Author: Marilyn Garson

Click to access press-release-first-national-jewish-and-muslim-forum-on-peace-in-gaza.pdf

Alternative Jewish Voices, Dayenu and the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand are so, so excited to have opened a national dialogue for peace – real peace with real justice. Our combined voice will be new and compelling.

The full text of FIANZ’s press release:

PRESS RELEASE:
FIRST NATIONAL JEWISH AND MUSLIM FORUM ON PEACE IN GAZA
At a time when there is an unending humanitarian tragedy in Gaza, Jewish and Muslim community elders and youth have met in a forum held at the Centre of Peace and Dialogue in Wellington. This was the initiative of FIANZ, the umbrella national Muslim organisation, to reach out to respected members of the Jewish community, to find a common platform for dialogue for a pathway to peace in Gaza, said Abdur Razzaq, Chairperson of FIANZ RCOI.

“Given there is polarisation of viewpoints, our social cohesion strategy calls for shared conversations on difficult issues and this has been the key objective of this peace initiative,” said Farouk Khan an elder of the Muslim community of Auckland and Senior Advisor of FIANZ.

“We need each other to make change. We came here to find common ground, and we agree that real solutions must recognise the equal human rights of all people”, said Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ). She also represented Dayenu, another national Jewish organisation working for peace in Palestine, whose speaker could not attend due to illness. The two organisations shall be merging soon.

The forum had both Muslim and Jewish speakers, with representatives of a number of government agencies present. “It was a first step in a difficult journey of seeking peace in a region which has seen over 75 years of violence and human tragedy. Here we had an opportunity to have a Aotearoa New Zealand approach, which is based on having respect and understanding”, said Mustafa Farouk, a prominent Muslim elder from Hamilton and Head of Interfaith Dialogue for FIANZ.

“Today’s event was a success, in two ways”, said Fred Albert, a member of the Jewish community in New Zealand. “Firstly, we chartered new approaches based on dialogue and secondly, we lay the foundation platform, so that
Jewish and Muslim youth can meet next month and continue this journey”.

“That both the Muslim and Jewish community members can have a shared narrative at this time of immense societal tension and polarisation with the unfolding ‘crisis of humanity’ [quoting the UN Secretary General], is rare in any other part of the world. We have to harness our smallness and our shared experience in this country”, said Abdur Razzaq. “Plans are progressing for a national gathering of Muslim and Jewish youth next month, so that the hard issues can be discussed, and a unified approach taken towards our response
to the current tragedy”.

We would also like to convey our gratitude to all the government agencies who have been fully supportive and encouraging such dialogue. This all-of-society and all-of-government approach is precisely what the March 15 Royal Commission had advocated as the way forward. It is nice to see this taking shape, particularly at these challenging times”, said Abdur Razzaq.

PRESS RELEASE – FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Abdur Razzaq
E: fianz.advocacy@gmail.com
Marilyn Garson
E: contact@ajv.org.nz

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 11, 2024

Contact: 

Donna Nevel, globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

CALL TO THE WORLD FROM GLOBAL JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS:

STOP THE GAZA NIGHTMARE

The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP)—an organization with Jewish organizational members and associates from 14 countries across the globe—deplores the continuing death and starvation being foisted on the people of Gaza by a vengeful and genocidal Israeli regime.  Statements this week by the Israeli government indicate the possibility that this war may go on through 2024, a prospect unimaginable in its horror.

We abhor the complicity of powerful governments that have failed to act vigorously to achieve a meaningful ceasefire, particularly the United States, which not only has bypassed its own normal fiscal procedures to fund this atrocious war on Gaza but prevented for weeks the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian goods through vetoes and abstentions at the United Nations.  

We find it particularly reprehensible that this war is being conducted by the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” and supported by the self-defined “greatest democracy in the world,” which has systematically ignored the views of 61 percent of its own citizens who support a permanent ceasefire.

As a community that is no stranger to calamity, we call on the world’s leadership to act immediately to halt the Gaza nightmare. Other states should follow the example of South Africa, whose initiative to charge Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice we vigorously support.

Signed by:

International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine

 (Canada, U.S., UK,  Ireland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 9, 2024

Contact: 

Donna Nevel, globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

Israel’s War on Gaza and our Jewish Communal Institutions

The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP) wishes to express our abhorrence for the many ways in which Israel-supporting Jewish organizations in our countries have stoked the flames of racism and have embraced genocidal military violence through their support of Israel’s war on Gaza.  It is unfathomable that Jewish leaders choose to justify Israeli violence when two million Gazans are starving, displaced, ill, wounded, and in mourning for the nearly 25,000 Palestinians killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing and land incursions. The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine fully supports South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza war and calling for an immediate suspension of it military campaign. 

Jewish community leaders have vilified those protesting the war by labelling them “terrorist supporters,” “gangs,” “mobs,” and other epithets intended to operationalize the anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia so ubiquitous in the west. Our communities have also been deeply implicated in the suppression and criminalization of speech on Palestine which disproportionally impacts racialized individuals. Dissident Jews who are demonstrating openly in their tens of thousands worldwide against this immoral war have not been immune to slander from Jewish institutional leaders and are characterized as “useful idiots,” “self-haters,” “un-Jews,” and worse; this betrays the long Jewish tradition of theological debate and political diversity.  

 While millions around the world march in the streets demanding an end to the inhuman devastation of Gaza, many of our communities choose to characterize this unprecedented demand for an end to genocide as antisemitic. We are appalled that there is not even a glimmer of humanity or compassion expressed for the thousands of Palestinians killed and the families who have been decimated in this horrific war. Jews who are challenged in the streets with vocal opposition to Israel’s genocidal violence and eliminationist racism are portrayed as victims for whom the sight of a Palestinian flag or the sound of chants for Palestinian freedom pose an existential threat despite little evidence that this is true. In the meantime, attention is diverted from the actual threat of antisemitic white supremacism which is growing exponentially. 

Histories of Jewish suffering must never be used justify inflicting unimaginable misery on the civilian population of Gaza. We call on all Jews to reject this politics of Jewish exceptionalism and to hold our communities accountable for supporting and enabling this wholly unjustifiable war, a war that is destroying Palestine and which imperils Jews while defiling our prophetic tradition. 

Signed by:

International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine

(Canada, U.S., UK,  Ireland, Germany, France, Luxembourg, South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina)

In large cities, a Jewish person declares Palestinian rights to be equal to their own, and they are welcomed into new institutions of non-Zionist Jewish worship, politics and identity. They blend into large groups of protestors wearing the same T-shirts: Jews say no. Jews for ceasefire. They attend discussion groups to unpack their anti-Palestinian training. In a place as small as Aotearoa, a Jew who says ‘Palestinians are my equals’ has been warned that they will be alone and vilified. To doubt Zionism is to become a Hamas-lover race-traitor genocide-monger with (according to statements printed by a senior Stuff journalist without question) no Jewish identity.

That did not begin on October 7, 2023.

Before AJV was formed, its co-founders tried and failed for 18 months to obtain permission to convene a single conversation where Progressive synagogue members would be allowed to speak freely about Israel. Even in 2019, there was no Jewish space for one unpoliced conversation among synagogue members. Thus did Zionist boards drive the wedge between their questioning and dissenting members.

Since then, Jewish institutions have ruled out more and more of the world in the interests of Israel. Human rights – antisemitic. Ceasefire – genocidal. Their rightward lurch leaves no place for Jewish doubt about the reality of the Zionist fairy tale, the murder and starvation of civilians, and the nature of any Israel that emerges from this unfathomable violence.

Where does the doubt go in a small community?

Alternative Jewish Voices was formed as a Jewish-pluralist collective. We reject the Zionist claim to a monopoly over Jewish identity. We are drawn from the not-Zionist breadth. We are inspired by large, politically uniform Jewish organisations whose members can block the rotunda of Congress or the Brooklyn Bridge. However, our five founding members could have held our protests in the back of a taxi. Our challenge was to make our breadth strategic and fearlessly Jewish.

We have always told our Palestinian friends that together we are a Venn diagram. We each have communal issues and audience, while we coalesce around the work of justice in Palestine. We will never sound fully alike, but when we stand side by side we model the solution.

Nor do we sound quite like other solidarist organisations because, for us, Palestine is not a distant issue. It ripples back and forth through our daily lives.

There are some people for whom solidarity is straightforward: if X cannot stand beside you while you call for justice in Palestine then X was never truly your friend and you lose nothing by letting go of them. That does not work for Jews. That suggests that our families are not part of us, and it invalidates our oldest Jewish relationships. It suggests that we are better off cutting ourselves entirely adrift – but our relationships are more precious and organic than that.

Even worse, such a blanket demand mirrors the Zionist tactic: adhere unwaveringly or your family, community and your oldest friends will heal smoothly over your exclusion.

That is not a path; that is a threat and we will not replicate it. At a recent AJV meeting, one of the common threads was our difficult, essential work of preserving integral relationships. That work is harder now than it has ever been before.

Why do Jews feel compelled to speak when the first step is so hard? Ask instead: if we do not speak, who will speak for us? It is unthinkable that we will be mere spectators while this is done in our names. We could not bear for our generation to be remembered as having been passive at genocide. This crime is ours to end, and justice is partly ours to build. Even if we were born and raised on the myths of Zionism, the Israel that we see before us has forfeited any legitimacy as the centrepiece of our Jewish identity.

And look: the radicalisation of the Jewish-Christian Zionist camp in Aotearoa has driven the old wedge differently. Jewish institutions have cut themselves off from the Jews who question, and from the Jews who see a more embracing future than that of Benjamin Netanyahu and the endless American bombs of the IDF. The Zionist vision also makes it a litmus test that Aotearoa Jews must enjoy rights to Israel which take precedence over the rights of Palestinians. Who would want to pass that test?

Now that the moral cost of conforming blindly to Zionism is so high, Aotearoa’s broad not-Zionist tent has become the place of radical welcome.

Our breadth is our strength because the process of enquiring into one’s identity and forming a more just Jewishness is layered and reflective. There are decades of conditioning to be peeled back, and exploration to be undertaken of the diasporic Jewish identities which flourish in the space that opens up. In a broad tent questioning, discovery and growth can take place alongside the urgent, liberating action that is needed to stop the killing in Gaza, to bring about a ceasefire and then to press for the justice that must underlie any real solution.

Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices are merging so that we can extend this radical welcome to more of Aotearoa’s Jews.

Come and speak freely.

Marilyn Garson for

Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices

Monday, 4 December – For immediate release

On Tuesday, 5 December at 12:45pm supporters of Palestine will gather at the steps of Parliament to call on the incoming Minister of Foreign Affairs, the new Government and all our elected representatives to take action and call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Rt Hon Winston Peters takes up the role as the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, as hostilities resume and innocent civilians in Gaza continue to be killed.

This is a time that calls for courageous and compassionate leadership. Ahead of the state opening of Parliament on Wednesday when the new government will speak to its policy agenda, Alternative Jewish Voices and Justice for Palestine have sent a briefing to the incoming Minister of Foreign Affairs on the actions the new government should take to address the immediate situation in Gaza and to play a role in establishing a new pathway to a just peace in Palestine and Israel.

In addition to calling for a permanent ceasefire, Alternative Jewish Voices and Justice for Palestine urge the Government to immediately:

● Call for all parties to act in accordance with their obligations under international law
● Demand the provision of sufficient humanitarian aid in Gaza, including the fuel necessary to
distribute supplies and restore hospital operations
● Call on Hamas to release all civilian hostages, and Israel to release
● Reject the provision of military aid to Israel
● Support the investigation and adjudication of all alleged war crimes.

“New Zealand must act now to support efforts to end the brutality in Gaza. But just as Israel’s disregard for Palestinian lives didn’t start on October 7, the need for the international community to stand up for Palestinian rights and to hold Israel to account for its breaches of international law will continue after the current violence ends. New Zealand has a role to play in establishing a pathway
to a just and lasting peace” said Justice for Palestine spokesperson, Samira Zaiton.

The human rights groups’ briefing urges the Government to take a principled stance, consistent with New Zealand’s long-standing independent approach to foreign policy, to support a peace process that addresses the root causes of the current situation.

Marilyn Garson, Alternative Jewish Voices Co-founder said: “Israel is carrying out the longest, now-illegal, now-apartheid occupation in modern history. In both Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians have been subjected to daily infringements of their basic human rights including thousands of political prisoners being held without charge or trial. Millions of Palestinian refugees have never been able to return to their homes. There will be no lasting peace until our governments support a peace process that addresses these issues and respects Palestinians’ right to self-determination.”

Read the full briefing to the Minister here.

Contact: Samira Zaiton; Marilyn Garson

Justice for Palestine is a human rights organisation working to promote justice, peace and freedom for the Palestinian people. Justice for Palestine is a democratic, membership organisation that works to educate and inform New Zealanders about issues relating to Palestine and to advocate for New Zealand to contribute to international solidarity with Palestinian efforts to achieve equal rights.

Alternative Jewish Voices is a collective of Wellington and Auckland Jews. AJV works on three issues: Jewish pluralism in the community and its representation, anti-racism including antisemitism, and supporting Palestinians as they pursue their own liberation and freedom. AJV welcomes every step that normalises relations with Palestinian communities.

Through the weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza, our media have solicited comments from the NZ Jewish Council (NZJC) and the Israel Institute (IINZ) without querying their composition or mandates. Publicly available information shows that the NZJC falls far short of representing the Jewish community, while the IINZ seems to be a Christian-libertarian company with one Jewish director.

The NZJC’s constitution claims that it is the representative body of NZ Jews. We could write the same words with as little meaning. This claim is based on the assumption that Jews affiliated with a Jewish synagogue or institution are represented by the structure that underpins the NZ Jewish Council. Jews with no institutional membership are entirely excluded. In fact, we don’t know how many or who or where they are.

The NZJC constitution and the Charities Commission / Incorporated Societies websites show that the Jewish Council structure is hollow. As sometimes happens in small communities, it seems to have become a collection of the willing. In this case, the willing are uniformly ardent Zionists who speak their views in the name of the whole community, while ruling other Jews in or out for their stance on Zionism. They have made Israel, not religion or Jewish inheritance, into a litmus test.

New Zealand’s Jewish communities were intended to be represented by Regional Jewish Councils. Are we really?

The Auckland Regional Jewish Council appears to be the only regional council in formal operation. They are obliged to inform the Charities Commission of any change in their officers, but the Charities Commission’s website shows no change to the Auckland Regional Jewish Council officers since 2006. Its six officers are the same individuals who signed the constitution itself.

(If the date rings a bell, that might be because 2006 was also the year of Hamas’s election. We have loudly objected to calling Hamas a representative of all Gaza on the strength of that expired mandate.)

The Wellington Regional Jewish Council (WRJC) is listed on the NZJC website and in the Wellington Jewish Community Centre directory, but no information is attached to the listing. It is not formally listed as a charity or incorporated society. 

More than two years ago, the WRJC convened a public meeting whose participants “made clear their dissatisfaction with the Jewish Council’s tone of voice, composition, accountability and their narrow definition of the Jewish community’s shared interests.” The WRJC issued a public statement suspending its own operations until it can produce “a new constitution that can capture the voice and aspirations of the community.” To date, they have not done that. If the WRJC is operating in some informal sense, they have not consulted or accounted to the community.

The other regional councils may be informally composed but they are not officially registered.

The Jewish community of New Zealand is not represented by any accountable regional structure.

The national NZ Jewish Council can have up to 18 members, geographically divided to cover the entire country. Voting members of the Council are appointed from the Regional Councils while non-voting members come from a list of affiliate organisations and synagogues. A number of the affiliate groups are not membership organisations that might offer real channels for community input, and none are non-Zionist. The full council chooses the NZJC Executive Committee and the Executive Committee chooses the President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer.  The Executive Committee may also establish sub-committees with people who are not on the Council.

Without a democratic regional structure that represents Jewish commmunities, we do not choose and cannot influence or recall those who purport to represent us. They do not account to us. Indeed, it’s not clear that they account to anyone. Longstanding members of Auckland and Wellington synagogues are not aware of any opportunity to attend AGMs (which need be comprised only of member organisations) or express their views. There is no public voting mechanism.

That is far from being a representative community structure.

The constitution of the NZJC does not contain the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Zionism’. Yet the NZJC’s devotion to Zionism and its vilification of any non-Zionist Jewish identity are its hallmark. The NZJC is effectively trying to define who is a Jew, a task for which they have no qualification or mandate whatsoever. The Dunedin Jewish community has publicly placed itself in solidarity with Palestinians. The NZJC’s statements would exclude the whole community.

Lacking any democratic accountability or intent to represent the breadth of the community, the NZJC cannot claim to be our representative body. In the absence of representation, we call once more on our synagogues and community institutions to find their voices and speak with empathy and vision.

Our media have also turned for comment to the Israel Institute (IINZ). The Jewish Council circulates IINZ materials as ‘helpful explainers’ of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The two institutions are related through David Cumin. Shortly after her comments at the Christchurch anti-terror hui provoked a walkout by participants, Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses appeared on David Cumin’s podcast to announce their intention to “disempower … as much as possible” the Jews who “raise their voice” in pluralism. 

The directors of the IINZ (only one of whom is Jewish) are also founding or executive members of the Free Speech and Taxpayers’ lobby groups, and other Christian Zionist organisations whose names might imply a Jewish provenance. The IINZ is not a Jewish institution although it does reflect Israel’s increasing Christian Zionist support. Media should make that clear when giving David Cumin airtime.

So, who speaks for the Jewish community? It is prejudicial and inaccurate for our whole community to be understood through these harsh, pro-war voices. Scores of NZ Jews have signed an open letter calling on our institutions to find their voice, their empathy and vision. They have yet even to distance themselves from Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church and others who support Israel’s war in the service of very different agendas.

We are alarmed by the perception that the whole Jewish community is rightwing and opposed to our equal human rights. We call on the media to include speakers who represent Jewish diversity, and we call on our Jewish institutions to speak up.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

Last night, we were hosted at parliament by Debbie Ngarewa-Packer of Te Pāti Māori, and Golriz Ghahraman of the Green Party. Text of Marilyn Garson’s comments at this International Solidarity Day event:

Today the world is reminded that Palestinians have yet to attain their inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty, and the return of refugees. And now, suddenly, they are being deprived of so much more.

In other words, today is a day to envision a world wherein people realise their rights to live in dignity, autonomy, equality, safety and home.

What is Jewish solidarity with Palestine? There’s a Hebrew song, Gesher Tsar M’od, which describes a very narrow bridge. Jewish solidarity feels like stepping onto that very narrow bridge.

When a Jew takes up Palestinian rights as being equal to her own, that Jew’s communal Jewish life abruptly ends. That Jew will find herself remade as a straw man, a fictitious extremist and therefore an easier target for those Jewish leaders and ideologues whose world is zero-sum: our rights or theirs. This country does not have one welcoming non-Zionist Jewish institution – not one.

When you find yourself standing on that very narrow bridge, the song continues, the most important thing is not to be afraid.

Jewish solidarity requires us to build a positive Jewish community of abundant rights: the more rights we realise, the more we can make. Our solidarity is not a matter of changing sides, but of seeing and rejecting this debacle of sides. We reach for a more embracing vision.

We condemn all of the crimes and we mourn for everyone who has been harmed, displaced, is suffering or waiting for news. After seven weeks of devastation and collective punishment, it is clear that Jews are no safer, feel no safer for dropping all these bombs. There is no violent solution and there is no separate safety. Jewish-Palestinian solidarity is the knowledge that both of us or neither of us is going to live in peace, safety and dignity.

I also think today of the solidarity of embodied memory. Palestinian, Māori and Jewish people carry intergenerational horror that has been passed down to us.

It has been jolted awake in these seven weeks – vulnerability, Otherness, violence, expulsion, structural state menace. All that is also at work right now. When the memory of Gaza’s bombardment comes alive within me like an animal with claws, I cannot see beyond it – and that is something that both of our peoples desperately need to do. In our solidarity, in each other we need to see beyond our own trauma.

While this shattering violence continues, Fred and I are also deeply concerned by the temptations of the twin, misguided solidarities that seek a toehold in our streets: the enraged camps of us against them. We see the rise of antisemitism and the menace of performed antisemitism that masquerades as pro-Palestinian protest. No Palestinian will realise their rights because the windows of a New Zealand synagogue or mosque have been broken. Some of that is led by people who benefit from our diverging understandings. They seek only to drive us further apart.

We also hear the casually hateful language of Palestinian harm that our media re-broadcast uncritically. We can only imagine the offence, the sense of peril that language sparks within every Palestinian heart. Fred and I also live with the abuse and the lack of safety that have become normal within the Jewish community.

Our Aotearoa peace is wobbling. Solidarity enjoins us to dig our heels in, to resist and roll back all of the hate.

Fred and I believe that the only response to this terrible time is our Jewish-Palestinian solidarity – this daily walk of co-existence. Surely this is how a peace camp begins.

From there, when we meet on that narrow bridge and shrug off the fear, the bridge begins to feel sufficient and finally spacious enough to hold us all. This day of solidarity imagines two peoples living in dignity, integrating all the brokenness with compassion into some kind of mutual recognition and healing. Peace with justice is the only solution. Our equal rights delineate all the work of our struggle to get there.

We will not be free until we are all free. Until then, the most important thing is not to be afraid of each other.

B’tzedek (justice), ngā mihi nui,

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert, Oct 29, 2023

The obliterating mindset of Israel’s war on Gaza is driving a wedge differently through our community. Palestine is firmly embraced by those who believe there is some law and empathy left to call on. The Jewish community stands in the company of the Free Speech Union and Destiny Church. The Jewish institutions of Aotearoa have yet to object or get to grips with their fellow travellers.

While they drift, Israel obliterates.

Gaza has among the world’s highest rates of literacy. Israel has destroyed every one of its universities as if to obliterate any prospect of children’s future.

Gaza was a community of neighbours, of deeply interwoven connections that held people in place. Israel has driven over a million people from their homes and blown up more than half of Gaza’s residences as if to obliterate any possibility of again being safe within four familiar walls.

As if to deny Gaza’s very humanity, Israel is now attacking hospitals. Overnight, Medecins Sans Frontieres has stated: “At the time of writing, our staff are witnessing people being shot at as they attempt to flee the Al-Shifa hospital.” Israel would obliterate the very possibility of healing.

Israel’s blockade had already rendered Gaza dependent upon our world’s laws, aid and frankly its sense of shame. Now Israel is waging war on the whole international framework of harm limitation. They have targeted ambulances and now hospitals, shattered civilian and lifesaving infrastructure, refused the essentials of life to two million people with no hope of escape, blown up mosques and churches. In the full view of cameras, Israel is obliterating a community and daring the world to care.

Thus far, the voices which purport to represent the New Zealand Jewish community are harnessing this obliterating mindset to their local agenda. Our silent institutions appear to acquiesce if not to support the destruction of Gaza in utter defiance of law, Jewish prayer and empathy. If this continues, they will find themselves in the company of people who cheer Israel on for their own purposes, not from the slightest love of Jews.

Israel’s campaign and its supporters are driving a new wedge through our community, reflecting the global shift. The Jewish community is being positioned among Israel’s anti-human rights fellow travellers, while we who protest find ourselves among larger and larger crowds. The street, the young, tens of thousands of people who have not been involved before are repelled by the slaughter they see, and by our absentee government which has let it go so far. That it takes so long for our government to follow its people is a disgrace, but follow they will.

The Jewish community must situate itself within this new moral geography. We are not now the victims. Older Jews have grown up reading the poetry and the agonised reflections of a Jewish community wondering how to live with the indifference that had permitted genocide against us. We saw a generational crisis of faith and our parents’ fear of ever being at ease in a world that had stood back and looked down its nose at the surviving Jewish refugees.

That powerlessness is not our landscape now. Licensed by the world’s shame, riding on Western fear and suspicion of Muslims, Zionist Israel today is an obliterating war criminal. Its leaders flaunt their genocidal intent.

The institutions of our Jewish community have yet to make this leap: our community is not now divided between pro- and anti-Zionism. Now we are divided between those who condemn war crimes and those who don’t; between those who can be for the rights of all and those who are only for themselves.

Israel’s crimes will fail, just as the crimes against us failed. Israel’s atrocities will fail on their own terms: no one here or there will be made safe by these bombs. Neither can Israel obliterate the Palestine that it cannot bear to co-exist with. For all the rubble of Gaza, human belonging is not confined to four walls. Learning is not done only in a classroom. The people entombed within the canyons and mounds of concrete will be honoured and remembered.

There is no military solution because the spirit of liberation cannot be obliterated. Palestine now embodies that spirit. Now all the poetry will be for Palestine.

To whatever degree the Jewish community continues to passively give permission for all this, the community trades its soul for a flag. When institutions are coopted by Israel’s acts of obliterating power; Jews of conscience, soul and aroha form new communities of values.

More Jews are linking arms with Palestinians around the world than ever before. In our shared, life-loving protest lie the seeds of a response to this wounded time.

Cease fire now. Aid Gaza now. Free Palestine now.

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert, co-founders of AJV

Justine Sachs, co-founder of Dayenu

Sue Berman

(reprinted with minor revisions from May, 2021)

Alternative Jewish Voices has been thinking about that phrase, “from the river to the sea.”

Last Saturday Wellington had a big, many-lingual demonstration seeking justice and safety for Palestinians. There was another today on the steps of Parliament, urging our government to stand up and protect the endangered people of Gaza. Then MP Golriz Ghahraman tabled a motion calling for Aotearoa-NZ to recognise the State of Palestine. 138 countries have done that already.

We spoke at both rallies, and we thank everyone present for their warm welcome. We closed today by wishing for “a just peace for everyone who lives between the river and the sea.”

Meanwhile the NZ Jewish Council was busy calling Green MPs antisemitic for using exactly the same words. Hmm.

Also this morning several American rabbis launched an initiative for Gaza, calling for “a just peace that guarantees equality, justice and freedom for all who live between the river and the sea.”

Is the NZ Jewish Council calling these rabbis antisemites? Inciters of hatred? Have they undermined the security of the NZ Jewish community?

Jeff Halper’s new book is called Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler-Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State. He uses the term “river to the sea” when he discusses people’s fears about co-existence with Palestinians. Does that make Jeff Halper (an Israeli) a Jew-hater?

From the river to the sea is geography – there’s a river on one side and the sea on the other. Governments, political parties and popular movements Israeli and Palestinian have at times used expansionist, excluding slogans in their politics. We condemn that because it takes us further from a just solution – but not every reference to geography is hateful. We have been at, spoken at, Wellington’s rallies and we have heard no hatred.

As a term of liberation, the phrase may be politically threatening because it unifies a space that successive Israeli regimes have fragmented. It unifies national consciousness, population counts and resistance – as in today’s national strike by Palestinians. And it speaks to the scope of a solution: the regime of power needs to change from the river to the sea.

It is not a term we fear, because we don’t view freedom as a zero-sum business. Power may be finite, or privilege – yours may necessarily be at the expense of mine. But freedom? Freedom belongs in that wonderful economics of abundance – the more we have, the more we can make. ‘From the river to the sea’ may indeed rub some people the wrong way, but the term is in wide use, including mainstream Jewish use. Rather like ‘apartheid.’

We contend that the Jewish Council is policing language much as Israel polices its spacial divisions to preserve its privilege and power.

We wish a just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

No one leaves Gaza unchanged. It is not like any other community.

Lock two million other people behind a wall, imprison and blockade and deprive them, set drones over them and bombard their cities. See if they respond by building half a dozen universities and observing special noise regulations on the days when children are writing their exams. When there is no water and no electricity, see how many neighbours haul water up twelve or fourteen flights of stairs so that the baby can have a bath. Gaza’s neighbours did that.

After these weeks of bombardment exceeding the destructive power of Hiroshima, without fuel or light or supplies of food or clean water or sleep or meaningful assistance from the whole damned world; which other community would continue to display the mutual aid we see still among Gazans? Where else would neighbours run toward the bombs? Where else would people waiting for help in the hospital halls make way to let someone else go first?

Gaza educated me in ways that were uncomfortable and vital. I was given the chance to live among people who, I had been told in a million ways, were my enemies. I was more inclined to hear the validating messages of a White European voice until I found myself immersed and sharing the experience of Palestinians. The content of ‘we’ changed as I unlearned the fifty years of training that I brought with me to Gaza, and instead learned to trust the world I saw around me. I had been raised to admire Jewish power; in Gaza my people became the people who stand in front of the tanks.

I listened acutely for them to hate Jews per se. If they had, I would have fallen back on my training, but they didn’t. They resisted an occupier, Israel, the IDF, the bombs that broke their windows at night and made their children sleep under their beds for safety. They resisted Zionism, not Judaism.

I was raised to be a principled, responsible Jewish person and an uncritical Zionist, handing off my soul for a flag. While I lived in Gaza, one of my sisters sat in the World Zionist Organisation. We were each living the life we had been trained to live at the family dinner table – but the world in front of my eyes changed my understanding of my Jewishness.

This is not only a Jewish training. What conditioning does Aotearoa bring when a mostly European occupier bashes, bulldozes and starves a Middle Eastern, mostly Muslim, indigenous community that won’t stop resisting? I have been shocked to hear the answer in these weeks: our media and our government are educating me again. It is uncomfortable and vital, much like the lesson of Auckland War Museum that was unable to see Palestinian civilians as human beings worth grieving. Israeli lives were all they saw, so that is what they grieved.

Our media is framing the story in ugly ways. Uncritically they rebroadcast the words of Israeli cabinet ministers and military spokespeople who, by the way, speak Hebrew for domestic consumption and English when performing for our benefit. In smart uniforms with the beret snapped just so on the shoulder, the nice man explains that it is not time for a ceasefire. The nice man has the guns to decide when and how much Palestinian civilians will eat.

Our media give an uncritical platform to Israel’s defence minister who refers to Palestinians as ‘worse than Nazis’ and ‘subhuman animals’; to the party whose elected member called to ‘flatten Gaza’ and ‘bomb without distinction’ while there is ‘worldwide legitimacy’; and to the prime minister who says that this is a war of ‘civilisation against the barbarians’. Israel has long debated in such language, baiting its army to ‘mow the lawn’, ‘finish the job’, ‘clean it out’. This slaughter is what they meant, and their appetite for Palestinian blood is apparently endless. These are statements of genocidal intent and they should be so labelled. Instead, our media are letting Israeli speakers peel away the civilian status of Palestinians as visible, equal, protected human beings.

They broadcast Israel’s claim that it has no choice but to slaughter. Nonsense; there is only no choice in minds that have rejected every other choice. ‘No choice’ is a criminal rationale that has been aired in this country as fact.

Our media look askance at the numbers of Palestinian deaths because the Gazan ministry of health is ‘Hamas-run’. I have yet to hear them mention that Israel is in part run by duly elected fascists like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

At moments we hear from a legal scholar, but we do not hear from our Palestinian neighbours whose voices make this slaughter human and consequential. Our media are reproducing the world according to the European belligerent and discounting the deaths of those who are non-White and Indigenous.

I know that the pain I feel is a fraction of the harm that such broadcasts do to Palestinians who are, themselves and their families, being downgraded. Even this fraction hurts like a sliver of glass through my lungs; this cutting knowledge that I cannot and we choose not to protect the people of Gaza. One million children have been born behind that blockade wall. Nearly 4000 of them have already been slaughtered in front of us.

Then I see the malice of a small number of Jews, part of that Israel Institute-Free Speech Union vortex, harnessing Gaza to their local projects. They call advocates for decolonisation worms, excrement, less than human; they call co-covernance a coded message for Māori to ‘be like Hamas’ and kill Pākehā. Shame on our Jewish institutions for worrying about anti-Jewish racism while refusing to stand up to the hatemongers beneath their own roofs.

Aotearoa is supposed to have learned that implacable hatred is not content to live online. We claim to know that it will manifest in real life somehow, at a terrible cost. So why do the media import this language? Where is Luxon, the ghost in the blue suit? What have we learned?

Marilyn Garson, with Fred Albert