Category: Uncategorized

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

Hamas has responded to Israel’s escalating violence with an unprecedented attack. This is not a new tragedy; it is an extension of the same old cycle. We grieve all the losses of this calamity, and we call on our government not to speak the same old words but to finally act.

To call today’s act ‘unprovoked’ is wilful blindness. Choose your timeframe; choose your provocation. Israel is carrying out the longest, now-illegal, now-apartheid occupation in modern history. Gaza has been illegally blockaded for 17 years, confining more than two million mostly civilian human beings in deteriorating conditions, subjecting them to repeated bombardments and ceaseless deprivation. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in 2023 so far, including four the other day. The latest of Israel’s settler-state pogroms in the West Bank took place in Huwara one day before Hamas’s action.

Hamas’s attack is a response to longterm and escalating, immediate violence.

The blockade wall that was breached is an illegal structure. A million children have been born behind that wall; did you expect them to sit quietly? That wall deserves to fall – but we, here in Aotearoa and throughout the world, should have brought it down with diplomatic and economic and legal sanctions long before it came to this.

Now Hamas’s violent resistance has broken through the wall.

Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance, but no one has a right to unlimited violence. There is no honour in attacking civilians in their homes or bombing Gazan apartment buildings. It is a core principle of international humanitarian law that the violations of one armed group do not release another armed group from its constant obligation to uphold the rights of civilians. Armed groups are responsible to the law, to the idea of minimising the harm done in this world.

We who demand the protection of Palestinian civilians can best do that by calling for the protection of all civilians: human rights are either everyone’s rights or they are nothing. If we lose sight of that, the world becomes even more dangerous – and Palestinians have always borne the brunt of that danger.

There is no military solution. Solutions call for political will here, outside Israel / Palestine. The rage and despair accumulated through generations and decades of brutality will not reset. Do not call for the return to the status quo ante because it was intolerable, unjust and illegal.

We, here, need to act on the basis of law and the equal rights of human beings to protection, to justice, to self-determination. We call on our government to initiate, to pick up the phone and lead in mustering international action.

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

Marilyn Garson

Fred Albert

Sue Berman

Justine Sachs

Sunday, 1 October 2023, 8:24 pm
Press Release: Justice for Palestine and Alternative Jewish Voices

Justice for Palestine and Alternative Jewish Voices welcome the Labour Party’s announcement that if elected it will extend diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, by inviting the Head of the General Delegation of Palestine to present their credentials as an Ambassador to New Zealand [1]. In taking this stance New Zealand would be joining the majority of UN member states – 139 of 193 already recognise Palestine as a state. This includes others who, like New Zealand, pride themselves on their independent and principled foreign policy, such as Sweden [2], and Iceland.

Today the Labour Party has joined the growing weight of global opinion that recognising Palestinian statehood is a prerequisite for a just solution in Israel / Palestine, including the two-state solution that New Zealand has long supported. Such a solution is increasingly under threat by the violent expansion of Israeli settlements into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which are illegal at international law [3].

Responding to Israel’s increasingly flagrant violations of international law and the basic human rights of Palestinians, many and diverse voices are pushing for diplomatic recognition of

Palestine and accountability for Israel, in order to level the ground for any negotiations towards peace. This includes, among many others, former Israeli ambassador and director general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alon Liel,[4] Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign Minister [5], and the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who described “the recognition of the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to determine their political, social and economic status and develop as a people, free from foreign occupation, rule and exploitation” as the “ critical issue” in addressing the situation in Palestine [6].

Marilyn Garson of Alternative Jewish Voices added, “Remember that Palestine predates Israel. We welcome Labour’s commitment to let Palestine speak with its own diplomatic voice about its own future. That’s a prerequisite for any solution grounded in the rights of all who live between the river and the sea.”

Justice for Palestine spokesperson, Neil Ballantyne, said “it’s great to see the Labour Party joining the Green Party in making a commitment to recognise Palestine if elected. In doing so they are continuing Aotearoa New Zealand’s tradition of taking independent and principled stances on foreign policy issues from nuclear free to standing up against apartheid.”

Neil continued “We have faith that just as ordinary New Zealanders were not prepared to stand by in silence while the South African government maintained an apartheid regime, we will not be silent while Palestinians suffer similar indignities and will reward those politicians who are taking this courageous stance.” [7]

Notes:

[1] See p. 64 – 65: labour_manifesto_2023.pdf (documentcloud.org)

[2] After recognising Palestine in 2014, the Swedish government now calls on other states to recognise Palestine arguing that the two-state solutions requires “mutual recognition and a desire for peaceful coexistence”: Badarin, E. (2020). States recognition in foreign policy: The case of Sweden’s recognition of Palestine. Foreign Policy Analysis, 16(1), 78–97.

https://doi.org/10.1093/fpa/ory019

[3] As recognised in the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 sponsored by New Zealand under the leadership of the National Government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Murray McCully.

[4] Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador and director general of their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recently wrote in support of the need to recognise Palestine now: “The Benjamin Netanyahu-led ultranationalist government is racing towards annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), a manoeuvre which will not only end any chance of a two-state outcome, but also permanently entrench the daily humanitarian and anti-democratic nightmare that the Israeli occupation has become.”

[5] Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign Minister, recently dismissed the argument that recognition would destroy the peace process, saying the argument has no credibility “in the face of Israel’s breathtaking intransigence, being taken to ever more alarming new heights by the Netanyahu government. If the two-state solution is in fact dead, it is the Israeli settlement program that has killed it.”

[6] UN General Assembly Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese (A/77/356) (21 September 2022), at para 11. Available at: https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A.77.356_210922.pdf

[7] Numerous major international human rights organisations have reported that Israel is an apartheid regime, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian Territories. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines “apartheid”, the systematic oppression of one racial group of persons over another, as a crime against humanity. Daily life for Palestinians living under the Israeli apartheid regime is unbearable and inhumane.

Background on Justice for Palestine, Alternative Jewish Voices and the campaign to recognise Palestinian statehood

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

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

Justice for Palestine presented a petition to Parliament earlier this year calling on the Parliament to pass a motion recognising the State of Palestine and urge the Government to formally recognise the State of Palestine. Justice for Palestine’s website sets out in more detail legal, political and moral reasons for recognising Palestine.