Month: July 2023

On this night nine years ago, I watched the fire station opposite my Gaza apartment explode and burn. What malice, to destroy a fire station at the onset of a bombing campaign. Neighbours raced heedlessly toward the shattered building, willing to dig with only their bare hands, to haul forth survivors or carry what they found for burial – because international rescue teams dared not go to Gaza.

Nine years have passed since Israel bombed Gaza for 51 days and 50 interminable nights. The sounds of screaming through those nights will live forever within anyone who heard them. Screaming for rescue, screaming for mercy, screaming from the very edge of human tolerance.

Still Gaza waits for the International Criminal Court to get to work—and more fundamentally, Gaza waits for us to bring down the damned blockade walls. Behind those walls, two million Gazans wait to breathe, to walk, to live and be rejoined to the human community of our world.

For my dear colleagues, neighbours and everyone who waits in Gaza, I restate this:

Tell it to a judge. I am not Palestinian but I was a witness to the assault of 2014. I want its alleged war crimes to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. Those Israeli warriors who were ‘brave’ enough to direct an assault on a trapped populace should be brave enough to account for their choices in a well-lit courtroom. Why is a court of law important? Because the menace that underpinned the assault of 2014 is still present: the dehumanization of Palestinians. Walled off and vilified, anything can be done to the people of Gaza. A trial will amplify their story of being under intensive attack behind a wall. Let Gazans tell their story. Because people will still be living with the memory and the imprint of this war (as I am). The body remembers the singed smells that linger on your skin, the sight behind your eyelids of neighbours racing toward rubble to rescue neighbours, the sound of children in hospital hallways with chattering teeth. The drifts of white dust in the corners of window sills. The screams of people in the streets, seeking shelter before nightfall – but there is no shelter behind a wall. Because courts prosecute individuals, not nations. Individuals make choices and are accountable. Individual responsibility lets everyone else get beyond blaming whole states. Someone wrote the doctrines, chose the weapons and the targeting parameters and the orders of battle. They should be judged by their handiwork. Because of the 18,000 homes destroyed, the 100 family homes targeted in the first week, and the millions of tons of rubble that altered the very landscape of the Gaza Strip. In 51 days, Gazan forces fired nearly 6000 rockets and artillery shells while Israel’s armed forces acknowledge dispatching 5000 tons of munitions to fire at a trapped populace. The tonnage and the stated IDF doctrines of disproportionate force like the Dahiya Doctrine await judgement. Because someone knew that the UN shelter-schools were filled with displaced Palestinians. They knew, because I told them. As a member of the UNRWA team operating those shelters, one of my tasks was to confirm the pre-existing protections of each flagged United Nations school building that was sheltering displaced people. Over and over they were told. Those schools were clearly marked on military maps. Everyone knows their location and their signature colours. Someone in Israel knew and approved the decision to fire at them anyway. Seven times they fired at shelters, killing 44 Palestinians and injuring 227. Let those responsible people explain their actions to a judge. Because the earth trembled with the tonnage of bombs that the IDF used to destroy the homes of 92,000 Palestinians in Shuja’iyya, and because of the quieter killings in Khuza’a. The stories of Gaza’s neighbourhoods need to be heard and responsibility assigned. Because of the 73 medical facilities, the ambulances and every other illegal target that was hit. Because of the civilian infrastructure destroyed, the water pipes and the power plant, and all the gratuitous hardship that Gazans endured. The lesson of the war, they said later, was that Israel no longer saw any civilians in Gaza at all. A court must restore Gazans’ civilian status and protections. Because of the 293,000 displaced Gazans who endured such trying conditions in 90 UNRWA shelters—because there was no safer place behind that wall. Because 6,000 airstrikes and 14,500 tank shells and 35,000 artillery shells equates to 100,000 kg of explosives every day, day after day. Israeli forces killed 2251 Gazans including 1,462 civilians, a third of whom were children. The human consequence of the IDF’s choice to inflict such massive violence must be heard. Battlefield explosive weapons must not rain down upon crowded cities with impunity again. Because beneath those bombs in Gaza, the minutes were interminable. There was nowhere to flee, no way to help, nothing to do but wait for the next bomb through nights when there were more bombs than minutes. Let a trial record and weigh the harm of those 51 merciless days and nights of minutes of witness. Because some debased Israelis sat on hillsides eating popcorn. They watched the bombs land on human beings and homes as if it were entertainment. Around the world many, many others turned away and did nothing. Perhaps both sets of people will be shaken to realise that they were enjoying, or averting their eyes from, a crime. Because what is demonstrated in Gaza with impunity today, is normalised elsewhere tomorrow at the expense of other inconvenient human beings. The assaults upon Gaza are relevant even here, because New Zealand is buying military robots that were tested on the trapped people of Gaza and the West Bank. Is this who we aspire to be? Because as a Jew, I have heard the rationales for that massive violence. “It’s necessary.” “Kill all the little snakes.” “This time we’ll finish the job.” I have heard all that. But where is Gaza’s voice? I wait to hear the evidence and the verdict on the Jewish ethno-nationalist project. Our world must not value human life so differently when the life is Palestinian. Because our lives are of equal value, Gazans must be heard in court. Marilyn Garson

Wellington City Council has initiated a friendly city link with Ramallah, Palestine, as a precursor to a sister city relationship. In the course of this initiative, the patterns of Zionist speech in Aotearoa have deteriorated. They are becoming less transparent, more alarming and alarmist.

Although it is not in Wellington, For the Protection of Zion Trust  was vocal. The FPZT is not a trust in the usual sense at all. It is registered as a “trust” business type. Its trustees are Pastor Nigel Woodley of a Hastings Christian Zionist church, and one other person with the same surname. As a company, it is not obliged to disclose much more than its basic information. It does not disclose any financial information, so we don’t know who paid over $10,000 for two full-page advertorials in The Post, opposing the city council motion. Their content is clearly in the form of an opinion but we wonder whether The Post would permit Jewish capacities and rights to be similarly belittled.

In council chambers, Pastor Nigel called Ramallah a “centre . . . a hotbed of terrorism.” His depiction of murder strayed so far into the weeds that Mayor Whanau had to reel him back by reminding him that there were children in the room.

David Zwartz said that he was speaking as an individual. He is a member of the New Zealand Jewish Council Incorporated (NZJC), and the wording on their website overlaps strongly with his. He said that twinning with Ramallah would be “bad, both for the Jewish community and for Wellington,” and that the motion “is seeking to align us with Ramallah’s values.” Among those, Zwartz listed violence, intolerance of LGBTQ+, lack of democracy and hostility toward the people who occupy Palestinian land. Our inclusive Wellington values, he emphasised, do not align with the values of Ramallah.

We, Alternative Jewish Voices, do not celebrate violence in any form. However, neither Ramallah nor Palestine can be reduced to incidents of violence. Wellington has three sister cities in China, whose government is engaged in widescale, systematic human rights violations against Uighurs. Do our sister cities align us with those values? Did we cut our sister city ties to the US when it elected Donald Trump? Is David Zwartz reducible to the fascism of members of Israel’s current government, or the ethno-nationalist pogroms of its settlers?

No, only in Palestine do such incidents render a whole people unfit to associate with us.

We reject the PAs opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, as strongly as we reject this Israeli MK’s assertion on June 21 that the “LGBTQ community poses [a] greater threat to Israel than Hezbollah or Hamas.”

We are waiting to hear the Zionist speakers shout for our government to cut its ties with Israel for the preservation of Wellington’s values.

These speakers opposed the motion on exceptional and highly selective grounds. Their arguments were specific to Palestinians and contrary to our treatment of others. Their tone left us feeling sad and indignant. At least their tone didn’t win.

But neither has it receded. Since losing, there is a sour aftertaste in comments like this tweet by Juliet Moses, member and spokesperson of the New Zealand Jewish Council.

Well the Israel haters’ favourite token Jew Marilyn was there to welcome Ramallah to Wellington, so presumably that’s the kind of thing that she’s keen to see.

— Juliet Moses (@JulietMosesNZ) June 29, 2023

Moses’s correspondent has previously shared anti-immigrant stories, covid denial, and so on. The spokesperson of NZ Jewish Council affirms his reduction of Palestinian culture to violence, and stokes the fear that welcoming Palestinians will lead to murder and mayhem. Further, she gratuitously attributes this looming danger to a Jew who disagrees with her–one who has never applauded violence.

How quickly we would all recoil from a tweet warning that Jews shouldn’t be welcome in Wellington—that if we let Jews in, chaos and criminality will follow because they are integral to Jewish culture. It is every bit as racist and reprehensible for the spokesperson of the NZ Jewish Council to write such garbage about others.

We are waiting for the Jewish Council to disavow the message or its speaker.

The Israel Institute’s last filing with the Companies Office indicates that they now have four directors, three of whom are not Jewish while the fourth was a member of the NZJC until November 2022. On the day after the city council made Ramallah a friendly city, the Israel Institute circulated a tweet declaring, “Neo Nazis and Anti Israel activists are all the same.”

Aside from being vile and stupid, we’re unsure how this aligns with the lofty values that the Jewish Council and its members fear to tarnish by association with Ramallah.

It is disgraceful that these are voices of the current / recent NZ Jewish Council. Shame on them for trafficking in racist, menacing tropes and for continually using their platforms to vilify Jews and non-Jews who disagree with them.

Wellington’s thirteen other sister cities do not elicit this kind of vitriol. The WCC vote merely granted Palestinians a connection to their whenua that other ethnic communities already enjoy without such outrage–including communities divided by conflict like China and Taiwan.

That a simple connection should provoke such fragile, indeed hysterical opposition highlights the contingent status of Palestinians in New Zealand. The Zionist tone amounts to a heckler’s veto. They are trying to force government to restrict its actions because of the anticipated or actual response of the Zionist segment of the Jewish community.

This is how we objected to the heckler’s veto in council chambers:

It is misguided and misleading to hesitate to connect with Palestinian people out of fear of my Jewish community’s response. It’s misguided because the rights of my neighbours to expression, connection with their whanau and whenua, the peaceful enjoyment of our shared public space, robust political participation and the full realisation of their rights – in short, their wholeness—is not at my expense. Palestinian identity and rights do not diminish me. They enrich the tapestry of the city we share.

No one, including my people, has the right to define our identity so expansively that they ask you to erase others.

We again thank the Wellington City Council for treating Palestinians in Wellington and Ramallah as the normal, whole human beings they are. Let’s break down some barriers by getting to know each other better.

The radicalising of Zionist speech does not bode well for the reasoned conduct of politics. They are racing toward the kind of distortion and hatred that have harmed other communities. We fear they are harming ours.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa New Zealand