Category: Uncategorized

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Global Jews for Palestine , globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

The 600th Day of Genocide is No Time for Words!

In the 86th week of genocide, 24 countries have objected to Israel’s escalating violence. They call for the restoration of real, sufficient, life-saving aid to which Palestinians have a right – not the mercenary coverlet which would enable Netanyahu’s final solution. 

After 62,000 Palestinian deaths, according to a UN press release on 19 May, Israel

is inflicting conditions of life on Palestinians increasingly incompatible with their continued existence in Gaza as a group. Furthermore, the pattern of strikes on Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) tents and residential buildings, as well as on crowded hospitals, indicates that little, if any, care is being taken to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza, while reports of the use of weapons with wide area effects suggest deliberate, indiscriminate attacks. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation is beyond description.

Make no mistake: Our governments have always held the power to end this onslaught. But our states are speaking fine words while they arm and normalise Israel’s crimes. Every day that they delay, Israel kills another 35 children.

Foreign ministers of Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Slovenia, and Spain have expressed grave concern, but not so grave as to discontinue Israel’s participation in ‘security’ programmes under the EU-Israel Cooperation Agreement. And, heaven forbid, not so grave as to eject Israel from the Eurovision song contest.

A joint statement by UK, France, and Canada on 19 May vowed, “We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.” They have stood by for another week since then. Another 629 Gazan Palestinians including nine journalists have been killed. Gazans are obtaining, on average, 67% of the calories they need to survive while the UK, France and Canada continue to stand by. Even in South Africa, Glencore continues to send coal to Israel.

For 19 months these states have done nothing to alter their relationships with Israel, or to impact the normal flows of trade and treatment. They have not enacted their responsibilities as outlined by world courts, nor have they brought the slightest real pressure to bear in defence of two million trapped civilians.

Such steps are not mere tokens. Israel can live without our approval as individuals. However, Israel cannot live in the style to which it is accustomed without European, North American, and other diplomatic indulgence, interactions, and normalcy. Israel’s colonisation and genocide is predicated on impunity, in which Western governments collude. 

Historically, the withdrawal of diplomatic permission has been the brake that ended Israel’s assaults on the Gaza Strip.

In 2015, Israel’s Office of the State Comptroller published its assessment of Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza. Israeli newspapers called the report  “scathing” “scalding… blistering”. Among its criticisms: Israel bombed Gaza for fifty days without consistent objectives to focus and limit its use of violence. Israel’s security cabinet and IDF periodically paused to assess the war’s impacts on Israel’s international standing. Finding that states did not require Israel to stop, the security cabinet opportunistically wrote new objectives and carried on bombing. They did that four times – until they were stopped. 

It is wrong to think that only Trump matters to Israel. Israel is deeply integrated into international – particularly European and American – trade, tourism, and culture. There is every reason to believe that Israel remains susceptible to broad international pressure.

Right now, 81% of Gaza is unilaterally designated as an IDF military zone and / or is under displacement orders. The people of Gaza are being funnelled into killing zones. 

The danger to Gazan Palestinians is desperate and words do not protect them. They are starving and words do not fill their stomachs. Enough words! We must see action – sanctions, penalties, consequences.

Gaza cannot wait.

—–

GLOBAL JEWS FOR PALESTINE

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.

Four days ago, on the 592nd day of Israel’s genocide, Foreign Minister Winston Peters joined 23 countries in objecting to Israel’s escalating violence, and calling for the restoration of humanitarian aid. Peters’ diplomatic step was not accompanied by the usual MFAT media report or published statement, nor has there been any action to substantiate this call.

After 62,000 Palestinian deaths, Peters told RNZ that “we are running out of patience”.

While Peters’ patience runs low, according to a UN press release on19 May, Israel’s escalation:

is inflicting conditions of life on Palestinians increasingly incompatible with their continued existence in Gaza as a group… Furthermore, the pattern of strikes on Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) tents and residential buildings, as well as on crowded hospitals, indicates that little, if any, care is being taken to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza, while reports of the use of weapons with wide area effects suggest deliberate, indiscriminate attacks. Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation is beyond description.

In the 85^th week of Israel’s genocide, while we waited for Peters to act, 629 people were killed including nine journalists – the highest weekly death toll for journalists since this onslaught began. Gaza’s director-general of health reported the assassinations of 12 nurses and paramedics. Israel’s blockade has starved 58 people to death.

Minister Peters, when will your patience actually be spent? For 19 months, while 62,000 Palestinians have died, Aotearoa has done nothing to alter its relationship with Israel or impact the normal flows of trade and treatment. You have not called the ambassador in to hear our objections, let alone put him on a plane or sanction his government. You have not acted as per the world court’s advisory opinion to cease normalising an illegal occupation, nor have you brought the slightest pressure to bear on what the court calls Israel’s plausible genocide.

Peters told RNZ that such “symbolic gestures” are of no help to starving babies. That is fundamentally and historically incorrect. Diplomatic pressure is precisely the brake that has ended Israel’s assaults on the blockaded community of Gaza.

Israel can live without our approval as individuals. However, Israel cannot live in the style to which it is accustomed without European, North American and other diplomatic permission, interactions and normalcy. Israel is built on impunity, and that can be revoked.

In 2015, Israel’s Office of the State Comptroller published its assessment of Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza. Israeli newspapers called the report  “scathing” “scalding… blistering”. Among its criticisms: Israel bombed Gaza for fifty days without consistent objectives to focus and limit its violence. Israel’s security cabinet and IDF periodically paused to assess the war’s impacts on Israel’s international standing. Finding that states did not require Israel to stop, the security cabinet opportunistically wrote new objectives and carried on bombing. They did that four times – until they were stopped.

It is wrong to think that only Trump matters to Israel. Israel is deeply integrated into international – particularly European and American – trade, tourism, and culture. There is every reason to believe that Israel remains susceptible to broad international pressure.

States including Aotearoa have always held the power to make this genocidal onslaught end. This week governments cleared their throats and said some words, but that is not enough.

Right now, 81% of Gaza is unilaterally designated as an IDF military zone for operations and / or is under displacement orders. The people of Gaza are being funneled into killing zones.

The danger to Gazan Palestinians is desperate and words do not protect them. We applaud the government’s step, but we must see the actions which convey seriousness.

Now 596 days have passed and we are in the 86th week of genocide, and still we are waiting. Gaza cannot wait.

Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa New Zealand

Starvation of Gaza a continuation of a decades old plan

By Jeremy Rose

Reading an NBC News report a couple of days ago about a Trump administration plan to relocate 1 million Gazans to Libya reminded me of a conversation between the legendary Warsaw Ghetto leader Marek Edelman and fellow fighter and survivor Simcha Rotem that took place more than quarter of a century ago.

In the conversation, first reported in Haaretz in 2023, Rotem said the Jews who walked into the gas chambers without a fight did so only because they were hungry. 

Edelman disagreed, but Rotem insisted. “Listen, man. Marek, I’m surprised by your attitude. They only went because they were hungry. Even if they’d known what awaited them they would have walked into the gas chambers. You and I would have done the same.” 

Edelman cut him off. “You would never have gone” [to the gas chamber.] Rotem replied, “I’m not so sure. I was never that hungry.” Edelman agreed, saying: “I also wasn’t that hungry,” to which Rotem said, “That’s why you didn’t go.”

The NBC report claims that Israeli officials are aware of the plan and talks have been held with the Libyan leadership about taking in 1 million ethnically cleansed Palestinians. The carrot being offered is the unfreezing of billions of dollars of Libya’s own money seized by the US more than a decade ago.

The Arabic word Sumud – or steadfastness – is synonymous with the Palestinian people. The idea that 1 million Gazans would agree to walk off the 1.4% of historic Palestine that is Gaza is inconceivable. 

But then the idea that my great grandmother and other relatives walked into the gas chambers is equally incomprehensible. But we’ve never been that hungry.

The people of Gaza are. No food has entered Gaza for 76 days. Half a million Gazans are facing starvation and the rest of the population (more than 1.5 million people) are suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the UN. 

Last year, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich was widely condemned when he suggested starving Gaza might be “justified and moral.” 

The lack of outrage and urgency being expressed by world leaders – particularly western leaders – after nearly 11 weeks of Israel actually starving the inhabitants of what retired IDF general Giora Eiland has called a giant concentration camp – is an outrage.

As far as I’m aware there’s been no talk of cutting off diplomatic relations, trade embargos or even cultural boycotts. 

Israel – which last time I looked wasn’t in Europe – just placed second in Eurovision. “I’m happy,” an Israeli friend messaged me, “that my old genocidal homeland (Austria) won and not my current genocidal nation.”

A third generation Israeli, she’s one of a tiny minority protesting the war crimes being committed less than 100km from her apartment. 

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez and Irish president, Michael Higgins, is an honourable exception to the muted criticism being expressed by western leaders.

Sanchez had declared Israel a genocidal state and said Spain won’t do business with such a nation,

And peaking at a national famine commemoration held over the weekend Higgens said the UN Security Council has failed again and again by not dealing with famines and the current “forced starvation of the people of Gaza.” 

He cited UN secretary general António Guterres saying “as aid dries up, the floodgates of horror have re-opened. Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop.”

Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen argued in his 1981 book Poverty and Famines that famines are man-made and not natural disasters.

Unlike Gaza, the famines he wrote about were caused by either callous disregard by the ruling elites for the populations left to starve or the disastrous results of following the whims of an all-powerful leader like chairman Mao.

He argued that a famine had never occurred in a functioning democracy. 

It’s a horrifying fact that a self-described democracy, funded and abetted by the world’s most powerful democracy, has been allowed by the international community to starve two million people with no let-up in its bombing of barely functioning hospitals and killing of more than 2000 Gazans since the ban on food entering the strip was put in place. (Many more will have died due to a lack of medicine, food, and access to clean water.)

After more than two months of denying any food or medicine to enter Gaza Israel is now saying it will allow limited amounts of food in to avoid a full-scale famine.

“Due to the need to expand the fighting, we will introduce a basic amount of food to the residents of Gaza to ensure no famine occurs,” prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained.

“A famine might jeopardise the continuation of Operation Gideon’s Chariots aimed at eliminating Hamas.” 

If 19-months of indiscriminate bombardment, the razing to the ground of whole cities, the displacement of virtually the entire population, and more than 50,000 recorded deaths (the Lancet estimated the true figure is likely to be four times that) hasn’t destroyed Hamas to Israel’s satisfaction it’s hard to conceive of what will.

But accepting that that is the real aim of the ongoing genocide would be naïve.

In the first cabinet meeting following the Six Day War, long before Hamas came into existence, ridding Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants was top of the agenda.

“If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places … we can annex Gaza without a problem,” defence minister Moshe Dayan said.

The population of Gaza was 400,000 at the time.

“We should take them to the East Bank [Jordan] by the scruff of their necks and throw them there,” minister Yosef Sapir said.

Fifty-eight years later the possible destinations may have changed but the aim remains the same. And a shamefully indifferent western world combined with a malnourished and desperate population may be paving the way to a mass expulsion.

If the US, Europe and their allies demanded that Israel stop, the killing would end tomorrow.

Author’s note – As a Palestinian, I write this not to provoke but to expose the dominant myths that have long shaped public understanding of Zionism and the so-called Israeli Palestinian conflict which continues to shield Israel from rightful scrutiny. This article is a call to recognise Zionism for what it is — a settler-colonial movement — and to encourage honest, informed conversations about justice, history, and the urgent need for a truly democratic future in Palestine. My aim is to raise awareness, especially among Western readers, so they can see through the layers of propaganda and challenge the so called two-state solution and join the growing effort — in Palestine and beyond — to speak clearly and truthfully about what has happened, and continues to happen, in that beautiful land.

There are truths that societies often find difficult to confront, and among the most elusive is the recognition of oneself as a coloniser. Throughout history, colonialism has rarely been perceived as such by those who practiced it. It was cloaked in the language of civilizing missions, divine promises, or national rebirths. Yet the patterns repeat: the arrival of settlers, the displacement of indigenous peoples, the claiming of land under foreign notions of entitlement.

Zionism follows this same historical pattern. It is a political movement that sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine—a land already inhabited. This is not a theoretical or ancient dispute, but an ongoing reality. From its earliest stages to its present-day manifestations, Zionism has functioned as a settler-colonial project, relying on the displacement of Palestinians to realise its vision.

Prior to the arrival of Zionist settlers, Palestine was a diverse land with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians living in established communities. The Zionist project, backed by imperial powers, aimed not to integrate into this existing society, but to replace it. This is not a matter of interpretation—it is a matter of documented historical planning and execution.

Zionism’s and Israel’s founding figures, such as Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, understood that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would not occur through peaceful coexistence with the native population. Instead, it would necessitate the removal of that population. Israeli New Historians — including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim — have documented, using Israeli archival sources, that the expulsion of Palestinians was not an unintended consequence of war. Early Zionist leadership foresaw and accepted the necessity of expulsion.

The State of Israel was established through a planned mass ethnic cleansing campaign during which over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, more than 500 villages and towns were destroyed, and dozens of massacres committed. This catastrophic event is known as the Nakba.

 From that day to this day, Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return, in defiance of UN Resolution 194, further confirms Zionism’s intention to destroy the Palestinians as a distinct group of people. Had peace been the goal, Israel would have allowed return, restitution, and reconstruction. Instead, it has only expanded its colonial project.

Today, this settler-colonial reality continues through settlement expansion, military occupation, home demolitions, and land theft. These are not security measures. They are the modern practice of the same project that began over a century ago: to secure maximum land with minimum Palestinians.

This is not antisemitism, and it does not negate the historical suffering that Jews experienced in Europe, which is often used to justify Israel’s crimes. Instead, it is a necessary step toward an honest reckoning with the past and the present, if Palestinians and Israelis are ever to build a shared future together.

The longer the world continues to avoid speaking honestly and bravely about the nature and essence of the actual settler-colonial relations between Israel and the Palestinians, the longer we continue to be participants in sustaining Israel’s criminal apartheid regime – until it reaches its own final solution stage.

The Western powers’ blessing of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was cynically branded as partition. Today, the so-called two-state solution continues the same deceit, dressing up a brutal colonial project as a peace offer.

When you hear “two-state solution”, you should hear “partition” and recognise it for what it is: a form and a tool of colonisation.

Partition was proposed in South Africa to create separate homelands for Black South Africans. It was argued by some in the United States after the Civil War to preserve the Confederacy. French settles in Algeria pushed for it. So too did colonial powers in Vietnam, carving the country into north and south.

Whether it was through wars of liberation or internal revolution, the lesson was the same: partition is unjust, unsustainable and must be called out and rejected.

In a world that is increasingly recognising and reckoning with the facts and impacts of colonialism – from the Americas to Africa and the Pacific – it is time to extend this recognition to Palestine.

The only just and lasting way forward is a shared country. There should be one democratic state for both peoples with equal rights, freedoms and responsibilities for all who live on that land, from the river to the sea.

One country that would open its gates and take in the descendants of its sons and daughters who were recently made refugees – who, after nearly 80 years, still dwell in refugee camps around their beloved homeland like orphans, denied their inalienable right of return to the motherland.

by ‘Goliath’

What now? The blog has been quiet. 2025 has blown the doors off their hinges. Israel has openly, as a matter of stated government policy, starved 2.3 million people for two months while our government has looked quietly on. I have had no words for that, only mounting desperation.

The lives of powerless people outline the reality of surviving genocide. I have worked with Cambodian colleagues who hoarded rotting food in their desks in order to soothe their bodies’ memories of the wracking pain of starvation. Friends who recalled eating grass. Colleagues of stunted growth, colourblind, developmentally impaired . . . Palestinians will be accumulating these lifelong effects now.

Violence is futile, always. It can destroy bodies and things but it cannot address cause, establish co-existence or validate its users. Israel’s violence, too, will do none of those things. How many people will be allowed to die before our government says that out loud? From a population the size of Auckland and Northland, Israel has killed more people than live in Porirua or New Plymouth. New Zealanders in our tens of thousands have demanded intervention in our names.

We shouted for help through bombardment, displacement; the shattering of Gaza’s infrastructure, shelters, universities and hospitals. A century’s work to limit the harms of war has drained away through our fingers like water, as Israel sneered at the very notion of distinguishing civilians from combatants. International courts issued warrants for the arrests of Netanyahu and Galant for crimes of genocide. In vain, we expected our government to review our relations as the courts have directed.

Finally, having devastated every facet of Gazan life while the arms kept flowing in and its diplomatic standing was undisturbed, Israel’s government felt sure enough of its impunity to openly starve the survivors. Israel’s end game is underway.

Israel feels sure of our indifference. And damn it, they have been right. We, Aotearoa, have done officially nothing to disrupt starvation. Not a peep, not a tourist visa withheld or a diplomatic please-explain. That fact has broken my understanding of our governing institutions.

I have tried to work for change within the politics of the institutionally possible. Even through 2024, I continued to speak about the equal rights and dignity of human beings, because I believe it and because I believed that we are governed by people who share the cornerstone value of human life across the differences of our national politics. That cornerstone compels us to intervene when we see genocide.

I was wrong. Now we are governed by people who have not so much as cleared their throats.

So, what now? What comes after f*** you?

Martin Buber, a Jewish anarchist, wrote that protest is a demand that all people should be loved. Buber located his anarchism in the choice of means to the ends. The ends – saving life and providing what people need to live well – do not change.

We protest in front of government buildings and I have given up on the people inside those buildings. But institutions are more than buildings. Mostly, they consist of our habituated, unexamined behaviours. When you break the habits and disintermediate the institutions – when you look through the buildings – you come freshly to our choices.

Then a whole cascade of our anti-life choices comes into focus: military spending over peace, foreign policy from the lemming side of history at the expense of our planet and our place in the Blue Pacific, landlords eating children’s school lunches. One-tenth of us are indebted to social welfare institutions, serving the institutions at the expense of their own daily prospects. Write your own list.

Our deadly forfeit on Gaza is of a piece with all these. Act for Gaza as part of all this. But act. That must be the conclusion of this moment. We do not have the luxury of giving up while hunger is mounting by the hour.

When it feels futile, find the people who are not afraid. A neighbour reminded me as we huffed and puffed up a steep walking path this week, “Empathy is never futile. Hope is resistance now.” This neighbour wakes up each morning and writes an email to an MP. MPs may not reply, but they can count.

Turning up is a performance of imagination now.

Today, Palestinian women and children will bring their pots in a desperate hunt for food. Give them your voice: bang a pot in the ears of our indifferent bureaucrats.

Join the funerals of Palestinians who are being bombed, burned, starved this day. Pay your respects by shaming every last yawning member of our government.

Israel’s policy of starvation is before the World Court right now. Stand in the gallery and dare the judges to do right.

Let the doors blow off their hinges. Look freshly at the choices that weave our politics together. Attach this issue to that one. Then we are not powerless. We are merely out of power and preparing to take it back.

Kia kaha, arohanui – stand strong, in abundant love

Marilyn Garson

This letter was written by a Palestinian New Zealander who has good reason to use a pseudonym. Call him Goliath. Please share his message widely: there is so much that we can do, including those of us who might not stand on the front lines. Take the private, cumulative steps that every New Zealander can take. Our choices count, either as passive permission to continue or as effective pressure to end this nightmare.

LEST WE FORGET TO LEARN

I want to talk about something that I believe is incredibly important—not just for those involved, but for all of us: the situation in Gaza, and why it should matter to us here in New Zealand.

As a nation, we pride ourselves on fairness, on standing up for what’s right. We have taken a stand against apartheid, and against nuclear weapons.

We understand that silence in the face of injustice is complicity.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its broader military aggression are driving instability that reaches far beyond the Middle East. This is not just a regional issue; it’s a global one.

Here’s why you should care:

• It is the ethical and moral thing to do; plain and simple. Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
• Aotearoa is a small remote country, and we rely heavily on imported fuel and consumer goods.
• Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its push for wider war is fuelling global instability.
• Trade routes are under threat, making goods more expensive and travel more difficult.
• The economic impact is already raising food and fuel prices, worsening our cost-of-living crisis.
• Geopolitical tensions create financial instability, which in turn causes inflation, eventually pushing interest rates up. This could make our mortgages more expensive.
• Military escalation risks involving the USA and its allies directly, just as “our allies” dragged us to war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Vietnam, and indeed WW1 before that. All this means that New Zealand could face pressure to support military interventions, risking the lives of young Kiwis in conflicts we did not create. LEST WE FORGET TO LEARN.

I know that we have urgent issues here at home that needs our attention, but living in such a way that contributes to sustaining Israel’s apartheid regime does nothing to solve our domestic problems. In other words, these are two separate issues.  

Silence is not neutrality; it’s complicity. And it will backfire on us. We do not need to “fix” anything overseas, we just need to stop funding oppression.

Here’s what we can [and should] do with almost zero inconvenience to ourselves:

• Boycott – download the No Thanks or Boycat app to make ethical shopping choices.
• Divest – check where your Kiwisaver is invested at Mindful Money and move to an ethical fund.
• Support local & second-hand businesses – Avoid companies profiting from apartheid.
• Learn about BDS – The Palestinian-led movement to hold Israel accountable through economic pressure.
• Stay informed – follow, engage and support PSNA, Justice for Palestine, Alternative Jewish Voices, and others on social media.
• Take political action – Sign petitions, write to MPs, and participate in demonstrations.
• Share this letter with as many people as you can.

We cannot continue to ignore the fact that our lifestyle and the choices we make every day—where we shop, where our investments go, our silence—contribute to maintaining a criminal and dangerous status quo.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for your participation.

Arohanui.

Jewish groups call for resignation or removal of Stephen Rainbow as Chief Human Rights Commissioner

In a recent meeting, Dr Rainbow made Islamophobic comments to Philippa Yasbek, spokesperson for Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: Jews Against Occupation.

“Dr Rainbow asserted that the SIS threat assessment shows that Muslims pose a greater threat to the Jewish community in New Zealand than white supremacists. I was shocked that Dr Rainbow is so prejudiced that he misrepresented the SIS report to say the complete opposite of what is written in the document. The SIS report states that it should not be used to single out any ethnic community as a threat. It also says that white supremacists make up the bulk of violent extremists in Aotearoa,” says Philippa Yasbek.

“The Human Rights Commission is meant to promote human rights and racial equality, as well as encourage harmonious relations between diverse groups. Dr Rainbow’s comments in our meeting were Islamophobic and completely contrary to everything that the Human Rights Commission is supposed to stand for. He is clearly unable to perform the role of Chief Human Rights Commissioner. He should immediately resign or be removed by the Government,” says Philippa Yasbek.

The Prime Minister said in Christchurch on 15 March “Islamophobia – like all forms of hatred – has absolutely no place in New Zealand, and it is our duty to challenge it wherever it appears, whether it’s in words, policies or in the silence that allows prejudice to fester.” “I expect the Government to live up to these words. I have written to Paul Goldsmith, the Minister of Justice, asking for an independent investigation into Dr Rainbow’s fitness for the job. This is the first step to remove him from the role,” says Yasbek.

ENDS 

Text of the letter of complaint to the Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith, by Philippa Yasbek concerning Dr Rainbow, can be assessed here: https://ajv.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/rainbow-complaint-to-pg_redacted.pdf

Links to other stories about this issue:

https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/02-04-2025/chief-human-rights-commissioner-accused-of-islamophobia-by-jewish-groups

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/556990/chief-human-rights-commissioner-apologises-to-muslim-community

https://www.tickaroo.com/e/FPyBiaHkaQ3alXfVhttps://www.1news.co.nz/2025/04/03/stoush-between-human-rights-commissioner-and-jewish-leader/

Israel has broken the ceasefire by massacring Gazan civilians in darkness. Israel turned from talks to utter slaughter, with the reported agreement of US president Trump. A surprise Israel-American attack killed more than 400 Palestinians, entirely without warning and without the slightest chance to save themselves and their children.

Israel’s barbaric choices are beyond human tolerance. For more than two weeks, Israel’s government has again cut off Gaza’s supplies of food and fuel. Hunger and thirst again prevail among civilians, despite their most basic right to humanitarian supplies. This is not warfare; it is genocide. Calamity is escalating in the West Bank. More than 40,000 people have been displaced as Israel destroys civilian communities.

Alongside other Aotearoa organisations, we call for peace and we call yet again for our government to represent our outrage by acting in the name of law and the rights of human beings. Act as the highest UN court has already instructed us to act: stop pretending that this is normal. Expel Israel’s ambassador, cease the trade and reciprocal actions that we enjoy with decent states. Israel has removed itself from the community of decent states.

In the disbelieving silence, we ask each other what we can do. For Aotearoa, this assault revives our anger and our fear that nothing we do will be sufficient.

We at AJV urge our friends and neighbours not to yield to despair. Peace is the work of generations, not days. Find your community among people who are not afraid of that commitment. Take your lead from Palestinians and other Indigenous struggles. Learn from their long vision. If you have never waved a Palestinian flag, join one of the dozens of weekly gatherings. Be uplifted by their company in firm solidarity. This genocide will overwhelm anyone who sits alone with the things we are seeing.

Our Jewish community must urgently confront this new era. Hollow claims of “antisemitism” are by now merely the instruments by which Trump dismantles law and pursues his demons. Jewish institutions which defend Netanyahu’s politics by endless slaughter or imagine that Donald Trump is their protector, are worse than blind. Such Jewish institutions have failed the ethical test of our lifetimes. We need new institutions and we will build them.

Our message is to walk beyond horror into action: into the streets, into government’s inboxes, and into community with those who will see this nightmare through to something better.

Alternative Jewish Voices

An open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon                          

Tēnā koe, Prime Minister,                                                                 Feb 16, 2025

We are Jewish New Zealanders, members of Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation. We understand that your office has scheduled a meeting this week with the NZ Jewish Council (NZJC) and additional ministers. We object in the strongest terms. The NZJC is unelected coterie, forever uncritically aligned with Israel. That is not the Jewish community.

We have documented in depth that the NZJC is not representative. They are not elected. Their constitution outlines a regional structure for indirect democracy, but much of that structure does not seem to exist. They are not accountable to the community. Their president has broadcast her intention to ‘disempower as much as possible’ Jews like Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV) members who ‘raise their voices’.

Several of us attended the Wellington Regional Jewish Council’s last community meeting, in 2021. The meeting roundly disavowed the Jewish Council’s tone and their relentless focus on Israel. Indeed, the NZJC’s constitution does not even mention Israel or Zionism. The Wellington Regional Jewish Council dissolved itself after that meeting, acknowledging that they have no community mandate. They haven’t been heard from since. So much for regional representation.

Through public and private channels, members of the Jewish community have repeatedly asked the NZJC to embrace some positive, rights-based vision of the future. Instead, through Israel’s 15-month ‘plausible genocide’ in Gaza, the NZJC’s militarism has only become more overt. Juliet Moses was to share a platform with IDF’s head of infantry doctrine Yaron Simsolo at an Auckland event in March, until Jewish objections drove Simsolo’s session offsite.

This is not solely an issue for the Jewish community. For years, we have protested that the Jewish Council’s related Community Security Group shares politically slanted information about New Zealanders with Israel’s embassy. They interpret objections to Israel’s occupation as a security threat to the New Zealand Jewish community, and they share their views of individual Palestinian, Muslim and other New Zealanders with a regime accused of genocide against Palestinians. This creates particular risk for Palestinian New Zealanders, should they ever travel to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories to visit family and whānau.

Let us say this clearly: there is nothing essentially Jewish about Zionism. Zionism is a project of colonisation, erasure, apartheid, ethnic cleansing—finally, of genocide. Institutions that wrap their nationalism in our Jewishness are shielding the brutality that we witness daily. In this country, the NZJC has been a leading voice in the campaign to confuse Jewish with Zionist, enabling decades of oppression in our names.

The NZJC does not serve, represent or account to the Jewish community. How many Jewish New Zealanders would choose a representative who, like NZJC president Juliet Moses, retweets defenses of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute?

The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa. We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.

It’s not hard to guess what the NZJC will be asking for: some special “antisemitism regime” that uses our Jewish identity to shield Israel from the directives of the International Court of Justice. They will be asking to divorce the Jewish community from our shared mahi of antiracism and our human rights framework. They will be seeking some exceptional status, suppressing principled protest for Palestinian rights and the criminal accountability of Israeli leaders. That conversation should not take place without representation from the Muslim and Palestinian communities. They are the New Zealanders whose voices are being silenced, and frankly they are the communities who have lost the most to racism in recent years.

Prime Minister, any meeting with the NZJC ought to be recorded in the ministerial diaries as a session with Israel’s ambassadors. And damn it, they will be doing it in our name. We are also the New Zealand Jewish community, and we are so tired of being used this way.

We would like to join your meeting with the NZJC, bringing Jewish diversity into the room. If you will not open this meeting to the real breadth of the Jewish community, then we wish to schedule a second meeting which includes Muslim and Palestinian representation. We work closely with the Muslim and Palestinian communities in Aotearoa, modelling the change that we would like to see in the Middle East.

Hear us out before you act.

Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation

Anyone who cares about human rights should be able to see these decisions for the travesty they are

Marilyn Garson in The Forward, February 5, 2025

After Israel last week enacted its ban on UNRWA, the United Nations agency that serves Palestinian refugees, from operating in Israeli-controlled territory, President Donald Trump on Tuesday halted all U.S. funds for the agency. I consulted for UNRWA’s Gaza director for two and a half years, including during the 2014 bombardment and the following year of what passes in Gaza for reconstruction. I have seen the work that these actions will disrupt; work that is essential to any real recovery from 15 months of furious violence.

The Knesset’s ban and Trump’s withdrawal cap a long and exceptionally rancorous campaign against both UNRWA and Israel’s obligation, in the context of its military occupation, to provide and facilitate humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Jerusalem’s deputy mayor, Aryeh King, called UNRWA “the enemy in our holy city.” Noga Arbell, formerly a Foreign Ministry official, said flatly in the Knesset that “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA.”

The vitriol was on display long before Israel alleged that fewer than 0.01% of UNRWA employees had taken part in attacking Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. UNRWA terminated the employees in question, and Israel has not provided evidence to support any wider charges against the agency — although such sweeping claims have continued to circulate.

While the politics swirl, Trump and Netanyahu’s moves mean, simply, that more civilians in Gaza will die because fewer of their survival needs will be met. The ban also directly contravenes Israel’s obligations in international law.

The International Court of Justice affirmed last summer that Israel is illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza. In January, 2024, it ordered Israel to improve humanitarian access to Gaza amid the war. Yet 26 NGOs reported last week that “Israel’s authorities failed on all counts to improve humanitarian access over the last year” to Palestinians fleeing the Israeli onslaught.

In 1949, the UN established UNRWA with a mandate to serve Palestinians as members of one dispersed nation, until a durable political solution could be found. That mandate recognizes that Palestinians’ suffering has a political cause, and awaits a national political solution. Recent moves are far from the first time that UNRWA’s detractors have tried to erase that mandate.

UNRWA also records intergenerational refugee rights, which detractors say helps to perpetuate violent resistance against Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. Politically, the millions of people who have protested for Palestinian rights across the globe mock any notion that UNRWA is the cement holding their movement together. And the frequent suggestion that Palestinians’ intergenerational rights are exceptional is factually incorrect: Worldwide, the rights of refugees always transfer to their children.

These arguments distract from what UNRWA needs to do. More than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza need to reestablish a standard of basic livability after the unprecedented destruction of the war. UNRWA is essential to meeting their most fundamental rights.

Even more responsibility for Palestinians’ rights will devolve to Israel in UNRWA’s absence. There is no reason to expect that Israel will take that obligation seriously. Some Israeli leaders, envisioning Gaza’s future, have presented proposals for prospective Israeli settlements and beachfront condos. For-profit security contractors are already at work.

And Trump, leader of Israel’s most powerful ally on the world stage, has in his first weeks back in office repeatedly called for Palestinians to be relocated from Gaza to other Arab countries — despite forced relocation being, under every definition, a war crime.

These actions affirm Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ rights, and for its own clearly outlined obligations. In Israel’s hands, there will be no meaningful aid for Palestinians in Gaza — only attempts to turn the strip into an asset for Israel.

Gazans’ need is enormous. Amid the war’s violence, life expectancy in Gaza has been cut nearly in half, according to one Lancet study. The UN’s development program estimates that Gaza’s development has been set back by 75 years. Investigators with the research group Forensic Architecture have charted in Gaza the “near-total destruction of civilian life.”

UNRWA is indispensable to any genuine response. Statements of scale — UNRWA delivers more than half of all Gaza’s aid — fail to explain the agency’s real importance. UNRWA is a blockade specialist with decades of deep neighbourhood knowledge.

For a year following the 2014 war, I saw just how essential that specialized knowledge can be. In my reconstruction role, I spent time compiling the needs of bakers, tailors, and self-employed families whose chickens and rabbits had died of fright from the noise of the bombings. Around me, colleagues measured windows and doors to weatherproof more shelters. UNRWA consolidated exceptionally diverse needs for shelter, water, sanitation, food, fuel, cash, education, medication and health services. It produced quantity surveys for buildings to provide those services, all while navigating a longstanding blockade so intricate that it has been known to make it impossible to import the lead in pencils.

UNRWA was designed to pull this together in one coherent appeal, rather than presenting donors with a hundred competing requests.

Within weeks of the cessation of bombing in 2014, civilians in Gaza began to protest at UNRWA’s gates. They felt that the scale of need in Gaza was already receding in importance in the global eye.

Where else could they go to make that statement? Gaza has no Embassy Row. Israel prevents or controls the entry of international journalists, and most Gazan civilians have never been outside the blockaded strip. Then as now, Palestinians in Gaza sent messages to donor states through UNRWA, and UNRWA delivered its assistance in the name of donor countries.

UNRWA is the face of the world’s obligation to Palestinians. Every pallet of aid says that the world has not forgotten. Having survived an unimaginably destructive war, it is intolerable that the civilians of Gaza might now see the General Assembly let UNRWA’s mandate be torn up.

And although Israel’s ban will be deadliest in Gaza, its implications are much wider. If Israel is permitted to push UNRWA from occupied East Jerusalem, doing so will help cement Israel’s illegal annexation of the area and its religious sites. Just how much provocation will the region tolerate?

Marilyn Garson in The Forward