Tēnā koe, Minister Peters, will you stand up?

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