Month: June 2026

Remarks at the (lively) protest against Aotearoa’s participation RIMPAC, the Pacific Rim war games – the world’s largest naval war games, absurdly including Israel.

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We’re not playing games with Donald Trump and the IDF – especially not war games.

War games are more than the kinetic games of soldiers. They are an exercise in
inevitability. They ensure that our weapons systems and our assumptions are
interoperable with America’s. Think of RIMPAC as a trade show for American imperialism.

Well, we don’t buy in. We do not share the assumptions of empire. We will not budget for the next illegal war of aggression. The slaughter of civilians with American weapons that poison the earth is a crime, not a game. And we refuse to play nicely with the genocidaires of the Israeli military.

War games don’t just train soldiers; they train us. They condition us to believe that we must make our way through this world with guns drawn. They regard the military as our first resort. They foreclose on all the other collective responses to our world, even as they snatch away the budget to do things differently.

RIMPAC assumes military threat – but who poses the real threat in our world? This year, Canada war-gamed an American invasion. The Canadian defence forces concluded that Canada should not respond militarily, given its population and geography. They concluded that Canada would fall back on the same kind of citizen resistance as the Taliban or Hamas.

It is past time to ask whether an American-style military makes sense for Aotearoa. To spend as we spend on a conventional fighting force is a choice, not an inevitability. It’s a choice of method, rather than drawing on other values to shape our place in the world. And we make that choice at the expense of urgent needs like decent housing, nutritious food for every school lunch, real social services. When we follow the old colonial club, we shunt life and planet and justice aside.

The officers in that building (Defence House) will tell you this is naive. Do they think that America’s military doctrine is profound: bomb and lose, bomb and lose. And when that fails, as it is failing against Iran right now? Trump’s offsider lectured us a couple of weeks ago: even as American empire falters, we’re told to buy more of it. Do the people in that building really believe that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are making the world a safer place?

We will not be trained to fishtail after Trump’s aging needs for muscular validation. We will not play at business as usual with Netanyahu’s endless war. They are selling death and subjugation and poison. Why would we hitch our beautiful Pacific waka to such deadwood? Surely, surely the time has come to mark out our own path, to heal this life and the planet on which our survival depends.

Step 1 – NZ out of RIMPAC! Step 2 – vote this government out of office! 

We will not be followers into war; let us be leaders into peace.

June 23, 2026, on the lawn between parliament and Defence House.

A couple of days ago, we debunked a webinar that had been advertised by New Zealand synagogues. It was hosted by the Indigenous Embassy, which is co-directed by Alfred Ngaro, a former National MP and current New Zealand First candidate.

The presenter urges listeners to –

Since the webinar, three different articles in Aotearoa and Australia have followed its strategy, some mapping the medieval Catholic Inquisition over rights-based protest. A second webinar is now being promoted here. Then the presenter wrote to threaten various ‘avenues’ . . . and say that he would ‘relish’ a public debate or podcast.

Hmm. Someone wants a platform – but the best response to disinformation is to refuse to recirculate it. Repetition makes any statement feel more possible. So here’s our reply.

Joshua,

Your email boils down to a request to engage, recirculate and dispute your statements on their own terms. You advise listeners not to engage with goodwill. We take you at your word and we decline to engage. When a person instructs listeners to regard rights-based protest as racial hatred or incitement, we decline any exchange that might normalise such falsehoods.

Frankly, we refuse to be diverted onto your narrative ground. We had been concerned that debunking your distortions involved writing, even once, on your terms. Thanks for tipping the balance. We’re content to give you much less space. On April 22, at minute 42 of your YouTube presentation, you said:

‘Label [anti-Zionism] under the umbrella of antisemitism. Whether or not it is a type of antisemitism, it doesn’t matter. If we want to believe that anti-Zionism nests within antisemitism, that’s fine.’

That will suffice. We’re not interested in the use you make of your false premise. The truth does matter, and the truth is that anti-Zionism protests decades of Israel’s actions.

When a person conjures an anti-Zionism without Palestinians at its beating heart, we reply with these truths:

• The ongoing genocide in Palestine is not a story about Jews. It is the Zionist project of Israel; a regional hegemon defending genocide accusations in court, whose leaders are wanted for crimes of genocide, whose government ministers openly incite genocide.
• We understand Zionism through the lived and ongoing experience of Palestinian people. They tell us what Zionism means. Only when we learn to listen without being defensive; only when we imagine and work for Palestinian freedom will we also be free.
• Anti-Zionists protest against Israel’s actions including apartheid, illegal occupation and the illegal blockade of Gaza, illegal wars of aggression waged at overwhelming and intentional civilian cost, the starvation and bombardment of civilians, the horrifying abuse of prisoners, the targeting of healthcare workers and journalists and children.
• Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Israel’s actions may endanger Jews, but anti-Zionism does not seek violence against the Aotearoa Jewish community.
• We strain to distinguish Jewish from Zionist from Israel, notwithstanding the efforts of Zionists to confuse them.
• Aotearoa’s Jewish institutions are not responsible for Israel’s actions. They are responsible for their own political choices, including their support of / silence regarding genocide committed in our names.
• Human rights and the laws which centre the value of life are the much-battered framework by which we insist on human equality. Jewish safety is inextricable from everyone’s safety. Jewish safety will be secured by working with others against all forms of racism and deprivation.
• Anti-Zionism opposes that which prevents our Palestinian whānau from realising their full, equal individual and collective rights. We Jewish anti-Zionists understand our solidarity as part of our essential Jewish obligation to stand with the oppressed.