Importing the language of Israel’s project

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