Month: October 2025

J-Wire is reporting that Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskell will slip into Auckland this weekend, quietly as a thief in the night. Winston Peters has been known to set his diplomatic encounters to music, but not this one.

If you’re not familiar with Heskell, here is her calling card.

Recall that this week’s Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice unanimously found that:

the State of Israel, as an occupying Power, is required to fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law. These obligations include the following: … to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services.

Now watch as Haskell calmly justifies bombing the Al Shifa and Nasser hospitals in Gaza.

Our government makes threadbare comments about law and humanitarian concern. Then they issue a visa to a front-row proponent of Israel’s genocide. Token words, followed by acts of complicity and permission.

And what will Israel’s genocide defender be doing in Aotearoa? According to J-Wire, she will be shoring up business ties with anyone willing to forget that on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice admonished all states not to normalise, support or perpetuate Israel’s illegal occupation.

The profitable business ties that Heskell seeks are precisely those that the court has told us to end. Heskell’s visa mocks the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who have taken to the streets for law and justice.

To our disgust, she will also be bolstering Israel’s ties with the Zionist-Jewish community. Every one of our Jewish institutions has failed to condemn Israel’s genocide and call for Israel’s accountability. They have failed to value non-Jewish lives. For any Jewish institution to invite or interact with a minister of the Israeli government (whose leaders are wanted for genocide) is a Shonda – a shame of scandalous proportions.

We are a collective of Jewish New Zealanders from the Far North to Dunedin. On the day that Israel elected a pack of butchers, the tone of our statements changed. Israel’s current government did not represent a new direction of travel, but it manifestly did represent an escalation of the violent madness that has rampaged through occupied Palestine for more than two years. Our world has been altered by the experience of witnessing slaughter while being governed by its accomplices.

We reject utterly the boards, the decision-makers of Jewish institutions who have stayed silent and passive through two years of annihilation. We need new institutions.

The same goes for a government that mumbles about the rights of human beings and the laws of states while carrying on normal diplomatic and economic relations with the state of Israel. If we want that to change, we must change our government.

Sanction Israel. Suspend normal relations. Support war crimes investigations.

Recognise the state of Palestine. Demand the immediate, sufficient and unimpeded provision of humanitarian supplies by the UN and NGOs.

End the illegal occupation which is the cause of this carnage.

Alternative Jewish Voices

We welcome the cessation of firing with so many emotions. We are relieved for each Palestinian family who knows that their relatives can sleep in safety, even as we are horrified by the devastation around them. We are indignant that Palestinians have been forced to choose between such a neocolonial plan—a plan to give Israel what it wants at the expense of law and justice—and ongoing starvation and annihilation.

Israel’s onslaughts have never really ended in Gaza. There have been cessations of bombing, and plans which were not meaningful beyond their first few bullet points. Bombing has been suspended, and Gaza has lived in the interim between attacks. But peace? Peace is built upon justice, and Gazans have enjoyed none of that.

We know all of the reasons for cynicism and rejection, but we will not give in to them. Our role is to support Palestinians in their choices, to share in their best hopes and stand by them while they begin to feel everything that had been postponed by the hourly desperation of 732 days of genocide.

Even in these very first days, we also know that an urgent task lands on all of our shoulders. Donor states have historically delivered only a small fraction of their grand pledges for Gaza’s recovery. In the twelve months after the bombardment of 2014, donors sent just 6% of their recovery pledges. They said that they wanted to see if the quiet would last. Their stance ensured that Gaza’s deprivation continued.

That absolutely must not happen again. Winter is approaching. Gazan Palestinians need warm shelter and blankets, food and water, medications and baby supplies. They need machinery to search for their loved ones who lie beneath the rubble of their homes. They need functioning health, education and food distribution infrastructure to replace what Israel has so mercilessly destroyed. Experts must be granted entry to Gaza to document Israel’s crimes and begin the essential work of holding Israel to account.

Gaza needs all this, and they need it now. Winter is coming. Securing actual donor-state contributions to deliver essential supplies, in sufficient quantities: this is an immediate task for our advocacy.

Alternative Jewish Voices

Are we doing enough?

by Diego Lewin

It is a new anniversary for the October 7th attacks and the question that we should ask ourselves to truly honour the memory of the people that were killed that day,  is how to avoid this to happen again, and to answer that, we should be honest and confront the question of Why did it happen in the first place.

We could say that the core issue is that Palestinians don’t want peace and they have refused every opportunity that they had.

But are we doing enough?

– In 1948, when the state of Israel was created 700.000 people (palestinians) were displaced (1) known by Paelstinians as the Nakba (catastrofe).

– Israel granted only to the Jewish people the right to citizenship (Law of return) ,  meanwhile Israel denied the right to return for the people displaced.

– In 1967, Israel occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank, known as Naksa by Palestinians, and with a new displacement of 300.000 (2) people (Palestinians), since then,  the remaining  non Jewish population lives under military occupation. This is 58 years of military occupation.

– Since then (1967) until today, the amount of Jewish settlers in the occupied land increased steadily to around 700.000 settlers (3).

Today is the second anniversary of the October 7th  attacks, and the one writing this article deeply believes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and at the same time I can not avoid linking both stories, the history of Palestinian displacement that continues until today and the attack of October 7th.

Israel response to the attack is the ongoing killing of 70.000 people in Gaza majority civilians, destroying most school,  mosques, universities, infrastructure, housing  making Gaza unlivable, displacing the population internally many times, and starving the remaining people in Gaza

I keep thinking, how a deliverate starvation and on going genocide (4) with the clear intention of ethic claeansing of Gaza can honour the memories of the October 7th victims and how we can talk of the 7 th of October victims without talking about the ongoing suffering and geocide that the Palestinian people are suffering.

How these actions described since the creation of the state of Israel (and even before) are contributing to peace, but instead creating the conditions for a new 7th of October, we have seen this play again and again, so many times, too many times, too many lives.

Also, what this means for the children of Israel, to be part part of a country that from its inception displaced an opress other people and that now is actively commiting genocide.

We need now more than ever a different path, and not for some, but for all people living in the land.

Justice and  Peace goes hand by hand, one cannot exist with the other. We need equal rights for all, no more occupation, no more genocide, we need justice and respect the right of the Palestinians displaced to return to their homes,  we need basic human rights for all, and we need it now.

This is not only the right thing to do as a human being, but also the way to honor life, all life.

Each day, each week that passes, Israel goes to a new low, more extreme, more brutal,  from the diaspora, all people with conscience, we have the obligation to stop this madness against the Palestinian people as Israel by itself is clearly unable and unwilling to stop.

(1) UN marks 75 years since displacement of 700,000 Palestinians | UN News

(2) Naksa – Wikipedia

(3) Israeli settlement timeline – Wikipedia

(4) Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds | OHCHR

by Diego Lewin

It has been two years, 730 days of annihilation and the sheer heartlessness of starvation. This day and every day, we send our deepest aroha to our Palestinian whānau who live this nightmare.

With contempt we have watched this government’s degrading courtship of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—a convicted felon and a wanted war criminal—at the expense of law, rights, morality and human dignity.

Israel’s genocide has broken our hearts, but not our spirit.

Two years of witness and marching have changed us. Look at this movement: in two years, we have laid foundations that will last.

We mark this day with deep gratitude for the generous vision of our Palestinian leaders; for the wisdom of Māori tikanga and the invitation of Te Tiriti to co-exist in mutual respect.

We march within a broad-based movement that is forward-looking, anti-racist, built with aroha and resolve. We stand among professional groups who have adopted their Gazan counterparts, unions, faith groups, university and community organisations who have embraced Palestine.

All around us, we notice the number of people who have used social media to form sustained relations with Palestinian families in Gaza. In these two years, Gaza has become personal.

We hear the language of solidarity as people make connections between issues. We see people turn up across the issues, because they recognise that liberation can only be collective.

In our own community, we welcome each person who throws off the tribal and the nationalist, and falls in love with humanity. Join us.

It should not take two years to alert the world to a livestreamed genocide!

Perhaps those in power thought that we would get tired and give up. Instead, here we are on the 730th day, a larger and more resolute movement than ever.

We will move this world. Palestine WILL be free, and on that day, our Jewish community will begin to be free as well.

Alternative Jewish Voices with our friend, Sarah Cole