Month: October 2021

Generations of Imprisonment – No Justice in Sight

Alternative Jewish Voices joins our fellow Jewish activists to protest the incarceration of Palestinians in Israel’s military jails.

In September 2021 the world’s attention focused briefly on six Palestinian prisoners who escaped from the Gilboa Prison in northern Israel.  The spotlight revealed deep and ongoing human rights violations against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

As Jews from around the world, we in the International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP) are dismayed and acutely sensitive to the age-old command not to stand idly by.

The statistics are grim. 4,650 Palestinian prisoners are now incarcerated, including 200 children and 40 women. Some 520 people are held in administrative detention, which provides that a prisoner can be held for months without charge or trial, which can then be renewed—over and over again ad infinitum. One Palestinian  former aid worker from Gaza has been held more than five years, appearing in Israeli courts 166 times without evidence that any crime has been committed. (1) One of the Gilboa escapees, Monadel Yacoub Nafe’at, had been in administrative detention since 2019.

In addition, Human Rights Watch reports that “Israeli authorities try Palestinians charged with crimes in military courts, where they face a conviction rate of nearly 100 percent.” (2) Israel is the only country on earth to routinely prosecute children in its military courts.

For decades, prisoners have charged officials with torture, beatings and other forms of maltreatment, all of which are prohibited by international law. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have engaged regularly in hunger strikes to protest their conditions.

This revolving door of imprisonment touches every Palestinian family, and amounts to the collective punishment of a people.

If we do nothing, how will we reply when a generation of Palestinians asks, “Why have all of my male cousins been incarcerated? Why have all my uncles been incarcerated?” (3)

Let us take seriously another age-old precept: Justice, justice, thou shall pursue. Let us therefore act in each of our communities to draw attention to these injustices where we can, whether in individual or communal settings.

(1)   Numbers provided by Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/13/infographic-how-many-palestinians-are-imprisoned-by-israel-interactive, relying on figures from Addameer, the prisoner’s rights group, adameer.org).

(2) https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution#_ftn248

(3) From Aotearoa to Palestine: Discussing Foreign Policy for Solidarity, a Te Kuaka podcast by NZ Alternative. For notes and further information, https://anchor.fm/te-kuaka/episodes/From-Aotearoa-to-Palestine-Discussing-Foreign-Policy-for-Solidarity-e17s8c8

Signatories

Jewish Voice for Peace (USA)

Jews Say No! (USA)

Independent Jewish Voices Canada

Boycott From Within (Israeli Citizens for BDS)

South African Jews for a Free Palestine

Jewish Voice for Labour (UK)

Jewish Network for Palestine (UK)

Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany)

Alternative Jewish Voices (New Zealand)

Jewish Call for Peace (Luxembourg)

Jews Against the Occupation (Australia)

French Jewish Peace Union

Another Jewish Voice (Belgium)

All groups listed are members of the International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP)

Resistance is not terror

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz has issued a military order which designates six leading Palestinian legal and human rights groups as “terrorist” organisations. The government of Israel has declined to back its orders with evidence.

The order criminalises lawyers who provide legal aid, and observers who inform the world of human rights abuses: Addameer,  Al-Haq,  Palestine branch of Defence of Children International, Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, Bisan Center for Research & Development. 

On the websites of the targeted organisations, you will learn about incarcerations, documented human rights violations, the imprisonment of children, aid to farmers in the West Bank. To prevent the sharing of such information, the Israeli government will now fight these activities as if they were fighting terrorists. 

Leading global human rights organisations have objected in the strongest terms. They clearly state that they will continue to work with their Palestinian colleagues:  Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch call it “an attack on the human rights movement” while B’Tselem calls it “a draconian measure that criminalizes critical human rights work.”

Alternative Jewish Voices calls this military order the contemptible act of an authoritarian.  This order would jeopardise the funding which creates factual information about Palestinian life under Israel’s occupation.  The order poses a new level of violent threat to the defenders of human and legal rights.  If we do not defuse that threat internationally, it will set a frightening precedent for all of the people who stand up to authoritarians around the world.

Israel’s military order extends its pattern of criminalising any resistance to its regime of occupation, de facto annexation and legislated apartheid.

Members of Israel’s government refer to boycotts – the non-violent exercise of economic choice – as economic terrorism.  Israel’s President called Ben and Jerry’s decision not to sell ice cream on occupied land as “a new kind of terrorism.”  Around the same time, Israel confiscated 23 tons of chocolate bars destined for Gaza with the explanation, “We will continue to hunt down networks that fund terror.” 

There seems to be no form of resistance that Israel won’t categorise as terroristic.  This new military order will criminalise even the use of the law.  In occupied Palestine, it appears that resistance will be treated as terror, period.

We urge the government of Aotearoa-New Zealand to take the recent advice of Ban Ki Moon, former Secretary General of the United Nations, and change our yawning diplomatic stance:

“a powerful state is controlling another people through an open-ended occupation, settling its own people on the land in violation of international law and enforcing a legal regime of institutionalised discrimination… What has become increasingly clear in recent years is Israel’s intent to maintain its structural domination and oppression of the Palestinian people through indefinite occupation… resulting in a situation that arguably constitutes apartheid. It is now time for the international community to recognise and confront the consequences of Israel’s policies and actions in this regard.”

When will we defend the people who defend the law and human rights?

Alternative Jewish Voices  

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October 26, 2021

Important, Welcome News about (and from) the Wellington Jewish Council

At a recent Wellington Jewish community meeting, participants made clear their dissatisfaction with the Jewish Council’s tone of voice, composition, accountability and their narrow definition of the Jewish community’s shared interests.

The Wellington Jewish Council (our regional council, which also sends four delegates to the NZ Jewish Council’s membership of eighteen) has taken this feedback on board.  They have begun the work to revise their constitution and earn their mandate. 

We at Alternative Jewish Voices regard this as a hopeful, significant opening. We share this excerpt from the Council’s email with their agreement:

After reflecting on the discussion held, we propose that in order to re-establish the Wellington Jewish Council, a new constitution will be required that can capture the voice and aspirations of the community. Below is a survey to help begin that journey.  …

Until we have completed the process of drafting and confirming a constitution, the four of us will not purport to speak on behalf of the Wellington Jewish Council as we do not feel that we have a mandate to do so.

The Council has circulated a survey to elicit the Jewish community’s views about the representation we want.  Here’s the challenge.  Wellington Jews who belong to a synagogue will have received this survey at least once.  Our existing institutions have multiple channels and email lists.  How can this consultation include the members of our community who do not belong, or have not felt welcome, in our institutions?  They are disenfranchised now, and their views are essential if this process is to result in the genuine representation of our community as a whole.

Please help by sharing this survey with members of the Wellington Jewish community who might not have received it.  If you are Jewish in the Wellington region, please complete a survey. Please include yourself, in the hope that this conversation will lead to a more inclusive community, and a Council voice that actually reflects and represents more of us.

Here is the survey link. 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfWeBfl5bOFUNzgVq6xjVMN1rdFW12Jnj_yBgsycDL4SMtBOA/viewform

If you want a copy of the regional or national Jewish Council’s current constitution, please write to the contact address below or write directly to the Wellington Jewish Council.  The survey is open for three weeks.

Alternative Jewish Voices

No Time for Fragility: we need to do to community differently

The fragility of Zionism is undermining us. Our membership institutions and representation are narrowing the NZ Jewish community, precisely when engagement and collective action are needed. It’s time for us to do community differently.

Let me say (as we have repeated for years) that this is not about being agreed with.  It is about learning to exist and let others exist who disagree.  Zionism must cease to be our litmus test.

A few years back, a fellow Jew told me, “You are a walking indictment of everything I believe.”  That’s an honest statement of a belief so fragile that the very existence of others threatens it.  Problem is, I do live and I will walk.

While I could not walk safely in my own shul, I would wake up at 2:30 am to join Tzedek Chicago’s Torah study group. All I wanted was to belong in some Jewish space. They welcomed me while I was torn in half – but Aotearoa is still my community and its needs are my needs.

For advocating Palestinians’ full measure of rights, I have been targeted in some ugly ways. I have also been the object of astonishing hatred from a few (non-Palestinian) supposed fellow advocates.  Happily, there are plenty of people doing the real mahi of building coalitions and relationships for change.

I wrote a book about my work and my colleagues in Gaza. My Radio NZ interview was cancelled on the day it was to air.  I filed an Official Information Act request to learn the reason.  RNZ disclosed the internal email that had warned, “Given the huge flood of formal complaints we get any time we do a Palestine story without Israeli balance…”

They cut the interview because no one had on hand a story from Israel to “mention before and after.”  Without those defensive bookends in place, our national radio station self-censored. 

In these and other ways, I have learned something that Palestinians already know: this has become an identity campaign of erasure.  Erasure makes others – not the substance of any issue – the object of its attack.  A campaign of erasure is fought through restatements of history, exclusion and lies and harmful forms of license.

To be targeted in those ways, Palestinians know and I have learned, strikes at a deep, essential place.  Emotionally expensive as it is to withstand this form of attack, one cannot concede except by losing one’s very self.

We formed Alternative Jewish Voices partly to do the work of withstanding.

Along the way, we’ve heard from numerous fellow Jews who keep their mouths shut because they know the punishment that would follow if they spoke. We’ve met others who turned away from the community because they cannot keep their mouths shut. The result is the suppression, alienation and exclusion of Jews by Jewish institutions, for reasons unrelated to their Jewishness.

The NZ Jewish Council calls itself “the representative body of Jewish communities in New Zealand.” However, its members are indirectly and not transparently selected by other institutions, further excluding the excluded.  Thus they represent much less than they claim.

We must pry open our institutions or make more institutions.  We, and the media and government, need to listen more widely. We are a religious community, not a single-issue interest group.  Judaism has been plural for 2000 years, and no one has a monopoly on it today. 

Ours is a devastating moment to be a community in pieces. Have we no common interest in discussing city planning, housing, Covid response, climate, racism, inequality? The finite planet, our interdependent health and distributional justice all depend on our collective action.  Fragile communities wither and fail because they deny any need to be challenged by people who don’t fully agree.  We need every challenging conversation now. We confront issues which will not be solved only by people who fully agree with us.

Compare our fragility with the unfolding of mana whenua institutions in Auckland.  They are responding to Covid and related needs by casting their net inclusively, recognising an interdependent crisis and stepping straight in to do the mahi. It should not have fallen so heavily on their shoulders, but their action and their community-building will not be undone.  Maori Health Authority – what a proof of concept.  

If we are to live up to the demands upon us as a Jewish community, we too need to do community differently. We need to formulate aspirational solutions that can anchor a much wider group of us.  We disagree and yet we are in this together.

Marilyn Garson

For Alternative Jewish Voices