Month: May 2025

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Global Jews for Palestine , globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

The 600th Day of Genocide is No Time for Words!

In the 86th week of genocide, 24 countries have objected to Israel’s escalating violence. They call for the restoration of real, sufficient, life-saving aid to which Palestinians have a right – not the mercenary coverlet which would enable Netanyahu’s final solution. 

After 62,000 Palestinian deaths, according to a UN press release on 19 May, Israel

is inflicting conditions of life on Palestinians increasingly incompatible with their continued existence in Gaza as a group. Furthermore, the pattern of strikes on Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) tents and residential buildings, as well as on crowded hospitals, indicates that little, if any, care is being taken to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza, while reports of the use of weapons with wide area effects suggest deliberate, indiscriminate attacks. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation is beyond description.

Make no mistake: Our governments have always held the power to end this onslaught. But our states are speaking fine words while they arm and normalise Israel’s crimes. Every day that they delay, Israel kills another 35 children.

Foreign ministers of Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Slovenia, and Spain have expressed grave concern, but not so grave as to discontinue Israel’s participation in ‘security’ programmes under the EU-Israel Cooperation Agreement. And, heaven forbid, not so grave as to eject Israel from the Eurovision song contest.

A joint statement by UK, France, and Canada on 19 May vowed, “We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.” They have stood by for another week since then. Another 629 Gazan Palestinians including nine journalists have been killed. Gazans are obtaining, on average, 67% of the calories they need to survive while the UK, France and Canada continue to stand by. Even in South Africa, Glencore continues to send coal to Israel.

For 19 months these states have done nothing to alter their relationships with Israel, or to impact the normal flows of trade and treatment. They have not enacted their responsibilities as outlined by world courts, nor have they brought the slightest real pressure to bear in defence of two million trapped civilians.

Such steps are not mere tokens. Israel can live without our approval as individuals. However, Israel cannot live in the style to which it is accustomed without European, North American, and other diplomatic indulgence, interactions, and normalcy. Israel’s colonisation and genocide is predicated on impunity, in which Western governments collude. 

Historically, the withdrawal of diplomatic permission has been the brake that ended Israel’s assaults on the Gaza Strip.

In 2015, Israel’s Office of the State Comptroller published its assessment of Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza. Israeli newspapers called the report  “scathing” “scalding… blistering”. Among its criticisms: Israel bombed Gaza for fifty days without consistent objectives to focus and limit its use of violence. Israel’s security cabinet and IDF periodically paused to assess the war’s impacts on Israel’s international standing. Finding that states did not require Israel to stop, the security cabinet opportunistically wrote new objectives and carried on bombing. They did that four times – until they were stopped. 

It is wrong to think that only Trump matters to Israel. Israel is deeply integrated into international – particularly European and American – trade, tourism, and culture. There is every reason to believe that Israel remains susceptible to broad international pressure.

Right now, 81% of Gaza is unilaterally designated as an IDF military zone and / or is under displacement orders. The people of Gaza are being funnelled into killing zones. 

The danger to Gazan Palestinians is desperate and words do not protect them. They are starving and words do not fill their stomachs. Enough words! We must see action – sanctions, penalties, consequences.

Gaza cannot wait.

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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.

We believe that it is our particular responsibility to challenge Jewish organizations whose alliances and actions undermine Palestinian human and national rights, promote Jewish exceptionalism, and overturn Jewish social justice traditions. At the heart of our work is the fight for Palestinian liberation and the struggle for a world free of racial and ethnic hierarchy, colonial domination, and unbridled militarism.

Four days ago, on the 592nd day of Israel’s genocide, Foreign Minister Winston Peters joined 23 countries in objecting to Israel’s escalating violence, and calling for the restoration of humanitarian aid. Peters’ diplomatic step was not accompanied by the usual MFAT media report or published statement, nor has there been any action to substantiate this call.

After 62,000 Palestinian deaths, Peters told RNZ that “we are running out of patience”.

While Peters’ patience runs low, according to a UN press release on19 May, Israel’s escalation:

is inflicting conditions of life on Palestinians increasingly incompatible with their continued existence in Gaza as a group… Furthermore, the pattern of strikes on Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) tents and residential buildings, as well as on crowded hospitals, indicates that little, if any, care is being taken to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza, while reports of the use of weapons with wide area effects suggest deliberate, indiscriminate attacks. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation is beyond description.

In the 85^th week of Israel’s genocide, while we waited for Peters to act, 629 people were killed including nine journalists – the highest weekly death toll for journalists since this onslaught began. Gaza’s director-general of health reported the assassinations of 12 nurses and paramedics. Israel’s blockade has starved 58 people to death.

Minister Peters, when will your patience actually be spent? For 19 months, while 62,000 Palestinians have died, Aotearoa has done nothing to alter its relationship with Israel or impact the normal flows of trade and treatment. You have not called the ambassador in to hear our objections, let alone put him on a plane or sanction his government. You have not acted as per the world court’s advisory opinion to cease normalising an illegal occupation, nor have you brought the slightest pressure to bear on what the court calls Israel’s plausible genocide.

Peters told RNZ that such “symbolic gestures” are of no help to starving babies. That is fundamentally and historically incorrect. Diplomatic pressure is precisely the brake that has ended Israel’s assaults on the blockaded community of Gaza.

Israel can live without our approval as individuals. However, Israel cannot live in the style to which it is accustomed without European, North American and other diplomatic permission, interactions and normalcy. Israel is built on impunity, and that can be revoked.

In 2015, Israel’s Office of the State Comptroller published its assessment of Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza. Israeli newspapers called the report  “scathing” “scalding… blistering”. Among its criticisms: Israel bombed Gaza for fifty days without consistent objectives to focus and limit its violence. Israel’s security cabinet and IDF periodically paused to assess the war’s impacts on Israel’s international standing. Finding that states did not require Israel to stop, the security cabinet opportunistically wrote new objectives and carried on bombing. They did that four times – until they were stopped.

It is wrong to think that only Trump matters to Israel. Israel is deeply integrated into international – particularly European and American – trade, tourism, and culture. There is every reason to believe that Israel remains susceptible to broad international pressure.

States including Aotearoa have always held the power to make this genocidal onslaught end. This week governments cleared their throats and said some words, but that is not enough.

Right now, 81% of Gaza is unilaterally designated as an IDF military zone for operations and / or is under displacement orders. The people of Gaza are being funneled into killing zones.

The danger to Gazan Palestinians is desperate and words do not protect them. We applaud the government’s step, but we must see the actions which convey seriousness.

Now 596 days have passed and we are in the 86th week of genocide, and still we are waiting. Gaza cannot wait.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa New Zealand

Starvation of Gaza a continuation of a decades old plan

By Jeremy Rose

Reading an NBC News report a couple of days ago about a Trump administration plan to relocate 1 million Gazans to Libya reminded me of a conversation between the legendary Warsaw Ghetto leader Marek Edelman and fellow fighter and survivor Simcha Rotem that took place more than quarter of a century ago.

In the conversation, first reported in Haaretz in 2023, Rotem said the Jews who walked into the gas chambers without a fight did so only because they were hungry. 

Edelman disagreed, but Rotem insisted. “Listen, man. Marek, I’m surprised by your attitude. They only went because they were hungry. Even if they’d known what awaited them they would have walked into the gas chambers. You and I would have done the same.” 

Edelman cut him off. “You would never have gone” [to the gas chamber.] Rotem replied, “I’m not so sure. I was never that hungry.” Edelman agreed, saying: “I also wasn’t that hungry,” to which Rotem said, “That’s why you didn’t go.”

The NBC report claims that Israeli officials are aware of the plan and talks have been held with the Libyan leadership about taking in 1 million ethnically cleansed Palestinians. The carrot being offered is the unfreezing of billions of dollars of Libya’s own money seized by the US more than a decade ago.

The Arabic word Sumud – or steadfastness – is synonymous with the Palestinian people. The idea that 1 million Gazans would agree to walk off the 1.4% of historic Palestine that is Gaza is inconceivable. 

But then the idea that my great grandmother and other relatives walked into the gas chambers is equally incomprehensible. But we’ve never been that hungry.

The people of Gaza are. No food has entered Gaza for 76 days. Half a million Gazans are facing starvation and the rest of the population (more than 1.5 million people) are suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the UN. 

Last year, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich was widely condemned when he suggested starving Gaza might be “justified and moral.” 

The lack of outrage and urgency being expressed by world leaders – particularly western leaders – after nearly 11 weeks of Israel actually starving the inhabitants of what retired IDF general Giora Eiland has called a giant concentration camp – is an outrage.

As far as I’m aware there’s been no talk of cutting off diplomatic relations, trade embargos or even cultural boycotts. 

Israel – which last time I looked wasn’t in Europe – just placed second in Eurovision. “I’m happy,” an Israeli friend messaged me, “that my old genocidal homeland (Austria) won and not my current genocidal nation.”

A third generation Israeli, she’s one of a tiny minority protesting the war crimes being committed less than 100km from her apartment. 

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez and Irish president, Michael Higgins, is an honourable exception to the muted criticism being expressed by western leaders.

Sanchez had declared Israel a genocidal state and said Spain won’t do business with such a nation,

And peaking at a national famine commemoration held over the weekend Higgens said the UN Security Council has failed again and again by not dealing with famines and the current “forced starvation of the people of Gaza.” 

He cited UN secretary general António Guterres saying “as aid dries up, the floodgates of horror have re-opened. Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop.”

Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen argued in his 1981 book Poverty and Famines that famines are man-made and not natural disasters.

Unlike Gaza, the famines he wrote about were caused by either callous disregard by the ruling elites for the populations left to starve or the disastrous results of following the whims of an all-powerful leader like chairman Mao.

He argued that a famine had never occurred in a functioning democracy. 

It’s a horrifying fact that a self-described democracy, funded and abetted by the world’s most powerful democracy, has been allowed by the international community to starve two million people with no let-up in its bombing of barely functioning hospitals and killing of more than 2000 Gazans since the ban on food entering the strip was put in place. (Many more will have died due to a lack of medicine, food, and access to clean water.)

After more than two months of denying any food or medicine to enter Gaza Israel is now saying it will allow limited amounts of food in to avoid a full-scale famine.

“Due to the need to expand the fighting, we will introduce a basic amount of food to the residents of Gaza to ensure no famine occurs,” prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained.

“A famine might jeopardise the continuation of Operation Gideon’s Chariots aimed at eliminating Hamas.” 

If 19-months of indiscriminate bombardment, the razing to the ground of whole cities, the displacement of virtually the entire population, and more than 50,000 recorded deaths (the Lancet estimated the true figure is likely to be four times that) hasn’t destroyed Hamas to Israel’s satisfaction it’s hard to conceive of what will.

But accepting that that is the real aim of the ongoing genocide would be naïve.

In the first cabinet meeting following the Six Day War, long before Hamas came into existence, ridding Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants was top of the agenda.

“If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places … we can annex Gaza without a problem,” defence minister Moshe Dayan said.

The population of Gaza was 400,000 at the time.

“We should take them to the East Bank [Jordan] by the scruff of their necks and throw them there,” minister Yosef Sapir said.

Fifty-eight years later the possible destinations may have changed but the aim remains the same. And a shamefully indifferent western world combined with a malnourished and desperate population may be paving the way to a mass expulsion.

If the US, Europe and their allies demanded that Israel stop, the killing would end tomorrow.

Author’s note – As a Palestinian, I write this not to provoke but to expose the dominant myths that have long shaped public understanding of Zionism and the so-called Israeli Palestinian conflict which continues to shield Israel from rightful scrutiny. This article is a call to recognise Zionism for what it is — a settler-colonial movement — and to encourage honest, informed conversations about justice, history, and the urgent need for a truly democratic future in Palestine. My aim is to raise awareness, especially among Western readers, so they can see through the layers of propaganda and challenge the so called two-state solution and join the growing effort — in Palestine and beyond — to speak clearly and truthfully about what has happened, and continues to happen, in that beautiful land.

There are truths that societies often find difficult to confront, and among the most elusive is the recognition of oneself as a coloniser. Throughout history, colonialism has rarely been perceived as such by those who practiced it. It was cloaked in the language of civilizing missions, divine promises, or national rebirths. Yet the patterns repeat: the arrival of settlers, the displacement of indigenous peoples, the claiming of land under foreign notions of entitlement.

Zionism follows this same historical pattern. It is a political movement that sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine—a land already inhabited. This is not a theoretical or ancient dispute, but an ongoing reality. From its earliest stages to its present-day manifestations, Zionism has functioned as a settler-colonial project, relying on the displacement of Palestinians to realise its vision.

Prior to the arrival of Zionist settlers, Palestine was a diverse land with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians living in established communities. The Zionist project, backed by imperial powers, aimed not to integrate into this existing society, but to replace it. This is not a matter of interpretation—it is a matter of documented historical planning and execution.

Zionism’s and Israel’s founding figures, such as Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, understood that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would not occur through peaceful coexistence with the native population. Instead, it would necessitate the removal of that population. Israeli New Historians — including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim — have documented, using Israeli archival sources, that the expulsion of Palestinians was not an unintended consequence of war. Early Zionist leadership foresaw and accepted the necessity of expulsion.

The State of Israel was established through a planned mass ethnic cleansing campaign during which over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, more than 500 villages and towns were destroyed, and dozens of massacres committed. This catastrophic event is known as the Nakba.

 From that day to this day, Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return, in defiance of UN Resolution 194, further confirms Zionism’s intention to destroy the Palestinians as a distinct group of people. Had peace been the goal, Israel would have allowed return, restitution, and reconstruction. Instead, it has only expanded its colonial project.

Today, this settler-colonial reality continues through settlement expansion, military occupation, home demolitions, and land theft. These are not security measures. They are the modern practice of the same project that began over a century ago: to secure maximum land with minimum Palestinians.

This is not antisemitism, and it does not negate the historical suffering that Jews experienced in Europe, which is often used to justify Israel’s crimes. Instead, it is a necessary step toward an honest reckoning with the past and the present, if Palestinians and Israelis are ever to build a shared future together.

The longer the world continues to avoid speaking honestly and bravely about the nature and essence of the actual settler-colonial relations between Israel and the Palestinians, the longer we continue to be participants in sustaining Israel’s criminal apartheid regime – until it reaches its own final solution stage.

The Western powers’ blessing of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was cynically branded as partition. Today, the so-called two-state solution continues the same deceit, dressing up a brutal colonial project as a peace offer.

When you hear “two-state solution”, you should hear “partition” and recognise it for what it is: a form and a tool of colonisation.

Partition was proposed in South Africa to create separate homelands for Black South Africans. It was argued by some in the United States after the Civil War to preserve the Confederacy. French settles in Algeria pushed for it. So too did colonial powers in Vietnam, carving the country into north and south.

Whether it was through wars of liberation or internal revolution, the lesson was the same: partition is unjust, unsustainable and must be called out and rejected.

In a world that is increasingly recognising and reckoning with the facts and impacts of colonialism – from the Americas to Africa and the Pacific – it is time to extend this recognition to Palestine.

The only just and lasting way forward is a shared country. There should be one democratic state for both peoples with equal rights, freedoms and responsibilities for all who live on that land, from the river to the sea.

One country that would open its gates and take in the descendants of its sons and daughters who were recently made refugees – who, after nearly 80 years, still dwell in refugee camps around their beloved homeland like orphans, denied their inalienable right of return to the motherland.

by ‘Goliath’