Month: January 2025

For immediate release:

January 31, 2025

Why is Israel’s head of infantry doctrine addressing a Jewish community leadership gathering?

Alternative Jewish Voices asks its community to step back from uncritical militarism

Why is Israel’s head of infantry doctrine addressing a Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ) leadership gathering? With genocide charges pending in international court, why is the UPJ’s 2025 fundraising campaign being led by an IDF major general?

The Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ) is the Australian-based umbrella for New Zealand and Australian synagogues in the Progressive stream of Jewish religion. Over the past 15 months, the UPJ has folded an uncritical militarism into its vision of the Israel which it supports.

Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV), a collective of anti-Zionist New Zealand Jews, is voicing their alarm.

In January 2025, the UPJ advertised a leadership forum for emerging Jewish community leaders. Among the featured speakers was Colonel Yaron Simsolo, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) head of infantry doctrine, pictured in his uniform. After some internal resistance, the event was re-branded in warm yellows as a “Shabbat gathering – a weekend with the UPJ”. Colonel Yaron’s image was removed, although he remains part of the event. The current UPJ newsletter also announces that an IDF major general will spearhead its 2025 fundraising appeal for Israel.

Infantry doctrine guides frontline troops. It is an inextricable part of the IDF’s strategy and guidance on matters including ammunition, targeting and the permissible levels of civilian death and destruction. Military doctrine thus displays the IDF’s respect or disregard for the laws of war and civilian protections.

For years, longitudinal studies have quantified Israel’s increasingly deadly selections of ammunition, its use of explosive weapons ever closer to Palestinian civilians with foreseeable increases in civilian casualties, and its explicit doctrines of disproportionate violence against civilian areas. These studies chart the deadly doctrinal path to the decimation of Gaza—which the International Court of Justice calls “plausible genocide”.

A deeper layer of scrutiny, as in this survey of operations from 1993 – 2014 points to the existence of “a second war doctrine — overt, but not officially written or institutionalized. The result is recurrent tension and dissonance owing to prevailing expectations within the IDF and in the public arena, based on official documents and the divergence from formal doctrinal documents.”

The IDF’s actions are now before the courts. In July, the International Court of Justice instructed all states not to normalise or advance Israel’s illegal actions. Israel’s civilian leaders of the IDF are charged with genocide.

Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices, says, “For the UPJ to hold up an IDF doctrine writer some kind of leadership role model is just plain ostrich-headed. People are already baffled and disillusioned that Jewish institutions seem so indifferent to Gaza’s suffering. It is beyond imagining that young Jewish New Zealanders will be lectured by a shaper of this doctrine, while Muslim New Zealanders are grieving for scores of thousands of their whānau—and while Gazans unearth their relatives’ remains. What are they thinking?

“Alternative Jewish Voices works hard to distinguish IDF accountability from the rights of Jewish New Zealanders. The UPJ’s actions blur the distinctions we are asking others to respect. This event is not merely insensitive. It also privileges violence above other ways of seeing our place in the world. Our Jewish community institutions absolutely must imagine a better future than that.”

Alternative Jewish Voices is a collective of anti-Zionist Jews. It works on three issues: Jewish pluralism, antiracism including antisemitism, and support for Palestinians in their pursuit of freedom and justice.

Enquiries: Marilyn Garson, contact@ajv.org.nz

On January 27, Alternative Jewish Voices member Rick Sahar hosted a Genocides Remembrance gathering. Tangata whenua, Armenian, Irish, Jewish and others; we spoke of our losses and the power of sharing in survival. Palestine is at the heart of every bit of comfort and solidarity that we – together – can offer.

Jewish commemoration now needs to open itself to all this, as Jewish memory confronts Jewish participation.

Kia ora koutou. I want to acknowledge mana whenua. I am an immigrant descended from refugees. I am grateful for my welcome and for the place of Tangata te Tiriti in Aotearoa.

I want to speak to two sides of being Jewish on this day of commemoration. Like many of you, we are imprinted with genocide. I appreciate your company in that. When we remember the category of genocide, rather than our losses alone, then we acknowledge all of our intergenerational trauma. We take on the task of seeing more than our fears in the eyes of others.

My four grandparents would be called refugees today. They fled from Eastern Europe and Russia. They were welcomed in North America. They established new lives and I grew up admiring their agency. My whānau had mostly left Europe before the Holocaust. I was born 16 years after. I grew up in its shadow. The Jewish religion also took a beating in the time of my childhood. How can anyone believe when a third of your people have just been killed in the heart of Europe? In those baffled, grieving years, Zionism took hold as a secular way to be Jewish.

I, and many Jews who grew up then, learned indelibly that the non-Jewish people around us had sat silently while we were murdered. We learned that there was no safety. I got beyond those fears by living for two decades among endangered communities. I am convinced that we are each others’ best hope.

We can remember in either of two ways. Let me contrast two parliamentary events. On November 29, 2023, I represented AJV alongside Palestinians and tangata whenua to mark the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people. That evening drew together three communities imprinted with genocide and suspicion. We committed to bringing a better future about—together.

In that same spirit we, here, will give each other a parting gift this evening. We will leave here reminded that vulnerability and loss and comfort and hope are aspects of our shared human condition.

By contrast, tonight a parliamentary event is remembering only the Jewish losses of the Holocaust. No shared future in sight, and no responsibility. That’s the other, exceptional path.

There’s a great big elephant in that parliamentary reception room, of course. We are watching genocide again. This time it is being carried out by people who are Jewish and who coopt the Jewish religion and identity for their ideology.

AJV spends a lot of energy distinguishing between Jewish and Israel, Judaism and Zionism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Jewish New Zealanders are not responsible for a government for which we do not vote. But here’s the elephant: we, Jewish New Zealanders, must grapple with the fact of Jewish soldiers committing genocide and inflicting hideous, gleeful destruction on Palestinians. This time, the institutions of our community are among those who turn away and sit silently. Even as we ask you to maintain those distinctions, we need to account to ourselves for the intersection of Jewish memory and participation right now. The Jewish community will be held to this account for generations.

This time, we are implicated. To be implicated is not guilt. It is involvement. In my view, most of us have something to learn from the category of implication. We, Jewish New Zealanders, naturally avoid this accountability because it takes in family, friends and community. I want to tell you a story from the Cambodian genocide, which helps me to reckon with being an implicated Jew.

In the 1970s, in four years, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered and starved somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of their own people. Scholars called it auto-genocide because there was no ethnic distinction between killers and victims. Media called the Khmer Rouge an inexplicable, alien evil. I studied the Cambodian genocide with adolescent fixation. I knew there was something I needed to learn from it. Maybe I was trying to understand the Holocaust in my own way.

In university, no professor would let me take up the Khmer Rouge for graduate work. Instead I travelled to Cambodia a number of times and became fluent in Khmer. I first lived in Cambodia in the 1990s. I directed an organisation of former child soldiers and people with disabilities—all child survivors of four years of genocide and starvation. I cannot count the hours I spent learning from my colleagues. I formed a sophisticated political analysis of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

After three years, a man very close to me deliberately told me a story that marked him as Khmer Rouge. I was stunned: my friend! We talked for hours about his choice to join the Khmer Rouge as a teenager, and about the things he did. I believe he told me in order to complicate my political analysis with flesh and blood. He taught me that genocide is not the act of a safely-removed ‘them’. Genocide is an act of human beings. We will only grasp that if are willing to know it as an act of familiar people, not aliens. Sometimes, we even find people we love there.

Well, now our Jewish community is implicated. People familiar, close to us, are enablers. We are offered the benefits of a system which trains teenage fighters, and produces leaders who harbour genocidal visions. We are the product of four generations of conditioning to tolerate demonisation, to do violence and expect impunity.

More broadly, many people who have been silent this year enjoy some stake. Many of us are implicated in matters of stolen land and colonisation, in the harm done to other communities represented in this room. Many of us are not ready to see the future in the eyes of those who are dispossessed or securitised or imprisoned.

My Cambodian friend wanted me to embrace the discomfort of being implicated. Implication is not the disabling trauma that removes one from action. It is the recognition that we participate in genocide unless we participate in ending it. We find ourselves, our grief and our hope fully as we struggle to integrate all that. Only then can we say, “Tell me. I believe you. I hear you without defensiveness and I will stay here with you until we make something better.”

Tēnā koutou katoa

Marilyn Garson

(Below are Marilyn’s remarks to the rally outside MFAT today, January 22. Please put them to good use! There’s still time to write to Foreign Minister Winston Peters. Use your own arguments or cite any of the points below. Write to W.Peters@ministers.govt.nz today. Again tomorrow. And then again the next day.)

The Israeli government is just days away from dismantling Gaza’s humanitarian system and controlling reconstruction—if it can ban UNRWA. We are here to tell Winston Peters and MFAT to act before that happens.

What is UNRWA in Gaza? They call it para-statal. It has government-like responsibility for Palestine refugees, who are 2/3 of Gaza’s population. UNRWA registers each refugee’s birth, and their rights. UNRWA provides education, health, housing, social welfare, rubbish collection—state  responsibilities until there is a Palestinian state able to provide for its citizens. UNRWA does that in our name.

In times of emergency, UNRWA provides for everyone it can reach, refugee or not.

What makes UNRWA indispensable in emergencies? UNRWA is Gaza’s largest employer, owning by far the most extensive network of trucks, warehouses, shelters and food distribution centres. But UNRWA is not essential because it owns trucks. Israel says those can be given to NGOs to do the work. No, UNRWA owns the trucks because UNRWA has been built on the knowledge that anchors Gaza’s humanitarian operations. UNRWA is made to get goods through a blockade which is designed to keep goods out. UNRWA’s distribution points are the places where food reaches neighbourhoods.

Israel is claiming that donors can somehow contract, hire, procure, deliver, navigate that deadly blockade and distribute food to every neighbourhood in a manmade famine, without communications or buildings or neighbourhood standing. That is a formula for ongoing genocide; nothing less. States like ours must refuse to let more people die avoidably.

Israel also wants to erase UNRWA’s mandate. UN states assigned UNRWA to serve Palestinians as members of a single nation, and to persist until their rights are fulfilled. Now, Palestinians know, you and I know that Palestine refugees are members of one nation. UNRWA is the United Nations’ demonstration of the world’s commitment to a real political solution. Donors to UNRWA are recognising political cause and political solutions.

NGOs can’t do that. They will assist Palestinians as de-politicised individuals needing humanitarian goods. NGOs sign time-limited contracts to provide X to location Y.

On December 9 Israel introduced new regulations for NGOs, requiring them to comply with Israel’s defense and policy interests. Israel will refuse or de-register organisations which, for example, deny that Israel is democratic or call for boycotts. They will deregister any organisation whose staff, local Palestinian partners or board members have used that language within the past seven years!

This regulation is already in place. If you feel critical of NGO language, Israel’s limitations are part of the explanation. Israel is trying to regulate the end of advocacy and human rights work in occupied Palestine. Our government did not object. Investigators for the International Criminal Court—do you think they’re getting into Gaza?

Israel is bound by law to facilitate humanitarian aid to the people of occupied Gaza. It is not up to Israel to control, to buy and sell access, survival, shelter or advocacy for Palestinians. States sign agreements when they join the United Nations. Will Aotearoa sit quietly while Israel shreds those agreements?

Ceasefires in Gaza have never been more than suspensions of violence. Within a few weeks of the suspension of bombing in 2014, Gazan Palestinians were protesting at UNRWA’s gates. They protested the donor states’ slow response to the enormous task of reconstruction

Where else should they go to speak to us? We have no embassy in Gaza. UNRWA is the face of states’ obligations to Gaza behind an illegal blockade. Gazan Palestinians live at the sharpest edge of Palestinian suffering, and UNRWA is proof that our government has not forgotten. UNRWA’s services and lifesaving supplies are delivered in our name.

Governments had the power and failed to use it to stop 470 days of genocide. It is unthinkable that we, our governments, will let Israel erase the proof of our obligations now, after 15 months of this apocalyptic nightmare.

If UNRWA is banned: food, water, fuel, medicines; all the immediate essentials of survival will not arrive as they could arrive to relieve a shocked, starving, grieving, homeless, cold community. It’s that simple.

If this ceasefire takes hold and lays bare the extent of Israel’s devastation, Gaza can think about living and rebuilding while they pursue their political and human rights.

UNRWA is essential to reconstruction. It’s the middle of winter. 90% of Gaza’s homes are ruined and 90% of its people need warm shelter. Half of Gaza’s trees and agricultural land are wrecked. 2/3 of its water resevoirs are gone. Universities, hospitals—gone. 95% of its schools have been blown up and children have had their eductions disrupted. 40m tons of debris need to be sifted for the bodies of the missing and for explosives. UNRWA anchors each of those tasks.

Reportedly Israel will permit a private Egyption company to bring in reconstruction materials. Remember the exit visas they privatised—$5000 US to get through the Rafah gates. What will they charge for concrete, and who will get it first? That is Israel’s vision, if we sit back and let Israel contract out and control reconstruction. UNRWA prioritises refugee needs; Egyptian companies do not.

Israel will also take over UNRWA’s headquarters and facilities in occupied East Jerusalem. Already, mobs have set fire to the perimeter of the buildings repeatedly, while people were inside. Reportedly, Israeli authorities will seize the buildings, hand them over to settlers, and instantly establish one more illegal settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. Palestinian students will be transferred from UNRWA to Israeli schools, in defiance of the rights of an occupied people.

The ICJ has ruled that the occupation is illegal and we must bring it to an end. Instead, Israel will unilaterally push the UN out of occupied East Jerusalem. Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem will become one more fact on the ground. And East Jerusalem contains Al Aqsa Mosque. Israel’s intended actions have massive implications.

UNRWA is our face in Gaza. We must not withdraw, we must not let Israel dictate Gaza’s survival and its prospects. After 76 years of illegal occupation, after 17 years of illegal blockade, and 470 days of genocidal violence, after all the words our politicians have said, we need action this week.

Winston Peters, MFAT, you failed to act on genocide. You must not fail in our names again.

Marilyn Garson,

for Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

Perhaps this ceasefire will take hold. We hope so. The cessation of firing is an urgent, insufficient step. Gaza’s grief and suffering are overwhelming and Israel’s forces must stop compounding it. They must facilitate immediate, sufficient quantities of food, water, medicines, fuel, materials for shelter and warmth; all the essentials of life that have been withheld through 470 days that the ICJ has called ‘plausible genocide’. Let all those held hostage go home: Israelis, Palestinians marched away by an invading army, and all those held in administrative detention or convicted in Israel’s kangaroo occupation-courts.

Israel has brought about the ‘near total destruction of civilian life in Gaza.’ Genocidal intent has become so normalised that an Israeli cabinet minister can demand that the killing continue until Gaza is left a ‘vegetable patch’. Gazans need quiet, protection, and they need the supplies to live right now.

Families and the nation of Palestine must be in unimaginable pain. We wish them every comfort and the time to breathe. We as friends and supporters also need to breathe in the possibility that this first step will lead toward political solution: reconstruction, statehood, justice.

Accountability is integral to that possibility. The ICJ’s arrest warrants must be served on Israel’s leaders. Investigators must be brought into Gaza to properly document all of the crimes. We have watched genocide for 470 days and now we need to see accountability.

We write these things one week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Many of our parents and grandparents’ generations fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, were slaughtered or escaped from genocide in Europe. We constantly challenge Zionist institutions to stop dishonouring that history by using it to justify genocide and impunity. Many of us had roots in Russian or Ukrainian villages that no longer exist, German or Polish cities whose Jewish communities were murdered en masse.

A week from now, parliament will acknowledge our losses—and only our losses—in the company of Israel-supporting Jewish institutions. The commemoration will not relate that genocide to the present; that burnt-out village to the rubble fields that were Gaza’s cities just one year ago.

We protest the compartmentalisation of history, and the representation of our Jewish community solely by Israel-supporting institutions. For years we, Alternative Jewish Voices, have been objecting to their use of Jewish ‘sensitivities’ as a pretext to silence Palestinian and Muslim participation in our media and public space. This year they have used Jewish historical trauma to silence calls that sought to save Palestinian lives and grant Palestinians their full human and political rights.

We too are Jewish New Zealanders. The memory and the house of government are also ours. We call for the commemoration of genocides. The Holocaust was an event while genocide is a category. We are living in another moment of genocide and we call for its acknowledgement, so that we might all mourn and finally transcend the patterns of ethnic violence which underlie genocide.

We must remember fully, not selectively. The world did nothing while European Jews and others were murdered. Diplomatic guilt (and no small measure of anti-Jewish racism) helped to create the state of Israel, disregarding Palestine’s existing, indigenous people. That set in motion the Nakba or Catastrophe of the Palestinian people—and the Nakba is culminating in genocide before our eyes. Israel’s exceptional impunity is not separate from the horror of the Holocaust. We, who have genocide imprinted on us ought to recognise genocide when we see it.

This genocide is a crime that happens to be committed by some Jewish Israelis. Israel and its advocates have worked for years to wrap an Israeli flag around Jewish identity. We categorically reject that flag. Jewish does not equal Israel, and Judaism does not equal Zionism. A crime committed by the government of Israel is just that: a crime. Judge it by the law, by morality and decency and the dignity of all human beings.

New Zealand’s Jewish community did not vote for the fascists who govern Israel and we are not responsible for their actions. That said, we each choose to support, enable, or with our silence we may passively permit those actions—or else we stand up and say out loud that they are hideously, shamefully wrong.

We have found our institutional Jewish community’s silence this year acutely painful. We were raised being told to remember that the world was silent during the Holocaust. Now our institutions have been silent while others have been killed, and Jewish identity has been deployed to shield Israel in the commission of genocidal crimes.

Our government and others failed to stop 470 days of genocide. By joining with a Holocaust Centre which is unable to condemn all genocide, in order to commemorate some pain without reference to the pain in front of their eyes, they are perpetuating their failure.

We will therefore host our own Genocides Remembrance event. Watch this space for details.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

To: Hon. Foreign Minister Winston Peters

Tēnā koe Minister,                                                                                   January 10, 2025

We are the co-founders of Alternative Jewish Voices, and members of the Aotearoa Jewish community. We both happen to be observant Jews. For us, social justice is an essential part of our understanding and practice of Judaism.

Marilyn Garson also consulted for UNRWA in Gaza for 2 ½ years. As a member of UNRWA’s emergency shelter management team through the war of 2014, she has personal knowledge of UNRWA’s essential humanitarian and political role in Palestine.

We write to draw your attention to this media release from Global Jews for Palestine, a collective of Jewish justice organisations in 17 countries. We have also appended the text to this email. As you will read, campaigns are taking place around the world to ask as we are asking you, ‘What are you doing in our name to preserve UNRWA’s operations and mandate right now?’

If Israel’s Knesset proceeds to ban UNRWA from its lifesaving work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories on January 30, more Palestinians will die avoidably. Surely you know that UNRWA’s operations are indispensable, built on decades of knowledge and credibility at street level. No other organisation could step in to contract, hire, procure, deliver and distribute the essentials of life behind a blockade wall, under fire, as UNRWA is now doing.

UNRWA does not operate at Israel’s grace. As you well know, it is a UN agency with a unique mandate to serve Palestinians as members of a single nation until a political solution is found to their displacement. To parcel out UNRWA’s kinetic tasks among dozens or hundreds of NGOs across its six geographical fields would undermine Palestine’s rightful collective, national claim. NGOs would treat Palestinians merely as a collection of individuals in humanitarian distress.

We are confident that you realise the implications of Israel’s legislation to ban UNRWA. Then, sir, what are you doing in our names to ensure that UNRWA’s operations and its mandate stay in place until they can be handed on to a sovereign, effective Palestinian government?

The foreign ministers of seven of our allies have expressed their ‘grave concern’ at Israel’s threatened ban. As the International Court of Justice has advised, New Zealand must not normalise or aid a situation which is illegal and so unbearably inhumane.

We urge you on behalf of New Zealand to speak up, and to attach consequences to any ban. Should Israel’s government flaunt its obligations by banning UNRWA and criminalising its service delivery, we urge you to sanction Israel and suspend diplomatic relations until Israel conforms to the law.

If no one intervenes, Israel will ban UNRWA in three weeks. We ask for your reply, detailing the steps that New Zealand will take to stand up for our principles.

We are supported in this correspondence by our colleagues at Justice for Palestine.

Thank you for your consideration (but we will thank you far more for your action),

Fred Albert and Marilyn Garson

Co-founders, Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

I consulted to the office of UNRWA’s Gaza director for 2 ½ years. I arrived a skeptic, but I left convinced that UNRWA is indispensable for now.

Israel’s advocates have long tried to blur civilian Gaza into militant Hamas, as a way of discounting Palestinians’ civilian protections. This campaign extends to UNRWA itself, portraying UNRWA as a Hamas vehicle in order to call for its closure. Returning to Aotearoa at the end of 2015, I was taken aback by the depth of fury that the Israel Institute in particular reserved for UNRWA. So I have written intermittently about UNRWA since then.

Israel’s parliament has passed legislation that will ban UNRWA’s operations in Gaza and the West Bank on January 30. It will also close the headquarters which supports UNRWA’s operations in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. UNRWA is mandated by the UN General Assembly, not by Israel. Its closure would violate the agreements Israel signed when it became a member of the United Nations. Israel’s action would also set a deadly precedent for other states to deny civilians the essentials of life. Simply put, if Israel bans UNRWA, “more people will die.” States have widely condemned Israel’s legislation as an immediate disaster and a calamitous violation of the UN Charter, the laws of war, Israel’s humanitarian obligations, and orders of the international courts.

Israel’s government is counting on the apathy of states like ours. Israel’s legislation will take effect unless states raise the cost of its implementation, such that Israel steps back. This month, a global campaign calls for civil societies’ intervention.

Israel’s legislation is an attack in three dimensions. It targets the life, unity and spirit of a community in resistance.

First and most urgently, UNRWA is indispensable to Gaza’s humanitarian assistance. This is not simply because UNRWA owns the largest number of trucks and is the largest employer in Gaza. More than that, UNRWA is the repository of expert knowledge. UNRWA anchors Gaza’s supply chain because it has been built to procure and bring goods through an atrocious blockade which inflicts collective punishment by keeping goods out. From the crossings through warehouses to neighbourhood distribution points, UNRWA’s capacity rests on skilled people from each of Gaza’s neighbourhoods.

Israel’s advocates say dismissively that UNRWA’s trucks can be given to others who have some disaster management experience. They say that it will be a routine matter to contract, hire, procure, deliver, navigate the blockade, warehouse and distribute lifesaving supplies without records or local knowledge. Behind a blockade, the likes of which exists nowhere else on this planet. Under fire, among people who have survived 15 months of unbearable suffering. Israel’s advocates say it will be routine to do all this in conditions of infrastructure, social and environmental collapse; while enduring an assault that the UN’s highest court calls ‘plausibly genocidal’. In 2018 I wrote,

“Gaza has not had a natural disaster… It is a zone of manmade, escalating sacrifice. To cast that as an administrative matter for routine, instant rescue is – and this is the very nicest thing I can write – murderously misleading.”

Israel’s attack on UNRWA is also essentially political. UNRWA is mandated to serve Palestine refugees as members of a single national community, displaced to a number of locations. UNRWA will do that until a durable, just political solution is in place. If Israel can pull UNRWA apart while other states yawn, UNRWA’s kinetic functions will be fragmented into thousands of NGO budget lines. There will be six-month contracts to supply sacks of flour to a given refugee camp, and NGOs will want to hit their quantitative marks in the hope of extending their contracts.

I once asked a group of Gazan IT graduates how they would feel about collecting food within such a system. They were aghast, and tried to put the obvious into words. Gazans are not simply poor. They have been intentionally, politically deprived for four generations. The neighbours who distribute and receive food in Gaza share that history and await a political solution together. To be Gazan is to be held in place. Gazans are the living evidence, and together they persevere. Food distribution enacts all that at neighbourhood scale. To simply line up before strangers without reference to cause or meaning or purpose would feel—the university graduates searched for words—diminished, even a little shameful.

You see, UNRWA is also the proof that donor states have not forgotten. UNRWA’s logo is a two-way bond. Less than two weeks after the cessation of bombing in 2014, people began to gather at UNRWA’s gates to protest donors’ slow response to the enormity of reconstruction. Where else should they go to be heard? UNRWA is the face of UN states’ obligations to Gaza, and its withdrawal would constitute a terrible betrayal at any time. It is unthinkable that Gaza would see us toss our obligations away after these 15 apocalyptic months.

Wouldn’t NGOs try to replicate that mandate?

I worked two years for a well-regarded NGO whose American donor required that documentation exclude words like blockade, occupation and war. Just like that, the hardship of Gazan Palestinians had neither cause nor solution, while Israel had no obligations. Humanitarianism is not about cause. It addresses needs in the present tense.

When I arrived at UNRWA, I asked a colleague which euphemisms I would be required to use. He regarded me as if I’d come straight out of kindergarten and spoke very deliberately, “Around here, we call a blockade a blockade.”

This is part of the reason why donors have kept UNRWA around. UNRWA is evidence of Palestine’s longstanding, unresolved injustice. As UNRWA’s January 30 denouement looms, the UN has made it clear that “the United Nations does not plan to replace the agency in the Palestinian territories, and the Knesset must reverse its decision to ban it.”

The UN is a set of institutions, a collection of member states and a framework of international agreements. The institutional UN will not cooperate while Israel trashes that framework, leaving in its place a compliant remnant of aid for people who are being starved as a war strategy. Now we need to convince our own member-state government to back that up with action.

UNRWA needs not simply preserving but progress, and there is only one direction in which to progress. There’s not enough left in Gaza to imagine reverting to the status quo ante. That is why Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA has said, “UNRWA can be replaced only through a functioning Palestinian state which would address the plight of Palestine refugees.”

Remember that: UNRWA’s mandate can only go to a sovereign state.

Is it too late? States have done nothing while Israel’s forces damaged or destroyed 70% of UNRWA’s buildings; 95% of them while they were being used as shelters. States have sat and watched while 237 UNRWA staff have been killed – the greatest loss in the history of the United Nations. What does it matter now? It matters because UNRWA continues to provide shelter in the buildings that remain. It still matters because there will be a ceasefire one day. Gazan Palestinians will need every ounce of autonomy and advocacy to decide what happens next. UNRWA will continue to matter for some time yet.

Therefore, in the coming weeks, please join AJV and Justice for Palestine as we push our government to do three things.

1. Stand up for UNRWA’s humanitarian operations and its mandate.
2. Attach consequences to Israel’s illegal ban. If Israel bans UNRWA, we should suspend diplomatic ties until Israel complies with its legal and humanitarian obligations. Such consequences are entirely within our capacity.
3. Immediately recognise the State of Palestine. UNRWA’s mandate can only be handed to an effective Palestinian state, capable of assuming responsibility for its citizens. New Zealand has not even imagined the existence of such a state.

Write to Foreign Minister Winston Peters today. And tomorrow. Join Justice for Palestine and Alternative Jewish Voices in front of MFAT, 195 Lambton Quay in Wellington, 12:30 on January 22. We will tell them again!

Marilyn Garson, for Alternative Jewish Voices

Jan 5^th, 2025

On January 30, two new Israeli laws will effectively ban UNRWA’s (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) lifesaving operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Although the threat to UNRWA has slipped from the headlines, it is urgent right now and for the longer term.

Immediately, as the Foreign Secretaries of seven countries have expressed in a joint statement, UNRWA is essential to Israel’s “responsibility to facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian assistance in all its forms as well as the provision of sorely needed basic services to the civilian population.” If UNRWA cannot operate, Gaza’s catastrophe will be made exponentially worse. 

Less visibly, Israel’s legislative attack on UNRWA also aims to undermine the integrity and continuity of the Palestine refugee community. UNRWA is the only agency mandated to serve Palestine refugees as a single national community, dispersed to multiple locations. UNRWA creates and holds records essential to refugees’ ability to claim their rights. 

That unifying recognition would be lost if humanitarian assistance were fragmented into hundreds of local NGO budget lines. NGOs’ humanitarian response would de-politicise the problem and its solution. Food is desperately needed, but Palestinians have a right to more than food: they have a right to be free and self-determining. UNRWA’s mandate is to serve Palestinians until a political solution is found.

That is why Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA has said, “UNRWA can be replaced only through a functioning Palestinian state which would address the plight of Palestine refugees.” In diplomacy and donorship, our states must relate to Palestine as a fellow national actor, not merely to Palestinians as a collection of humanitarian recipients.

The long assault on UNRWA will come to a head this month. The UN is (properly) not backing down, stating on January 4 that “the United Nations does not plan to replace the agency in the Palestinian territories, and the Knesset must reverse its decision to ban it.”

UNRWA perseveres despite the greatest loss of staff members and physical infrastructure in the history of the United Nations: 237 staff. We urge everyone to make UNRWA a priority this month. We urge groups and individuals to write to their political representatives with two messages. 

1.    Pressure Israel to live up to its legal commitments by facilitating UNRWA’s work. 

2.    Palestine’s political demands will not be met by humanitarian NGOs. Diplomatically and as donors, call on governments to preserve UNRWA’s mandate until a genuine political solution is in place.

Statement from Global Jews for Palestine

***

About Global Jews for Palestine: We are Jews from many countries, who are members of local, national and international networks and organizations. We are multi-ethnic and multigenerational and our members embrace a broad range of viewpoints on Jewish religious and ethical traditions.  We are connected by our involvement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, and by our determination to work for justice. We oppose Zionism and all forms of racism and colonialism. 

__________

Additional information for drafting letters to political representatives:

UNRWA Sitrep and other reports:

Since October 7^th 2023, UNRWA health teams have provided millions of consultations vaccinated 560,000 children against polio, provided food assistance to almost 2 million people and provided shelter to hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

• 388,000 families have received flour at least twice.
• 1.46 million have received UNRWA food parcels
• 97 mobile medical teams have covered medical points
• 196,245 displaced people have received community social work support including psychological first aid and psychological support.
• 129,475 displaced people have received internal community social network support.
• 7.753 people with disabilities or injuries have received assistive devices and rehabilitation
• The allegations of large numbers of Hamas operatives being UNWRA workers have come with little evidence to the International community

 UNRWA: Claims Versus Facts | UNRWA

More ideas to support UNRWA, from Jewish Voice for Labour

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Contact: Marilyn Garson, Donna Nevel—Global Jews for Palestine

globaljewishcollective@gmail.com