Month: November 2023

Last night, we were hosted at parliament by Debbie Ngarewa-Packer of Te Pāti Māori, and Golriz Ghahraman of the Green Party. Text of Marilyn Garson’s comments at this International Solidarity Day event:

Today the world is reminded that Palestinians have yet to attain their inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty, and the return of refugees. And now, suddenly, they are being deprived of so much more.

In other words, today is a day to envision a world wherein people realise their rights to live in dignity, autonomy, equality, safety and home.

What is Jewish solidarity with Palestine? There’s a Hebrew song, Gesher Tsar M’od, which describes a very narrow bridge. Jewish solidarity feels like stepping onto that very narrow bridge.

When a Jew takes up Palestinian rights as being equal to her own, that Jew’s communal Jewish life abruptly ends. That Jew will find herself remade as a straw man, a fictitious extremist and therefore an easier target for those Jewish leaders and ideologues whose world is zero-sum: our rights or theirs. This country does not have one welcoming non-Zionist Jewish institution – not one.

When you find yourself standing on that very narrow bridge, the song continues, the most important thing is not to be afraid.

Jewish solidarity requires us to build a positive Jewish community of abundant rights: the more rights we realise, the more we can make. Our solidarity is not a matter of changing sides, but of seeing and rejecting this debacle of sides. We reach for a more embracing vision.

We condemn all of the crimes and we mourn for everyone who has been harmed, displaced, is suffering or waiting for news. After seven weeks of devastation and collective punishment, it is clear that Jews are no safer, feel no safer for dropping all these bombs. There is no violent solution and there is no separate safety. Jewish-Palestinian solidarity is the knowledge that both of us or neither of us is going to live in peace, safety and dignity.

I also think today of the solidarity of embodied memory. Palestinian, Māori and Jewish people carry intergenerational horror that has been passed down to us.

It has been jolted awake in these seven weeks – vulnerability, Otherness, violence, expulsion, structural state menace. All that is also at work right now. When the memory of Gaza’s bombardment comes alive within me like an animal with claws, I cannot see beyond it – and that is something that both of our peoples desperately need to do. In our solidarity, in each other we need to see beyond our own trauma.

While this shattering violence continues, Fred and I are also deeply concerned by the temptations of the twin, misguided solidarities that seek a toehold in our streets: the enraged camps of us against them. We see the rise of antisemitism and the menace of performed antisemitism that masquerades as pro-Palestinian protest. No Palestinian will realise their rights because the windows of a New Zealand synagogue or mosque have been broken. Some of that is led by people who benefit from our diverging understandings. They seek only to drive us further apart.

We also hear the casually hateful language of Palestinian harm that our media re-broadcast uncritically. We can only imagine the offence, the sense of peril that language sparks within every Palestinian heart. Fred and I also live with the abuse and the lack of safety that have become normal within the Jewish community.

Our Aotearoa peace is wobbling. Solidarity enjoins us to dig our heels in, to resist and roll back all of the hate.

Fred and I believe that the only response to this terrible time is our Jewish-Palestinian solidarity – this daily walk of co-existence. Surely this is how a peace camp begins.

From there, when we meet on that narrow bridge and shrug off the fear, the bridge begins to feel sufficient and finally spacious enough to hold us all. This day of solidarity imagines two peoples living in dignity, integrating all the brokenness with compassion into some kind of mutual recognition and healing. Peace with justice is the only solution. Our equal rights delineate all the work of our struggle to get there.

We will not be free until we are all free. Until then, the most important thing is not to be afraid of each other.

B’tzedek (justice), ngā mihi nui,

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert, Oct 29, 2023

The obliterating mindset of Israel’s war on Gaza is driving a wedge differently through our community. Palestine is firmly embraced by those who believe there is some law and empathy left to call on. The Jewish community stands in the company of the Free Speech Union and Destiny Church. The Jewish institutions of Aotearoa have yet to object or get to grips with their fellow travellers.

While they drift, Israel obliterates.

Gaza has among the world’s highest rates of literacy. Israel has destroyed every one of its universities as if to obliterate any prospect of children’s future.

Gaza was a community of neighbours, of deeply interwoven connections that held people in place. Israel has driven over a million people from their homes and blown up more than half of Gaza’s residences as if to obliterate any possibility of again being safe within four familiar walls.

As if to deny Gaza’s very humanity, Israel is now attacking hospitals. Overnight, Medecins Sans Frontieres has stated: “At the time of writing, our staff are witnessing people being shot at as they attempt to flee the Al-Shifa hospital.” Israel would obliterate the very possibility of healing.

Israel’s blockade had already rendered Gaza dependent upon our world’s laws, aid and frankly its sense of shame. Now Israel is waging war on the whole international framework of harm limitation. They have targeted ambulances and now hospitals, shattered civilian and lifesaving infrastructure, refused the essentials of life to two million people with no hope of escape, blown up mosques and churches. In the full view of cameras, Israel is obliterating a community and daring the world to care.

Thus far, the voices which purport to represent the New Zealand Jewish community are harnessing this obliterating mindset to their local agenda. Our silent institutions appear to acquiesce if not to support the destruction of Gaza in utter defiance of law, Jewish prayer and empathy. If this continues, they will find themselves in the company of people who cheer Israel on for their own purposes, not from the slightest love of Jews.

Israel’s campaign and its supporters are driving a new wedge through our community, reflecting the global shift. The Jewish community is being positioned among Israel’s anti-human rights fellow travellers, while we who protest find ourselves among larger and larger crowds. The street, the young, tens of thousands of people who have not been involved before are repelled by the slaughter they see, and by our absentee government which has let it go so far. That it takes so long for our government to follow its people is a disgrace, but follow they will.

The Jewish community must situate itself within this new moral geography. We are not now the victims. Older Jews have grown up reading the poetry and the agonised reflections of a Jewish community wondering how to live with the indifference that had permitted genocide against us. We saw a generational crisis of faith and our parents’ fear of ever being at ease in a world that had stood back and looked down its nose at the surviving Jewish refugees.

That powerlessness is not our landscape now. Licensed by the world’s shame, riding on Western fear and suspicion of Muslims, Zionist Israel today is an obliterating war criminal. Its leaders flaunt their genocidal intent.

The institutions of our Jewish community have yet to make this leap: our community is not now divided between pro- and anti-Zionism. Now we are divided between those who condemn war crimes and those who don’t; between those who can be for the rights of all and those who are only for themselves.

Israel’s crimes will fail, just as the crimes against us failed. Israel’s atrocities will fail on their own terms: no one here or there will be made safe by these bombs. Neither can Israel obliterate the Palestine that it cannot bear to co-exist with. For all the rubble of Gaza, human belonging is not confined to four walls. Learning is not done only in a classroom. The people entombed within the canyons and mounds of concrete will be honoured and remembered.

There is no military solution because the spirit of liberation cannot be obliterated. Palestine now embodies that spirit. Now all the poetry will be for Palestine.

To whatever degree the Jewish community continues to passively give permission for all this, the community trades its soul for a flag. When institutions are coopted by Israel’s acts of obliterating power; Jews of conscience, soul and aroha form new communities of values.

More Jews are linking arms with Palestinians around the world than ever before. In our shared, life-loving protest lie the seeds of a response to this wounded time.

Cease fire now. Aid Gaza now. Free Palestine now.

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert, co-founders of AJV

Justine Sachs, co-founder of Dayenu

Sue Berman

(reprinted with minor revisions from May, 2021)

Alternative Jewish Voices has been thinking about that phrase, “from the river to the sea.”

Last Saturday Wellington had a big, many-lingual demonstration seeking justice and safety for Palestinians. There was another today on the steps of Parliament, urging our government to stand up and protect the endangered people of Gaza. Then MP Golriz Ghahraman tabled a motion calling for Aotearoa-NZ to recognise the State of Palestine. 138 countries have done that already.

We spoke at both rallies, and we thank everyone present for their warm welcome. We closed today by wishing for “a just peace for everyone who lives between the river and the sea.”

Meanwhile the NZ Jewish Council was busy calling Green MPs antisemitic for using exactly the same words. Hmm.

Also this morning several American rabbis launched an initiative for Gaza, calling for “a just peace that guarantees equality, justice and freedom for all who live between the river and the sea.”

Is the NZ Jewish Council calling these rabbis antisemites? Inciters of hatred? Have they undermined the security of the NZ Jewish community?

Jeff Halper’s new book is called Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler-Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State. He uses the term “river to the sea” when he discusses people’s fears about co-existence with Palestinians. Does that make Jeff Halper (an Israeli) a Jew-hater?

From the river to the sea is geography – there’s a river on one side and the sea on the other. Governments, political parties and popular movements Israeli and Palestinian have at times used expansionist, excluding slogans in their politics. We condemn that because it takes us further from a just solution – but not every reference to geography is hateful. We have been at, spoken at, Wellington’s rallies and we have heard no hatred.

As a term of liberation, the phrase may be politically threatening because it unifies a space that successive Israeli regimes have fragmented. It unifies national consciousness, population counts and resistance – as in today’s national strike by Palestinians. And it speaks to the scope of a solution: the regime of power needs to change from the river to the sea.

It is not a term we fear, because we don’t view freedom as a zero-sum business. Power may be finite, or privilege – yours may necessarily be at the expense of mine. But freedom? Freedom belongs in that wonderful economics of abundance – the more we have, the more we can make. ‘From the river to the sea’ may indeed rub some people the wrong way, but the term is in wide use, including mainstream Jewish use. Rather like ‘apartheid.’

We contend that the Jewish Council is policing language much as Israel polices its spacial divisions to preserve its privilege and power.

We wish a just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

No one leaves Gaza unchanged. It is not like any other community.

Lock two million other people behind a wall, imprison and blockade and deprive them, set drones over them and bombard their cities. See if they respond by building half a dozen universities and observing special noise regulations on the days when children are writing their exams. When there is no water and no electricity, see how many neighbours haul water up twelve or fourteen flights of stairs so that the baby can have a bath. Gaza’s neighbours did that.

After these weeks of bombardment exceeding the destructive power of Hiroshima, without fuel or light or supplies of food or clean water or sleep or meaningful assistance from the whole damned world; which other community would continue to display the mutual aid we see still among Gazans? Where else would neighbours run toward the bombs? Where else would people waiting for help in the hospital halls make way to let someone else go first?

Gaza educated me in ways that were uncomfortable and vital. I was given the chance to live among people who, I had been told in a million ways, were my enemies. I was more inclined to hear the validating messages of a White European voice until I found myself immersed and sharing the experience of Palestinians. The content of ‘we’ changed as I unlearned the fifty years of training that I brought with me to Gaza, and instead learned to trust the world I saw around me. I had been raised to admire Jewish power; in Gaza my people became the people who stand in front of the tanks.

I listened acutely for them to hate Jews per se. If they had, I would have fallen back on my training, but they didn’t. They resisted an occupier, Israel, the IDF, the bombs that broke their windows at night and made their children sleep under their beds for safety. They resisted Zionism, not Judaism.

I was raised to be a principled, responsible Jewish person and an uncritical Zionist, handing off my soul for a flag. While I lived in Gaza, one of my sisters sat in the World Zionist Organisation. We were each living the life we had been trained to live at the family dinner table – but the world in front of my eyes changed my understanding of my Jewishness.

This is not only a Jewish training. What conditioning does Aotearoa bring when a mostly European occupier bashes, bulldozes and starves a Middle Eastern, mostly Muslim, indigenous community that won’t stop resisting? I have been shocked to hear the answer in these weeks: our media and our government are educating me again. It is uncomfortable and vital, much like the lesson of Auckland War Museum that was unable to see Palestinian civilians as human beings worth grieving. Israeli lives were all they saw, so that is what they grieved.

Our media is framing the story in ugly ways. Uncritically they rebroadcast the words of Israeli cabinet ministers and military spokespeople who, by the way, speak Hebrew for domestic consumption and English when performing for our benefit. In smart uniforms with the beret snapped just so on the shoulder, the nice man explains that it is not time for a ceasefire. The nice man has the guns to decide when and how much Palestinian civilians will eat.

Our media give an uncritical platform to Israel’s defence minister who refers to Palestinians as ‘worse than Nazis’ and ‘subhuman animals’; to the party whose elected member called to ‘flatten Gaza’ and ‘bomb without distinction’ while there is ‘worldwide legitimacy’; and to the prime minister who says that this is a war of ‘civilisation against the barbarians’. Israel has long debated in such language, baiting its army to ‘mow the lawn’, ‘finish the job’, ‘clean it out’. This slaughter is what they meant, and their appetite for Palestinian blood is apparently endless. These are statements of genocidal intent and they should be so labelled. Instead, our media are letting Israeli speakers peel away the civilian status of Palestinians as visible, equal, protected human beings.

They broadcast Israel’s claim that it has no choice but to slaughter. Nonsense; there is only no choice in minds that have rejected every other choice. ‘No choice’ is a criminal rationale that has been aired in this country as fact.

Our media look askance at the numbers of Palestinian deaths because the Gazan ministry of health is ‘Hamas-run’. I have yet to hear them mention that Israel is in part run by duly elected fascists like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

At moments we hear from a legal scholar, but we do not hear from our Palestinian neighbours whose voices make this slaughter human and consequential. Our media are reproducing the world according to the European belligerent and discounting the deaths of those who are non-White and Indigenous.

I know that the pain I feel is a fraction of the harm that such broadcasts do to Palestinians who are, themselves and their families, being downgraded. Even this fraction hurts like a sliver of glass through my lungs; this cutting knowledge that I cannot and we choose not to protect the people of Gaza. One million children have been born behind that blockade wall. Nearly 4000 of them have already been slaughtered in front of us.

Then I see the malice of a small number of Jews, part of that Israel Institute-Free Speech Union vortex, harnessing Gaza to their local projects. They call advocates for decolonisation worms, excrement, less than human; they call co-covernance a coded message for Māori to ‘be like Hamas’ and kill Pākehā. Shame on our Jewish institutions for worrying about anti-Jewish racism while refusing to stand up to the hatemongers beneath their own roofs.

Aotearoa is supposed to have learned that implacable hatred is not content to live online. We claim to know that it will manifest in real life somehow, at a terrible cost. So why do the media import this language? Where is Luxon, the ghost in the blue suit? What have we learned?

Marilyn Garson, with Fred Albert