January/February 2025

Standing Together has organized multiple campaigns around ending the occupation, raising the minimum wage and limiting carbon emissions. Most recently, some of their efforts gained global attention, including a campaign to hold protective presence at road junctions in the West Bank, allowing aid trucks and their drivers to safely pass settler protests that tried to block them; ongoing protests to stop the war; and collecting food from people in Israel and sending it to Gaza.

Two national Co-Directors of the group — Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish citizen of Israel, and Rula Daood, a Palestinian citizen of Israel — came to the US in December 2024 on a lecture tour, visiting seven cities. On 14 December, they spoke in San Francisco about why the group was formed and its ongoing work, the current political situation in Israel, as well as the group’s response in the aftermath of the attacks on 7 October 2023.

The following transcript of their remarks in San Francisco has been edited for length and content.

A new voice in Israeli society
Alon-Lee Green: It is extremely important to say at the beginning that we are here in the US to bring our voice from Palestine and Israel to call for a permanent cease fire in Gaza right now. To call for ending the killing, ending the starvation, ending the destruction, releasing the Israeli hostages, bringing them back home to their families, ending the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and achieving a reality of Israeli-Palestinian peace where all people on the land are equal, free and independent.

These principles, these demands, are the only possible way to move forward after 14 months of despair, grief and sorrow [after 7 October], months where people lost their loved ones, lost any hope for a future in this land. It is tough, tough, tough, tough to exist right now in Gaza. It is tough to exist in the West Bank. But it’s also tough in different ways to exist in Israel. Acknowledging that we don’t experience symmetric realities, we don’t suffer and pay the same price, but understanding that we all pay some price for these miserable realities, Standing Together organizes for a shared future.

Where does this voice exist in our society? We are talking right now about maybe the 15th war in a decade and a half between Israel and Gaza. Each time they promise us this time we’re going to win, this time we’re going to bring safety. But all that happens is more Palestinians die. Right now, we’re talking about 45,000 Palestinians that are declared dead in Gaza, 15,000 of them children. But it’s not the first war. In 2014, 2,000 Palestinians lost their lives. A lot of them were children.

And we asked ourselves: why? Why do we need to live in these cycles of ongoing wars? Why don’t we see some political forces, some political leaders coming to us as Israelis, telling us that what existed until now will be different? That we promise you something totally different, not moving from one war to the other, and in between expanding the occupation, building more hatred between the people. But actually saying this reality is bad for all of us. This reality can end with a peaceful resolution. This reality can turn in a different direction.

After suffering from the war of 2014 and the aftermath in 2015, what was called in our society ‘the knifers’ intifada’, where a lot of stabbing attacks happened, we decided that we need to take responsibility for raising this voice ourselves. If no political leader in Israel, no political party does it, we need to do this ourselves.

We started organizing rallies of both Jews and Palestinians, at the beginning in Jerusalem, where it was the toughest. It was very tense; it was very violent. We were saying yes, we can stand together — Jews and Palestinians within our society — but also Israelis and Palestinians from across the Green Line [the border between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza]. We can demand an end to the occupation. We can demand peace. We can demand a reality where racism and incitement do not control our streets.

It was tough to raise this voice. But we felt that this is something we need to do after so much death. We didn’t know we were going to face even more deaths. But we felt we must do it and we must organize.

An historic role
We moved from one city to the other. We continued organizing a lot of rallies and demonstrations. We saw that thousands of people were coming with us. And then we decided it’s not enough to mobilize people. It’s not enough to just call people to come to a rally or demonstration. We need to organize. We need to deeply and consistently organize, and call people to become part of a political home that builds power within our society around those interests, around those values.

That was the beginning of Standing Together. We couldn’t know that it would become a historic role of standing in a time where humanity is being pushed aside, where our leaders are calling for us to lose our humanity. And we stand together — Jews and Palestinians in our society — and insist on this humanity together. We couldn’t know, but we are very proud of this role. …

Rula Daood: We know and we see and we live with a government that is not ashamed to speak of genocidal ambitions, that is not afraid to say that Gaza should be flattened, that is not ashamed to say that there are no innocent people in Gaza. That is the government that is leading the people who live in Israel right now. And that was the only voice, and still is the only very loud voice, speaking.

We understood that we needed to give them some competition, we needed to do something different, because it cannot be that the only loud and clear voice is the voice of messianic [religious Zionists who believe the Jewish people have divine authority to rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea] and fascist people.

So we went out to the streets. We organized demonstrations. We demanded a deal. We demanded a ceasefire. And we kept on going to the streets, and we still go until this day, with the same demand — a ceasefire, a stop to this war, a hostage deal. Because these are the things that must be done right now in order to stop the destruction, the pain, the killing and the starvation that is happening right now in Gaza. And that is the voice we held, and still are holding, for 14 months.

Through these months we understood that we need to build a political power from within our people because we understand the reality that we live in. There is an hegemonic force, there is a hand that is much more powerful. And it is the hand of Israel — the government and the society. If this war must stop, the demand must come also from the people within Israel, from the Israeli society. …

The only real solution is stopping this war, ending the occupation, understanding that my people deserve their own independence in the same way that people who live in Israel deserve their own security. This can be done only by having a true and real Israeli-Palestinian peace. And this is what we have done for 14 continuous months.

(Source: standing-together.org/en)

In Part One of his interview with Share International’s Jason Francis, Kantor discussed the basic tenet of homeopathy (the ‘law of similars’) and how homeopathic remedies are developed; the golden era of homeopathy in the US from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s; the reasons behind its decline, and why homeopathy is still ‘flourishing under the radar’ in the US today.

In Part Two of the interview, Kantor talks about how people with mental illnesses were treated at homeopathy-based ‘sane asylums’ in the US, and how we might bring homeopathy back into mainstream health care and accepted science today.

Homeopathic asylums in the US
Share International: How did homeopathic doctors treat their patients in the asylums of the day?
Jerry Kantor: Privacy concerns extended back then. I found old records, but people’s names were never given. What happened in the hospital, at least, was that the doctors would see patients and prescribe various homeopathic remedies for conditions. Mental conditions at that time were not named as they are today. They had names like dementia praecox [now known as schizophrenia]. There also came a period of time when, unfortunately, eugenics [a widely condemned, racist approach to increasing certain genetic characteristics in a population] filtered into diagnosis, which was widespread in all forms of medicine. Some patients also suffered from inebriation. There were a lot of alcoholics. There was also a lot of senility. Quite a few remedies were used in those settings. They were actually asylums.

The idea was not to drug someone up, kick them out, and send them back to the community. An asylum was a place where you could rest, get good nutrition, get away from your toxic family, and where you could slowly recover from the stress of war. It was not one particular approach. I could give you pages of the remedies that were used per symptom, but it wouldn’t explain very much to you. They can be found in my book Sane Asylums.

SI: Could you tell us how homeopathic psychiatry came about? Was its development concurrent with overall homeopathic medicine?
JK: It’s all tied together. In the conventional world, we create silos. Everything is separated. Samuel Hahnemann [founder of modern homeopathy] did not consider psychiatry to be a separate discipline. It was just commonly called homeopathy altogether. Even in acupuncture, which is a totally holistic medicine, there isn’t a separate category for mental illness. …

That’s reflected in the homeopathic history of treating so-called psychiatric complaints. That’s why the nurses in these asylums were not content to say you had such-and-such a condition, drug you up and that’s the end of it. They also engaged at that time in what was called ‘moral hygiene’. They engaged with a client and tried to reason with them about their entrenched beliefs while they were recovering from their stresses.

Madness is really the perfect storm of a shock, exhaustion, a belief formed into a strong opinion that gets narrowed, thickheaded and fixated. That’s a common sense way of describing madness. If you do that, you don’t have to come up with, and pay a lot of lip service to, conditions such as schizophrenia. You actually can lead someone to sanity. They’re overcoming their fixed beliefs. And you’re improving their energy so they have recourse to behave in a way they’ve long lost. It’s a tremendous advantage and much more humane and effective in the long run than saying: ‘You’ve got this disease and you’re stuck in it forever’. …

Investing in sanity
SI: Could you talk about what you mean when you say we should “invest in sanity”?
JK: That’s the last chapter of my book. It’s a fantasy, I suppose, but let’s bring back the asylums and this idea that people are not the sum of their diagnostic categories. Let’s treat them with respect and not take them out until they are fully recovered. It’s a very difficult thing to do because people have to live in the asylums, and you have to have wonderful nurses.

But the values of the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, when homeopathy flourished — apart from the fact that homeopathy flourished and was recognized and valued — the values were good then. People took the time to help each other, to really look thoroughly at these problems, and took the time to nurse one another back to health.

But a lot of it is common sense. We are tormenting the mentally impaired with drugs and creating new conditions that never existed before. Just not doing that and going back to the values of moral care and infusing that with homeopathy is really good mental healthcare. …

One of the great tragedies of our present outlook on existence is our attitude to that recurring event which we call death. We approach it, for the most part, with fear and loathing, seeking by every means to resist its call, prolonging, often beyond its usefulness, the activity of the physical body as a guarantee of ‘life’. Our dread of death is the dread of the unknown, of complete and utter dissolution, of being ‘no more’. Despite the vast amount of evidence gathered over the years by the many spiritualist groups that life of some kind continues after death; despite the intellectual acceptance by many that death is but an awakening into new and freer life; in spite of the growing belief in reincarnation; notwithstanding the testimony of the wisest Teachers down the ages, we continue to approach that great transition with fear and trepidation. What makes this attitude so tragic is that it is so far from the reality, the source of so much unnecessary suffering. Our fear of death is our fear that our identity will be obliterated. It is this which terrifies. If we did but realize and experience that that identity is an immortal Being which cannot die or be obliterated, our fear of death would vanish. If, further, we realized that after so-called death we enter into a new and clearer light in which the sense of our identity is altogether more vivid, and also that there are yet higher aspects of our Being of which, till then, we are unaware and which await our recognition, our whole approach to death would change for the better.

We would see death and physical-plane life as stages in an endless journey to perfection, and death as the door into far less limiting experience on that road. Freed from the confines of the physical world, our consciousness would find great new vistas of meaning and beauty hitherto denied it. In the time immediately ahead, the Masters and their Disciples will teach the truth of that experience we call death and open up for all a great new freedom. We will learn to accept death for what it is: restitution of our vehicles to their source — ”ashes to ashes, dust to dust” — and liberation into a new and meaningful life.

The process of dying
The death of the dense physical body begins when the soul withdraws its energy from its vehicle. This can take place over a longer or shorter period of time. A series of heart-attacks or an illness which becomes steadily graver could be the sign that the soul is beginning this process. As soon as death takes place, the subtle bodies — the astral and the mental bodies within the etheric vehicle — withdraw from the dense physical body. This, too, can take place quickly or more slowly, but the Masters advise that one should wait for three days before burial or cremation to ensure that the etheric body has completely withdrawn from its physical counterpart. …

If the consciousness is very much focussed on the astral, with very little mental focus, such a person could remain on the astral plane for a long time — ‘long’ to our way of thinking, for outside the realm of the physical brain there is no such thing as time.

On this astral plane one does what, normally, one would have been doing in incarnation on the physical plane. And though life on the astral plane is a fact, as it is a fact on the dense-physical plane, it is nevertheless only an illusion. All our hopes, fears and aggression, our hatreds, jealousies and vices, form powerful thought-forms which must, sooner or later, be dissolved. Therefore the only hell which exists is that which we have created ourselves on the astral planes. The hell which we encounter is the hell of our own desires, our atrocities, our own separation, and our own grudges and fears which inhabit the astral realm. This is the principle behind the advice that the Masters always give — to learn to control our thoughts and emotional reactions.

Dying consciously
For that reason it is also important to raise the consciousness as high as possible at the time of death, using the last nerve reflex to drive the consciousness through the astral and the lower mental levels onto higher mental levels as far, as fast and as consciously as possible. That is why it is so important that there should be some preparation for death and in the future people will be taught how to die consciously in order to do this. To overcome the fact that some people do not realize that they are dead, there are disciples, initiates and some of the Masters active on the astral plane, protecting people and making them aware of the fact that they have died.

For most people, the greatest fear of death exists in their expectation of loss of identity and consciousness; of loneliness and cessation of contact with family and friends. Far from experiencing such a loss, the dead man finds that, freed from the limitations of the physical vehicle, his conscious awareness is heightened immeasurably. He sees both ways: the world of forms which he has just left and the new world into which he has come, with familiar people around him ready to welcome him into that more liberated state. At the same time, he can still tune into the feelings and thoughts of those left behind. So far from being a traumatic experience, death for many is so gentle and smooth that they do not realize that they are dead and require the help of those whose task it is to acquaint them with this fact.

After the death of the physical body, the individual concerned remains on those astral planes which correspond most closely to the point of development attained by him in physical life. On those subtle levels our faculties of perception become freed from the process of thinking and reasoning which function through the physical brain. All knowledge and experience can be directly seen, heard, felt and known in their full significance. There is instantaneous perception, knowledge and beauty and a type of joy and liberation such as we cannot know on the material plane. …

Permanent atoms
This refining process of the soul vehicles, the material, the astral and the mental bodies, takes place by means of the so-called permanent atoms. These are atoms of matter, physical, astral and mental, around which the bodies for a new incarnation are formed. The permanent atoms retain the vibratory rate of the individual at the moment of death. If that person has made great progress, his or her bodies will subsequently be more refined, akin to the vibration of this permanent atom and, due to the magical working of the soul, will increasingly attract matter of a sub-atomic nature. In this way, the permanent atoms will spiral up to reach increasingly higher frequencies. Because a body attracts matter to it of a similar vibratory rate, each advance through each life will bring a more refined body of increasingly higher vibration. The permanent atoms are therefore nuclei which attract the atomic particles from which first the mental, then the astral and subsequently the etheric-physical bodies are formed — after which the gross physical body ‘precipitates’.

The permanent atoms of an individual are not influenced by experience out of incarnation but are connected to the causal or soul body. The causal body is a sort of reservoir of all perception, all knowledge and all experience of the physical, the astral and the mental realms. A ‘silver’ cord connects the soul and its body with the three permanent atoms. Consciousness is continuous in this cord so that when it is time for the soul to reincarnate once again, particles of matter of like vibration are magically attracted to form around the permanent atoms. The permanent atoms therefore still vibrate at the same frequency as in the previous life and are permeated with the consciousness of those levels. The energy vibration is in the particles of matter which retain consciousness of the point to which they have evolved. The causal body, the receptacle where this consciousness is accumulated and stored, is to be found on the highest of the four mental levels.

At the beginning of subsequent incarnations, when the vehicles are ready, the soul pours its energy from the causal body into its mental, astral and physical sheaths. The accumulated knowledge and experience, gained over a succession of previous lives, pours down from the soul level to the physical brain which retains as much as it can consciously absorb, use and know. This knowledge cannot really be tapped until the brain centres have been sufficiently awakened to be used in this way. Where this does occur, we have what we call a genius. In the soul is mirrored the monad or spiritual will, Buddhi, the spiritual intuition, and manas, higher mind. A genius is able to attune him or herself to the soul level and to that of manasic or buddhic consciousness, or thinking. This is the source of that higher knowledge and superior talent held in store from experience in previous lives. A genius is therefore someone who has a close and instantaneous contact with the soul, and can bring the wisdom and knowledge from that level down into the physical brain because the brain centres, which in most people remain unused, have been opened. …

Soul groups
Every soul incarnates and re-incarnates under the Law of Rebirth. Groups of souls come in together in order to work out karma created in the past. Hence this law provides the opportunity to repay ancient debts, to recognize and work with old friends, to accept ancient responsibilities and obligations, and to bring to the surface for re-use talents and qualities acquired long ago. What beauty and order there is, therefore, in this law which governs our appearance on this plane.

To summarize, we can say that reincarnation depends on the particular destiny of the individual. If he or she is not sufficiently developed, there is no destiny as yet; the individual is simply drawn back into incarnation. When the man has progressed somewhat further, his destiny becomes a group destiny. In the case of a disciple or initiate, however, the cycles of incarnation are governed by his individual destiny and above all by his desire to serve.