Author: 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.

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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

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