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(Remarks to Student Justice for Palestine teach-in at Vic Uni, Nakba Day 2024)

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa

Ko Hūrae te whakapaparanga mai

I tipu ake ahau i Canada i te whenua o Mi’kmaq 

Ināianei, e noho ana ahau i Te Whanganui-a-Tara

I whakakaupapa māua ko Fred Albert i te rōpū Alternative Jewish Voices

Ko Marilyn Garson taku ingoa

Thank you for inviting me to speak, and to every Palestinian person here, I wish some kind of safety for your family. I wish you quiet, peace and real justice soon, in our time.

What does Nakba mean to anti-Zionist Aotearoa Jews like me?

75 years ago, some of my antecedents took the homes of Palestinians. Some of my antecedents were seeking safety from genocide while others were capitalising on it. But Jewish suffering is not resolved by replicating the exclusion, violence, dispossession, erasure.

Nakba Day reminds me that my history was and is still used to rationalise Palestinian Nakba. Nakba is a day for storytelling and I listen without defensiveness while Palestinians tell me what that has meant and continues to mean.

Nakba is a day to feel the reverberations of the intergenerational trauma that we carry in our bodies leading to and from 1948. Also we feel the trauma dug into the land itself when that land is colonised, stolen, soaked in Indigenous blood and sadness. Nakba is also a day to understand Aotearoa and our long project of decolonisation.

As an anti-Zionist Jew, I (and my co-founder Fred Albert) also regard the violent creation of Israel as a self-inflicted disaster. It repudiates many of our texts and the intentions of the prophets. Zionism reduced our religious imagination to a plot of land and reduced our eternal vision to an exploitative project of power over others. It traded our thousands of years of study and worship for what, a culture like the other cultures. Nakba is the day when some of our antecedents gave religion away to become landlords like all the other landlords. And it was a terrible milestone on the road to doing genocide.

Nakba is our day to remember that disavowing is not enough. We are still implicated in Israel’s structures of power and violence. I am involved, obligated in the present tense. I was raised on the story and its benefits are offered to me. Israel writes for me a so-called law of return while Palestinians have not realised their UN-mandated right to return.

When I lived in Gaza, I did not see enmity in my colleagues’ eyes. I saw the future. I saw them crafting explanations for the bombardments to prevent their small children from living lives blighted by hatred. What on earth can Gazan parents say today? I saw all the anger I would feel at the Zionist project which classified my colleagues’ lives ethnically, deprived their children and separated their families, stunted and shortened their lives. What must they feel today? So Nakba is a day to feel all my discomfort as I listen and continue to unwrap the training that enlisted me in the project of their deprivation.

This year, this Nakba Day we are all Palestinian and we are all holding back our despair. As a Jew I belong in those streets, those canyons of rubble. I walk with the homeless, I weep with the bereaved and I wish I could comfort every motherless child. If I hope to live in peace and justice with Palestine tomorrow, I must walk each step with Palestinians to get there.

Nakba is being done again, still. This Nakba is a day for Jews of conscience to recommit to return, restoration, reparation and justice.

Nakba is just one day. Together we all commit to the daily, steady work of making this stop and sowing the seeds of real justice. If this is your first act of solidarity, please don’t let it be your last.

B’Tzedek

Marilyn Garson for Alternative Jewish Voices of Atoearoa

May 15, 2024

Israel’s War on Journalism

By Jeremy Rose

Ahmed Alnaoug appearing in one of numerous interviews following the massacre of 21 of his family members in Gaza on 21 October last year.

Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq’s first published story dealt with what he described as Israel’s murder of his brother Ayman in 2014.

The IDF would call it self-defence or mowing the lawn – a common phrase in Israel for the periodic attacks on Gaza aimed at depleting Hamas’s military capacity.

The essay – published on the We Are Not Numbers website –  describes Ayman coming home, in the early 2000s, after five of his primary school mates had been killed by Israeli soldiers, and another 12 injured while playing.

By the time Israel invaded Gaza in what it dubbed Operation Cast Lead, in 2008, Ayman was in secondary school and once again he saw friends being killed.

Operation Cast Lead left 1400 Palestinians dead, 46,000 homes destroyed and more than 100,000 homeless. Thirteen Israeli soldiers died during the invasion. 

The blockade that followed the war left Ayman and Ahmed’s disabled, taxi driver father unemployed as the supply of petrol dried up. As the eldest son Ayman took on the role of breadwinner.

Then in 2012 Israel again “mowed the lawn” in Operation Pillar of Defence – and once again hundreds were killed and thousands left homeless.

“When this war was over, Ayman was not the same,” Ahmed wrote.

His older brother joined Hamas’ armed resistance force – the Al Qassam Brigades.

It was a decision that would cost him his life. In 2014  Israel yet again invaded Gaza and Ayman was killed by a missile fired from an F16 as he as he made his way to battle the IDF

The world is divided on what to call the likes of Ayman. To Palestinians he’s a martyr, a freedom fighter, and a patriot – to Israelis  he’s a terrorist.

Some will praise him for his decision to join the armed struggle. Others will condemn him.

Ahmed chose another form of resistance: journalism.

In 2014 he helped set up We Are Not Numbers, a website that provides a platform for young Gazans to share their stories, in English, with the outside world.

Then in 2019 he teamed up with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham to bring the stories to an Israeli audience in Hebrew in a project called We Beyond the Fence.                 

On October 21 of last year Israel dropped a bomb on Ahmed’s family home killing 21 members of his family – including 14 of his nieces and nephews all under the age of 13.

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The house was in the south of Gaza in an area Israel had declared a safe zone.

Ahmed heard of the massacre in the UK where’s he’s on scholarship.

He’s been tirelessly telling people the stories behind the numbers ever since.

But as we enter to seventh month of what leading Holocaust scholar, Hebrew University professor, Amos Goldberg, last week, declared to be a genocide, the numbers tell other important and horrific stories.

The media has been updating the death count daily  – currently it’s over 34,000 the vast majority women, children and civilian men – but there are other numbers that are less well known.

Around 100 journalists – 10% of Gaza’s journalists have been killed to date. It’s by far the most deadly war for journalist in the 21^st Century.

The reason I’ve fudged the numbers is twofold: firstly whatever figure I use is likely to be out of date by the time this story goes to print; and, secondly there’s a discrepancy between the figures given by the Committee to Protect Journalists which reports that 92 Palestinian, three Lebanese and two Israeli journalists have died since the  Hamas’ October 7 attack and the Gaza media office which claims more than 140 journalists have been killed

The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate reports that 84 media offices have been bombed – including the We Are Not Numbers offices.

Prof. Goldberg includes the targeting of journalists in his carefully argued case for declaring the assault of Gaza to be genocidal.

“What is happening in Gaza is genocide because the level and pace of indiscriminate killing, destruction, mass expulsions, displacement, famine, executions, the wiping out of cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanisation of the Palestinians — create an overall picture of genocide, of a deliberate conscious crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza.”

Reporters Without Borders filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court on October 31 last year, asking for an investigation into the targeting of journalists by Israel which it believes constitutes war crimes.

And in February a group of UN experts, including four special rapporteurs,  issued a statement calling on the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court  to look into the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza.

“We have received disturbing reports that, despite being clearly identifiable in jackets and helmets marked “press” or travelling in well-marked press vehicles, journalists have come under attack, which would seem to indicate that the killings, injury, and detention are a deliberate strategy by Israeli forces to obstruct the media and silence critical reporting,” a spokesperson wrote.

Ahmed Alnaouq is far from alone among Gaza’s journalists in having multiple family members murdered. Last week he tweeted: “Israel killed my sister and all her children while sheltering in my home in October. Today they have bombed her husband’s home. This home sheltered over 70 people. 7 flats.”

Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief Wael Al Dahdour – probably Gaza’s best known journalist – lost his wife, son, daughter and grandchild, when an Israeli airstrike hit their home in the Nuseirat refugee camp on 25 October last year.

On 7 January his son, Hamza Al Dahdouh, a journalist, was killed by an Israeli airstrike while travelling in a car, marked press,  along with a colleague. 

It’s an open question whether Israel is targeting not just journalists but their families.

What is certain is that Israel has a terrifyingly high threshold for the number of civilian deaths resulting from its targeted killing.

Yuval Abraham – who worked with Ahmed on the We Beyond the Fence project – published an investigation on the progressive  +972 website which revealed an AI programme called Lavender that identified 37,000 suspected militants in the first weeks of the war.

The article, based on interviews with six IDF intelligence officers, claimed Israel systematically targeted those on the kill list while they were home usually at night.

Another automated system called Where’s Daddy? was developed to identify when suspected militants arrived home.

Two of those interviewed claimed that in the early weeks of the war it was permissible for 15 to 20 civilians to be killed for every militant targeted.

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement in December saying it was alarmed by journalists in Gaza reporting death threats and subsequently their family members being killed.

“The killing of the family members of journalists in Gaza is making it almost impossible for the journalists to continue reporting, as the risk now extends beyond them also to include their beloved ones,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour.

Last Sunday Israel closed Al Jazeera’s office in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating broadcast equipment and taking the channel off air.

The move comes almost exactly two years after an IDF soldier shot and killed the American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank for Al Jazeera.

At first, Israel claimed Abu Akleh, who was wearing a blue vest identifying her as media, has been shot by a Palestinian militant. When that story became untenable, due to video evidence, the IDF launched its own investigation which declared there was a high probability that the Al Jazeera journalist had been accidentally hit by an IDF bullet and there would no further criminal investigation.

Israel’s targeting of journalists and their families, the closure of Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem office, the imprisonment and alleged torture of journalists, and the refusal to let foreign journalists enter Gaza amounts to a war on journalism.

Ahmed Alnaouq remains committed to the craft of journalism but he’s critical of much of the mainstream coverage of Israel’s assault of Gaza.

“The Western media played a pivotal role in the murder of 21 members of my family, including my parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews,” he tweeted on X.

“Yes, Israel executed the attack and the US supplied the weaponry, BUT the Western media provided cover. I hold every propagandist for Israel and every Western journalist who repeated the narrative of “Israel’s right to self-defense” against the civilian population of Gaza, including children and women, accountable. The era of diplomacy is past. It’s time to call these terrorists by their true name: enablers of genocide. I refuse to tolerate Israeli propaganda any longer. I refuse to be intimidated any longer, and neither should anyone else.”

With leading Holocaust scholars like Amos Goldberg declaring Israel guilty of genocide it’s time for media outlets to ask themselves whether Ahmed Alnaouq has a point.

Jeremy Rose is a founding member of Alternative Jewish Voices

Would you like to live in a country that looks like Israel, segmented by endless kilometres of walls, watchtowers, cameras and checkpoints to divide its citizens; with an army as its chief unifying institution and military-grade weapons carried by its dominant ethnicity in the streets; ghettoes and mass graves at its edges?

Would you like to live in a democracy like Israel, preventing half of those over whom it wields power from voting while the fascists compete with fundamentalists for the sizeable psychopath vote?

Would you like to make your fortune in a securitised economy like Israel’s, marketing the technologies of population surveillance, separation and containment; testing its weapons on trapped human beings?

Would you like the power to signal like Israel, to invent allegations while knowing that you won’t be asked for evidence? Such signals they send – Hamas headquarters, UNRWA neutrality, minimise civilian casualties – while the world’s most moral army rolls over human rights and civilian protection.

Would you like to live in a world that operates like Israel, a world of states that shop for their police and call the preservation of apartheid self-defence – all with one eye on their own inconvenient populations and the other eye on thoses hordes at the doorstep?

We already inhabit a world that complicit. Glissando, Zionism has slid us from being consumers of Jewish supremacy to enablers of genocide. If you doubt that, try reversing the ethnic roles in the news.

Imagine reading that Jewish-Israeli babies were deprived of oxygen for their incubators or Jewish-Israeli children were deprived of anaesthetics for amputations, or that the bodies of Jewish doctors with bound hands were being lifted from mass graves still wearing their scrubs. Imagine that Palestinians were at the same time circulating offers to purchase Israel’s beachfront property now that the houses had all been blown up. Imagine your preferred media outlet uncritically rebroadcasting statements that Jews are less than human, or that calling Jews animals insults animals, or that there are no innocent Jews. Would you sit quietly while two million Jews were penned up behind a wall and deprived of food for six months?

This onslaught is unthinkable unless the objects of the violence are Palestinian. That measures the success of Zionism’s radical dehumanisation. Even as Israel’s most loathsome settler thugs entered Cabinet, our own government acknowledged only a deterioration; not a disaster.

Genocide is always this numbing gradation of violence. Glissando – we are arming, trading, normalising; we are invested in genocide.

Netanyahu has spent years positioning Israel at the brazen, profitable edge of a White supremacist, anti-democratic, securitised new regime of power. Zionism was wrapped up in Jewishness to give it cover. Now, in Gaza we see its real outlines.

We are concerned for our Jewish community. Netanyahu and his cohort have seeded confusion about the boundaries of Judaism, Zionism, and antisemitism. They have made all Jews vulnerable to the anger provoked by Israel’s actions. Damn them. Some Jews fear their friends because they have been told so often that protest stems from hatred and constitutes a local threat. They are wrong.

The manipulation of antisemitism is not a reason to stand back and let the slaughter continue. It is a reason to keep educating while we try together to save lives. Genocide is continuing unchecked, and we must make that stop.

Just look at the movement spreading on campuses and in Aotearoa: Jews arm in arm with Palestinians, tangata whenua, labour unions, human rights activists, health workers and angry young people. Do we evince fear of the people next to us? No, we protest because we fear a world that acts like Israel: scholasticide, econocide, domicide, genocide.

What do we want? Ceasefire. Stop doing business as usual with a genocidal regime.

When do we want it? Right now. Today.

Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert

To our Palestinian friends and our allies in the mahi tahi,

This night is not like all the other nights. We gather for our Passover meals while your people are being starved in our names. How can we speak while this unthinkable crime is ongoing?

The holiday of Passover commemorates Jewish liberation. It is not enough that we were freed from oppression. We are feeling our rage and finding our place to act against the oppression of any people by another.

We are instructed to retell the story of our liberation, and we will.

75 years ago, some of our antecedents took the homes of yours. Some were seeking shelter from a cataclysm while others were capitalising on it. We regard every survivor with compassion. The echoes of their traumas live on within both of our peoples.

Our cataclysm was exploited to justify your Nakba. We listen without defensiveness while you tell us what that has meant. Until we address that with restoration, reparation and return, your catastrophe will live in the present tense.

Since then a bitter, violent disparity of power and consequence has prevailed from the river to the sea. We call for our people to surrender their power, to elevate and centre your justice.

The Zionist project of displacement and erasure is finding its fullest expression this year. We see desolation, starvation and terror inflicted upon your families in our names. Our tears and our horror are boundless, but tears are no help without actions. We will not rest until every person who is cold and hungry finds food, safety, home and comfort. Even then, we will not turn away until the quiet of ceasefire is followed by the real peace of justice. That will be the hour of your and our liberation.

What does it mean to be pro-Jewish anti-Zionist this year? It means directing our outrage into action: being seen and heard in solidarity, protesting the brutality and the appropriation of our good name. To be pro-Jewish means digging beneath the travesty of Zionism, unearthing thousands of years of Jewishness and bringing that into the light.

It means establishing a Jewish community where all are welcome and no one is harmed – an Aotearoa Tangata Tiriti Jewish community that is part of the long work of liberation. We are not safe while others are targeted; we are not valued by devaluing others.

Trauma is resolved with acceptance and belonging. May we find resolution together in time.

That is the lesson we take from our Passover festival of liberation: we reject the oppression of one people by another.

Soon, in our time, may we be all be free.

Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu

Why did a German bank close the Jewish Voice account?

Media release: March 28, 2024

Jewish groups from 14 countries are outraged that the Berliner Sparkasse bank has frozen the account of Jüdische Stimme (Jewish Voice) until the organisation submits documents including the full names and addresses of its members.

‘The Berliner Sparkasse is a public corporation, operating in a state whose citizens are free to associate and engage in politics. Their request is an act of intimidation,’ says Wieland Hoban, chairman of Jüdische Stimme. ‘Jüdische Stimme / Jewish Voice is assisting the organisers of the Palestine Congress, which will take place in Berlin in mid-April. The closer the congress gets, the more intense the persecution becomes; for weeks, there has been shrill defamation from the tabloid media and local politicians, such as describing it as a “hate summit” for which “thousands of anti-Semites” will be coming to Berlin. Because the journalists can’t write anything factual about it, they try to delegitimise the congress through guilt by association.’

In country after country, Palestinians, Jews and others who protest Israel’s devastation of Gaza are being called antisemitic for upholding Palestinians’ human and collective rights.

The International Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine (IJCJP) is a grouping of Jewish organisations in 14 countries. Jüdische Stimme is a founding member. IJCJP members educate their communities to distinguish real antisemitism from its weaponisation to shield Israel from protest and accountability. The political use of antisemitism is enabled by a definition which conflates anti-Zionism and the hatred of Jews or Judaism. One of the definition’s drafters has testified to US Congress that it is being used with ‘“the subtlety of a mallet” to stigmatise and stifle criticism of Israel.’

We, the member groups of the IJCJP, are appalled that German Jews  are being called antisemitic for upholding the rights and laws on which the world agreed after the Holocaust, so as to prevent further genocide. Judische Stimme’s membership includes the descendants of Holocaust survivors determined to be personally faithful to their commitment ‘never again’.

Right now, Israel stands charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. For a German bank to confiscate Jewish funds from a mission to save lives is a new low in the long effort to silence Palestinian, anti-Zionist and pro-human rights voices.

It is unthinkable that German banks should presume to define the terms of Jewish involvement in public life. Restore the account and think again: which side of history is Germany on this time?

Contact: Donna Nevel, globaljewishcollective@gmail.com

END

News item: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/512474/prime-minister-s-auckland-office-vandalised-for-third-time-in-six-months

Personally I do not support vandalism or use of Nazi symbolism as a form of protest.I support of the Grant the Visas campaign to advocate to Government to rapidly facilitate the granting of visas to relatives of Palestinians living in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This is an urgent humanitarian issue and is the least that our Government can do.

However I want to distance myself from the individuals who spray painted on the Prime Minister’s office with the words ‘Grant the Visas’ – I do not support vandalism as a form of protest.

Even more abhorrent is the defacing of a picture of the Prime Minister with a mustache and hair in reference to Adolf Hitler.

There is always a risk that in supporting a cause that some individual or faction will behave or act in a way that is against my values and that may bring the cause into disrepute. This is one reason that makes me uncomfortable and keeps me from attending rallies supporting freedom for Palestinians. I fear someone more extreme being involved and by attending I can be accused of supporting those actions.

While there are a wide range of forms of legitimate protest, I strongly reject the use of vandalism and Nazi symbolism.

David Weinstein

We, Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu, renew our call for our government to recognise the State of Palestine. Do it now, today.

Recognition is integral to arresting and responding to the genocidal violence we are watching on our screens.

We are sick of seeing states (led by the US and followed by Aotearoa among others) respond to this horror with apolitical tokens of aid. Governments including ours are (under-)reacting to a manufactured humanitarian cataclysm without a squeak about its structural cause or solution. Over and over.

• America is air-dropping 38,000 meals into Gaza. If all goes very well, one-tenth of the Gazans who are starving in the north might have one meal – and we hope it does go very well. But why is Biden not objecting to Israel’s obstruction of an aid shipment at its port of Ashdod – a shipment that would feed 1.1 million people for a month? Neither the US nor New Zealand is speaking about the cause of this need: Israel is using starvation as a tool of war, and that is a war crime.
• West Bank settlers (whose settlements NZ acknowledge as illegal) are plundering and ethnically clearing villages. Over 400 West Bankers have been killed and 7000 detained since October 7. NZ has told a dozen settlers that they can’t come to Queenstown in response. The Israeli occupation forces that accompany settlers on their crime sprees and detain Palestinians are untouched. NZ has not acted or even spoken about the cause of these casualties: illegal settlement by fanatics who wield unprecedented power in Israel’s coalition government.
• 30,400 Gazans have been killed and NZ would like a ceasefire, please, for humanitarian reasons (which are desperately real and urgent). Our government has not acted against the makers of this repugnant strategy and it has not spoken about the cause of this violence: Palestinians have a right to self-determination and Israel has obstructed it for 75 years.

In a world of such diplomatic acquiescence, who speaks for Palestine? Who envisions the new Gaza and protects West Bankers as parts of a single future, who will see to Palestine’s interests in its own resources (from the water under its ground to the natural gas off its shores)? Who determines the shape and administration of Palestine? These are not decisions for Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu to make. Nor has their agent, the Palestine Authority, any national mandate.

NZ fails to imagine a national Palestinian voice. NZ is among the minority of countries that do not recognise the State of Palestine and grant Palestinians their own voice as of right in all such conversations.

There is a Palestine-shaped hole in Aotearoa’s response to this season of genocidal violence. Statehood is a sine qua non of survival in this state-led world. In a world of states, stateless people are unprotected and their interests do not figure except as it suits the transactional whims of states.

Palestine – in particular Gaza – has been a little rip in the fabric of states for decades. This is a bitter irony that every Jew and every supporter of Israel should be made to confront and grapple with: the vulnerability of statelessness was also the problem statement of Zionism.

Zionism responded to the threatened status of Jews who had been denied the rights and protection of their states. In a world organised by states in the interests of state power, anything could be done to a stateless, dehumanised and unprotected people. Jews knew that statelessness was a precursor of violent erasure yet, watching Palestinians endure the same vulnerability, too many Jews have turned amnesiac.

We write while genocide is being done and watched. It is the lowest and the defining moment of this issue in our lifetimes. Parts of our understanding of the world have failed and broken because we did not believe that so many institutions and governments would stand back and watch suffering like this.

Broken or not, this catastrophe will need to be addressed in a world of states’ interests and neighbours’ indifference. Palestinians have every right to find their own national voice and call on Aotearoa as an equal collective with equal rights to defense, resource sovereignty and territorial integrity as per UN resolutions. Recognition says clearly that the IDF, West Bank settlers and those displacing families in Occupied East Jerusalem are operating on Palestinian land. Recognition rejects Israel’s efforts to invalidate UN resolutions with violent facts on the ground.

We are tired of hearing that there is nothing Aotearoa can do about justice from this distance. Recognition is the thing our government can do, and doing it will bring Aotearoa in line with the majority of the world’s states.

So we are renewing our call for the government of Aotearoa to recognise its fellow State of Palestine. Now, today. We call on Foreign Minister Peters to put some actions in place to support the call for a ceasefire. Send Israel’s ambassador home until normalcy on the ground permits normal diplomatic relations.

It’s time to name the nation that will not be erased, and elevate its voice to the centre of our concern: the State of Palestine.

Alternative Jewish Voices ~ Dayenu

Friends, please take a moment to meet Ilan, a member of AJV – Dayenu, and hear his testimony about serving in the IDF.

We have deep respect for him for speaking up.

[The tallis is a fringed Jewish prayer shawl, usually woven from silk, wool or linen. Not every Jew chooses to wear a tallis and Jewishness is plural. We respect the choices of our fellow Jews, be they religious or secular.]

My father kept his silk tallis in its velvet bag, in a drawer of the telephone table in our hallway. He would pick it up on his way out the back door whenever the synagogue was short of its quorum for prayer. He would not have dreamed of taking the tallis out of its bag before he arrived at the sanctuary doors.

I have never worn my tallis in public either, because prayer is such a private and separate event.

However, throughout Israel’s campaign to shatter Gaza, the tallis has been on display as never before. Rabbis have blocked bridges, railway stations and the Congressional rotunda. They have been arrested while wearing their tallis and reciting prayers. They have set the symbols of Jewishness against the powers that fund and permit genocide.

Now those spiritual leaders are rabbis to us all. Bring it, they are urging us. Bring everything we have and place it visibly in the service of justice and peace. Throw all of our Jewishness against the ethno-nationalism that props up the walls around Gaza and hardens the walls around too many hearts.

Last weekend Dayenu and Alternative Jewish Voices members did just that. We welcomed and farewelled the Sabbath at Israel’s consular offices in Auckland and Wellington. We prayed for an end to this genocidal madness.

We stepped from pedestrian into sacred space by preparing to put on the tallis. We said a short reflection and then the prayer for being wrapped in this deeply personal garment. The prayer is whispered within the tent of the tallis itself. Then, solemn and a bit self-conscious, we settled the prayer shawls on our shoulders and looked out at the friends gathered around us. We conducted short services of prayer and song on the sidewalk.

In Wellington, I asked the group to think of my colleague’s grandchild, just born in a tent in Rafah. Her family named her Salaam – peace. We sang so that Salaam might hear Jewish voices raised for peace, for justice, for a life with her – not at her expense.

In our small groups on the street, we wore the tallis to bring Jewishness more fully to our solidarity. Jewish solidarity with Palestinians requires us to confront our responsibility as well as our own trauma – and after all that it requires us to choose the risks of peace rather than the risks of war.

Jewish solidarity is thus not an act of self-abasement but of a fuller participation in our world. We have been raised in the harms of Zionism and we can be agents of change. Our responsibility is not self-hating, it is adult and repairing.

People are familiar with Hillel’s 2000-year-old injunction, If I am only for me, then who am I? Jewish solidarity replies by being for each other.

Relational Jewish philosophy or theologies like Martin Buber’s say that Gd is present in the space between fully present equals. We recently read a Torah portion in which Gd situates Gd’s voice in the space between two winged carvings.

Solidarity happens in that space between us when we stand together, look straight at each other and imagine in each others’ eyes a land beyond war – from the river to the sea.

In both Auckland and Wellington, our prayer services were joined by non-Jews. Thank you: it felt so good to be surrounded by friends. Being Jewish in public while the White Right is mainstreaming anti-semitism is not risk-free, but as with any form of racism or threat, we face it together. We face it knowing that others will stand with us because we stand with them.

I wear my tallis to say privately hineini – ­I am here. I wore it in public to append the fuller meaning, hineini – and I am ready. I am ready to enact a Judaism beyond Zionism in a world where we thrive in our mutual bonds.

Marilyn Garson

Media Release – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Thursday, 15 February 2024, 15:00

Rights groups call for stronger government action to prevent slaughter in Rafah

“What’s happening in Rafah is of a different order of magnitude, even in the context of Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, and so our response needs to be too” – say human rights groups, Alternative Jewish Voices – Dayenu and Justice for Palestine.

Israel has begun bombing Rafah, as part of a planned full-scale ground offensive on the city. About 1.4 million of the 2.3 million people who live in Gaza are currently sheltering in Rafah in dire conditions, but with nowhere else safe to go.

Since Israel began its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, Israel has killed more than 28,500 people, mostly women and children; much of the civilian infrastructure has been destroyed and more than 80 percent of the population has been displaced. Many of the displaced civilians have sought refuge in Rafah.

Despite those stark facts, it is against that background that the head of UN aid Martin Griffiths is warning that Israel’s planned offensive in Rafah could lead to “slaughter”, and that this “long-dreaded [scenario] is unraveling at alarming speed”.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have “urged” Israel not to begin its ground offensive in Rafah, as part of “an overwhelming consensus of the international community”. Rt Hon Winston Peters has stated that “New Zealand remains extremely concerned by indications that Israel is planning a ground offensive into Rafah” and “the humanitarian consequences of an offensive in Rafah would be appalling.”

We welcome these statements of concern. They are a necessary indication of our government’s attitude to the next phase of Israel’s war on Gaza.  But they are not sufficient.

They will not reassure Palestinian refugee families sheltering in tents at the border with Egypt tonight. They will not alter Israel’s genocidal intention to exterminate and displace Palestinian civilians, under cover of a war on Hamas.

The South African government has lodged an urgent request with the International Court of Justice to consider whether Israel’s operations targeting Rafah are a breach of the provisional orders the court made in the case alleging genocide by Israel, and to order additional provisional orders to halt the mass killing in Rafah. 

The Foreign Minister has noted that NZ regards the ICJ’s decisions, including the provisional measures requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, as binding.

The New Zealand Government should support South Africa’s urgent request to the ICJ and take other concrete steps to sanction Israel for its failure to comply with international law.  If we truly want to hold Israel to account, the Israeli ambassador should be left in no doubt that, if the Rafah ground offensive goes ahead, diplomatic relations with Israel will cease.

“We are at the precipice of witnessing the mass slaughter of civilians in Rafah and the most concerted effort yet to depopulate Gaza. These are flagrant violations of international law and the ICJ’s orders. New Zealand’s response needs to measure up to the enormity of the situation at hand,” said Marilyn Garson of Alternative Jewish Voices.

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