We renew our call: recognise the State of Palestine now, today!

We, Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu, renew our call for our government to recognise the State of Palestine. Do it now, today.

Recognition is integral to arresting and responding to the genocidal violence we are watching on our screens.

We are sick of seeing states (led by the US and followed by Aotearoa among others) respond to this horror with apolitical tokens of aid. Governments including ours are (under-)reacting to a manufactured humanitarian cataclysm without a squeak about its structural cause or solution. Over and over.

• America is air-dropping 38,000 meals into Gaza. If all goes very well, one-tenth of the Gazans who are starving in the north might have one meal – and we hope it does go very well. But why is Biden not objecting to Israel’s obstruction of an aid shipment at its port of Ashdod – a shipment that would feed 1.1 million people for a month? Neither the US nor New Zealand is speaking about the cause of this need: Israel is using starvation as a tool of war, and that is a war crime.
• West Bank settlers (whose settlements NZ acknowledge as illegal) are plundering and ethnically clearing villages. Over 400 West Bankers have been killed and 7000 detained since October 7. NZ has told a dozen settlers that they can’t come to Queenstown in response. The Israeli occupation forces that accompany settlers on their crime sprees and detain Palestinians are untouched. NZ has not acted or even spoken about the cause of these casualties: illegal settlement by fanatics who wield unprecedented power in Israel’s coalition government.
• 30,400 Gazans have been killed and NZ would like a ceasefire, please, for humanitarian reasons (which are desperately real and urgent). Our government has not acted against the makers of this repugnant strategy and it has not spoken about the cause of this violence: Palestinians have a right to self-determination and Israel has obstructed it for 75 years.

In a world of such diplomatic acquiescence, who speaks for Palestine? Who envisions the new Gaza and protects West Bankers as parts of a single future, who will see to Palestine’s interests in its own resources (from the water under its ground to the natural gas off its shores)? Who determines the shape and administration of Palestine? These are not decisions for Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu to make. Nor has their agent, the Palestine Authority, any national mandate.

NZ fails to imagine a national Palestinian voice. NZ is among the minority of countries that do not recognise the State of Palestine and grant Palestinians their own voice as of right in all such conversations.

There is a Palestine-shaped hole in Aotearoa’s response to this season of genocidal violence. Statehood is a sine qua non of survival in this state-led world. In a world of states, stateless people are unprotected and their interests do not figure except as it suits the transactional whims of states.

Palestine – in particular Gaza – has been a little rip in the fabric of states for decades. This is a bitter irony that every Jew and every supporter of Israel should be made to confront and grapple with: the vulnerability of statelessness was also the problem statement of Zionism.

Zionism responded to the threatened status of Jews who had been denied the rights and protection of their states. In a world organised by states in the interests of state power, anything could be done to a stateless, dehumanised and unprotected people. Jews knew that statelessness was a precursor of violent erasure yet, watching Palestinians endure the same vulnerability, too many Jews have turned amnesiac.

We write while genocide is being done and watched. It is the lowest and the defining moment of this issue in our lifetimes. Parts of our understanding of the world have failed and broken because we did not believe that so many institutions and governments would stand back and watch suffering like this.

Broken or not, this catastrophe will need to be addressed in a world of states’ interests and neighbours’ indifference. Palestinians have every right to find their own national voice and call on Aotearoa as an equal collective with equal rights to defense, resource sovereignty and territorial integrity as per UN resolutions. Recognition says clearly that the IDF, West Bank settlers and those displacing families in Occupied East Jerusalem are operating on Palestinian land. Recognition rejects Israel’s efforts to invalidate UN resolutions with violent facts on the ground.

We are tired of hearing that there is nothing Aotearoa can do about justice from this distance. Recognition is the thing our government can do, and doing it will bring Aotearoa in line with the majority of the world’s states.

So we are renewing our call for the government of Aotearoa to recognise its fellow State of Palestine. Now, today. We call on Foreign Minister Peters to put some actions in place to support the call for a ceasefire. Send Israel’s ambassador home until normalcy on the ground permits normal diplomatic relations.

It’s time to name the nation that will not be erased, and elevate its voice to the centre of our concern: the State of Palestine.

Alternative Jewish Voices ~ Dayenu