Mapping genocides remembrance

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