Assertions of Palestinians’ rights are now routinely met with a barrage of antisemitism charges. The noise doesn’t deter protest. As we write, two dozen artists have pulled out of the Sydney Festival to protest its Israeli embassy sponsorship. Still, equating protest with racism is harmful to everyone.
Having enlisted racism, the Holocaust is now being harnessed to politics.
Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan this week replied to Emma Watson’s statement of solidarity with Palestinians by calling her a Jew-hater. Later this month, the New York Jewish Week reports that Ambassador Erdan “will introduce a resolution opposing Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion.” He says that he will base his resolution on the most sweeping definition of antisemitism – a definition which equates criticism of Israel with the hatred of Jews (See our resource page on this definition).
Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has disqualified the Israeli government as a protector of Holocaust truth. He falsely claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was inspired to extermination of Europe’s Jews by Jerusalem’s then-grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian nationalist. His government’s willingness to manipulate the Holocaust in the interests of illiberal allies is well documented by Sylvain Cypel. One cannot abuse and protect the truth on alternate days of the week.
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To call Palestinian solidarity racist is to try to discredit the speaker by associating them with racism. It’s also a distraction from the genuine mainstreaming of far Right / white supremacist ideas which include racism.
Three distinct things are happening within the language of protest. We need to distinguish between them, so that we can pursue both justice and antiracism.
Zionism has attracted openly antisemitic fellow travellers since Richard Spencer began calling himself a ‘White Zionist’ admirer of Israel’s ethnic supremacist regime. Trump supporters openly wore Nazi symbols to storm their Capital building, hoping to prevent a democratic handover of power.
Extremist and hateful memes were bundled into protests against COVID public health measures by the American Right. That noxious bundle has now been imported to Aotearoa.
Of the COVID protest in Wellington on November 9, Nicky Hager warned, “When people I know march down the road with white supremacists, Trump supporters, fundamentalist Christians, people who are pro-guns, anti-UN, anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish, people who believe a powerful “them” want to kill millions and enslave the earth, things have got totally out of hand…. I strongly suspect the Covid resistance is being actively used by some on the right of New Zealand politics to try to destabilise Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Government.”
In June, the Israel Institute of NZ accused union members of somehow “promoting the murder of Jews” by protesting Israel’s violence against Palestinians. The IINZ webpage features a collage in which a protester morphs into a uniformed Nazi.
On December 28, 2020, a Stuff OpEd vaguely wondered whether the memes could be blamed on Green MP Golriz Ghahraman. When challenged on Twitter, the writer attributed to Ghahraman a statement that Israel has committed the “grossest of war crimes, crimes against humanity and, I would say, genocide.” Ghahraman stated her opinion as a lawyer who has worked on war crimes trials. Although the remark does not refer to the Holocaust at all, this OpEd writer accuses her of ‘Holocaust revisionism.’ Stuff published his view uncritically.
There is also a third category of Holocaust reference. Genocide and apartheid may be referenced in protest to name the very worst actions. ‘Genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ are categories of crime – essential subjects which create obligations for us and our government. However, to invoke the Holocaust, rather than the crime of genocide, is misleading and distressing to many people.
We are being desensitised by evermore extreme language. Alternative Jewish Voices will not adopt it, and we will not be moved by it. Instead, we will dig our heels into ground truth.
The expansive linkage of antisemitism with support for Palestinian liberation is based on a definition which has no standing in Aotearoa. We must not let this overreach go unnoticed. Solidarity with Palestine is not per se antisemitic. The rights of Palestinians are not about Jews.
We protest any denial or distortion of the Holocaust for the same reason that we protest any denial or distortion of the ongoing Nakba. These real, lived experiences belong with us, intact, to spur progress toward human equality and freedom.
Genocide is a category of crime, like apartheid. The discussion of crimes against Palestinians, Uighurs, Rohingya or others is not anti-Jewish (nor is it anti-Cambodian or anti-Rwandan). On the contrary, vigilance honours history and we are all obliged to act on crimes against humanity.
Notwithstanding the existence of racism anywhere in society, the systematic use of Nazi memes characterises white supremacist movements and the far Right.
This last point has been made before but it bears repeating: when anyone is racist, they are wrong. When a white supremacist is racist, they are explaining a core component of their world view. Racism, including antisemitism, fuels their resentment and justifies their violence. No racist gets a pass, but the one is wrong while the other belongs to a demonstrably, repeatedly dangerous cohort.
That is a danger from which we must not be distracted. Look Right for trouble.
Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa – New Zealand
We share Ben Kepes’ emphasis on clear language, and so we object to his unclear inferences in today’s Stuff OpEd.
Ben Kepes doesn’t mention which of MP Golriz Ghahraman’s protests offended him. We can only reply on the basis of our own experience. We are aware of two protest actions to which he might refer. Perhaps they were typical. 12 Green MPs stood on the steps of Parliament in May, to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and request Parliament’s recognition of the State of Palestine. MP Ghahraman hosted an evening at Parliament to highlight Israel’s illegal detention of Palestinian children in its military jails.
We spoke at both of those events. Neither the Holocaust nor antisemitism were themes. Thus far, Kepes rather than Ghahraman is linking the Holocaust with Palestine. Please cite specifics or leave Ghahraman out of your argument.
Do loudly decry the use of Holocaust or Nazi references to protest COVID public health measures. We agree that those references are wildly inappropriate, designed to shock and sadly to normalise extremism. COVID disinformation took root and was cultivated offshore, long before it was grafted onto our issues. It is absurd to link or source this to the Green Party of Aotearoa.
To protest that offensive language, you need the addresses of Donald Trump, Q-Anon and co. We’re with you in that protest when it is properly directed.
Finally, in the interests of precision please correct your language. Gazan Palestinians are not being “treated… poorly” or “subjugated.” Their land is occupied, and two million human beings live behind a blockade instituted by one of the most powerful armies on the planet. They live deprived of their most basic human rights. Read a current, comprehensive summary by the UN Special Rapporteur A/76/433.
As profoundly as you feel protective of the truth of your family’s experience in the Holocaust, you must not do a disservice to Palestinians’ equal human rights: the right to life and medical treatment, freedom to move, collective self-determination. Please make your point without discrediting the protest of others. Your memory and their daily reality are not in competition.
Phnom Penh today, population 2,078,000 (Image: Eleven Myannmar)
When we speak about foreign policy, we like to say that Aotearoa punches above its weight. Our independent foreign policy is a national mantra. We have indeed taken progressive positions on some big issues. However, in between our proud moments, we have also been complicit in some of our allies’ least principled actions. I saw the cost while travelling and working under two occupations – first in Cambodia and last in Gaza, Palestine. At those two extremes of violence and deprivation, Aotearoa timidly followed our allies’ agendas.
We will need to reckon with this part of our legacy as we determine our policy on challenges like climate change.
Cambodia, 1979 – 1990
Cambodia sits between the regional powers of Vietnam and Thailand. The US regarded Cambodia as an adjunct to their war in Vietnam. From the late 1960s, President Richard Nixon authorised a secret, escalating bombardment of neutral Cambodia.
I was a child then, but I knew there was something I needed to learn in Cambodia. I studied, from the mid-1980s I travelled and then I worked in Cambodia to understand what had happened. Every Cambodian I knew who joined the Khmer Rouge, explained that they had been radicalised by the bombing. That unreachable rain of violence was intolerable.
Embittered and extremist, the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. They sealed off Cambodia, emptied the cities and reduced their country to a forced-labour camp. The world did nothing for four years, while the Khmer Rouge committed unfathomable crimes. They killed, starved or worked to death up to 2,000,000 people, a fifth of the population.
In late 1978, ostensibly responding to Khmer Rouge cross-border raids, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam installed a compliant Cambodian government led by Heng Samrin. Stories tumbled forth of the most profound suffering and trauma. A loyal remnant of the Khmer Rouge retreated into camps along the Thai border. Many others took off their uniforms and disappeared into the crowds of Cambodians who were searching for relatives, walking toward their abandoned cities or villages, walking – and not planting.
The Khmer Rouge had dragged Cambodia back to a pre-industrial state. It was the poorest place on earth, its people hungry and grieving in darkness, its infrastructure shattered. There were no reserves of food. Famine quickly set in.
The Tonle Sap inland lake was, and remains, a primary source of protein (Marilyn Garson)
The regional ASEAN group of states and the US led the response to Cambodia’s occupation and famine. Thailand wanted a buffer between itself and Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge camps offered that buffer. The US wanted to punish Vietnam for humiliating America at war four years earlier. They aimed to ‘bleed Vietnam dry’ with the burden of feeding millions of starving Cambodian survivors in addition to its own population. Genocide? According to diplomatic cables and notes cited here, former Thai Foreign Minister Siddhi Savetsila explained during a visit to New Zealand in February 1981 that genocide was “for the people of Cambodia to deal with, not Thailand and not Vietnam.” By extension, genocide was not our concern either.
We, Aotearoa, loyally adopted ASEAN’s agenda. For twelve years, we recognised the Khmer Rouge genocidaires as the rightful representatives of Cambodia. A succession of coalitions and acronyms failed to convince anyone (except our diplomats) that the Khmer Rouge had been rehabilitated or shared power in their border camps. We provided infrequent, small amounts of humanitarian aid to those Khmer Rouge-controlled “bamboo ghettoes.” We withheld recognition from the Heng Samrin government, and we did nothing to meet the most basic rights of Cambodians to food, justice, self-determination, and safety.
We could have chosen principle over loyalty, as some others did. Australia and the UK swiftly de-recognised the Khmer Rouge, and a few countries did aid Cambodia.
In just the first year of ASEAN’s stability regime, Counting Civilian Casualties estimates that 300,000 Cambodians died from famine. Through the 1980s, one in five Cambodian children died in their first five years. I visited and wrote about the people whose suffering did not break the surface of the world’s concern.
In the countryside, a few NGOs struggled to feed the Cambodians who languished in inland camps between two armies. Ben Pringg camp, between Battambang and Pailin, was within artillery range of the Khmer Rouge. A woman there explained to me that they had eaten their rice seed and were again hungry. They knew that they were consuming the year’s potential crop – but with nothing else to eat, they would all have starved before the rice grew. The Khmer Rouge shelled the NGO trucks that tried to deliver food.
Ben Pringg camp residents (Marilyn Garson)
As a donor state, we must have understood that our aid choice contributed to massive, avoidable human suffering. Sending aid into an environment of scarcity alters its balance of power. In famine, food is a magnet. I recall any number of Cambodians who told of their losses and then mused about conditions at the border, weighing the availability of food and the possibility of flight against the certainty of encountering the Khmer Rouge.[1]
Denied aid and trade in the name of politics, Cambodia remained the poorest place on earth a full decade after the Khmer Rouge fell, with an annual per capita GDP of $40 US. It was also becoming the most heavily mined.
In histories like The Devil You Know: New Zealand’s Recognition Policy Towards Cambodia From 1978 – 1990, successive NZ Foreign Affairs Ministers’ reiterate that our Cambodia policy demonstrated our reliability as an ASEAN ally. Our loyalty led us into absurdity as we pursued a policy whose logical outcome – the return of the Khmer Rouge to power – we did not want. We adhered to the ASEAN line until 19 July, 1990. By then the Vietnamese had departed. The US had withdrawn its recognition from the Khmer Rouge-led coalition. Further from the headlines, Cambodia’s civil war sputtered on for another decade.
Leading an NGO staffed by Cambodians with disabilities, I heard Cambodia’s story narrated primarily by people who survived the genocide as children. The men had been child soldiers in all of the armies, and most of my colleagues had lost limbs to landmines. They explained the meaninglessness, the fatuousness of war. They felt fated; fighting was just something they were told to do. They recalled that, when units of opposing armies stumbled upon each other in the jungle, they would first try to back away, hoping to avoid conflict by mutual, unspoken agreement.
While I worked on my Khmer literacy, I often read the local papers with colleagues who were also struggling to master Cambodia’s esoteric alphabet. Once we read a story about an aspiring criminal who gave his followers a gun and $20. I turned to the man sitting next to me and asked him if he would join. He shrugged, “If someone gives me a gun and pays me then I have to fight.”
Rehab Craft Cambodia farewells its founder, the late Colin McLennan (Marilyn Garson)
My colleagues had been exposed to the most heartless power. Policies like ours, disinterested in justice, helped to convince them that they would always remain unprotected.
Our choices in Cambodia highlight part of New Zealand’s foreign policy legacy. Our history as a follower has done great damage. If we were ever going to act on principle, we should have done it when we faced the stark choice to align with the genocidaires or their survivors. We prioritised the interests of states whose stability was built on the suffering of a powerless nation. That sort of stability is anathema to justice or to any durable peace.
I went on to work five years in Afghanistan and I cannot help but hear the echoes. Today, some of the same allies prioritise the isolation of the Taliban, at the direct expense of 23 million Afghans who face starvation this Northern winter. States call it a diplomatic dilemma. The World Food Programme calls Afghans’ plight “hell on earth.”
Gaza, Palestine
A quarter-century later, I lived in the Gaza Strip from 2011 through 2015. I worked with family businesses, job-seekers and (unexpectedly) as a member of the United Nations emergency team that sheltered one-sixth of Gaza’s population through the bombardment of 2014. In Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Aotearoa again serves regional, powerful state interests, and overlooks the suffering and rights of an occupied nation.
To be clear, I am not comparing the Khmer Rouge genocide with Palestinians’ decades under settler colonial occupation. Nor is this about Vietnam or Israel per se. I am writing about New Zealand’s willingness to be led into absurdity, and our ongoing use of aid to buttress bad policy.
The UN Security Council and General Assembly, international courts, the Red Cross, legal and human rights NGOs – the overwhelming preponderance of international institutions – agree that the West Bank, east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights are Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). International Humanitarian Law and the laws of occupation apply in full. This includes Gaza. The standard for occupation is “effective control.” Israel’s military, economic, social and technological blockade effectively controls the Gaza Strip and the two million people who live behind blockade walls. Israel disagrees.
Israel’s annexations of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are illegal because it is illegal to annex occupied territory. UN Resolution 478 declares the annexation of East Jerusalem illegal while UN Resolution 497 covers the Golan Heights. Donald Trump disagreed and recognised Israel’s actions. Repeated UN Resolutions and successive New Zealand governments have reiterated that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are also illegal.
Israel consistently ranks among the most militarised nations on earth. Decades of American military aid “unmatched by any other bilateral relationship in the world,” have made Israel a leading military and cybersecurity power, and weapons exporter. Between 9 January, 2009 and 31 October, 2021, 3624 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, while 196 Israelis were killed by Palestinians: the casualties of the occupation are overwhelmingly Palestinian.
The UN Special Rapporteur summarised in October, “Israel is in long-standing breach of … foundational [legal] principles, with its occupation having crossed a bright red line into illegality under international law…. Israel is a bad-faith occupier.”
Categorising bomb fragments removed from a Beit Hanoun school, bombed in July 2014 while it was in use as a shelter for displaced Gazans. Investigation attributed the bombing to the IDF. This is among the acts that the International Criminal Court will investigate as prima facie war crimes. (Marilyn Garson)
Although we tolerated the Khmer Rouge rather than the occupation of Cambodia, in Israel-Palestine we recognise only the occupier, Israel. 138 United Nations member states also recognise the State of Palestine.[2] We do not recognise the occupied State of Palestine because, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta writes, “it lacks sufficient control of its territory to constitute a state.” (Correspondence in response to a joint briefing by Justice for Palestine and Alternative Jewish Voices, Dec 14, 2020)
Well, yes, occupation is the violent denial of territorial sovereignty. New Zealand did, however, recognise the odious Khmer Rouge, which controlled neither significant territory nor the best interests of their nation.
As a state, Israel presents its case to our government within normal diplomatic relations. Palestinians lack the representation or the access to speak.[3] Imagine how differently we might respond, if we understood that occupation is, first, the lived story of the occupied people.
We tolerate an occupation that is increasingly called apartheid. We acknowledge the illegality of Israel’s settlements, but we do not penalise breaches of law, treaties, or conventions.[4] We have not acted on Israel’s military incarceration system with its 95% conviction rate, nor do we penalise Israel for routinely imprisoning children in military facilities – the only state to do so, in breach of the Geneva Convention. We have not condemned Israel’s recent (unsubstantiated) decision to regard six leading Palestinian legal and human rights NGOs as “terrorist,” effectively criminalising Palestinains’ resort to law.
To paraphrase the Thai Foreign Minister’s 1981 comment, we act as if these crimes need not be our concern. Our stance is legally as well as morally wrong: occupied people are a protected category of people. If New Zealand is committed to international law, then this is our responsibility. Yet, when Israel deploys its overwhelming power to punish Palestinian protest, we ask everyone to stand down as if their roles were equal, and wait for two states to sprout like magic beans.
One bomb, one greenhouse, 3000 citrus trees, ten family livelihoods. Nov 2012 (Marilyn Garson)
The long duration of this occupation is significant, not only because occupation is required to be temporary but also because this occupation is hardening. Our policy – already tilted – should be changing in response. In October the UN Special Rapporteur assessed the “deepening occupation”:
The now 54-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestine – always repressive, always acquisitive – has been metastasizing into something much harsher and more entrenched: the permanent alien rule of one people over another, encased in a two-tiered system of unequal laws and political rights.
Israel has pursued a policy of incremental de facto annexation in the territories it has occupied since 1967… This is not a conflict between equals… a powerful state is controlling another people through an open-ended occupation… What has become increasingly clear in recent years is Israel’s intent to maintain its structural domination and oppression of the Palestinian people through indefinite occupation… a situation that arguably constitutes apartheid. It is now time for the international community to recognise and confront the consequences of Israel’s policies and actions.
Then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, speaking to UNRWA staff in Gaza City during the 2014 bombardment. (Marilyn Garson)
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has made it clear that our policy is fixed, illegalities notwithstanding.
Successive New Zealand Governments have been clear that Israeli settlements are a violation of international law… New Zealand will continue to pursue a principled and balanced approach to the Middle East Peace Process including support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… The two-state solution has been the accepted basis for resolving the Palestinian question for many decadesnow.(direct correspondence, Dec 14, 2020)
Again in Palestine, we use aid to buttress the status quo. We defray Israel’s costs, and co-manage the humanitarian catastrophe of occupation by sending the most passive forms of aid. We send relief food rather than the means of food production or food sovereignty.
Strangled by the blockade, Gaza has one of the world’s highest rates of literacy and youth unemployment. Technology is the object of many hopes. In 2015, my team was trying to raise start-up funds for our GGateway social enterprise. Donor delegations were frequent after the devastating 2014 war, but they all said the same thing: great idea, anywhere else. Their government would not send development assistance to Gaza. Gazans are meant to sit in limbo. At last, the South Korean government invested – their first start-up in the Gaza Strip.
The hardest job in the world, we used to say, is to look for a job in Gaza.
Surely Aotearoa did not set out to normalise or legitimise the structural oppression of a nation. Yet here we are again, loyally enabling and siding with actions whose logical outcome we do not seek. Palestine, like Cambodia, underscores the deadly consequences of our acquiescence.
New Zealand World War I graves, Deir al Balah War Cemetery, Remembrance Day 2014 (Marilyn Garson)
Some people scoff at the very idea of values-led policy. They call it naive. I ask whether our policies in Cambodia or Palestine, unanchored by values, look sophisticated. Or independent.
The colonial face of our foreign policy presumes that the story of our world is only the story of powerful states. At our worst, we have been so eager to sit next to them, we have followed them onto the wrong side of history.
On issues of global justice, we must situate our policy with those who share both our interests and our values – the two are not in competition.
The wealthy states bring a computational theory to transformational issues. They calculate how little of their lifestyle they must give up in order to stabilise the rest. They send doses of COVID-19 vaccine to African nations while preserving the patents. They manage the disruptions of climate as one-off events, even as the waters lap onto the Pacific island shores around us. Their rearguard action builds walls to hold back the migrants without acknowledging that extractive capitalism and US-led militarism helped to necessitate the migrants’ flight.
We face issues which will not be resolved at the margins. 2022 should be a year of radical foreign policy ambitions, around which to galvanise new networks of shared purpose. It is not enough for our policymakers to trot along behind the states that brought us to the cliff’s edge. We need to see the earth and the human beings who share it, in the context of a future we will experience together. We need to ask what we owe and how much we can add.
Future-facing values are all around us. They are the values of tangata whenua and indigeneity, of young people who will live with the consequences, of the lessons we are learning in our uneven decolonisation. We are beginning to re-learn history and philosophy. Now we need to project our local lessons outward, to shape a more principled foreign policy.
Marilyn Garson
[1] On the limbo of war economy, see the work of Mark Duffield. On humanitarian donorship practice, see initiatives like the Overseas Development Institute’s Good Humanitarian Donorship. On the specifics of the Cambodian aid embargo, see for example Punishing the Poor, which Oxfam has made freely available here.
[2] Find here an assistant law professor’s extended discussion on the nature of recognition, including the question ‘How much recognition is needed?’
[3] Nadia abu Shanab elaborates on this lack of access around minute 32 of this Te Kuaka podcast by NZ Alternative.
[4] The UN Special Rapporteur has outlined the roles and responsibilities of states in his 2019 report A/74/507, the Security Council’s failure to impose the costs obliged by its own resolutions and international law in his 2020 report A/75/532, and the roles played by key multilateral groups in his 2021 report A/76/433.
Beginning on Land Day in 2018, Gazan Palestinians stood on their own land and demanded their basic rights as human beings and as a nation. In the course of the Great March of Return, Israeli soldiers and snipers killed 223 Palestinians (46 of them younger than 18 years) and wounded around 8000.
Medecins Sans Frontieres has written about the Palestinians who were left with complex wounds from expanding bullets, those shot through the eye by snipers, those who have lost limbs. Hollowed out by Israel’s blockade, Gaza’s health infrastructure cannot possibly cope with their injuries, with Covid, with the injuries from last May’s bombardment – with all of it.
Israel’s investigations have returned a total of one indictment for 223 killings. That one unlucky token solder was sentenced to a month of community service.
2021 has been a shocking year. Israel has withheld Covid treatment and vaccines from Palestinians. In May Israeli forces bombarded Gaza, inflicting a new layer of trauma and intensively damaging the infrastructure of modern life. The Israeli government has designated six legal and human rights NGOs as ‘terrorist’ (we use scare quotes to alert readers that the designation is wholly unsubstantiated). This designation effectively criminalises Palestinians’ resort to law. Settler violence is escalating and intermingling openly with military violence – a more overt state endeavour. In the midst of it all, Israeli authorities also thought it was important to confiscate 23 million tons of chocolate bars destined for Gaza because, well, maybe just because they could.
States including ours have failed utterly to protect Palestinians. 2021 has been a year of outrageous impunity for Israel, and we are outraged. We are not heart-broken, because our hearts were not in the Zionist nationalist project to be broken. We are not saddened by the news, we are pissed.
We have listened in vain for more of our Jewish community to object.
Like them, some of us were raised in Zionism. We have had to confront the result of placing Israel’s settler colonial project at the heart of our identity. As we un-learned Zionism, we opened a loving, expansive space for our religion, culture, music, history, spirituality, study and all the other dimensions of being positive (non-Zionist) Jews.
As we unlearned Zionism, we recognised the occupation of Palestine as Palestinians’ struggle for liberation. It is not about us, but it is ours to support. When we witness the outrageous impunity of Israeli apartheid violence, we do not tut-tut in a loving voice (that being the tone we are told to adopt as the limit of loyal Jewish expression).
Stand up and shout with us, we challenge our Jewish community. If you have any regard for the basic equality and value of human lives, stand up to this. 223 Palestinians were killed on their own land and one Israeli soldier has done a month of community service. Stand up and object as loudly as you would object if this happened anywhere else. It has happened, and that is enough.
Stand up this Chanukah, when you read the prophetic warning against reliance on transient militarism, “Not by might and not by power.” When you light your candles, remember that justice is the flame burning in the darkness.
We stand in solidarity with Palestinians, with our fellow non-Zionist Jews and all others who call for transformation between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. May this year have been the nadir.
Most communities fragment under pressure, as we are abruptly finding in Aotearoa. Gazans are constantly awareness that they are powerless before an overwhelming, uncaring threat – yet somehow, in extremis Gaza coheres like contact cement.
November 14, 2012 was the first night of an eight-day bombardment and I was alone in my apartment on the 14th floor. With each explosion nearby, my building and my stomach lurched further than I would have expected.
Worst was the helplessness. Gaza has no defensive weapons, so Israeli planes circled and bombed at will. I sat and waited – BOOM, lurch, correct – sat and waited. I tracked each plane across my ceiling and thought, this is what the fish sees in its barrel.
My Palestinian team members called with practical advice. Did I know to leave the windows slightly open to diminish the chance that they would blow inward? Had I plugged in every device to charge while there was electricity? In two of their households, parents were distracting their small children by teaching them to dance to the peculiar backbeat of the naval shelling that was pouring into Beach Camp, an undefended refugee camp just north of me.
Two of my male colleagues called me. They each lived nearby. Each man offered to leave his family, collect me, and bring me home to live with his family through the war. One of those men had enduring professional differences with me, yet he pressed me especially to take shelter with him. No one, he insisted, should be alone beneath the bombs.
I’ve thought of him often through Covid. Imagine calling up the people you dislike, and pleading with them to lock down with your family through the worst, open-ended stress. Imagine checking in with your nemesis daily because you are sharing an experience more profound than your dislike. Rather than turning on each other, rather than assuming that personal responsibility is sufficient in a collective crisis, Palestinians knew, ‘I will be well while I am caring for you, too.’
In 2013, I was appointed to a task force. Israel’s blockade of Gaza produces deep poverty, and 800,000 Gazans were then in need of relief food (today, more than 1,000,000 Gazans need relief food). Budgets were not keeping pace with need. Our task force had to devise policy and operating systems to prioritise the food entitlements of 800,000 human beings behind a wall. Disrupted by the war of 2014, it took the task force 16 months to devise, implement, code, train and roll out a new system. When Covid struck, the system enabled food distribution, rather than collection.
Our thorniest ethical question was this: what happens when a parent secures their family’s entitlement by giving false information? In a situation of scarcity and malnutrition, what policy response is fair?
Fair to whom, we wondered. Fair to a fiercely protective parent? Fair to the neighbour who did not lie? How could civic order be maintained, if not by punishing dishonesty? How else should the system preserve its integrity? What was the point of having policy if entitlement could be forged? What would happen to neighbours if trust broke down? Round and round we went, trying to devise fairness behind an indefensible wall.
The man who broke through our stuckness was a self-described trouble-maker with lifelong radical credentials. “Wait,” he pleaded, “stop. Who is this policy for? Who are we responsible to? Food policy is a policy for children’s nutrition, so why are we arguing about adults? What is fair for the children?”
We devised our solution from caring rather than punishment, aiming to harness shared values. Our system was despised and mistrusted, as would be any mechanism to cope with insufficient resources. However, it nourished children first and we could devise no more decent response to Israel’s indecent deprivation of Gazans.
Surviving in a situation willfully designed to harm them, Gazans made goodness their intentional, hourly work. In so doing, they refused to be defined by the violence of others and got on with the business of making the better world they had in mind. They chose to act as if they had already won.
Their choices choices feel relevant now, as the language of outrage seeps into our social fractures. People I care about are being drawn onto uncharacteristically angry and absolute ground. This is going to call for every bit of transcendence we have.
Alternative Jewish Voices joins our fellow Jewish activists to protest the incarceration of Palestinians in Israel’s military jails.
In September 2021 the world’s attention focused briefly on six Palestinian prisoners who escaped from the Gilboa Prison in northern Israel. The spotlight revealed deep and ongoing human rights violations against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
As Jews from around the world, we in the International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP) are dismayed and acutely sensitive to the age-old command not to stand idly by.
The statistics are grim. 4,650 Palestinian prisoners are now incarcerated, including 200 children and 40 women. Some 520 people are held in administrative detention, which provides that a prisoner can be held for months without charge or trial, which can then be renewed—over and over again ad infinitum. One Palestinian former aid worker from Gaza has been held more than five years, appearing in Israeli courts 166 times without evidence that any crime has been committed. (1) One of the Gilboa escapees, Monadel Yacoub Nafe’at, had been in administrative detention since 2019.
In addition, Human Rights Watch reports that “Israeli authorities try Palestinians charged with crimes in military courts, where they face a conviction rate of nearly 100 percent.” (2) Israel is the only country on earth to routinely prosecute children in its military courts.
For decades, prisoners have charged officials with torture, beatings and other forms of maltreatment, all of which are prohibited by international law. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have engaged regularly in hunger strikes to protest their conditions.
This revolving door of imprisonment touches every Palestinian family, and amounts to the collective punishment of a people.
If we do nothing, how will we reply when a generation of Palestinians asks, “Why have all of my male cousins been incarcerated? Why have all my uncles been incarcerated?” (3)
Let us take seriously another age-old precept: Justice, justice, thou shall pursue. Let us therefore act in each of our communities to draw attention to these injustices where we can, whether in individual or communal settings.
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz has issued a military order which designates six leading Palestinian legal and human rights groups as “terrorist” organisations. The government of Israel has declined to back its orders with evidence.
On the websites of the targeted organisations, you will learn about incarcerations, documented human rights violations, the imprisonment of children, aid to farmers in the West Bank. To prevent the sharing of such information, the Israeli government will now fight these activities as if they were fighting terrorists.
Leading global human rights organisations have objected in the strongest terms. They clearly state that they will continue to work with their Palestinian colleagues: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch call it “an attack on the human rights movement” while B’Tselem calls it “a draconian measure that criminalizes critical human rights work.”
Alternative Jewish Voices calls this military order the contemptible act of an authoritarian. This order would jeopardise the funding which creates factual information about Palestinian life under Israel’s occupation. The order poses a new level of violent threat to the defenders of human and legal rights. If we do not defuse that threat internationally, it will set a frightening precedent for all of the people who stand up to authoritarians around the world.
Israel’s military order extends its pattern of criminalising any resistance to its regime of occupation, de facto annexation and legislated apartheid.
Members of Israel’s government refer to boycotts – the non-violent exercise of economic choice – as economic terrorism. Israel’s President called Ben and Jerry’s decision not to sell ice cream on occupied land as “a new kind of terrorism.” Around the same time, Israel confiscated 23 tons of chocolate bars destined for Gaza with the explanation, “We will continue to hunt down networks that fund terror.”
There seems to be no form of resistance that Israel won’t categorise as terroristic. This new military order will criminalise even the use of the law. In occupied Palestine, it appears that resistance will be treated as terror, period.
We urge the government of Aotearoa-New Zealand to take the recent advice of Ban Ki Moon, former Secretary General of the United Nations, and change our yawning diplomatic stance:
“a powerful state is controlling another people through an open-ended occupation, settling its own people on the land in violation of international law and enforcing a legal regime of institutionalised discrimination… What has become increasingly clear in recent years is Israel’s intent to maintain its structural domination and oppression of the Palestinian people through indefinite occupation… resulting in a situation that arguably constitutes apartheid. It is now time for the international community to recognise and confront the consequences of Israel’s policies and actions in this regard.”
When will we defend the people who defend the law and human rights?
At a recent Wellington Jewish community meeting, 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 Wellington Jewish Council (our regional council, which also sends four delegates to the NZ Jewish Council’s membership of eighteen) has taken this feedback on board. They have begun the work to revise their constitution and earn their mandate.
We at Alternative Jewish Voices regard this as a hopeful, significant opening. We share this excerpt from the Council’s email with their agreement:
After reflecting on the discussion held, we propose that in order to re-establish the Wellington Jewish Council, a new constitution will be required that can capture the voice and aspirations of the community. Below is a survey to help begin that journey. …
Until we have completed the process of drafting and confirming a constitution, the four of us will not purport to speak on behalf of the Wellington Jewish Council as we do not feel that we have a mandate to do so.
The Council has circulated a survey to elicit the Jewish community’s views about the representation we want. Here’s the challenge. Wellington Jews who belong to a synagogue will have received this survey at least once. Our existing institutions have multiple channels and email lists. How can this consultation include the members of our community who do not belong, or have not felt welcome, in our institutions? They are disenfranchised now, and their views are essential if this process is to result in the genuine representation of our community as a whole.
Please help by sharing this survey with members of the Wellington Jewish community who might not have received it. If you are Jewish in the Wellington region, please complete a survey. Please include yourself, in the hope that this conversation will lead to a more inclusive community, and a Council voice that actually reflects and represents more of us.
If you want a copy of the regional or national Jewish Council’s current constitution, please write to the contact address below or write directly to the Wellington Jewish Council. The survey is open for three weeks.
The fragility of Zionism is undermining us. Our membership institutions and representation are narrowing the NZ Jewish community, precisely when engagement and collective action are needed. It’s time for us to do community differently.
Let me say (as we have repeated for years) that this is not about being agreed with. It is about learning to exist and let others exist who disagree. Zionism must cease to be our litmus test.
A few years back, a fellow Jew told me, “You are a walking indictment of everything I believe.” That’s an honest statement of a belief so fragile that the very existence of others threatens it. Problem is, I do live and I will walk.
While I could not walk safely in my own shul, I would wake up at 2:30 am to join Tzedek Chicago’s Torah study group. All I wanted was to belong in some Jewish space. They welcomed me while I was torn in half – but Aotearoa is still my community and its needs are my needs.
For advocating Palestinians’ full measure of rights, I have been targeted in some ugly ways. I have also been the object of astonishing hatred from a few (non-Palestinian) supposed fellow advocates. Happily, there are plenty of people doing the real mahi of building coalitions and relationships for change.
I wrote a book about my work and my colleagues in Gaza. My Radio NZ interview was cancelled on the day it was to air. I filed an Official Information Act request to learn the reason. RNZ disclosed the internal email that had warned, “Given the huge flood of formal complaints we get any time we do a Palestine story without Israeli balance…”
They cut the interview because no one had on hand a story from Israel to “mention before and after.” Without those defensive bookends in place, our national radio station self-censored.
In these and other ways, I have learned something that Palestinians already know: this has become an identity campaign of erasure. Erasure makes others – not the substance of any issue – the object of its attack. A campaign of erasure is fought through restatements of history, exclusion and lies and harmful forms of license.
To be targeted in those ways, Palestinians know and I have learned, strikes at a deep, essential place. Emotionally expensive as it is to withstand this form of attack, one cannot concede except by losing one’s very self.
We formed Alternative Jewish Voices partly to do the work of withstanding.
Along the way, we’ve heard from numerous fellow Jews who keep their mouths shut because they know the punishment that would follow if they spoke. We’ve met others who turned away from the community because they cannot keep their mouths shut. The result is the suppression, alienation and exclusion of Jews by Jewish institutions, for reasons unrelated to their Jewishness.
The NZ Jewish Council calls itself “the representative body of Jewish communities in New Zealand.” However, its members are indirectly and not transparently selected by other institutions, further excluding the excluded. Thus they represent much less than they claim.
We must pry open our institutions or make more institutions. We, and the media and government, need to listen more widely. We are a religious community, not a single-issue interest group. Judaism has been plural for 2000 years, and no one has a monopoly on it today.
Ours is a devastating moment to be a community in pieces. Have we no common interest in discussing city planning, housing, Covid response, climate, racism, inequality? The finite planet, our interdependent health and distributional justice all depend on our collective action. Fragile communities wither and fail because they deny any need to be challenged by people who don’t fully agree. We need every challenging conversation now. We confront issues which will not be solved only by people who fully agree with us.
Compare our fragility with the unfolding of mana whenua institutions in Auckland. They are responding to Covid and related needs by casting their net inclusively, recognising an interdependent crisis and stepping straight in to do the mahi. It should not have fallen so heavily on their shoulders, but their action and their community-building will not be undone. Maori Health Authority – what a proof of concept.
If we are to live up to the demands upon us as a Jewish community, we too need to do community differently. We need to formulate aspirational solutions that can anchor a much wider group of us. We disagree and yet we are in this together.
Imagine foreign policy led by our values, grounded in justice.
Imagine policy that speaks to decolonisation – here and there.
Listen to the podcast by Te Kuaka / New Zealand Alternative: From Aotearoa to Palestine, with Nadia Abu Shanab and Samira Archer of Justice For Palestine, and Marilyn Garson of Alternative Jewish Voices.
Big thanks to Phoebe and all of NZ Alternative for making a space to speak aspirationally about the world that can, and should, become our world.
Sh'ma Koleinu - Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) 