Uncategorized | Marilyn Garson

Overland, 151025: Building a vision for anti-Zionist Judaism

Marilyn Garson — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 19:06:23 +0000

Published in Overland Literary Journal, October 15, 2025

Building a vision for Jewish anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionist Jews are saying: we need new institutions. In London, Toronto or New York, this is a literal call for social and religious organisations that do not replicate the harms of Zionism. However, institutions are agreed practices long before they are bricks and mortar. For anti-Zionist Jews to unseat Zionism globally, we must institutionalise a positive, liberatory Jewish identity and new religious, cultural and political practices.

Judaism has a history of re-creating itself in crises. We adapted to dispersion, and we have seen off false messiahs. The arid rabbinic Judaism of the eighteenth century was kindling for the most heartfelt Hasidism. The monstrous culmination of Zionism presents us with such a crisis today. What will we make of Jewishness now?

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza ruptures the world that many Jews thought they inhabited. Some had let Zionism supplant their religion. Others saw their liberal white Jewishness as a safe, reasonable redoubt within a stable world order. Confronted with its moral failure, seeing the starvation of Palestinian children, some freeze in place while others say, “we can no longer remain silent”.

A minority of Jews has worked for years for justice and real peace in Palestine. Whether we are anchored in religion or radical politics, our tools long pre-date the creation of the state of Israel. Israel’s criminality affirms what we knew. Our identity is intact and we strain to apply it to the lifesaving work at hand. We have not yet conveyed our vision beyond that.

The work of restoring Jewishness is integral to our urgent politics on Palestine. We refuse the bad-faith claims of antisemitism that would silence Palestinian voices. We defy the monopoly that Zionism tries to assert. And we do all this as an act of decolonising our own identity. Without it, we are deracinated.

In 2019, anti-Zionist Jewish groups in a dozen countries began to meet online, to bring this vision to life across borders. Global Jews for Palestine (GJP) began as an act of resistance to the coordinated campaign of the IHRA definition of antisemitism — that dreaded trope which conflates opposition to Zionism with the hatred of Jews.

A global organisational forum must bridge many differences. The languages of Left politics, identity and human rights sometimes conflict. What works in South Africa or Ireland, with their histories of apartheid and colonisation, sounds otherworldly to Americans. Next-generation decolonisers can feel held back by the pace of social justice veterans. Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, for years the smallest member-group, brought the invitation contained in our relational Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That has always distinguished our vision.

When we meet, Zionism is not the only hegemon in the room. Beatriz Kalichman notes from Brazil the challenges,

that we usually encounter when working internationally with high income countries, or the Global North. There are the issues of resources, of language and of worldviews, and if we don’t recognise the structural inequalities between countries we often end up reproducing these power dynamics.

Over five years, GJP became a community of values and practice, with member-groups in twenty-one countries on six continents. We found a voice that brought our geography to bear on issues and events, although we felt reactive.

As Gaza became the fulcrum on which an entire world order is poised, our task became more foundational. To speak the truth. To centre the voices and experience of Palestinians. To be global. Yet Zionism’s bad faith actors also make Jewish anti-Zionism more fraught. Israel’s leaders and soldiers appropriate our name. They take the symbols and language of Jewishness. In the US, the UK, Germany, people are arrested as antisemites and as terrorists for drawing attention to genocide.

Having witnessed Israel’s brutality in Gaza and the instrumentalization of Jewish identity to suppress protest elsewhere, is it futile to hold on to Jewishness and continue to protest as Jews? Has Israel finally destroyed the Jews?

No, we do not concede. Many of us draw our inspiration from Jewishness, and we will not let nationalism steal that. Our future does not lie in negotiating the marginal reform of self-appointed leaders who bring our institutions into disgrace. We need new institutions.

Guided by a social justice ethic as old as the prophets, our Torah is a call for solidarity with the oppressed. We are told that each generation writes the Torah for its time, and we are writing ours by rejecting nationalism, restoring Jewish conscience and planting it firmly within wider solidarity.

Midrash is a Jewish literary form that draws out the story between words. We drew out the story of a Jewish community that takes Gaza to heart. We wrote it into a manifesto that sketches the principles that enact ethical, inclusive, solidarist Jewish community. Dr Sheryl Nestel, its lead writer, envisioned it as

responding in a meaningful way to the overwhelming support for the genocide in Gaza by legacy Jewish institutions. This support verified to many of us that these institutions are morally indefensible and have been so for decades. They are not redeemable, therefore Jews of conscience must refuse to support or collaborate with them. Moreover, we need to publicly refute their claims to represent all Jews – a tactic that is used to defame and undermine the overwhelming opposition to what Israel is doing.

The very first anti-Zionist institution that we are building in each of our countries is new Jewish community itself. Aspects of Judaism are socially enacted. Community is vital, but Zionist institutions have adopted a painful, scarring practice of driving non-Zionists out. The tactic of expulsion tries to impose a spiritual death. When I returned from working in Gaza, I clung to my synagogue for six long years, because I didn’t know how to be Jewish without it. Others endure similar harm within their families or on campus.

Leaving Zionist-Jewish community used to be like stepping from a vision into a void. That is no longer the case. Religious and social anti-Zionist Jewish community is flourishing.

As a public speaker, I sense a desire to construct something beyond dissent. In the past year I have often been asked, “Is there something I can sign?” In one regional city, two of the four anti-Zionist Jews asked that question. In Wellington, a man in his seventies said that he had “never really done much” about being Jewish, but he would like to sign his name to anti-Zionism now.

Signature conveys membership. Beatriz Kalicher adds that signing the GJP manifesto “means we are not lonely… There is something of reclaiming our right to be Jewish after feeling that it was revoked for our refusal of Israel.”

Resistance is relational. It flourishes in the spaces between us, where we make and recognise commitments. It is no small thing to institutionalise a principled, global practice of Jewishness. It ensures that our work for Palestine will derive from, and nurture, our Jewish identity. It says that we have outgrown mere rejection of the identities imposed on us by Zionism.

What lies beyond that preposition, anti, in the phrase anti-Zionist? It is nothing less than a liberatory Jewishness in spiritual, secular, and political forms. It is the Jewish identity for our time.

Marilyn’s books Still Lives – A Memoir Of Gaza and Jewish, Not Zionist are published in Australia by Interventions and be will launched at Sydney’s Trades Hall tonight, 15 October, at 6.30 pm and on Monday 20 October at Melbourne’s Trades Hall, also at 6.30 pm. The events are endorsed by Jewish Council of Australia, Loud Jew Collective, Jews Against the Occupation ’48, NIBS, Search Foundation. The Melbourne event will also be livestreamed.

The Forward, 250225: Dismantling UNRWA is a travesty

Marilyn Garson — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:05:19 +0000

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

An elderly man covers his face while crying beside a grave in the Fallujah cemetery in the northern Gaza Strip on Feb. 3 Photo by Abood Abusalama / Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images

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, Feb 25, 2025

Ha’aretz Dec 2024 – Solidarity: Total Identification From the Soul

Marilyn Garson — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:04:50 +0000

Written for the Ha’aretz (paywalled) December magazine 2025. The sound of Aotearoa’s Palestine solidarity carries far – Marilyn Garson

Image: Teirangi Klever

“We can hate some of their actions and see them as very wrong, but we recognise that most of them thought they were coming to a land without a people when they came—and they found that people were already living here. They were fed a colonising narrative.”

Palestine? No. Dr. Catherine Love (descended from Te Atiawa, Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui) is instead discussing the colonial experience of Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa / New Zealand.

Love is grandmotherly in the way of elders who have stood on many front lines. Around 2014, UNICEF hired her to assess the wellbeing of Palestinian children. “Every time, every Palestinian individual we spoke with; it connected at a really visceral level. As I learned more about Palestine, I could see the colonisation process. I could see the parallels with what had happened to our ancestors, and is still happening to us in a different way. It was total identification from the soul… [T]he media are biased and present the Israeli-American narratives as if they’re true. But we are also familiar with that as Māori: dehumanising representations of ourselves.”

Te Otāne Huata (Ngāti Kahungunu) is animated and certain at 34. He studied history in a curriculum that was “very much an Israel-leaning or -supporting perspective.” It failed to explain why Palestinians should pay “for the sins of the Nazis.” When he saw Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, Te Otāne probed that narrative more deeply. He concluded, “I’m actually being taught that my superheroes are the villains.”

Te Otāne lives in the town of Hastings (population 52,000), which is scarcely larger than his Instagram following of 45,500. Yet he finds it essential to stand and wave the Palestinian flag at 1:30 every Sunday afternoon, in front of the Hastings town clock. “Regardless of whether we get 1000 people or whether we get twenty people, we will continue to stand in solidarity. When you throw those intentions into the universe, you are literally changing the fabric of the universe itself… Tino rangatiratanga means ultimate authority, sovereignty over your land and your waters. Those concepts are definitely applicable to other Indigenous communities. It’s about collective liberation… People like to say, ‘Worry about your own back yard.’ When we’re standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are worried about our own back yard.”

Te Otāne Huata (Image: Putaanga Waitoa)

At weekly flag waving gatherings in villages and towns up and down the country, the symbols of Māori sovereignty mingle with those of Palestine. The campaign for Palestinian rights is widely understood as an anticolonial movement. By bringing Māori experience to bear on Palestine, Aotearoa’s campaign has acquired a distinct voice.

It took shape on October 23, 2023, as around 800 people leaned into gale-force winds and dodged flying placards on the Pōneke / Wellington waterfront. They had assembled to hear Māori, Jewish and Muslim speakers make spiritual commitments to work together under the banner: Justice the Seed, Peace the Flower.

Nadia Abu-Shanab, a veteran organiser with the human rights group Justice for Palestine, recalls their intentions. “It’s worth understanding the way that people have already organised here for generations. Māori have deployed… strategic political strategies and insights on how you move through things and how you change things.”

Knowing that a new era had begun, Justice for Palestine chose “to have mana whenua open this space: the Māori who have the authority because this is their ancestral local area… We were able to open the space on the land in a way that respected the history of the land with integrity… [Our vigil] demonstrated how we wanted to move forward: together in solidarity between the Indigenous people of this land, Jews, Palestinians and all peoples. That came through. I feel like it distinguished my experience of the year from the experience that many other people have narrated to me from different places.”

As the Jewish speaker that day and on other days since, I have also felt our gatherings channel outrage into something more aspirational. Pōneke / Wellington is a capital city of 215,000 in a remote country of 5 million. Our vision has greater impact than our volume.

Māori bring more than just the long-sightedness of Indigenous resistance to Palestine. Te Tiriti o Waitangi / the Treaty of Waitangi, Aotearoa’s constitutive document, offers an actionable vision of co-existence.

For Abu-Shanab, Te Tiriti extends “an invitation… to consider how two peoples might live together on a land where one people is Indigenous, and other people arrive. We can belong here together. Equality isn’t in the smashing of those differences. It isn’t in a domination of one people over another, but nor is it that we don’t have the right to live here. That is a bit of an invitation for the world… The idea of Indigenous rights doesn’t preclude other people being able to live on that land. It requires a responsibility from people who arrive, to honour the self-determination of the people who already live there.”

Abu-Shanab navigates freely from here to there and back again. Indigenous to Palestine, she dismisses Israel’s “supremacist justifications; [its] claim of the Jewish need for safety while Palestinians do not need safety or self-determination.” In Aotearoa, she advocates from privilege. “All it requires is that we honour Māori self-determination, and then we have a really honourable and dignified way to live here.”

Dr Cath Love (Image: Teirangi Klever)

Tau iwi / non-Māori New Zealanders who know that our society and our rights derive from this invitation, are known as Tangata Te Tiriti / people of the treaty. Our status reminds us that collective liberation is not safely remote. It involves us. The framework of tikanga Māori / values approximating a system of law, then shapes a method of acting.

Dr Love enumerates the elements on her fingers to give each one full play. “Our tikanga—the root word, tika, refers to what is right, correct, true and just—are the way that we organise all of our behaviour… That sets the tikanga for us to be peaceful and inclusive.” Each time Love opens Palestine rallies in Pōneke-Wellington, she grounds the gathering in these expectations.

The current New Zealand government jeopardises the vision of Te Tiriti. On November 14, the coalition’s small neoliberal partner tabled a bill which aims to unilaterally alter Te Tiriti’s meaning in law. The youngest parliamentarian, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, tore up the bill and replied with a haka / challenge.

The haka and the thunder of feet in the parliamentary gallery were galvanising. Indigenous Aotearoa laid down a boundary that has been witnessed more than half a billion times.

The Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti / March for the Treaty was already underway to reassert Māori rights. For nine days, Māori and Tangata Te Tiriti walked from the far north and south of the country toward parliament. The Auckland Harbour Bridge shook as they passed over it. No one knows how many people took part locally, walking or volunteering to house and feed the walkers en route.

Hīkoi, still arriving at parliament (Image: Te Ao Māori News)

As the hīkoi approached the capital, Te Otāne Huata urged organisers to include a Palestinian speaker in the ultimate gathering. “Symbolically it was… the greatest movement that we’ve ever seen in Te Ao Māori [the Māori worldview], offering a place to our Indigenous brothers and sisters of Palestine; a position where they can say the truth.”

Nadia Abu-Shanab recalls the humility of addresssing the 50,000 people who surrounded parliament. Palestine had been invited into a “foundational, generation-changing, historic moment—probably the biggest mass mobilisation our country has ever seen—and a day that was framed by the principle of Kotahitanga, of unity and togetherness and working together… It was a collective moment. People were open-hearted. They were feeling the sense of confidence and strength that you feel when you’re together.”

She recites a Māori chant that dates to the land wars of the 1860s: We are engaged in a struggle without end, forever and ever and ever. She and others re-work the words to say, “We are here to live forever and ever and ever. We’re not just here to fight, we’re here to live. That resonates, because we and Māori are really good at this. We’re not just fighting against something, we are actually fighting for something. We’re fighting for life, for dignity and for better ways of living in relationship with the lands where we live.”

Image: Teirangi Klever

The Jewish community of Aotearoa divides over Palestine like every Jewish community. Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV, an anti-Zionist collective) calls for a liberatory Aotearoa Jewish identity that reckons with our roles in Aotearoa’s colonial story. Notwithstanding historical suffering, we Jews are not victims in Aotearoa. We do not tend to be food-insecure or over-policed. We are not denied employment or the freedom to practice our religion. It is not we who wake each day wondering who of our relatives between the river and the sea have survived the night.

AJV works in partnership with Justice for Palestine and with the Federation of the Islamic Associations of New Zealand. Each time we meet with decision-makers together, we defy the assumption that Jews exist in a zero-sum relationship with Palestinians or Muslims. Over the years, shared experience becomes a glue. Samira Zaitoun, a tireless co-convenor of Justice for Palestine, said at a recent book launch, “When you’ve taken enough steps together, you realise that you just have to go through this thing together.”

The Zionist-Jewish community has rallied and published with Christian Zionists and neoliberal lobby groups for several years. For example, a recent media release condemning ICC warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant was jointly issued by 7 Christian Zionist groups, 1 majority-Christian and neoliberal group, and 2 Jewish Zionist groups.

When Māori rights intersect with Palestine, it complicates those tidy Jewish community divisions in hopeful ways. Part of the wisdom of small communities lies in leaving doors ajar. So it was on the day of the hīkoi. Its breadth brought some Jewish supporters of Māori sovereignty into an unexpected encounter with Palestine.

‘Elaine’ and ‘Dorothy’ are tau iwi / non-Māori, Jewish Wellingtonians who regard Israel as a Jewish homeland. They groan at the Zionist label because, Dorothy explains, “I’m also a person who feels deeply that colonisation is a powerful harm… I feel deeply for the Palestinian people who were resident on that piece of land… Zionism feels like a swear word. It feels like, as soon as I say the word, I’m endorsing” Israel’s actions.

On the day of the hīkoi, Dorothy understood the unity of “groups who’ve had the experience of colonisation and having their rights and land taken away… Being there together as tau iwi and Māori, not being divided was more important to me” than being surrounded by people who share her views about Israel.

Earlier this year, Elaine expressed her contempt for Israel’s actions by attending an event calling for Palestinian rights. “It was really hard for me to stand there, but I’m too aware of the indoctrination that I grew up with to let that make me leave… If I felt unwelcome, it came from me, not from anybody else.

“It didn’t even occur to me that I wouldn’t” join the hīkoi at parliament, Elaine continues. She wanted to add her body to the count of Māori rights proponents, and she defends the Māori embrace of Palestinian rights. “Nothing shocks me about the intersectionality of it… It makes sense to me that the two groups who are being oppressed… identify with each other… I actually said that to someone who was saying [Palestinians] shouldn’t have been there. I said, it’s not for us [to determine]… We were there to support Māori.”

While she stands outside the anti-Zionist intersection, Elaine makes a point of challenging the inconsistencies she hears within her networks. “A lot of people who say that they’re leftwing are pretty rightwing when it comes to [Palestine], because it’s literally the first time they’ve had to stand by those beliefs. That’s me as well. Does it make me uncomfortable? Yes. Does that bother me? No.”

The Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti culminated on a Tuesday. On Wednesday the media speculated about the new political landscape. On Sunday at 1:30, Te Otāne Huata waved the Palestinian flag in front of the Hastings town clock.

Image: Teirangi Klever

Marilyn Garson is the author of Jewish, not Zionist, the story of a liberatory Aotearoa Jewish identity, and Still Lives – a Memoir of Gaza. She is the co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, and a member of Global Jews for Palestine.

Spinoff 211024: Justice as our common cause: What can an Aotearoa Jewish identity look like?

Marilyn Garson — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:01:08 +0000

OPINION BooksOctober 21, 2024

Justice as our common cause: What can an Aotearoa Jewish identity look like?

A new book argues for a religious space without nationalism.

Marilyn Garson, author of Jewish, Not Zionist, outlines how Aotearoa’s Jewish community can live a full Jewish life without Israel.

—

Israel’s advocates have tried for years to cram Jewishness into Zionism. It’s time to unpack these terms: we are Jewish, an ethno-religious group. Israel is a state. Zionism is a nationalism, and a large majority of Zionists are Christian. How large? A group of 65 Christian clergy publish as the Coalition of Ministers Supporting Israel in New Zealand. That’s nearly 11 times the number of Jewish synagogues, and 13 times the number of rabbis in the country.

Aotearoa’s media has generally told just two Jewish stories. Either we are asked to speak as pro- or anti-Zionists; or else antisemitism is used to justify exceptional license for Israel. The license granted by that narrative now appears to be endless.

Those two well-rehearsed scripts are equally limiting. They wrongly present broad issues of justice and racism as separate Jewish matters, centred on Israel. The first reduces Palestine and Palestinians to being the voiceless objects of Israel’s actions. The second severs anti-Jewish racism from others’ experience and from our common anti-racist mahi.

Those narratives leave no space for a fearless, outward-looking Jewish identity; one that is not centred on Israel at all. Can we not live a full Jewish life right here in Aotearoa?

Stories of a revitalised diasporic Jewishness come from New York, London, Berlin and other major northern cities. Justice-oriented Jews walk out of the Zionist-Jewish institutions that denigrate their principles. They explore their Jewish identities in new communities of values. Flourishing Jewish organisations bring ritual into public space, to wrest the symbols of Judaism back from settlers and soldiers.

Jewish protest surrounding rabbis (wearing prayer shawls) in the Congressional rotunda (Photo: Jewish Voice for Peace)

That’s New York. What happens here? North of the Dunedin Jewish Congregation, what happens when a Jewish person asks, “What will I believe? Everything I have been told? Or the world in front of my eyes? If I am not Zionist, who am I?”

Until very recently, we asked that question at the expense of our communal lives. The effort of forming a Jewish identity that is politically alive and principled – and, for some of us, spiritual – was solitary work. Now we are building organisations to belong to. We have made a religious space not distorted by nationalism.

I wrote Jewish, not Zionist to tell one story of Aotearoa’s liberatory Jewish community. Far from feeling threatened by the rights of Palestinians, we regard justice as our common cause. We are tangata Tiriti, committing also to the long work of justice at home.

If not through Zionism, Aotearoa’s media presents the Jewish community through the lens of antisemitism. Repeatedly, reports of protest are diverted by claims of antisemitism. The focus of protest is obscured by personal accusations. It is an act of political misdirection to confuse principled protest with racial hatred. It implies that there is no other motive for upholding the rights of Palestinians.

Furthermore, when the media fails to present the Jewish community more fully, they reduce Jewish identity to victimhood. That is a distortion. We – Jewish New Zealanders – are not Aotearoa’s victims. Here, now, we are not underserved, over-imprisoned, or denied education. We do not tend to be food-insecure and few of us lack shelter. Many of us lead privileged lives. And we are not the people whose whānau are experiencing what the UN’s highest court has called “plausible genocide”.

We are not victims but we are targets of antisemitism. Distinct from its political use, real anti-Jewish hatred is alive and well. From the far right and malevolent disinformation networks, hardcore antisemitic voices are vigorously seeking to capitalise on widespread anger at Israel. They want to spread the lie that Jewishness is the cause of genocide in Gaza and injustice in Aotearoa – not nationalism or colonialism or imperial power-seeking, but Jews.

Overwhelmingly, these networks are also Islamophobic: Jews and Muslims are in this together. Aotearoa’s anti-Zionist Jews work alongside our natural antiracist allies to uphold the rights of Palestinians, Muslims, tangata whenua and Jews. Human and political rights are everyone’s rights, or they are nothing.

Even as we struggle with our outrage at Israel’s slaughter of civilians and the betrayals of law and politics, we reject the excuse of racism. We see exploitative structures of power and economy, not ethnicity. We protest against the crimes of genocide, apartheid, collective punishment and starvation – not against Jews, Jewishness or Judaism. Not against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims or those who are assumed to be Muslim.

At this moment, being Jewish in public can feel like standing on a very narrow bridge. As Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav wrote, when you stand on a very narrow bridge, the most important thing is not to be afraid. In that spirit, I have written one story to invite the whole anthology of our liberatory, spiritually and politically alive Aotearoa Jewishness.

Please tear up the old scripts and make some space.

Jewish, not Zionist by Marilyn Garson ($30, Left of the Equator Press) will be launched at Unity Books Wellington on October 22 and at Trades Hall, Auckland on October 27.

Are We Really Aiding Gaza?

Marilyn Garson — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 03:09:37 +0000

(published in the New Zealand International Journal, December 2019)

I lived and worked in the Gaza Strip 2011 – 2015, as the economic director of Mercy Corps and then as a business and livelihoods consultant to the office of UNRWA’s Gaza Director. Four years is plenty of time to reflect on the reality of our aid to an occupied community of two million people, languishing behind a military blockade for 13 years and counting.

This article will forego the underlying questions and national narratives which are beyond our control. I will instead write from experience about the effect of donor states’ actions upon the lives being lived behind the blockade walls today. I will argue that New Zealand’s few tangible actions conflict with our stated position and our legal obligations.

I will first set out the legal foundations of New Zealand’s – and Israel’s – obligations to Gazan Palestinians while they live under occupation. Because it is central and so much maligned, I will also examine UNRWA’s peculiar role and importance. Then I will discuss the aid anomaly of Gaza, and situate New Zealand’s actions within that context.

Finally, I will propose several immediate, affordable, achievable actions that would be more constructive and better aligned with our national character.

Note that ‘Gazans’ are ‘Palestinians’ who live in the Gaza Strip. The law applies to all Palestinians, although my specifics will narrow to ‘Gazans’.

The UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, International Court of Justice, International Committees of the Red Cross, human rights and legal NGOs agree that the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are occupied Palestinian territories, where International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the laws of occupation apply in full. S Michael Lynk is the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (hereafter the Special Rapporteur), and an associate professor of law. As the occupying power, he writes, “among Israel’s most important legal duties is to respect and preserve the fundamental rights of the protected population under international law.”[1]

Israel disagrees, but the relevant international institutions overwhelmingly reject language or arguments that render Palestine as a zone of exception, beyond the application of law.[2] Each time New Zealand votes in support of UN resolutions which condemn violations of international law, we affirm that we view the occupation of Palestine as an act bound by law.

While occupation is a legal, temporary status, the Special Rapporteur’s previous reporting assessed that the occupation of Palestine “has become illegal, given its flagrant violations of the foundational principles of the modern laws of occupation.”[3] His current report details the legal sources of states’ obligations to act. States must not recognize or assist any situation which was achieved outside of the law, and they bear a positive duty to act in order to end breaches of the law.

I write on this basis. The occupied people of Palestine are protected by law, and our government bears a legal duty to act on that knowledge, in addition to our humanitarian concern for their suffering.

States assist Palestinian refugees primarily through UNRWA, the UN’s single-issue agency for Palestine refugees in Gaza and the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. UNRWA is the UN’s largest and eldest agency, and it is the only UN agency which directly provides services. While other agencies contract out their service delivery, UNRWA builds and staffs its own schools and clinics, fleets of rubbish trucks and food distribution centers. UNRWA’s largest staff group consists of 22,000 educational staff, teaching 526,000 students.

The UN General Assembly established UNRWA in 1949. Its mandate, renewed by vote every three years, directs UNRWA to protect and assist one national community, whose members have been displaced to several locations. UNRWA’s mandate makes it an enduring, bureaucratic proof of the occupation and dispossession of Palestinians. UNRWA’s consolidated funding appeals make Palestine refugees visible as one national group. That coherence would be lost if refugees’ needs were subsumed into hundreds or thousands of NGO and for-profit companies’ budget lines. In the streets and alleys of its 59 refugee camps, UNRWA’s logo is equally the visible symbol of one coherent global obligation.

Think of UNRWA as a 360-degree target of opportunity, as everyone enacts some of their occupation policy through it. Each time they renew UNRWA’s mandate, the majority of the world’s states is refusing to normalize the occupation. Conversely, a few states try to eliminate UNRWA, in order to hide the evidence of occupation. Western states urge the Arab states to fund UNRWA as a gesture of regional solidarity, while Arab states require the West to regard UNRWA as one cost of winking at the occupation. Supporters of Israel complain that UNRWA relieves Hamas of its quasi-governmental burdens in Gaza, while supporters of Palestine allege as vociferously that UNRWA relieves Israel of the burdens of an occupying power.

Gazan Palestinians protest bitterly at the gates of UNRWA compounds – and where else should they protest donor actions and inaction? They live in deteriorating, thoroughly unacceptable conditions. UNRWA is the accessible face of the blockade regime and the donors’ role within it. Since March 30, 2018, Gazans have also protested weekly, in their thousands, at the fences which Israel built to confine them. Increasingly they protest against the rule of Hamas, although both of those protests lie beyond the scope of this article.

These are exceptionally difficult months for UNRWA.

President Trump abruptly abandoned American commitments to the Palestinian people, including more than $300 million US of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is staggering from the loss of roughly one-third of its total contributions. Trump wishes to deny the refugee status of Palestinians born after the actual displacement or Nakba (catastrophe), but Washington does not define their status. The UN website clearly explains that both of its refugee agencies, UNRWA and UNHCR, recognize intergenerational refugees where unresolved conflicts have created intergenerational displacement. Palestinians, Somalis and Afghans all register with their agencies as the descendants of refugees.

Several of UNRWA’s top officials are being investigated for abusing their authority. The allegations are personal rather than systemic, and two of the individuals have already left the agency. If the allegations are found to be true, the UN Secretary General will surely take appropriate action. The importance of UNRWA lies in its mandate and its work, not in a few individuals.

UNRWA is also subject to more thoughtful class, political and technical critiques, as its mandate and operations age. UNRWA has the invidious role of grafting a little global welfare onto the occupation’s gravest suffering. Its core problem is that a humanitarian institution – a temporary placeholder – cannot stand in for a political solution and was not designed to become a way of life. Humanitarian aid is far, far better than nothing but far, far less than a solution. New Zealand and other donors are neither acting on the problem, nor funding the real human consequences of neglecting that problem.

Gaza lives at the sharp end of all these facts. In 1948, 60 – 80,000 Gazans opened their doors to refugees. The Gaza Strip, which is the length of a marathon, now houses two million people. A refugee camp is a deeply unsatisfactory place, and the fourth generation of Gazan Palestinians is growing up in that limbo.

I worked as an UNRWA consultant for 28 months in Gaza, where the agency anchors one of the world’s most vulnerable communities and most volatile economies. UNRWA provides public sector services to two-thirds of Gaza’s population. While I was there, UNRWA’s economic activity constituted 16% of Gaza’s GDP. It is Gaza’s largest non-military employer, and its transactions are a critical source of liquidity. UNRWA’s instability reverberates systemically through Gaza – especially threatening the food on its tables.

A 2011 – 2012 food security study found that after poor Gazan households received UNRWA’s relief food, they were still spending up to half of their income to meet their remaining food requirements. That is the extent of their need. Before the blockade, UNRWA fed 80,000 poor Gazans. Today one million people depend on UNRWA’s food distribution programme, and UNRWA’s budgets are teetering. That is what it means to send passive relief aid to a trapped community for seventy years: relief food preserves life, but does nothing to loosen the trap.

I also witnessed the lifesaving importance of UNRWA’s vertical integration, when I volunteered to work in Gaza through the bombardment of 2014. UNRWA’s emergency response team consisted mainly of 5500 Gazans. They stayed at their posts through the war, distributed food and water, operated 90 emergency shelters and a network of health clinics, removed rubbish, received supplies from the blockade’s one entry point, and drove through the streets under fire in order to warehouse and distribute the supplies. UNRWA designated ninety of its flagged buildings – already marked on military co-ordination maps – as emergency shelters. Of the half-million Gazans who were displaced during fifty days of bombardment, 293,000 came to UNRWA’s neighbourhood school buildings for shelter.

In these and other ways, UNRWA is essential rather than ideal. Only a madman would pretend that its infrastructure and experience can be routinely replaced behind a blockade. The defunding or loss of UNRWA would impose profound consequences on the most vulnerable people in the occupied territories – Gaza and Syria in particular. When Trump or anyone else fires broadsides at UNRWA, these are the people they are willing to hit.

I lived behind the Gaza blockade for four years. A blockaded community is such an anomaly in our entropic world that our minds look back to the medieval sieges of total war. That’s misleading. The blockade of Gaza is a very modern, high-tech strategy of endless conflict maintenance.

The irony of Gaza’s hardship is particularly bitter because, as a community, Gaza has so much of what it needs to thrive. It has assets that other conflict-affected communities might take generations to replicate, like trust and mutual assistance, an entrepreneurial and scientific mindset, and an abiding love of education.

I remember visiting a kindergarten, in a shelter for families whose homes had been bombed in 2014. Someone had made kid-sized furnishings by hand from salvaged materials, and each child wore a bright construction-paper crown. The shelter manager, herself homeless, said firmly, “Our children must love learning. We may be displaced but our education comes with us.” For their kindergarten graduation, each of those children wore a sewn gown and mortarboard.

Gaza maintains one of the world’s highest rates of literacy, but its university graduates enter a labour market with one of the world’s highest rates of unemployment. When I worked for UNRWA, the waiting list for three-month temporary work assignments held 180,000 names.

I have never seen more avoidable waste of minds and skills. Because fully qualified engineers are not permitted to import replacement parts for the sewage treatment system, they must discharge untreated sewage into the Mediterranean sea. Because they may not import technology to manage its solid waste, the Gaza Strip holds three of the world’s fifty largest active rubbish tips. And so on.

The common donor wisdom sighs that nothing will work behind the Gaza blockade. From what I saw, very little has been tried. Donors have acquiesced in calling Gaza a humanitarian problem, and making soul-destroying aid choices fit for a brief moment of emergency. Gazans keep trying to work, and donors keep sending them food and telling them to wait.

Gaza is not a humanitarian problem. Gaza is a political problem, which has been allowed to fester so long that it now manifests in a humanitarian, economic and ecological calamity.

In the West Bank, aid rewards elites and holds the present Palestinian leadership in place – even as states bemoan the supposed lack of alternatives. It is often noted that that Western states condemn the Arab world for its authoritarianism, while supporting the authoritarians. Western aid to Palestine has also been a tool of the status quo.

Inevitably, all this stokes incendiary politics: no one is made safe by the immiseration of Gaza. At times of internal unrest, Hamas is susceptible to challenge from more-radical factions, not less. And internal unrest has been growing as the tacit humanitarian agreement – flour and stagnation, survival without change, energy with no outlet – is jeopardized by insufficient budgets for the aid itself. People are restive because human beings are not wired to accept the terms of survival that the blockade regime imposes upon Gazan Palestinians.

Where does New Zealand fit?

New Zealand regularly supports UN resolutions that affirm the applicability of the laws of occupation and IHL in Palestine. We support the establishment of two states for two peoples in Israel-Palestine. We do not recognize one of the parties to that vision, the State of Palestine. Palestine is recognized by 138 states, or 71% of the UN member states.

We do business normally with Israel and welcome Israeli visitors, while Palestinians face a different quality of scrutiny if they seek visitors’ visas. New Zealand recently acknowledged an anti-Middle Eastern bias in our ‘family link’ refugee program. Perhaps the assumptions behind our Palestinian visa policy should also be scrutinized: if we have problematized a Middle Eastern identity before, are we problematizing Palestinian nationality again?

New Zealand contributes roughly $1 million per year of unearmarked funds to UNRWA, with forward commitments through 2022.

We are also directly participating in the war economy by purchasing $9 million of Israeli military robotics.[4] Israel’s sale of the occupation’s technologies of surveillance, containment, paramilitary policing and combat made it the eighth-largest exporter of weapons on earth in the period 2014 – 2018, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israel’s arms sales had increased 60% over the previous study period.[5]

Media reports promote the successful test of Israel’s ‘first combat robot,’ and its intended deployment in Gaza. Readers are invited to click on a link and ‘watch the [Israel Defence Force] take it for a test run.’[6]

Anyone who has ever chosen not to purchase goods tested on caged animals, must surely be incensed by the purchase of machines that were designed for use on a confined human community. We contribute $1 to keep Palestinians alive behind a wall, and we spend $9 on the military force that confines them.

If NZ proceeds along its three current tracks – affirming the applicability of law, caring for the protected community while investing more heavily in the weapons of occupation – we will have become part of a global cognitive disconnect. As the Special Rapporteur writes, ‘No occupation in the modern world has been conducted with the international community so alert to its many grave breaches of international law… so well-informed about the scale of suffering and dispossession endured by the protected population under occupation, and yet so unwilling to act upon the overwhelming evidence.’[7]

The ratio of our expenditures suggests that we have come to view Palestinians as objects of security policy rather than as a nation of equal, rights-bearing human beings. How might our choices change, if we acted upon our statements that the occupation of Palestine is a matter of law and justice? Even knowing that our actions do not address fundamental causes or solutions, what could we do, affordably, achievably, constructively, now?

We could eschew business as usual in a setting that is anything but usual, and we could reward steps toward the vision we espouse.

President Trump has de-funded cross-border and cross-cultural projects. These aim to keep the possibility of co-existence alive for children and youth. Behind the walls of Gaza are many positive initiatives for employment, expression or environmental sustainability. Our small aid budgets could make a real difference to these activities.

In a world full of robots, there is flatly no need for us to buy machines that are tested upon, and designed to be used against, a protected human community under occupation. We could purchase ethically.

Having scrapped the biased ‘family link’ refugee program, we could re-examine the assumptions underlying our treatment of Palestinian people, including their visa status.

Repeated news stories hint at further partnerships with Israel’s IT sector, a sector deeply implicated in the military. IT is also a significant industry in the West Bank, and it is vital to Gaza because technology jumps over the blockade walls. Palestinian women have flocked to IT’s merit-based employment opportunities. We could limit our partnerships to initiatives that advance the peaceful, unifying uses of technology.

Finally, although we cannot make justice from here, we really could be speaking to it. Among the most insidious messages in Israel-Palestine is the claim that two peoples will never live peacefully together. That claim forecloses on justice and peace.

New Zealand has an unfinished national project of decolonization. We see the difficulty and the vitality of such projects. We know that negotiated agreements are essential, and we know that they mean little without the hard work of re-imagining our assumptions and our structures of power.

We ought to be speaking and acting from that knowledge. Instead, our present actions align with power and pay lip service to justice.

Published in the NZ International Review, December 2019

[1] Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory since 1967, March 15, 2019, p. 9. A/HRC/40/73

[2] Justice For Some, by Noura Erekat (Stanford University Press 2019) details the history and cumulative effect of exceptional language in Israel-Palestine.

[3] Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory since 1967, October 21, 2019, A/74/48057 available at https://www.ohchr.org/EN/newyork/Pages/GA74thSession.aspx para 58

[4] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-new-zealand-army-buys-roboteams-unmanned-ground-vehicles-1001287200

[5] https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/fs_1903_at_2018_0.pdf

[6] https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4907117,00.html

[7] Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory since 1967, October 21, 2019, A/74/48057 available at https://www.ohchr.org/EN/newyork/Pages/GA74thSession.aspx para 77

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