Surging support for Palestine fuels JVP's biggest meeting yet

posted on: Mar 17, 2015

The first Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) meeting Mitchell Plitnick attended was in 1999, in a living room alongside fifteen people. The latest JVP meeting he went to was last weekend, where over five hundred people took over the second floor of the Baltimore Hyatt. Hundreds more wanted to attend, but it was sold out.

Plitnick, program director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former director of policy at JVP, told me the conference was impressive.

It was a sentiment shared by many of the attendees. JVP has transformed from a scrappy California-based group to a national force in the American Jewish community and in the Palestine solidarity movement. Held from March 13-15, JVP’s latest national membership meeting was filled with Jewish prayer, a memorial service for those killed in Israel/Palestine last summer, and countless talks on dozens of different topics. The meeting, like JVP itself, was intergenerational and interdenominational, with young and old Jews and non-Jews holding discussions on the future of JVP. Some attendees were there for their first JVP gathering.

It was not nearly as slick as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, but there was a real sense that JVP was growing into a force that holds real power at the grassroots level.

Source: mondoweiss.net