What is Jewish solidarity with Palestine?

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