Month: August 2025

Our next UK import: The Terrorism Protest Speech Suppression Act

On Sunday August 24, both the Guardian and the New York Times carried articles worrying that the far Right was increasingly bold and secure, and articles detailing starvation and genocide in Gaza. At the same time, both UK and US governments have legislated or decided by edict to treat peaceful democratic protest as a national security threat. Their special target: the protest which draws attention to starvation and genocide in Gaza.

Aotearoa, always taking pride in our independent-minded foreign policy, are rushing to adopt something like the UK’s legislation. If we do, it will be our second such import this season. The divisive Harmony Accord is also a UK product that this government will use to reward its friends and sideline the community.

The government seeks to reform our Terrorism Suppression Act. The revisions would hasten the designation of terror while greatly broadening the idea of public support to terror. That breadth seems to include designating peaceful protest as a security threat. In an article entitled “slippery slope to authoritarianism”, Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva summarises the  “limited consultation currently taking place behind closed doors with a handpicked selection of groups and experts.”

Guess who’s in and who’s out?

In the UK, it is now legal to arm Israel but it is terrorism to object. We have yet to see a single arrest for inciting or endorsing crimes against humanity. Instead, octogenarian clerics fill the cells for silently holding signs that oppose genocide. People have been arrested for satirising this, so presumably mocking the government’s asinine actions now constitutes a national security threat.

The UK legislation misuses the language of security to shut down peaceful protest. Terrorism arrests bypass normal, open judicial processes where those charged can be heard stating their case. While the legislation’s application has disproportionately targeted protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the issues are wider.

Our government is in a rush to award itself the same tools. If Luxon acts as the UK government has, he will undermine democracy in the guise of security, suppress protest and the right to a fair, open judicial process. He is acting without public consultation, and there is a character issue whenever a government schemes behind closed doors to suppress public challenge. Finally, there is the opportunity to misuse legislation in a way that sidelines real threats in favour of the us-and-them selective use of power.

This government habitually listens to friends and former lobbyists, as it has done with guns, alcohol, smoking and forestry, disregarding the community and placing people at risk. This action is true to habit. Luxon is legislating for friends at the expense of democracy – and immediately for Gaza.

We cannot separate this from genocide in Gaza, the focus of so much protest that this government would like to ignore. Palestine is already an issue on which protest speech has been confused with security threat in Aotearoa. The Community Security Group (CSG) has for years monitored individual New Zealanders’ social media and speech, and declared legal speech to be a threat to the Jewish community. The CSG has shared this information with our security forces and the embassy of Israel. The CSG is funded partly by government, including a recent new CSG staff position. They enjoy special access as a member of Mark Mitchell’s so-called harmony accord.

Already, anyone who speaks to the rights of Palestine and condemns Israel’s genocide knows they will be called a supporter of Hamas and an antisemite in Zionist performative politics. We who demand human rights face various underhanded tactics, but not arrest. For how much longer?

We regard this legislative act as a mechanism to draw the cord evermore tightly around government’s friends and enshrine new ways to target government’s critics. We regard it as a self-inflicted democratic injury, the act of an authoritarian seeking to intimidate and blunt protest.

We regard it as a misdirection. While this government is busy suppressing protest as terroristic, they are also robbing us of the language to grasp the real threats to our society which emerge from the far Right and disinformation networks.

Finally and foremost, we regard it as an intentional distraction from the desperate work of ending genocide in Gaza. This act would call it terrorism to draw attention to the state terror before our eyes. This act cuts us off from those to whom we have obligations.

Count on this: we will oppose this action in every way possible. Taking our lead from friends in the UK, we will fill the public squares with sign proclaiming our disgust at genocide and our government indifference to it. We are confident that we will be in fine company, in numbers too large to intimidate or arrest or disregard. Sometimes, personal impact brings forth the numbers that governments cannot resist. It happened with Viet Nam, when the draft brought the war home. Watching the policy absurdity unfolding in the UK, we think perhaps this legislation might tip the scales.

Alternative Jewish Voices

Get out!

At each step of its genocidal campaign, Israel’s leaders have accurately assessed the world’s indifference, played on it and nudged it further. Over a period of decades, they eased the world from a settler-colonial theory that implied Palestine’s erasure, to a blockade that ensured Gaza’s strangulation. Now, over a period of months they have been enacting Gaza’s death by genocide in plain sight.

Today Israel’s elected government acknowledges that Israel will, again, still, once and for all, fulfil its fantasy of Greater Israel by stealing Gaza. They already occupy it, as courts have repeatedly affirmed. Now they judge that they can snatch it, displace Gaza’s population and get away with it. They judge that we have given up.

We say no. We say, get out. Get out, stay out, and begin the accounting. Gaza must live, and Gaza is Palestine. Two million human beings must be fed and protected, their bodies restored insofar as is possible after this torture. We concede nothing.

‘Intensifying criticism’? Every diplomatic shuffle distracts from the hourly deterioration of conditions in Gaza. Ever complicit, our governments buy time with their talk while the slaughter continues.

 ‘Widespread condemnation’ – so what? Not one child can eat these words, and neither can starving children digest the wholly inappropriate foods being distributed by the GHF. States are not taking the slightest meaningful action, although they are watching Israel deprive the children of Gaza of the nutrients they need if they are to have any chance to assert their right to life.

Even as they say, ‘We can no longer remain quiet,’ Jewish leaders are refusing to contemplate meaningful change. Spokespeople for the Zionist NZ Jewish Council still dare to outline the conditions that Palestinians must meet, in order to qualify for their fundamental human entitlements. It is not the task of Palestinians to satisfy the genocidaires of anything. Nonsense. The Jewish Council is trying to distance itself from the present crimes while preserving the core condition of October 6: a Jewish supremacist regime.

We study the indifference of states to the rise of Nazism. We’re past that. We talk about international indifference to the Holocaust. We’re beyond that. The only parallel now can be with the liberation of concentration camps. In those starving Jewish bodies, people glimpsed and felt overwhelmed by the scale and the inhumanity of Nazi crimes. That’s where we are. We see Israel’s inhumanity toward defenceless Palestinian children.

There is no avoidance but willful avoidance now. The problem is not Netanyahu. The problem is baked into Zionism and it cannot be redeemed.

Those children living in the most grotesque pain, those canyons of destruction, those deranged elected officials leading genocide; those are real, actual Zionism. Zionism is the system that produced Netanyahu, not the other way around.

We say, get out. Get Israel out of Gaza, get Zionism out of our institutions.

Feed Gaza – right now, this day. Start the engines, drive the trucks in.

Alternative Jewish Voices

We are not in accord with the ‘harmony accord’.

Mark Mitchell’s Ministry of Ethnic Communities has persuaded a small number of Muslim and Jewish organisations to sign a ‘harmony accord’. AJV was invited, took part in a number of discussions, and declined the offer. We have released a joint statement with the Islamic Council of New Zealand of our shared reasons.

The case for being in that room has been stated in detail. We accept that participants assessed risks and benefits and used their best judgement. We write not to undermine them, but to state the Jewish case for applying pressure on this government and its initiative from outside the accord.

In our view, this accord offers government access and resources at the cost of validating the narrative of power, placing human rights on the back burner, and excluding Palestinians. That does not accord with our values.

Of what value is selective access – is it not the role of government to listen to the community rather than the converse? We have pleaded with this government to intervene in grotesque crimes for nearly two years. During that time, we have watched the government try to dismantle Te Tiriti, undermine labour rights; and the list goes on. We want to change this government, not be cordial to it.

The harmony accord proceeds from the problem statement that genocide and government indifference can cause social disharmony in Aotearoa. That is true – but the disharmony has never been between the Jewish and Muslim religions. There is disharmony between the street and the backrooms of power; between society and the far Right and disinformation networks that seek to undermine society; between the great majority of New Zealanders and the White Christian nationalist use of religion to intimidate and incite.

An accord between some Jews and Muslims is not the way to address any of those. New Zealand has multiple interfaith initiatives including a faith leaders’ forum. Those are better placed to carry out faith-based advocacy. Those should be resourced and tasked, rather than funding or rewarding one more council to start from scratch. With starvation stalking Gaza, how can it possibly be anyone’s priority to negotiate the operations of a new council?

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The Jewish community is represented in this accord by the exclusively Zionist NZ Jewish Council, the Holocaust Centre (which denies that another genocide is taking place in Gaza), the Community Security Group and Dayenu.

This accord revives the flagging Jewish Council, an unelected group chosen by Zionist institutions. We have for years protested their hollow claims of representation. These days, the Jewish Council struggles for language to say that they regret Netanyahu’s extremes but wish to perpetuate Jewish supremacy. Such rearguard Zionist apologetics endanger Jewish safety by continuing to blur Jewish identity with Israel. The NZ Jewish Council cannot bring themselves to envision a future grounded the findings of international courts and our inalienable equality.

At no time in our discussions of this accord did we ever hear that the Community Security Group would be a signatory. Had we known, we would have walked out upon hearing.

The Community Security Group politicises the work of protecting Jewish places. AJV has for years objected to their reporting of individual Kiwis’ social media and other speech to the embassy of Israel in the guise of “anti-Zionist antisemitism”. Their inclusion gives Israel a seat at the table, nothing less.

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AJV took part in initial discussions of the accord, and had a hand in drafting V1 of the accord. Unlike that V1, the final accord documents do not recognise human rights, nor the role of international courts as the basis for finding peace with justice.  The accord’s rationale began with Gaza, but it now contains no vision for advocacy, bringing war criminals to account, and supporting Palestinians’ work for a just co-existence. Participants in the accord are not required to embrace our global agreement of human equality.

As we informed the Ministry of Ethnic Communities and others within the accord, when we realised how the accord had changed, AJV declined to sign.

Should we sit around a table with those who disagree? Sure. However, human rights and international law are not opinions. They are our global norms. They are where discussion begins. No one should have to enter a room, especially a room under government auspices, knowing that they will have to ask for that to which every human being is entitled.

There is no direct Palestinian representation in this accord. By framing discord as a religious matter; by including the Jewish Council who deny Palestinian rights, and the Community Security Group who report on individual New Zealanders to the Israeli embassy; perhaps the council came to feel hostile or unproductive.

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In these ways, AJV believes that this accord has validated the worst of the status quo. We must do more than ask for the marginal reform of the status quo.

Minister Mark Mitchell says he hopes this signing will be a precedent. Perhaps he hopes for a series of signings to take up the year before the next election.

AJV will work ceaselessly for justice in Palestine, in partnership with Palestinians, Tangata Whenua, and our global movement. We will work with local and international partners who believe that we need new Jewish community – community that will not replicate the harms we are witnessing in Palestine. We will change this government in partnership with all those whose interests and rights have been undermined. None of those are back room functions requiring government funds or recognition.

The real coalition is the one we will build in the street.

Feed Gaza. End Israel’s illegal occupation. Feed Gaza. Implement the decisions of international courts, including the arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders. Feed Gaza. Let justice take root.

Alternative Jewish Voices