In large cities, a Jewish person declares Palestinian rights to be equal to their own, and they are welcomed into new institutions of non-Zionist Jewish worship, politics and identity. They blend into large groups of protestors wearing the same T-shirts: Jews say no. Jews for ceasefire. They attend discussion groups to unpack their anti-Palestinian training. In a place as small as Aotearoa, a Jew who says ‘Palestinians are my equals’ has been warned that they will be alone and vilified. To doubt Zionism is to become a Hamas-lover race-traitor genocide-monger with (according to statements printed by a senior Stuff journalist without question) no Jewish identity.
That did not begin on October 7, 2023.
Before AJV was formed, its co-founders tried and failed for 18 months to obtain permission to convene a single conversation where Progressive synagogue members would be allowed to speak freely about Israel. Even in 2019, there was no Jewish space for one unpoliced conversation among synagogue members. Thus did Zionist boards drive the wedge between their questioning and dissenting members.
Since then, Jewish institutions have ruled out more and more of the world in the interests of Israel. Human rights – antisemitic. Ceasefire – genocidal. Their rightward lurch leaves no place for Jewish doubt about the reality of the Zionist fairy tale, the murder and starvation of civilians, and the nature of any Israel that emerges from this unfathomable violence.
Where does the doubt go in a small community?
Alternative Jewish Voices was formed as a Jewish-pluralist collective. We reject the Zionist claim to a monopoly over Jewish identity. We are drawn from the not-Zionist breadth. We are inspired by large, politically uniform Jewish organisations whose members can block the rotunda of Congress or the Brooklyn Bridge. However, our five founding members could have held our protests in the back of a taxi. Our challenge was to make our breadth strategic and fearlessly Jewish.
We have always told our Palestinian friends that together we are a Venn diagram. We each have communal issues and audience, while we coalesce around the work of justice in Palestine. We will never sound fully alike, but when we stand side by side we model the solution.
Nor do we sound quite like other solidarist organisations because, for us, Palestine is not a distant issue. It ripples back and forth through our daily lives.
There are some people for whom solidarity is straightforward: if X cannot stand beside you while you call for justice in Palestine then X was never truly your friend and you lose nothing by letting go of them. That does not work for Jews. That suggests that our families are not part of us, and it invalidates our oldest Jewish relationships. It suggests that we are better off cutting ourselves entirely adrift – but our relationships are more precious and organic than that.
Even worse, such a blanket demand mirrors the Zionist tactic: adhere unwaveringly or your family, community and your oldest friends will heal smoothly over your exclusion.
That is not a path; that is a threat and we will not replicate it. At a recent AJV meeting, one of the common threads was our difficult, essential work of preserving integral relationships. That work is harder now than it has ever been before.
Why do Jews feel compelled to speak when the first step is so hard? Ask instead: if we do not speak, who will speak for us? It is unthinkable that we will be mere spectators while this is done in our names. We could not bear for our generation to be remembered as having been passive at genocide. This crime is ours to end, and justice is partly ours to build. Even if we were born and raised on the myths of Zionism, the Israel that we see before us has forfeited any legitimacy as the centrepiece of our Jewish identity.
And look: the radicalisation of the Jewish-Christian Zionist camp in Aotearoa has driven the old wedge differently. Jewish institutions have cut themselves off from the Jews who question, and from the Jews who see a more embracing future than that of Benjamin Netanyahu and the endless American bombs of the IDF. The Zionist vision also makes it a litmus test that Aotearoa Jews must enjoy rights to Israel which take precedence over the rights of Palestinians. Who would want to pass that test?
Now that the moral cost of conforming blindly to Zionism is so high, Aotearoa’s broad not-Zionist tent has become the place of radical welcome.
Our breadth is our strength because the process of enquiring into one’s identity and forming a more just Jewishness is layered and reflective. There are decades of conditioning to be peeled back, and exploration to be undertaken of the diasporic Jewish identities which flourish in the space that opens up. In a broad tent questioning, discovery and growth can take place alongside the urgent, liberating action that is needed to stop the killing in Gaza, to bring about a ceasefire and then to press for the justice that must underlie any real solution.
Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices are merging so that we can extend this radical welcome to more of Aotearoa’s Jews.
Come and speak freely.
Marilyn Garson for
Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices
Sh'ma Koleinu - Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) 