can organize to fight the deportation machine. We are grateful for your patience, trust, and guidance through this process, especially as many have rightly expressed frustration that a statement like this has not come sooner.

None of this fundamentally changes what NAA stands for or does. Instead, it affirms the truth that has been core to our work all along: our struggles are interconnected. When we stand together, we are stronger.