Author: Marilyn Garson

(Remarks to Student Justice for Palestine teach-in at Vic Uni, Nakba Day 2024)

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa

Ko Hūrae te whakapaparanga mai

I tipu ake ahau i Canada i te whenua o Mi’kmaq 

Ināianei, e noho ana ahau i Te Whanganui-a-Tara

I whakakaupapa māua ko Fred Albert i te rōpū Alternative Jewish Voices

Ko Marilyn Garson taku ingoa

Thank you for inviting me to speak, and to every Palestinian person here, I wish some kind of safety for your family. I wish you quiet, peace and real justice soon, in our time.

What does Nakba mean to anti-Zionist Aotearoa Jews like me?

75 years ago, some of my antecedents took the homes of Palestinians. Some of my antecedents were seeking safety from genocide while others were capitalising on it. But Jewish suffering is not resolved by replicating the exclusion, violence, dispossession, erasure.

Nakba Day reminds me that my history was and is still used to rationalise Palestinian Nakba. Nakba is a day for storytelling and I listen without defensiveness while Palestinians tell me what that has meant and continues to mean.

Nakba is a day to feel the reverberations of the intergenerational trauma that we carry in our bodies leading to and from 1948. Also we feel the trauma dug into the land itself when that land is colonised, stolen, soaked in Indigenous blood and sadness. Nakba is also a day to understand Aotearoa and our long project of decolonisation.

As an anti-Zionist Jew, I (and my co-founder Fred Albert) also regard the violent creation of Israel as a self-inflicted disaster. It repudiates many of our texts and the intentions of the prophets. Zionism reduced our religious imagination to a plot of land and reduced our eternal vision to an exploitative project of power over others. It traded our thousands of years of study and worship for what, a culture like the other cultures. Nakba is the day when some of our antecedents gave religion away to become landlords like all the other landlords. And it was a terrible milestone on the road to doing genocide.

Nakba is our day to remember that disavowing is not enough. We are still implicated in Israel’s structures of power and violence. I am involved, obligated in the present tense. I was raised on the story and its benefits are offered to me. Israel writes for me a so-called law of return while Palestinians have not realised their UN-mandated right to return.

When I lived in Gaza, I did not see enmity in my colleagues’ eyes. I saw the future. I saw them crafting explanations for the bombardments to prevent their small children from living lives blighted by hatred. What on earth can Gazan parents say today? I saw all the anger I would feel at the Zionist project which classified my colleagues’ lives ethnically, deprived their children and separated their families, stunted and shortened their lives. What must they feel today? So Nakba is a day to feel all my discomfort as I listen and continue to unwrap the training that enlisted me in the project of their deprivation.

This year, this Nakba Day we are all Palestinian and we are all holding back our despair. As a Jew I belong in those streets, those canyons of rubble. I walk with the homeless, I weep with the bereaved and I wish I could comfort every motherless child. If I hope to live in peace and justice with Palestine tomorrow, I must walk each step with Palestinians to get there.

Nakba is being done again, still. This Nakba is a day for Jews of conscience to recommit to return, restoration, reparation and justice.

Nakba is just one day. Together we all commit to the daily, steady work of making this stop and sowing the seeds of real justice. If this is your first act of solidarity, please don’t let it be your last.

B’Tzedek

Marilyn Garson for Alternative Jewish Voices of Atoearoa

May 15, 2024

Would you like to live in a country that looks like Israel, segmented by endless kilometres of walls, watchtowers, cameras and checkpoints to divide its citizens; with an army as its chief unifying institution and military-grade weapons carried by its dominant ethnicity in the streets; ghettoes and mass graves at its edges?

Would you like to live in a democracy like Israel, preventing half of those over whom it wields power from voting while the fascists compete with fundamentalists for the sizeable psychopath vote?

Would you like to make your fortune in a securitised economy like Israel’s, marketing the technologies of population surveillance, separation and containment; testing its weapons on trapped human beings?

Would you like the power to signal like Israel, to invent allegations while knowing that you won’t be asked for evidence? Such signals they send – Hamas headquarters, UNRWA neutrality, minimise civilian casualties – while the world’s most moral army rolls over human rights and civilian protection.

Would you like to live in a world that operates like Israel, a world of states that shop for their police and call the preservation of apartheid self-defence – all with one eye on their own inconvenient populations and the other eye on thoses hordes at the doorstep?

We already inhabit a world that complicit. Glissando, Zionism has slid us from being consumers of Jewish supremacy to enablers of genocide. If you doubt that, try reversing the ethnic roles in the news.

Imagine reading that Jewish-Israeli babies were deprived of oxygen for their incubators or Jewish-Israeli children were deprived of anaesthetics for amputations, or that the bodies of Jewish doctors with bound hands were being lifted from mass graves still wearing their scrubs. Imagine that Palestinians were at the same time circulating offers to purchase Israel’s beachfront property now that the houses had all been blown up. Imagine your preferred media outlet uncritically rebroadcasting statements that Jews are less than human, or that calling Jews animals insults animals, or that there are no innocent Jews. Would you sit quietly while two million Jews were penned up behind a wall and deprived of food for six months?

This onslaught is unthinkable unless the objects of the violence are Palestinian. That measures the success of Zionism’s radical dehumanisation. Even as Israel’s most loathsome settler thugs entered Cabinet, our own government acknowledged only a deterioration; not a disaster.

Genocide is always this numbing gradation of violence. Glissando – we are arming, trading, normalising; we are invested in genocide.

Netanyahu has spent years positioning Israel at the brazen, profitable edge of a White supremacist, anti-democratic, securitised new regime of power. Zionism was wrapped up in Jewishness to give it cover. Now, in Gaza we see its real outlines.

We are concerned for our Jewish community. Netanyahu and his cohort have seeded confusion about the boundaries of Judaism, Zionism, and antisemitism. They have made all Jews vulnerable to the anger provoked by Israel’s actions. Damn them. Some Jews fear their friends because they have been told so often that protest stems from hatred and constitutes a local threat. They are wrong.

The manipulation of antisemitism is not a reason to stand back and let the slaughter continue. It is a reason to keep educating while we try together to save lives. Genocide is continuing unchecked, and we must make that stop.

Just look at the movement spreading on campuses and in Aotearoa: Jews arm in arm with Palestinians, tangata whenua, labour unions, human rights activists, health workers and angry young people. Do we evince fear of the people next to us? No, we protest because we fear a world that acts like Israel: scholasticide, econocide, domicide, genocide.

What do we want? Ceasefire. Stop doing business as usual with a genocidal regime.

When do we want it? Right now. Today.

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert

To our Palestinian friends and our allies in the mahi tahi,

This night is not like all the other nights. We gather for our Passover meals while your people are being starved in our names. How can we speak while this unthinkable crime is ongoing?

The holiday of Passover commemorates Jewish liberation. It is not enough that we were freed from oppression. We are feeling our rage and finding our place to act against the oppression of any people by another.

We are instructed to retell the story of our liberation, and we will.

75 years ago, some of our antecedents took the homes of yours. Some were seeking shelter from a cataclysm while others were capitalising on it. We regard every survivor with compassion. The echoes of their traumas live on within both of our peoples.

Our cataclysm was exploited to justify your Nakba. We listen without defensiveness while you tell us what that has meant. Until we address that with restoration, reparation and return, your catastrophe will live in the present tense.

Since then a bitter, violent disparity of power and consequence has prevailed from the river to the sea. We call for our people to surrender their power, to elevate and centre your justice.

The Zionist project of displacement and erasure is finding its fullest expression this year. We see desolation, starvation and terror inflicted upon your families in our names. Our tears and our horror are boundless, but tears are no help without actions. We will not rest until every person who is cold and hungry finds food, safety, home and comfort. Even then, we will not turn away until the quiet of ceasefire is followed by the real peace of justice. That will be the hour of your and our liberation.

What does it mean to be pro-Jewish anti-Zionist this year? It means directing our outrage into action: being seen and heard in solidarity, protesting the brutality and the appropriation of our good name. To be pro-Jewish means digging beneath the travesty of Zionism, unearthing thousands of years of Jewishness and bringing that into the light.

It means establishing a Jewish community where all are welcome and no one is harmed – an Aotearoa Tangata Tiriti Jewish community that is part of the long work of liberation. We are not safe while others are targeted; we are not valued by devaluing others.

Trauma is resolved with acceptance and belonging. May we find resolution together in time.

That is the lesson we take from our Passover festival of liberation: we reject the oppression of one people by another.

Soon, in our time, may we be all be free.

Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu

Why did a German bank close the Jewish Voice account?

Media release: March 28, 2024

Jewish groups from 14 countries are outraged that the Berliner Sparkasse bank has frozen the account of Jüdische Stimme (Jewish Voice) until the organisation submits documents including the full names and addresses of its members.

‘The Berliner Sparkasse is a public corporation, operating in a state whose citizens are free to associate and engage in politics. Their request is an act of intimidation,’ says Wieland Hoban, chairman of Jüdische Stimme. ‘Jüdische Stimme / Jewish Voice is assisting the organisers of the Palestine Congress, which will take place in Berlin in mid-April. The closer the congress gets, the more intense the persecution becomes; for weeks, there has been shrill defamation from the tabloid media and local politicians, such as describing it as a “hate summit” for which “thousands of anti-Semites” will be coming to Berlin. Because the journalists can’t write anything factual about it, they try to delegitimise the congress through guilt by association.’

In country after country, Palestinians, Jews and others who protest Israel’s devastation of Gaza are being called antisemitic for upholding Palestinians’ human and collective rights.

The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP) is a grouping of Jewish organisations in 14 countries. Jüdische Stimme is a founding member. IJCJP members educate their communities to distinguish real antisemitism from its weaponisation to shield Israel from protest and accountability. The political use of antisemitism is enabled by a definition which conflates anti-Zionism and the hatred of Jews or Judaism. One of the definition’s drafters has testified to US Congress that it is being used with ‘“the subtlety of a mallet” to stigmatise and stifle criticism of Israel.’

We, the member groups of the IJCJP, are appalled that German Jews  are being called antisemitic for upholding the rights and laws on which the world agreed after the Holocaust, so as to prevent further genocide. Judische Stimme’s membership includes the descendants of Holocaust survivors determined to be personally faithful to their commitment ‘never again’.

Right now, Israel stands charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. For a German bank to confiscate Jewish funds from a mission to save lives is a new low in the long effort to silence Palestinian, anti-Zionist and pro-human rights voices.

It is unthinkable that German banks should presume to define the terms of Jewish involvement in public life. Restore the account and think again: which side of history is Germany on this time?

Contact: Donna Nevel, globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

END

We, Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu, renew our call for our government to recognise the State of Palestine. Do it now, today.

Recognition is integral to arresting and responding to the genocidal violence we are watching on our screens.

We are sick of seeing states (led by the US and followed by Aotearoa among others) respond to this horror with apolitical tokens of aid. Governments including ours are (under-)reacting to a manufactured humanitarian cataclysm without a squeak about its structural cause or solution. Over and over.

• America is air-dropping 38,000 meals into Gaza. If all goes very well, one-tenth of the Gazans who are starving in the north might have one meal – and we hope it does go very well. But why is Biden not objecting to Israel’s obstruction of an aid shipment at its port of Ashdod – a shipment that would feed 1.1 million people for a month? Neither the US nor New Zealand is speaking about the cause of this need: Israel is using starvation as a tool of war, and that is a war crime.
• West Bank settlers (whose settlements NZ acknowledge as illegal) are plundering and ethnically clearing villages. Over 400 West Bankers have been killed and 7000 detained since October 7. NZ has told a dozen settlers that they can’t come to Queenstown in response. The Israeli occupation forces that accompany settlers on their crime sprees and detain Palestinians are untouched. NZ has not acted or even spoken about the cause of these casualties: illegal settlement by fanatics who wield unprecedented power in Israel’s coalition government.
• 30,400 Gazans have been killed and NZ would like a ceasefire, please, for humanitarian reasons (which are desperately real and urgent). Our government has not acted against the makers of this repugnant strategy and it has not spoken about the cause of this violence: Palestinians have a right to self-determination and Israel has obstructed it for 75 years.

In a world of such diplomatic acquiescence, who speaks for Palestine? Who envisions the new Gaza and protects West Bankers as parts of a single future, who will see to Palestine’s interests in its own resources (from the water under its ground to the natural gas off its shores)? Who determines the shape and administration of Palestine? These are not decisions for Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu to make. Nor has their agent, the Palestine Authority, any national mandate.

NZ fails to imagine a national Palestinian voice. NZ is among the minority of countries that do not recognise the State of Palestine and grant Palestinians their own voice as of right in all such conversations.

There is a Palestine-shaped hole in Aotearoa’s response to this season of genocidal violence. Statehood is a sine qua non of survival in this state-led world. In a world of states, stateless people are unprotected and their interests do not figure except as it suits the transactional whims of states.

Palestine – in particular Gaza – has been a little rip in the fabric of states for decades. This is a bitter irony that every Jew and every supporter of Israel should be made to confront and grapple with: the vulnerability of statelessness was also the problem statement of Zionism.

Zionism responded to the threatened status of Jews who had been denied the rights and protection of their states. In a world organised by states in the interests of state power, anything could be done to a stateless, dehumanised and unprotected people. Jews knew that statelessness was a precursor of violent erasure yet, watching Palestinians endure the same vulnerability, too many Jews have turned amnesiac.

We write while genocide is being done and watched. It is the lowest and the defining moment of this issue in our lifetimes. Parts of our understanding of the world have failed and broken because we did not believe that so many institutions and governments would stand back and watch suffering like this.

Broken or not, this catastrophe will need to be addressed in a world of states’ interests and neighbours’ indifference. Palestinians have every right to find their own national voice and call on Aotearoa as an equal collective with equal rights to defense, resource sovereignty and territorial integrity as per UN resolutions. Recognition says clearly that the IDF, West Bank settlers and those displacing families in Occupied East Jerusalem are operating on Palestinian land. Recognition rejects Israel’s efforts to invalidate UN resolutions with violent facts on the ground.

We are tired of hearing that there is nothing Aotearoa can do about justice from this distance. Recognition is the thing our government can do, and doing it will bring Aotearoa in line with the majority of the world’s states.

So we are renewing our call for the government of Aotearoa to recognise its fellow State of Palestine. Now, today. We call on Foreign Minister Peters to put some actions in place to support the call for a ceasefire. Send Israel’s ambassador home until normalcy on the ground permits normal diplomatic relations.

It’s time to name the nation that will not be erased, and elevate its voice to the centre of our concern: the State of Palestine.

Alternative Jewish Voices ~ Dayenu

Friends, please take a moment to meet Ilan, a member of AJV – Dayenu, and hear his testimony about serving in the IDF.

We have deep respect for him for speaking up.

[The tallis is a fringed Jewish prayer shawl, usually woven from silk, wool or linen. Not every Jew chooses to wear a tallis and Jewishness is plural. We respect the choices of our fellow Jews, be they religious or secular.]

My father kept his silk tallis in its velvet bag, in a drawer of the telephone table in our hallway. He would pick it up on his way out the back door whenever the synagogue was short of its quorum for prayer. He would not have dreamed of taking the tallis out of its bag before he arrived at the sanctuary doors.

I have never worn my tallis in public either, because prayer is such a private and separate event.

However, throughout Israel’s campaign to shatter Gaza, the tallis has been on display as never before. Rabbis have blocked bridges, railway stations and the Congressional rotunda. They have been arrested while wearing their tallis and reciting prayers. They have set the symbols of Jewishness against the powers that fund and permit genocide.

Now those spiritual leaders are rabbis to us all. Bring it, they are urging us. Bring everything we have and place it visibly in the service of justice and peace. Throw all of our Jewishness against the ethno-nationalism that props up the walls around Gaza and hardens the walls around too many hearts.

Last weekend Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices members did just that. We welcomed and farewelled the Sabbath at Israel’s consular offices in Auckland and Wellington. We prayed for an end to this genocidal madness.

We stepped from pedestrian into sacred space by preparing to put on the tallis. We said a short reflection and then the prayer for being wrapped in this deeply personal garment. The prayer is whispered within the tent of the tallis itself. Then, solemn and a bit self-conscious, we settled the prayer shawls on our shoulders and looked out at the friends gathered around us. We conducted short services of prayer and song on the sidewalk.

In Wellington, I asked the group to think of my colleague’s grandchild, just born in a tent in Rafah. Her family named her Salaam – peace. We sang so that Salaam might hear Jewish voices raised for peace, for justice, for a life with her – not at her expense.

In our small groups on the street, we wore the tallis to bring Jewishness more fully to our solidarity. Jewish solidarity with Palestinians requires us to confront our responsibility as well as our own trauma – and after all that it requires us to choose the risks of peace rather than the risks of war.

Jewish solidarity is thus not an act of self-abasement but of a fuller participation in our world. We have been raised in the harms of Zionism and we can be agents of change. Our responsibility is not self-hating, it is adult and repairing.

People are familiar with Hillel’s 2000-year-old injunction, If I am only for me, then who am I? Jewish solidarity replies by being for each other.

Relational Jewish philosophy or theologies like Martin Buber’s say that Gd is present in the space between fully present equals. We recently read a Torah portion in which Gd situates Gd’s voice in the space between two winged carvings.

Solidarity happens in that space between us when we stand together, look straight at each other and imagine in each others’ eyes a land beyond war – from the river to the sea.

In both Auckland and Wellington, our prayer services were joined by non-Jews. Thank you: it felt so good to be surrounded by friends. Being Jewish in public while the White Right is mainstreaming anti-semitism is not risk-free, but as with any form of racism or threat, we face it together. We face it knowing that others will stand with us because we stand with them.

I wear my tallis to say privately hineini – ­I am here. I wore it in public to append the fuller meaning, hineini – and I am ready. I am ready to enact a Judaism beyond Zionism in a world where we thrive in our mutual bonds.

Marilyn Garson

Media Release – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Thursday, 15 February 2024, 15:00

Rights groups call for stronger government action to prevent slaughter in Rafah

“What’s happening in Rafah is of a different order of magnitude, even in the context of Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, and so our response needs to be too” – say human rights groups, Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu and Justice for Palestine.

Israel has begun bombing Rafah, as part of a planned full-scale ground offensive on the city. About 1.4 million of the 2.3 million people who live in Gaza are currently sheltering in Rafah in dire conditions, but with nowhere else safe to go.

Since Israel began its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, Israel has killed more than 28,500 people, mostly women and children; much of the civilian infrastructure has been destroyed and more than 80 percent of the population has been displaced. Many of the displaced civilians have sought refuge in Rafah.

Despite those stark facts, it is against that background that the head of UN aid Martin Griffiths is warning that Israel’s planned offensive in Rafah could lead to “slaughter”, and that this “long-dreaded [scenario] is unraveling at alarming speed”.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have “urged” Israel not to begin its ground offensive in Rafah, as part of “an overwhelming consensus of the international community”. Rt Hon Winston Peters has stated that “New Zealand remains extremely concerned by indications that Israel is planning a ground offensive into Rafah” and “the humanitarian consequences of an offensive in Rafah would be appalling.”

We welcome these statements of concern. They are a necessary indication of our government’s attitude to the next phase of Israel’s war on Gaza.  But they are not sufficient.

They will not reassure Palestinian refugee families sheltering in tents at the border with Egypt tonight. They will not alter Israel’s genocidal intention to exterminate and displace Palestinian civilians, under cover of a war on Hamas.

The South African government has lodged an urgent request with the International Court of Justice to consider whether Israel’s operations targeting Rafah are a breach of the provisional orders the court made in the case alleging genocide by Israel, and to order additional provisional orders to halt the mass killing in Rafah. 

The Foreign Minister has noted that NZ regards the ICJ’s decisions, including the provisional measures requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, as binding.

The New Zealand Government should support South Africa’s urgent request to the ICJ and take other concrete steps to sanction Israel for its failure to comply with international law.  If we truly want to hold Israel to account, the Israeli ambassador should be left in no doubt that, if the Rafah ground offensive goes ahead, diplomatic relations with Israel will cease.

“We are at the precipice of witnessing the mass slaughter of civilians in Rafah and the most concerted effort yet to depopulate Gaza. These are flagrant violations of international law and the ICJ’s orders. New Zealand’s response needs to measure up to the enormity of the situation at hand,” said Marilyn Garson of Alternative Jewish Voices.

—

MEDIA RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                              January 29, 2024

Food is not a weapon: Jewish groups call on MFAT to re-commit to lifesaving aid

“Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu call on Foreign Minister Peters to increase – or at a bare minimum to maintain – NZ’s funding to UNRWA for humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. In the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe, we cannot abandon people who are being starved,” says Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV) and former UNRWA contractor.

“UNRWA provides vital aid to the besieged population of Gaza. No other agency can replicate their logistics and infrastructure. Their ongoing operations are critical to mitigating the effects of the humanitarian emergency in Gaza. UNRWA employs over 13,000 people in Gaza. Israel has accused fewer than 0.1% of those staff of complicity in Hamas’s 7 October attacks. These staff members have been fired and their actions are being investigated by the UN’s highest investigative body. Suspending UNRWA funding because of a few allegedly bad apples is collective punishment of Gazans. Imagine how enraged Palestinians must feel, hearing that donor states are withholding food while they are starving in flimsy tents through Gaza’s bitter winter storms.” says Garson.

“On Friday, the International Court of Justice found that Israel must take action to prevent the genocide of the Gazan people. The Court also determined that Israel must ensure the delivery of basic services and essential humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza. Suspending funding to UNRWA could make states complicit in genocide. New Zealand claims to have a principled foreign policy. On principle, we need to act against genocide and help save lives.” says Garson.

AJV co-founder Marilyn Garson was employed by UNRWA-Gaza from 2013 to 2015. She adds: “UNRWA is a diplomatic and humanitarian proof that Palestinians are one people. There have long been a few Zionist voices arguing that Palestinians’ national consciousness protracts their resistance. They say that, if Palestinians would just forget their nationhood, they could be dispersed quietly. In that sense, they say that UNRWA extends the problem. I would say that Israel’s refusal to acknowledge Palestinian rights extends UNRWA, not the other way around. Ask any Palestinian: their national consciousness is not going away.”

Background information supporting this media release

Alternative Jewish Voices is a collective of non-Zionist Jews. Dayenu is a group of New Zealand Jews opposed to racism and the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. More information can be found at https://ajv.org.nz/ and https://www.instagram.com/dayenunz/

The United Nations Refugee and Words Agency (UNRWA) is mandated to serve Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan until there is a just solution to their dispossession. By funding UNRWA, donor states refuse to normalise that dispossession.

In blockaded Gaza, UNRWA provides health, education, housing and services to 1.7 million refugees, 70% of the population. It is also a critical provider of employment, liquidity, population records and essential humanitarian aid. It is especially vital in emergencies. No other agency has a fraction of UNRWA’s skilled staff, logistics or infrastructure for shelter and distribution – whatever fraction of that capacity remains intact.

UNRWA and the UN’s highest investigative body are responding to unspecified allegations that a small number of staff somehow supported Hamas’s actions on October 7. Without waiting for their report, the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy ceased delivery of their aid commitments.

UNRWA is entirely dependent on voluntary funding. It is not funded through UN contributions. National voluntary contributions were committed some time ago. Budgets and plans have been made on the assumption that those promises would be kept.

ENDS

For further information contact:

Marilyn Garson

Shma.koleinu.nz@gmail.com

For as long as I have written about the equality of Palestinians, Jews have been insulting me in the language of the Holocaust. A small minority of my own community resorts to the ugliest imagery as if it will obscure their inability to disprove the equal rights and the full humanity of Palestinian people.

The effect of splattering ugly historic words around is to rob them of specificity. Even the most shocking reference is gradually emptied of any meaning beyond ‘someone who disagrees with me’.

That is what antisemitism is coming to mean: someone who protests Israel’s devastation, starvation and genocidal intent toward the people of Gaza. Those who purport to speak for the Jewish community are draining that word of its specific meaning by splattering it over anti-Zionism, expressions of Palestinian identity, and protest consistent with international law and our equal human rights. They have robbed us all of an essential category and they are distracting us from the rise and mainstreaming of real antisemitism by the far Right.

When ceasefire is equated with genocide or when the very sight of Palestinian protest is unbearably triggering, the speaker is making their own fragility the point of their statement. They are speaking of their own intolerance. We ask, what is the matter with you that you equate the cessation of violence with the very worst form of violence? More than one percent of Gaza’s people have been killed, the population is being starved and the cities are rubble – and you have fainting spells at the sight of a flag?

Such absurd efforts to proscribe the peaceful expression of Palestinian rights and international law are an evasion. Such sweeping claims say that the Jewish community need not engage in any conversation that is not predicated on seeing Jews in existential danger — a danger embodied by Palestinian identity and rights.

But look, whose are the weapons and whose homes lie in rubble? What are the proportions of dead, missing, hostage, maimed, homeless and starving civilians? We Jews are more than victims. We are agents.

As part of this squandering of language, Israeli government leaders and others use the language of the Holocaust to help incite total, perpetual, genocidal enmity. They call Palestinians Nazis, subhuman, Amalek.

We will not repeat more of the offensive language here because repetition makes anything feel more normal. The Israeli settler-Right is adept with that language. The antisemitic far Right has long used it. It peppers Israeli government and military incitement against Gaza.

In our own country, Nazi imagery and language have been mainstreamed in particular through the website of David Cumin, former member of the NZ Jewish Council and Community Security Group; founding member of the Free Speech Union and director of the Israel Institute.

These Zionist voices are not really complaining about the use of Holocaust- or genocide-related language at all. They wield it freely. They are objecting to anyone else using it, too.

Well, we also object. Let the Holocaust stand alone as itself. ‘Genocide’ is a category for everyone to use wisely. Within that category, the Holocaust is specific. Cambodia is specific. Rwanda is specific. We remember each instance of genocide in its specifics. We ask the questions and teach the lessons, live with compassion for the people affected, and try to learn from it.

Holocaust Memorial Day is coming. One of the legacies of having watched the devaluation, dehumanisation and extermination of six million European Jews is the vow, never again. What have we learned from it?

First, to the degree that we vowed ‘never again’, we have failed. In a way more public than in any previous genocide, Gaza is being destroyed and starved before our eyes and we have failed to stop it.

Second, within the Jewish community, those who support or tolerate Israel’s genocidal campaign have learned only tribalism: never again to Jews. They are prepared to dispense with 2000 years of Jewish pluralism. In the interests of Jewish power, Zionism has sought to wrap Jewish identity in the Israeli flag. Having spent enormous energy insisting that ‘Jewish’ must mean ‘Zionist’, Jews everywhere now reap the consequences as Israel’s actions drag all of our good names through the mud. Israel’s actions frankly endanger us all. Not-Zionist Jews are attacked as never before in the interests of Jewish ethnonationalist power.

Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, tangata whenua and friends honour Holocaust memories by holding firmly to the language of our principled protest. This is a time for solidarity and impatience as we honour the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Gaza is the existential conversation, and we are deeply disappointed that our Jewish institutions continue to evade it. Perhaps they will use Holocaust Memorial Day to speak with a more humane vision.

Marilyn Garson for

Alternative Jewish Voices