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

While they drift, Israel obliterates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert, co-founders of AJV

Justine Sachs, co-founder of Dayenu

Sue Berman

(reprinted with minor revisions from May, 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn Garson, with Fred Albert

What is our kaupapa when we call for a ceasefire?

We are anti-Zionist Jews and founders of the organisations Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu. We love our Jewishness. We live it in different ways but we live it here, in Aotearoa. We do not regard ourselves as being in exile from some other place.

When Israel calls itself the Jewish state or takes the mantle of all Jews, it recruits us against our will. Not in our names, we say. Zionism is not our Judaism and Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza is not our war.

Some Zionist voices respond that we must not care about Jews and our protest somehow legitimises antisemitism.

They seem to assume that peace and solutions are not also in the interest of Israelis and of our Diaspora Jewish communities – which are being torn to shreds by Zionism’s attempt to take shelter in the protected space of the Jewish religion.

We don’t legitimise antisemitism. We are especially disgusted by the use of Nazi images and rhetoric around us – notably by Israel’s Defense Minister who calls Hamas ‘worse than the Nazis’ and Palestinians ‘human animals’. We are no less offended by the adoption of Nazi references by some people in Aotearoa. Stop it. It’s shameful, offensive, inaccurate and woefully misguided. Let the Holocaust be the Holocaust. Let this assault on Gaza be described in accurate detail. That is the way to understand both.

Antisemitism is real but if protest creates it, then why are Muslims also experiencing elevated threats? We who protest are not they who threaten. The far Right and other hardened Islamophobic antisemites are doing their best to capitalise on Netanyahu’s bombing by mainstreaming their hatreds. We must refuse their racism.

We protest because the occupation, apartheid, and now this carpet bombing and collective punishment of Gaza are sickening.

Some have defended it by observing that Hamas digs tunnels.

Digging a tunnel does not invalidate the civilian protections of Gazans. Jews used the infrastructure than ran beneath the Warsaw Ghetto. The Vietnamese dug tunnels to resist a larger, more heavily armed invader. America dropped countless tons of bombs, threw away 55,000 mostly young lives, lost the faith of its own youth and still managed to be defeated. Some things you cannot bomb into submission.

We see an overwhelmingly civilian community being strangled and starved. Half of Gaza’s housing units have already been damaged or destroyed. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of Judaism to stand with the oppressed and stand up to the oppressor.

We protest because this is illegal. We are committed to our basic human equality as embodied in the best-we-have-so-far framework of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). No one is allowed to fight as Israel is now fighting.

Surely we as Jews can understand that. Modern instruments like the Geneva Conventions were developed in response to the world that failed our parents and grandparents. International Humanitarian Law is a framework for ‘never again’ if we would only uphold it. Even the UN Secretary-General, chief diplomat of this world, agrees that Israel is committing ‘clear violations’ of these laws in Gaza.

When we protest, we are accused of not speaking, or not speaking enough, about the crimes committed in Israel.

Actually, we are doing just that. We believe that the way to protect civilians is to protect all civilians, and Jews are contained within the category ‘all’. Every life is precious: in Judaism each individual life has the value of one world. 10,000 worlds have been extinguished already. We mourn each loss but we will not have our sadness used to support the devastation of Gaza.

The crimes committed on October 7 are part of Palestinians’ long struggle for their Indigenous rights. We recommend Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.

Zionism taught us the myth that Jews could live a normal – no, a superior – Jewish life next to the illegal wall which hides the oppression of two million people. The myth was shattered when the wall was breached on October 7. We support Palestinians’ struggle and resistance within the laws of war, while we condemn as war crimes the murder and the taking of civilian hostages. All civilians have a right to be safe and removed from combat.

Those events triggered, but do not justify or excuse Israel’s current, catastrophic assault on Gaza. We hold Israeli decision-makers fully responsible. As we chanted in the streets of Wellington and Auckland: Netanyahu, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide. So do Holocaust and genocide scholars like Raz Segal.

Can we not finally admit that violence doesn’t work? Neither the walls around Gaza nor the inhuman tonnage of bombs dropped on it have ever delivered safety, disarmed Hamas, or quenched Palestinians’ pursuit of their rights and their freedom. None of Israel’s billions in American military subsidies, none of its profitably marketed walls and technologies of surveillance, none of its tortured legislative suppressions have put a dent in Palestinian resistance. More bombs than the explosive power of Hiroshima have been dropped on Gaza in this assault, and still Hamas is lobbing rockets.

Israel’s violence is a failed argument. The immiseration of Gaza tries to cover with noise and bloodshed the simple, enduring fact that Israel has no strategy beyond vengeance – and the cycles of vengeance are endless. Violence that claims to deliver safety fails on its own terms. Who can pretend that they have been made safer by withholding food from children or entombing hundreds or thousands of Palestinians beneath their homes?

International pressure is needed to demand and to support genuine change in Israel – Palestine. Change must be grounded in our equal rights and international law.

Cease fire NOW. Assist Gaza NOW. Address these decades of cause and resolve the occupation.

Fred Albert and Marilyn Garson, co-founders Alternative Jewish Voices

Justine Sachs and Avigail Allan, co-founders Dayenu

When a young man picks up a stone to confront an army, it is easy to see that the story belongs to the stone. What makes a young man willing to do such a futile thing? In the 1980s, the story of the First Intefadeh was occupation, dispossession and structural violence. When the rock became a primitive rocket, the story extended to blockade.

Forty years after the First Intefadeh, 17 years into that blockade and five years after the Great March of Return; members of Hamas (and, it seems, some who were not) came through the illegal blockade wall. What followed deteriorated into the slaughter of civilians and the taking of hostages. Those are war crimes which have their precedents in anti-settler wars of liberation such as Phillippeville, Algeria. Those crimes merit condemnation and treatment by an international court.

Israel has taken this pretext to shatter Gaza, bombing a civilian community with mindless, inhuman intensity; without pause and within a total seige that defies any law. Twenty truckloads of supplies for 2.3 million people do not begin to make an impression on Gaza’s deprivation.

The story is now of occupation, apartheid, blockade and genocidal intent.

The devastation of Gaza challenges us to un-learn persistent myths. It requires each of us to stand on the precipice and ask, ‘What do I believe, everything I have ever been told or the world in front of my eyes?’

We do that learning as individuals because our government, media and too many institutions are still perpetuating the myths.

The Auckland War Museum could only see Israeli lives as being lives worth grieving. Its board had to be shown that Palestinians are also civilians. That is the ignorance that brings us to war after war.

The media still routinely shape interviews with Israel’s version of events. Speakers (and they aren’t Palestinian) must slog through Zionism’s rhetorical, ahistorical sand traps: this all began a couple of weeks ago, didn’t it?

put down the myths and instead look at the world in front of your eyes. The outright starvation and destruction of Gaza is not self-defense. It is the bloody, livid, intentional obliteration of an overwhelmingly civilian community. Yet we are constantly required to preface any speech with Israel’s—and only Israel’s—right to self-defense. Has Gaza no right to self-defense from Israel’s endless supply of American weapons? Have West Bankers no right to self-defense against the armed settlers and the IDF soldiers who protect them?

Our media have forfeited their critical faculties. Why are Palestinian voices not telling this story? Why is global solidarity with Gaza not a headline? Why did we hear that Israel denied bombing the Al Ahli Hospital but not the forensic investigations that debunk its claim of innocence? Several investigations are summarised and linked here. And Hamas’s offers to exchange civilians – nothing.

It’s time to ask better questions and take up the obligations of the world that you see.

We have tried asking ‘How can we, Aotearoa, be silent?’ It’s time to face the world wherein silence is our foreign policy. We are being positioned to spend another three years meekly following the old colonial club onto the catastrophic side of history. Hour by hour, Israel and the US are re-defining what power will now be permitted to do to unarmed civilians. That is also at stake here. Palestine has long been the testing ground of weaponry and the front line of that which is politically possible.

If you have condemned the passivity of bystanders at unfolding genocides in Rwanda, in Germany; here it is again. We are living it. Never again is right now.

Do not join the silence, join the protest. Grieve for all of the dead while you stand up and fight like hell to save those who are still alive. Write to your MP. Write to the media. Sign the petitions that demand ceasefire, ongoing and sufficient aid into Gaza, justice and real peace. Throw your weight against the tanks.

And join the march in Wellington October 28: Water, land, life.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa

We wait for a new government to take shape but Gaza’s desperate humanitarian needs cannot wait. Justice for Palestine and Alternative Jewish Voices have written urgently to our MFAT interlocutors, including this call for an accounting of our actions to date:

The New Zealand Government – consistent with its role as the caretaker  government – must act now to provide meaningful humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. This cannot wait.

Every non-urgent question can await the appointment of a new Minister for Foreign Affairs, but a hungry child cannot wait. A hospital whose fuel supplies are virtually exhausted cannot wait. UNRWA’s shelters, packed beyond any imaginable capacity, cannot wait. A traumatised, battered and trapped populace cannot wait.

What is Aotearoa doing to get the crossings opened? Who are we calling?

Which life-saving supplies have we dispatched? Have we ensured that sufficient fuel accompanies every shipment, because no supplies can be distributed without fuel for the delivery trucks?

Our questions are not rhetorical because a Palestinian life is neither rhetoric nor symbol.

Gazans are dying from the world’s inaction and we call for a public accounting of our country’s actions to ensure the basis needs of Gazans are being met, and ultimately to save their lives.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa and Justice for Palestine

October 19, 2023

We stand up with Palestinians because never again is right now.

We stand up because it is right. We unify our religion and our principles when we stand beside the oppressed and those in harm’s way.

Why do we march? We find it important be visible when we make this statement. We who love our Jewishness can help to embody the fact that loving Palestinians in their equal humanity is not anti-Jewish. Supporting Palestinians in pursuit of their political rights is thoroughly in keeping with the activist, social justice vein of Jewishness. As Avraham Joshua Heschel so beautifully said of marching for civil rights for Black Americans in his day; when we march for Palestinian freedom today, we are praying with our feet.

Zionism is nationalism, and the bombardment of Gaza is the violence of ethnic nationalism – not the Jewish religion. We find no Jewish compulsion to meekly nod and turn away.

75 years of normalised oppression, 17 years of an illegal blockade, and the escalating violence driven by Israel’s government led to this – but no provocation excuses Hamas’s abuse and murder of Israeli civilians. The right to armed resistance is not unlimited.

Hamas’s actions may have triggered but do not justify or excuse Israel’s gross and ongoing violations. What we see unfolding in Gaza is not self-defense. It is the overwhelming targeting of defenseless civilians and the structures of their life, the forcible transfer of populations, their collective deprivation of the necessities of life, and the pointless brutalising of 2.3 million people.

Stop it, stop them now. We are disgusted by our government’s indifference, and by the media’s unwillingness to more clearly broadcast the voices of Palestinians and the fact of public solidarity with Gaza.

We seek the freedom of all the captives – those held by Hamas, those Palestinian civilians held in Israeli military jails and every Gazan who is being held captive behind that loathsome wall.

We plead for a ceasefire, for the supply of humanitarian and medical aid into Gaza. Let those who have acted illegally be brought to the international courts.

That is half the job. The other half is justice. Address the cause. Require the change. These catastrophic days reiterate that no one will be safe until Palestinians are free and self-determining.

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert, co-founders of Alternative Jewish Voices

Justine Sachs

Jeremy Rose

Sue Berman

iLan Blumberg

Sarah Cole

David Weinstein

Prue Hyman

AJV statement to the vigil, Waitangi Park, 15/10/23

Ko Marilyn Garson, Ko Fred Albert aku ingoa. We are the founders of Alternative Jewish Voices.

Some of you know me. I lived in Gaza four years. I loved its city streets. They felt like a village because everyone knew everyone. Those velvet sunsets over the port. The hair-tearing stress behind the blockade conditioned people not only for resistance but for the fearless mutual aid that you witness in the streets under fire. In 2014 I was part of the UNRWA emergency shelter team. The hair still jumps up along my arms to remember the screaming after the bombs. I can still see the neighbours race toward the fires and the rubble to dig with their bare hands. That my friends and colleagues should be dying in hunger and darkness and indifference – I can’t bear it.

To every Palestinian who has spent their breath trying to make people understand the reality, the threat, the urgency; the simple fact that history didn’t begin last week, I want to cut through the denial and the dehumanisation to say that I also know this truth. A-J-V is with you for the coming mahi. More and more Jews around the world are unlearning the myths of Zionism and taking up solidarity.

I want to speak to the sheer weight of these days, of pushing through the pain underwater. We have come together today to stretch our hearts wide enough to hold all that pain. We are here to pause, to let our hearts break open. Let the sadness wash over us while we honour all the losses.

When we find each life precious – that is when justice takes root. Justice is the project of spacious, fearless hearts.

While justice is this distant, I search for words that I can wedge like a foot in the door, to prevent my own heart from closing. I learn from Palestinians, from tangata whenua, how to conduct a long, big-hearted liberation. I don’t know how else to live up to the demands that this moment makes on us. And I learn from open-hearted Jewish sources. I want to offer you some words from the rabbinic council of Jewish Voice for Peace:

May the One Who Remembers allow us to hold in one hand 75 years of occupation, dispossession and violence and in the other a future of peace, justice and freedom.

May the One Who Loves Justice fortify us to reinforce our solidarities with all those who share our vision of justice and dignity for all people

May the One Who Knows Hope instill in us the confidence to imagine wholeness, safety, and freedom for all people.

May the One Who is Without Limit expand our sense of what is possible as we reach for justice, freedom and peace for us all.

Olam Chesed Yibanenu – we will build this world with love – we will move this world because we must.

Thank you – Allah yatik al afiah, b’tzedek.

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert,

Wellington peace vigil, October 15 2023

The intentional starvation of civilians, the intentional thirst of civilians, the intentional damage to civilian infrastructure, are war crimes. [Israel’s Minister of Defense] seems to suggest them as war methods. It is There is no context in which such a policy can be legal.

https://t.co/8QEOhZeZU3 — Michael Sfard מיכאל ספרד (@sfardm) October 9, 2023

Israel is carrying out the most intensive bombing ever against Gaza, a trapped and largely civilian community. Israel has cut Gaza’s supply of food, water, fuel and electricity. Netanyahu calls this an ‘all-out war”, but it is simple battery by one of the world’s foremost armed forces against a trapped population. The blockade, the collective punishment of civilians and the targeting of civilian structures amount to a massive, unfolding crime.

Hamas has killed unarmed civilians, taken civilian hostages and is now threatening to execute them if Israel continues to bomb residential buildings without warning. Notwithstanding all the provocations, Hamas’s crimes against civilians dishonour the valid struggle for Palestinian rights.

We are awash with the pain of all these losses and the horror of each fresh report of accumulating deaths and damage. These days are overwhelming us.

All hell has broken loose. Each armed party is now taking out its rage on civilians, and the coming days threaten to be a protracted, depraved denouement. There are sparks flying and there are deaths in the West Bank and southern Lebanon. The US has moved warships closer, surely a statement of the potential of this fire, this time to become a regional conflagration.

Stop it – it is spiralling to everyone’s detriment. As the UN Special Rapporteur has said, the first act must be for this to return to the realm of law and accountability.

But that is not enough: within the whole context of the occupation, any state with a trace of wisdom and humanity must get behind a credible path to solutions based on law and our universal rights to live in safety and self-determination. That is the only way to make this violence the last violence.

For anyone to be safe, Palestinians must be free and civilians must be protected.

Free all the civilians now – those taken hostage, those held in Israeli military jails and those who are trapped behind the blockade walls.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa – New Zealand

This has never been a war of equals. It is war between an occupier and an occupied people. The demonisation of Palestine – Gaza in particular – has distorted many people’s understanding of the human and physical geography of Israel-Palestine. Gazan protections are further, systematically discounted by confusing ‘Gaza’ with ‘Hamas’.

Israel and Gaza both deeply enmesh military and civilian space. The government of Israel has long justified its aggressive force-protection stance by labelling its army as civilians in uniform. One distinct project of the occupation has been to normalise its geography – to civilianise space that is occupied and therefore not Israel’s. Every settlement has been built on occupied land. Towns feign normality within sight of the blockade walls around Gaza.

Within sight: I remember some Sederot residents watching the bombing of Gaza in 2014. Watching it, eating popcorn. Their behaviour made me sick. It is not easy for me to remember that the most debased civilian is still a civilian.

The Israeli performance of permanent, normal, civilian life was always predicated upon an oppressed, abnormal, militarised life right next door. Pictures of Gaza in darkness are backlit by the bright lights of Israeli towns. From Gaza with its perpetual water deprivation one can see the irrigated, verdant fields of Israel. Israel told itself that Palestinians were out of sight, out of mind – but one million Gazan children have been born behind Israel’s blockade wall, and they have been seeing their occupier every day of their lives.

It was always hard to believe that Israel and Gaza coexisted at the same time, in so very nearly the same space – but they do. Because of that proximity, when Hamas fighters broke through the blockade fence they walked not only onto Israeli territory but into towns.

This faux-civilian configuration was always doomed because the occupation must end. Occupation and apartheid have never, will never make anyone safe. I feel such anger at the myth Israelis have told and Zionists have retold, urging people to bring their children to settle these military spaces. Israel built walls to hide the truth, and sent its armed youth to maintain the fiction at the expense of Palestinians.

Living in Gaza with family in Israel, I turned to the universal concepts of human rights to live with my ceaseless fears for my Gazan colleagues and my irrational but persistent, loving concern for my family. I still believe that the world is better off with those agreed standards of universal rights and civilian protections. Where they have been violated, those violations are not ‘just what happens in war’. Provocations and aspirations not withstanding, those acts are wrong.

I do not condemn this uprising. Occupied people have a legal right to armed resistance. No other path has worked, and Palestinian life has become intolerable. It is not a crime to break through that wall – only the fiction of occupation could pretend that it would not happen – but where war has degenerated into the abuse, killing or kidnapping of civilians, those are crimes. So are the bombings of Gazan apartment buildings and the confinement of two million people behind that wretched, loathsome blockade wall.

If human beings are equal and our rights are universal then all the violations are wrong. I call for the protection of Gazan civilians by calling for the protection of all civilians.

Netanyahu has issued a delusional instruction for Gaza to ‘leave now’ before he turns his chosen parts of Gaza to rubble, a deserted island. Leave how, to where?

He has stated it. He has begun. He has cut electricity, fuel and food supplies to a trapped population. I take him at his word. These are massive crimes that can still be prevented.

States cannot stand by while this grows and deteriorates even further. Stop this. Step in, stop it now. Terrible things are unfolding. Please, stop them. Help to wrench this onto a real, credible path toward justice and safety for all who live between the river and the sea.

Marilyn Garson

Fred Albert