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
Sh'ma Koleinu - Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) 