Blog – Letter to Prime Minister: Covid19 and Gaza

We have done this before. Seeing genocide—millions of Cambodians dead and millions of starving survivors—Aotearoa has chosen the wrong side of history in order to assure American-led allies that we shared their priorities. I saw the cost while travelling and working with Cambodian survivors. Now, again, Aotearoa is content to follow a criminal American agenda.

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 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.”

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. We provided infrequent, small amounts of humanitarian aid to the Khmer Rouge-controlled “bamboo ghetto” camps.  We withheld recognition from Cambodia’s government, and we did nothing to meet the most basic rights of Cambodians to food, justice, self-determination, and safety.  

A few Western states chose principle. 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 aid embargo, Counting Civilian Casualties estimates that 300,000 Cambodians died from starvation-related causes. Through the 1980s, one in five Cambodian children died in their first five years. I visited and wrote about 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 (our guys) shelled the NGO trucks that tried to deliver food. 

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 Thai border. If they wanted to seek food, they had to seek out the Khmer Rouge who controlled it.[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 also became the most heavily mined ground on the planet.

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 pointless 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.”

My colleagues had been exposed to the most heartless power. Policies like ours helped to convince them that they would always remain unprotected.

Our choices in Cambodia highlight the harm we have done as a follower-state. 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 were a willing part of a regime of power built on the suffering of a powerless nation. That sort of stability is anathema to justice or to any durable peace.

Here we are again, pursuing a policy in Palestine whose logical outcome (the erasure of a nation and its state; a world of impunity, devoid of civilian protection and law) we say we do not want. To paraphrase the Thai Foreign Minister’s 1981 comment, we act as if Israel’s crimes need not be our concern – and again, we cling to that stance even as most of our colonial allies find it too absurd and offensive to maintain (in word if not yet in action).

If we want to end genocide – to end Israel’s genocide and prevent others that will take Israel’s crimes as their precedent – we need policy that values life. Some people scoff at the very idea of values-led policy. They call it naive. I ask them whether our policies in Cambodia or Palestine, unanchored by values, look sophisticated. Or independent.

The wealthy states bring a computational theory to the transformational issues around us. They calculate how little they must give up in order to keep the killing out of the headlines. But we face issues which will not be resolved at the margins.

The UN marks Genocides Remembrance and Prevention Day on December 9. If we are to end this genocide and prevent future genocides, we need to change the conditions that allow genocide. We need to change the politicans who trot along after those who have brought us all to the cliff’s edge. In the coming election, we need to vote for life, planet, Te Tiriti and radical foreign policy ambitions, around which to galvanise new networks of shared purpose.

Marilyn Garson

(Portions of this text were posted in a different form in December 2021.)

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[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.

Global Jews for Palestine media statement 22/11/2025

The UN Security Council’s approval of a revamped Trump plan for Gaza has sparked sharp condemnation from Palestinian resistance groups, who say it sidesteps international law, imposes external control on Gaza, and aims to rescue Israel’s failing colonization while disarming the resistance. A global coalition of 25 anti-Zionist Jewish organizations echoes this rejection, calling the resolution a political lifeline to Netanyahu’s regime and a betrayal of Palestinian self-determination.

UN Security Council votes Trump´s plan against the Palestinians. It´s an attempt to rescue Israel’s colonization of Gaza and to disarm the resistance

On 17 November 2025 the United Nations Security Council approved a US resolution on Gaza. Palestinian resistance groups quickly issued a joint rejection of this version of the ‘Trump Peace Plan.’ They said:  “The resolution bypasses international frameworks and paves the way for creating arrangements outside the Palestinian national will. Any international force intended to be deployed in Gaza in the proposed form will turn into a form of guardianship or imposed mandate, undermining the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.” As a global coalition of 25 anti-Zionist Jewish groups, we fully support the Palestinian claim and struggle for self-determination and the right of return. We also reject Trump´s plan, now endorsed by the UNSC.

This sordid role should be no surprise. As the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq had warned beforehand, the impending vote would demonstrate “the Security Council’s manifest abdication of its responsibility, and the further undermining and rejection of Palestinian self-determination.”

The ‘Peace Plan’ continues the US-Israel agenda to remove Palestine from any international legal framework in order to re-inforce Israel’s colonization. Now that Israel’s army has greater difficulty in maintaining its colonial control on the ground, the UNSC resolution rescues Netanyahu´s colonial regime and aims at disarming the anti-colonial resistance. The Palestinians have had no say whatsoever in this . 

Among Palestinians, only the Palestinian National Authority, desperate to retain its privileges through its collaboration with Israel, welcomed this travesty. All UNSC members voted for the resolution, except for shameful abstentions by China and Russia,rather than using their veto power. This UNSC resolution is a total betrayal of international law, human rights and the Palestinian struggle.   

What does this mean for the UN’s role? Its Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, has admirably gone further than her predecessors, especially by documenting the complicity of major countries and companies in her October 2025 report, Gaza Genocide: a Collective Crime.

The ICJ and ICC have diligently carried out their tasks, documenting Israel’s genocide and its leaders’ criminal responsibility. However, the UNSC continues the complicit legacy of the 1947 resolution partitioning Palestine. After the 1936-39 joint UK-Zionist counterinsurgency war severely weakened Palestinians’ defence against Zionist colonization, the Partition plan opened the way for further attacks and expulsions.

These developments further vindicate the call in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organisations for a comprehensive BDS campaign against international complicity with Israeli colonisation, firstly in our own countries. We are inspired by the action of dockers who have blocked arms shipments to Israel during the past two years. More recently, Italy’s mass strikes and demonstrations have opposed its complicity with Israel. Palestine’s most reliable supporters are the people of the world who fight their own oppression for a common future of social justice. Palestine’s resistance remains a symbol of that global struggle.

Global Jews for Palestine will participate in all demonstrations around the world on 29 November, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. It is not the time to abandon the streets.

Read this statement on our website

GLOBAL JEWS FOR PALESTINE

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We are Jews from many countries, who are members of local, national and international networks and organizations. We are multi-ethnic and multigenerational and our members embrace a broad range of viewpoints on Jewish religious and ethical traditions. We are connected by our involvement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, and by our determination to work for justice. We oppose Zionism and all forms of racism and colonialism.

We believe that it is our particular responsibility to challenge Jewish organizations whose alliances and actions undermine Palestinian human and national rights, promote Jewish exceptionalism, and overturn Jewish social justice traditions. At the heart of our work is the fight for Palestinian liberation and the struggle for a world free of racial and ethnic hierarchy, colonial domination, and unbridled militarism.

How shall we speak and act now?

For six years, Alternative Jewish Voices has spoken in an aspirational voice. This is intentional. Research shows, the voice that mobilises new political engagement is a voice of moral clarity which invites others to join the work of making a better world.

We ground our voice in facts, and today’s facts are shattering. We share the outrage that we hear. However, outrage alone does not make change. It has to be channeled forward into principled action.

Hope is resistance. AJV met this week to ask where we find that hope now, while grief and anger feel overwhelming.

With unprecedented Western permission and complicity, Israel’s genocide is ongoing. The IDF has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians and decimated the built environment of Gaza. They are queueing up more of the same in the West Bank. The tonnage of IDF poisons will affect generations. Israel has killed 271 and injured 622 Palestinians since the ceasefire. Gazan Palestinians are living in atrocious conditions as winter closes in. Israel is preventing UN agencies and NGOs from responding, despite the International Court of Justice’s October finding that Israel is obligated to provide for Gazan Palestinians and not to impede others from doing so. Along the way, Israel has bombed half a dozen countries which are not at war with it.

The silence of governments like ours imagines this dystopia as a new baseline. They will settle for negotiating the speed of Israel’s new crimes against the survivors of Palestine.

We utterly reject their selective amnesia—but each time we call out our complicit government, we need to call them forward and judge them against something better.

We do that by placing the value of human life at the centre of our understanding. People have laboured for a century and a half to embed a rights-based vision of human dignity and equality. Rights are not an opinion; rights are the basis of international law and institutions. That today’s governments spit on Palestinians’ rights does not invalidate Palestinians’ rights. It raises the stakes. Now we must fight for the vision even as we wield it.

Our baseline is a world in which people flourish with their basic needs and dignity ensured. We protest the deficits from that standard. We judge Israel and its powerful accomplices against the standard of an accountable, just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.

Even as our allies have taken the step of recognising Palestine, Luxon, Seymour and Peters cosy up to Donald Trump. We are reeling from their daily erosion of our democracy. Our government’s position on Palestine and the value it places on our own lives follow from a single agenda. This government is harming far more people than it is benefiting. We find hope in the work that brings together a majority for change.

While Palestine has become the cement of a broad global movement, Zionism is shifting. Israel used its years of Zionist-Jewish permission to consolidate new sources of support. It is no longer dependent upon Jewish social license. Christian Zionism, long the majority of Zionism, is now an insider shaping American policy. Israel dedicates new budgets to influencing American Christians.

Christian Zionist influence is now being unsettled in turn by the far Right, as Zionism attracts support from the eschatological, racist and fascist extremes. Trump’s MAGA world is grappling with the rise of more radical White racist nationalism. Those extremists are seeking narrative position and influence.

In Aotearoa, Israel’s deputy foreign minister has met with Christian nationalist Brian Tamaki and Alfred Ngaio. There are five rabbis in this country, while 130 Christian Zionist clergy wrote together of their representatives’ time with Winston Peters before Peters declined to recognise Palestine. In order to lend effective support to the liberation of Palestine, our protest needs to target the evolving structures and financial flows of Aotearoa’s Zionism.

This does not relieve the Zionist-Jewish community of responsibility. Globally, Zionist-Jewish institutions have eagerly wrapped Israel’s violence in the guise of Jewish identity, in order to place Israel’s genocidal actions beyond challenge. Aotearoa’s Zionist-Jewish spokespeople still imagine only the peace of the graveyard, after which there might be a nicer Zionism.

A significant segment of Liberal-Zionist Jews seems to have turned against the war—although not against Zionism. That speaks to some capacity for change despite the institutions.

We welcome every effort to end this genocide. However, as principled anti-Zionists our goal is greater than the cessation of firing. In our own community and in Palestine, we must change the conditions that give rise to genocide. We need to decolonise the Jewishness that taught us to stake our future on the oppression and slaughter of others. There is no nicer Zionism.

To realise a liberatory Jewishness, we need new institutions with genuinely new communal leadership. We work for a future without Jewish supremacy or exceptionalism. Two-thirds of Jewish New Yorkers aged 18-44 just voted for Mayor Mamdani in one such act of qualitative, visionary change.

We will not displace this toxic new Right power by emulating their perpetual outrage. That would only turn us into the thing we oppose. Outrage alone leaves one numb with grief and alienation. It stokes the identity politics which deny that we can live together. It leads to the despair which hardens the status quo.

We will only displace this power with an aspirational, broadly based vision of something better. We learn from the long, great works of our time: the works of peace, Indigenous rights, the common cause of dignified life in the hardest places.

That quality of holistic movement has coalesced around Palestine. We have never heard so many people acknowledge that the change must reach to the tangled roots of colonisation, racism, capitalism and fascism.

AJV brings to this our Jewish inheritance which recognises that social, ecological and material justice are inextricable. Together we will place life and justice at the centre of the work that needs doing, here and there.

In this dark time, hope is resistance and these are our ways forward.

In outrage and in aroha, we are Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

Media release from Global Jews for Palestine, Nov 9 2025

globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

Israel says, “You cease, we fire!”

Ceasefire means that the firing ceases. By October 29th, at least 211 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 600 injured in 125 ceasefire violations by Israel since a ceasefire was declared, as outlined by Al Jazeera. No Israelis had been killed.

In the deadliest 24 hours since the “ceasefire” began, Israel claimed it hit more than 30 targets. Israel claimed that the targets were “terrorists in command positions within terror organisations”. However, the world (again) saw babies, children and other civilians being pulled from the rubble, dead or destined for hospitals which lack the capacity to assist them.

Mainstream Western media continue to highlight Israel’s allegations, giving far less time to its many violations of the agreement.  There have been no repercussions against Israel for its violations, as it continues to occupy 58% of the Gaza Strip, moving the gangs it has supported behind the “line” and shooting Palestinians who cross that ill-defined invisible line. 

While Hamas is blamed for the slow return of the bodies of Israeli hostages, Gaza does not have the forensic equipment needed for examining human remains extracted from rubble.Israel is denying access for the machinery that is needed to lift the rubble and recover the many bodies that lie buried. The great majority of the people whose bodies await recovery beneath that rubble are Palestinian.

Not only does the “peace” promised by Donald Trump feel a long way off, but even the desperately needed respite is proving elusive for Palestinians. As is food: Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement which promised a minimum of 600 trucks filled with aid each day. Palestinians continue to go hungry. They await medical treatment. They live in dire conditions, many still in need of shelter, as winter arrives.

Our governments have immediate obligations. We must not normalise or support this illegal regime, and we must act to protect and save lives. We call on all our governments to expel the local Israeli ambassador; recall their own ambassador from Israel; end all arms sales; and impose sanctions on Israel until it ends the genocidal war on the people of Gaza, stops ethnic cleansing and settler violence in the West Bank, and commits to full equality and justice for Palestinians in accordance with all Palestinian rights under international law. 

We also call on our governments and legacy media to stop conflating Israel with Jews or Zionism with Judaism.  Israel’s claim to act in the name of the Jews of the world, to weaponise antisemitism and exploit the Holocaust of our people for genocidal ends must be rejected!

Read this statement on our website

GLOBAL JEWS FOR PALESTINE

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We are Jews from many countries, who are members of local, national and international networks and organizations. We are multi-ethnic and multigenerational and our members embrace a broad range of viewpoints on Jewish religious and ethical traditions. We are connected by our involvement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, and by our determination to work for justice. We oppose Zionism and all forms of racism and colonialism.

We believe that it is our particular responsibility to challenge Jewish organizations whose alliances and actions undermine Palestinian human and national rights, promote Jewish exceptionalism, and overturn Jewish social justice traditions. At the heart of our work is the fight for Palestinian liberation and the struggle for a world free of racial and ethnic hierarchy, colonial domination, and unbridled militarism.
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Alternative Jewish Voices is a member of Global Jews for Palestine

J-Wire is reporting that Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskell will slip into Auckland this weekend, quietly as a thief in the night. Winston Peters has been known to set his diplomatic encounters to music, but not this one.

If you’re not familiar with Heskell, here is her calling card.

Recall that this week’s Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice unanimously found that:

the State of Israel, as an occupying Power, is required to fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law. These obligations include the following: … to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services.

Now watch as Haskell calmly justifies bombing the Al Shifa and Nasser hospitals in Gaza.

Our government makes threadbare comments about law and humanitarian concern. Then they issue a visa to a front-row proponent of Israel’s genocide. Token words, followed by acts of complicity and permission.

And what will Israel’s genocide defender be doing in Aotearoa? According to J-Wire, she will be shoring up business ties with anyone willing to forget that on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice admonished all states not to normalise, support or perpetuate Israel’s illegal occupation.

The profitable business ties that Heskell seeks are precisely those that the court has told us to end. Heskell’s visa mocks the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who have taken to the streets for law and justice.

To our disgust, she will also be bolstering Israel’s ties with the Zionist-Jewish community. Every one of our Jewish institutions has failed to condemn Israel’s genocide and call for Israel’s accountability. They have failed to value non-Jewish lives. For any Jewish institution to invite or interact with a minister of the Israeli government (whose leaders are wanted for genocide) is a Shonda – a shame of scandalous proportions.

We are a collective of Jewish New Zealanders from the Far North to Dunedin. On the day that Israel elected a pack of butchers, the tone of our statements changed. Israel’s current government did not represent a new direction of travel, but it manifestly did represent an escalation of the violent madness that has rampaged through occupied Palestine for more than two years. Our world has been altered by the experience of witnessing slaughter while being governed by its accomplices.

We reject utterly the boards, the decision-makers of Jewish institutions who have stayed silent and passive through two years of annihilation. We need new institutions.

The same goes for a government that mumbles about the rights of human beings and the laws of states while carrying on normal diplomatic and economic relations with the state of Israel. If we want that to change, we must change our government.

Sanction Israel. Suspend normal relations. Support war crimes investigations.

Recognise the state of Palestine. Demand the immediate, sufficient and unimpeded provision of humanitarian supplies by the UN and NGOs.

End the illegal occupation which is the cause of this carnage.

Alternative Jewish Voices

We welcome the cessation of firing with so many emotions. We are relieved for each Palestinian family who knows that their relatives can sleep in safety, even as we are horrified by the devastation around them. We are indignant that Palestinians have been forced to choose between such a neocolonial plan—a plan to give Israel what it wants at the expense of law and justice—and ongoing starvation and annihilation.

Israel’s onslaughts have never really ended in Gaza. There have been cessations of bombing, and plans which were not meaningful beyond their first few bullet points. Bombing has been suspended, and Gaza has lived in the interim between attacks. But peace? Peace is built upon justice, and Gazans have enjoyed none of that.

We know all of the reasons for cynicism and rejection, but we will not give in to them. Our role is to support Palestinians in their choices, to share in their best hopes and stand by them while they begin to feel everything that had been postponed by the hourly desperation of 732 days of genocide.

Even in these very first days, we also know that an urgent task lands on all of our shoulders. Donor states have historically delivered only a small fraction of their grand pledges for Gaza’s recovery. In the twelve months after the bombardment of 2014, donors sent just 6% of their recovery pledges. They said that they wanted to see if the quiet would last. Their stance ensured that Gaza’s deprivation continued.

That absolutely must not happen again. Winter is approaching. Gazan Palestinians need warm shelter and blankets, food and water, medications and baby supplies. They need machinery to search for their loved ones who lie beneath the rubble of their homes. They need functioning health, education and food distribution infrastructure to replace what Israel has so mercilessly destroyed. Experts must be granted entry to Gaza to document Israel’s crimes and begin the essential work of holding Israel to account.

Gaza needs all this, and they need it now. Winter is coming. Securing actual donor-state contributions to deliver essential supplies, in sufficient quantities: this is an immediate task for our advocacy.

Alternative Jewish Voices

Are we doing enough?

by Diego Lewin

It is a new anniversary for the October 7th attacks and the question that we should ask ourselves to truly honour the memory of the people that were killed that day,  is how to avoid this to happen again, and to answer that, we should be honest and confront the question of Why did it happen in the first place.

We could say that the core issue is that Palestinians don’t want peace and they have refused every opportunity that they had.

But are we doing enough?

– In 1948, when the state of Israel was created 700.000 people (palestinians) were displaced (1) known by Paelstinians as the Nakba (catastrofe).

– Israel granted only to the Jewish people the right to citizenship (Law of return) ,  meanwhile Israel denied the right to return for the people displaced.

– In 1967, Israel occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank, known as Naksa by Palestinians, and with a new displacement of 300.000 (2) people (Palestinians), since then,  the remaining  non Jewish population lives under military occupation. This is 58 years of military occupation.

– Since then (1967) until today, the amount of Jewish settlers in the occupied land increased steadily to around 700.000 settlers (3).

Today is the second anniversary of the October 7th  attacks, and the one writing this article deeply believes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and at the same time I can not avoid linking both stories, the history of Palestinian displacement that continues until today and the attack of October 7th.

Israel response to the attack is the ongoing killing of 70.000 people in Gaza majority civilians, destroying most school,  mosques, universities, infrastructure, housing  making Gaza unlivable, displacing the population internally many times, and starving the remaining people in Gaza

I keep thinking, how a deliverate starvation and on going genocide (4) with the clear intention of ethic claeansing of Gaza can honour the memories of the October 7th victims and how we can talk of the 7 th of October victims without talking about the ongoing suffering and geocide that the Palestinian people are suffering.

How these actions described since the creation of the state of Israel (and even before) are contributing to peace, but instead creating the conditions for a new 7th of October, we have seen this play again and again, so many times, too many times, too many lives.

Also, what this means for the children of Israel, to be part part of a country that from its inception displaced an opress other people and that now is actively commiting genocide.

We need now more than ever a different path, and not for some, but for all people living in the land.

Justice and  Peace goes hand by hand, one cannot exist with the other. We need equal rights for all, no more occupation, no more genocide, we need justice and respect the right of the Palestinians displaced to return to their homes,  we need basic human rights for all, and we need it now.

This is not only the right thing to do as a human being, but also the way to honor life, all life.

Each day, each week that passes, Israel goes to a new low, more extreme, more brutal,  from the diaspora, all people with conscience, we have the obligation to stop this madness against the Palestinian people as Israel by itself is clearly unable and unwilling to stop.

(1) UN marks 75 years since displacement of 700,000 Palestinians | UN News

(2) Naksa – Wikipedia

(3) Israeli settlement timeline – Wikipedia

(4) Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds | OHCHR

by Diego Lewin

It has been two years, 730 days of annihilation and the sheer heartlessness of starvation. This day and every day, we send our deepest aroha to our Palestinian whānau who live this nightmare.

With contempt we have watched this government’s degrading courtship of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—a convicted felon and a wanted war criminal—at the expense of law, rights, morality and human dignity.

Israel’s genocide has broken our hearts, but not our spirit.

Two years of witness and marching have changed us. Look at this movement: in two years, we have laid foundations that will last.

We mark this day with deep gratitude for the generous vision of our Palestinian leaders; for the wisdom of Māori tikanga and the invitation of Te Tiriti to co-exist in mutual respect.

We march within a broad-based movement that is forward-looking, anti-racist, built with aroha and resolve. We stand among professional groups who have adopted their Gazan counterparts, unions, faith groups, university and community organisations who have embraced Palestine.

All around us, we notice the number of people who have used social media to form sustained relations with Palestinian families in Gaza. In these two years, Gaza has become personal.

We hear the language of solidarity as people make connections between issues. We see people turn up across the issues, because they recognise that liberation can only be collective.

In our own community, we welcome each person who throws off the tribal and the nationalist, and falls in love with humanity. Join us.

It should not take two years to alert the world to a livestreamed genocide!

Perhaps those in power thought that we would get tired and give up. Instead, here we are on the 730th day, a larger and more resolute movement than ever.

We will move this world. Palestine WILL be free, and on that day, our Jewish community will begin to be free as well.

Alternative Jewish Voices with our friend, Sarah Cole

Radio New Zealand has done it again!

RNZ has interviewed the ambassador of a state widely recognised as conducting genocide and a well-known Zionist for a lengthy article which denigrated the Palestinian right to self-determination, with a third Jewish voice added in at the end for ‘balance’. No Palestinian was given an opportunity to respond. Palestinians were portrayed simply as the sum of Zionist-Jewish fears, as if Palestine itself is no more than a discussion between Jews.

RNZ uncritically conveyed three harmful untruths.

1. Both speakers seem to believe that they withhold or grant inalienable rights to other human beings. They are wrong in their arrogance; Palestinians have rights and their right to self-determination in their land has been affirmed by the highest court in our international system. RNZ, which other people would you denigrate by implying that they have less than a full complement of rights?
2. Both speakers conflate Palestine with Hamas, and use that as a pretext to deny Palestinian rights. They are wrong, first because Gaza is not Hamas. To imply otherwise is to discount the civilian protections of two million people against whom Israel has conducted a nightmarish campaign of annihilation for nearly two years. Beyond that, rights are not a reward and they are not conditioned on the niceness of those in government or bearing arms. Israel’s prime minister is wanted for crimes against humanity. His cabinet colleagues are banned from Aotearoa for their filthy politics, and Israel’s military is carrying out genocide. Yet your speakers have not invalidated the rights of Jewish Israelis or rescinded their recognition of Israel.
3. To reduce any people to a single attribute, as these speakers reduce Palestinians to their supposed threat, is the very essence of racism. As our Human Rights Commission published under its former commissioner, to do so with respect to Palestinians builds on our history of regarding Muslims (and those we presume to be Muslim) as threatening.

RNZ, you must stop broadcasting such racialised, dehumanising and factually incorrect views.

Our government has shown that it is intent on erasing Māori history. It acts as if settlers did not disrupt independent, sovereign Māori iwi. So we should not be surprised that yesterday, our government chose to align with Israel’s similar acts of attempted erasure.

But we still need better from our national broadcaster. Why is RNZ failing to broadcast Palestinian voices?

Alternative Jewish Voices

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 27, 2025

Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV) is deeply disappointed by this government’s decision to regard Palestinian rights through the lens of politics yet again. The International Court of Justice has clearly affirmed that Palestinians have a right to self-determination in their land, that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is illegal, and that third-party states are legally obliged to take every step possible to bring that illegal situation to a rapid end.

The states we generally follow in our foreign policy have now recognised the state of Palestine.

The United Nations and the vast majority of human rights organisations and genocide scholars have recognised a genocide being perpetrated in Gaza by its illegal occupier, Israel.

New Zealanders have turned out in our tens of thousands to demand effective action including the recognition of Palestine as a state and the sanctioning of Israel for its crimes.

Rights, law, diplomacy, fact and conscience all point in the same direction: Palestine must be free and self-determining.

Ignoring all that, our government fails to see genocide and this morning it failed to acknowledge Palestinians’ right to statehood. Our Foreign Minister has chosen instead to court the favour of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu; a convicted felon and a man wanted for war crimes. This is not merely a failure of leadership. It is a failure even of followership. It’s a disgrace.

If we want to live in a world of human dignity and rights, if we want change, we have to change this government.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa