End Game

What now? The blog has been quiet. 2025 has blown the doors off their hinges. Israel has openly, as a matter of stated government policy, starved 2.3 million people for two months while our government has looked quietly on. I have had no words for that, only mounting desperation.

The lives of powerless people outline the reality of surviving genocide. I have worked with Cambodian colleagues who hoarded rotting food in their desks in order to soothe their bodies’ memories of the wracking pain of starvation. Friends who recalled eating grass. Colleagues of stunted growth, colourblind, developmentally impaired . . . Palestinians will be accumulating these lifelong effects now.

Violence is futile, always. It can destroy bodies and things but it cannot address cause, establish co-existence or validate its users. Israel’s violence, too, will do none of those things. How many people will be allowed to die before our government says that out loud? From a population the size of Auckland and Northland, Israel has killed more people than live in Porirua or New Plymouth. New Zealanders in our tens of thousands have demanded intervention in our names.

We shouted for help through bombardment, displacement; the shattering of Gaza’s infrastructure, shelters, universities and hospitals. A century’s work to limit the harms of war has drained away through our fingers like water, as Israel sneered at the very notion of distinguishing civilians from combatants. International courts issued warrants for the arrests of Netanyahu and Galant for crimes of genocide. In vain, we expected our government to review our relations as the courts have directed.

Finally, having devastated every facet of Gazan life while the arms kept flowing in and its diplomatic standing was undisturbed, Israel’s government felt sure enough of its impunity to openly starve the survivors. Israel’s end game is underway.

Israel feels sure of our indifference. And damn it, they have been right. We, Aotearoa, have done officially nothing to disrupt starvation. Not a peep, not a tourist visa withheld or a diplomatic please-explain. That fact has broken my understanding of our governing institutions.

I have tried to work for change within the politics of the institutionally possible. Even through 2024, I continued to speak about the equal rights and dignity of human beings, because I believe it and because I believed that we are governed by people who share the cornerstone value of human life across the differences of our national politics. That cornerstone compels us to intervene when we see genocide.

I was wrong. Now we are governed by people who have not so much as cleared their throats.

So, what now? What comes after f*** you?

Martin Buber, a Jewish anarchist, wrote that protest is a demand that all people should be loved. Buber located his anarchism in the choice of means to the ends. The ends – saving life and providing what people need to live well – do not change.

We protest in front of government buildings and I have given up on the people inside those buildings. But institutions are more than buildings. Mostly, they consist of our habituated, unexamined behaviours. When you break the habits and disintermediate the institutions – when you look through the buildings – you come freshly to our choices.

Then a whole cascade of our anti-life choices comes into focus: military spending over peace, foreign policy from the lemming side of history at the expense of our planet and our place in the Blue Pacific, landlords eating children’s school lunches. One-tenth of us are indebted to social welfare institutions, serving the institutions at the expense of their own daily prospects. Write your own list.

Our deadly forfeit on Gaza is of a piece with all these. Act for Gaza as part of all this. But act. That must be the conclusion of this moment. We do not have the luxury of giving up while hunger is mounting by the hour.

When it feels futile, find the people who are not afraid. A neighbour reminded me as we huffed and puffed up a steep walking path this week, “Empathy is never futile. Hope is resistance now.” This neighbour wakes up each morning and writes an email to an MP. MPs may not reply, but they can count.

Turning up is a performance of imagination now.

Today, Palestinian women and children will bring their pots in a desperate hunt for food. Give them your voice: bang a pot in the ears of our indifferent bureaucrats.

Join the funerals of Palestinians who are being bombed, burned, starved this day. Pay your respects by shaming every last yawning member of our government.

Israel’s policy of starvation is before the World Court right now. Stand in the gallery and dare the judges to do right.

Let the doors blow off their hinges. Look freshly at the choices that weave our politics together. Attach this issue to that one. Then we are not powerless. We are merely out of power and preparing to take it back.

Kia kaha, arohanui – stand strong, in abundant love

Marilyn Garson