When truth in protest is under attack, stand up, speak plainly.

Truth matters.

Aotearoa synagogues promoted an online talk on May 4, sponsored by a series of overlapping mostly-Christian Zionist groups. The Australian speaker advances a disingenuous and aggressive strategy to silence criticism of Israel by calling it antisemitic. The NZ Jewish Council’s statement in Stuff on May 25 seems to be trying it out.

Here, with Wajd El-Matary of Justice for Palestine, we debunk the lies and distortions. Then, on AJV Radio, we will open up ActionStation’s Far Right Playbook with El-Matary and Valerie Morse, to consider this strategy being deployed against Aotearoa civil society, and to formulate a strategic response. We urge you to read and listen, so that you recognise and respond to a strategy that has led other countries to criminalise truth in protest.

At the bottom of this post you will find a list of the NZ sponsors of the May 4 presentation, and a few of their overlaps.

I  The Strategy

The NZ workshop was presented by the Australian Movement Against Anti-Zionism (MAAZ). Their website claims to be ‘confronting a rapidly escalating antizionst hate movement that is actively endangering Jewish communities worldwide’. MAAZ imagines that Jews, not Palestine, are the targets of protest.

Words including ‘coloniser… apartheid… ethnostate… famine… genocide… flashpoint’ do not, for MAAZ, describe reality. They are merely ‘viral performances of suffering’ or ‘moral theatre’, even if they follow actual events. Those words constitute ‘anti-Jewish libel’, but unlike the legal definition of libel as a malicious falsehood, ‘anti-Jewish libel is not about the truth-value of individual claims.’

According to MAAZ, these statements are libels, even though they are true.

Anti-Zionism aims to ‘sanctify violence, casting murder of Jews and Israelis as moral duty… Rebranded as “resistance”, calls for slaughter are normalized as righteous activism… and when Israel itself cannot be struck, Jews abroad become the substitute target.’[1]

Joshua Dabelstein, the Australian head of MAAZ added in the presentation cited below that anti-Zionism ‘has actually been deadly [for Jews] including [mass murder at] Bondi.’ That is a lie: the Bondi murderers were Islamic State sympathisers, completely unrelated to anti-Zionist protest.

                II  Lies, Distortions and Omissions

For more detail, I listened to Josh Dabelstein’s presentation to the Australian Jewish Association on April 22, two weeks before his NZ appearance. The two presentations had the same title.

For Dabelstein, anti-Zionism is purely an act of antisemitism: anti-Zionist protest is directed solely at Jews. The stories that protestors cite about Israel are merely anti-Jewish libels ‘elevated to fact status’. Therefore, Jews need not notice the events cited by protestors. Jews are advised not to address that reality at all. As if to illustrate, Dabelstein has erased Palestine and Palestinians from the presentation.

As Wajd El-Matary of Justice for Palestine explains,

The extraordinary thing about this material is not only what it says about anti-Zionists, but what it leaves out. There is no occupation, no siege, no Gaza, no mass death, no dispossession, almost no Palestinians at all except as a rhetorical device. That absence is doing political work… So, part of the response is to keep bringing the reality of Palestinians back into view.

The whole strategy seems designed to shrink important differences: between Judaism and Zionism, criticism and hatred, protest and violence. Once that happens Palestinians disappear from the picture entirely.

What is the political work of Dabelstein’s erasure? By erasing the enactment of Zionism, MAAZ’s listeners can brush away Israel’s genocide and their own agency. They can turn every story toward their own presumed victimhood. The removal of Palestine also eliminates the motive for anti-Zionist protest. Dabelstein fills that vacancy with imagined antisemitism. Using the words anti-Zionism and antisemitism interchangeably, Dabelstein slots rights-based anti-Zionist protest into a distorted and re-traumatising recitation of an eternal antisemitism. Re-traumatisation is a strategy which revives fear and prevents critical participation. It says, fear your world. Seek protection.

It is a shameful trick to map the persecution of marginalised Jewish communities onto Israel – a regional hegemon, inflicting dispossession and genocide on others.

Dabelstein imagines that anti-Zionism ‘is not criticism of Israel’ at all. It’s merely the manifestation of antisemitism in our current politics – the politics of human rights.

Dabelstein incites a newly confrontational response to anti-Zionism’s rights-based protest. He tells people to loudly label anti-Zionism as ‘abuse’ and ‘bigotry’, to create new penalties for speech critical of Israel. Don’t engage in good faith, he urges. ‘Label it under the umbrella of antisemitism. Whether or not it is a type of antisemitism, it doesn’t matter.’

That bears repeating. Aotearoa’s Christian Zionists and our own synagogues promoted a speaker to tell their members that ‘it doesn’t matter’ if their attacks on protest speech are true.

The presentation implies that Palestinians must be made to vanish, protest speech must be silenced and the whole framework of our equal human rights must be abandoned in order for Jews to live in safety. It uses a myth about Jewish safety as moral cover for genocide, and it presses Jews to be insular and afraid of the world around us.

If such falsehoods hadn’t led to criminalising protest overseas, all this would be merely disgraceful. But falsehoods just like these have real-world consequences elsewhere, and they may already be finding their way into Aotearoa’s discourse.

III  The NZ Jewish Council puts it to use

On May 25, Ben Kepes for the NZ Jewish Council wrote in Stuff that the Jewish community is freshly afraid of the antisemitism which leads to protest against Israel’s embassy. Kepes added a new dimension to his usual recitation: ‘prejudice, no different in structure from telling Jews throughout history that they could earn safety by abandoning their identity, such as through conversion to Christianity. Even if some may choose to do so, it is still prejudice… [G]eopolitical issues must not become cover for the kind of hostility that has historically preceded violence against Jewish people.’

Kepes’ mapping of the medieval Catholic Inquisition over today’s rights-based protest is re-traumatising nonsense. Shame on Stuff for giving it oxygen and leaving it unchallenged.

IV  It’s Not Libel If It’s True

MAAZ does not have a problem with anti-Jewish libel. It has a problem with truths like these:

• The history of 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 and 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. These things are true – and it’s not libel when it’s true.
• Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Anti-Zionism was not responsible for centuries of antisemitic persecution, nor for October 7, nor for mass murder at Bondi.
• 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.

Wajd El-Matary concludes, ‘What worries me most is the bigger strategy underneath all this. It seems aimed at making ordinary language unusable. Words like apartheid, colonialism, genocide, even solidarity become redefined as forms of abuse. So maybe the task is partly to stay calm and keep speaking plainly. Keep insisting on shared standards. Keep refusing the idea that one group’s safety requires another people’s erasure. And keep making space for Jews, Palestinians, and others who still believe human rights have to apply equally to everyone.’

We anti-Zionist Jews will not be used as anyone’s pretext to suppress rights-based demands for justice in Palestine. On AJV Radio on June 13, we will open up ActionStation’s Far Right Playbook and speak about how to continue doing that.

—

The coalition of organisations sponsoring the May 4 presentation extends the NZ mostly-Christian Zionist echo chamber.

Movement Against Anti-Zionism, MAAZ: MAAZ was registered in the US as a not-for-profit corporation in December 2025, and in Australia in November 2025. Among their leadership, MAAZ’s Australian website lists Sheree Trotter, an Aotearoa Christian Zionist, as a partner.

Indigenous Embassy – Co-directors are Sheree Trotter and Alfred Ngaro, former National MP and 2026 NZ First candidate.

Israel Institute – the hub of NZ’s Zionist echo chamber. Three-quarters of the recent and current directors are Christian and neoliberal. See graphic below.

For the Protection of Zion Trust: registered as a business, 2021. Owners (Trustees) are Mrs Joann Woodley and Pastor Nigel Alexander Woodley of the Flaxmere Christian Fellowship.

B’nai Brith – International pro-Israel organisation, registered here as a charity. Website shows no recent news or forthcoming events. Leadership and projects in Israel are blank.

NZ Friends of Israel – Website shows a map of Palestine-Israel entirely covered by a star of David. From their gospel ministry webpage, ‘Our mission is to bring physical and spiritual comfort to the Jewish people while teaching about Israel and the Messiah.’

Christians for Israel NZ – Website refers to ‘Gd’s purposes for Israel’ and ‘Gd’s chosen people’.

---

[1] The Australian MAAZ website uses American spellings.