Our Jewish – not Zionist – kaupapa

What is our kaupapa when we call for a ceasefire?

We are anti-Zionist Jews and founders of the organisations Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu. We love our Jewishness. We live it in different ways but we live it here, in Aotearoa. We do not regard ourselves as being in exile from some other place.

When Israel calls itself the Jewish state or takes the mantle of all Jews, it recruits us against our will. Not in our names, we say. Zionism is not our Judaism and Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza is not our war.

Some Zionist voices respond that we must not care about Jews and our protest somehow legitimises antisemitism.

They seem to assume that peace and solutions are not also in the interest of Israelis and of our Diaspora Jewish communities – which are being torn to shreds by Zionism’s attempt to take shelter in the protected space of the Jewish religion.

We don’t legitimise antisemitism. We are especially disgusted by the use of Nazi images and rhetoric around us – notably by Israel’s Defense Minister who calls Hamas ‘worse than the Nazis’ and Palestinians ‘human animals’. We are no less offended by the adoption of Nazi references by some people in Aotearoa. Stop it. It’s shameful, offensive, inaccurate and woefully misguided. Let the Holocaust be the Holocaust. Let this assault on Gaza be described in accurate detail. That is the way to understand both.

Antisemitism is real but if protest creates it, then why are Muslims also experiencing elevated threats? We who protest are not they who threaten. The far Right and other hardened Islamophobic antisemites are doing their best to capitalise on Netanyahu’s bombing by mainstreaming their hatreds. We must refuse their racism.

We protest because the occupation, apartheid, and now this carpet bombing and collective punishment of Gaza are sickening.

Some have defended it by observing that Hamas digs tunnels.

Digging a tunnel does not invalidate the civilian protections of Gazans. Jews used the infrastructure than ran beneath the Warsaw Ghetto. The Vietnamese dug tunnels to resist a larger, more heavily armed invader. America dropped countless tons of bombs, threw away 55,000 mostly young lives, lost the faith of its own youth and still managed to be defeated. Some things you cannot bomb into submission.

We see an overwhelmingly civilian community being strangled and starved. Half of Gaza’s housing units have already been damaged or destroyed. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of Judaism to stand with the oppressed and stand up to the oppressor.

We protest because this is illegal. We are committed to our basic human equality as embodied in the best-we-have-so-far framework of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). No one is allowed to fight as Israel is now fighting.

Surely we as Jews can understand that. Modern instruments like the Geneva Conventions were developed in response to the world that failed our parents and grandparents. International Humanitarian Law is a framework for ‘never again’ if we would only uphold it. Even the UN Secretary-General, chief diplomat of this world, agrees that Israel is committing ‘clear violations’ of these laws in Gaza.

When we protest, we are accused of not speaking, or not speaking enough, about the crimes committed in Israel.

Actually, we are doing just that. We believe that the way to protect civilians is to protect all civilians, and Jews are contained within the category ‘all’. Every life is precious: in Judaism each individual life has the value of one world. 10,000 worlds have been extinguished already. We mourn each loss but we will not have our sadness used to support the devastation of Gaza.

The crimes committed on October 7 are part of Palestinians’ long struggle for their Indigenous rights. We recommend Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.

Zionism taught us the myth that Jews could live a normal – no, a superior – Jewish life next to the illegal wall which hides the oppression of two million people. The myth was shattered when the wall was breached on October 7. We support Palestinians’ struggle and resistance within the laws of war, while we condemn as war crimes the murder and the taking of civilian hostages. All civilians have a right to be safe and removed from combat.

Those events triggered, but do not justify or excuse Israel’s current, catastrophic assault on Gaza. We hold Israeli decision-makers fully responsible. As we chanted in the streets of Wellington and Auckland: Netanyahu, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide. So do Holocaust and genocide scholars like Raz Segal.

Can we not finally admit that violence doesn’t work? Neither the walls around Gaza nor the inhuman tonnage of bombs dropped on it have ever delivered safety, disarmed Hamas, or quenched Palestinians’ pursuit of their rights and their freedom. None of Israel’s billions in American military subsidies, none of its profitably marketed walls and technologies of surveillance, none of its tortured legislative suppressions have put a dent in Palestinian resistance. More bombs than the explosive power of Hiroshima have been dropped on Gaza in this assault, and still Hamas is lobbing rockets.

Israel’s violence is a failed argument. The immiseration of Gaza tries to cover with noise and bloodshed the simple, enduring fact that Israel has no strategy beyond vengeance – and the cycles of vengeance are endless. Violence that claims to deliver safety fails on its own terms. Who can pretend that they have been made safer by withholding food from children or entombing hundreds or thousands of Palestinians beneath their homes?

International pressure is needed to demand and to support genuine change in Israel – Palestine. Change must be grounded in our equal rights and international law.

Cease fire NOW. Assist Gaza NOW. Address these decades of cause and resolve the occupation.

Fred Albert and Marilyn Garson, co-founders Alternative Jewish Voices

Justine Sachs and Avigail Allan, co-founders Dayenu