How shall we speak and act now?

For six years, Alternative Jewish Voices has spoken in an aspirational voice. This is intentional. Research shows, the voice that mobilises new political engagement is a voice of moral clarity which invites others to join the work of making a better world.

We ground our voice in facts, and today’s facts are shattering. We share the outrage that we hear. However, outrage alone does not make change. It has to be channeled forward into principled action.

Hope is resistance. AJV met last week to ask where we find that hope now, while grief and anger feel overwhelming.

With unprecedented Western permission and complicity, Israel’s genocide is ongoing. The IDF has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians and decimated the built environment of Gaza.

They are queueing up more of the same in the West Bank. The tonnage of IDF poisons will affect generations. Israel has killed 271 and injured 622 Palestinians since the ceasefire.

Gazan Palestinians are living in atrocious conditions as winter closes in. Israel is preventing UN agencies and NGOs from responding, despite the International Court of Justice’s October finding that Israel is obligated to provide for Gazan Palestinians and not to impede others from doing so.

Bombed half a dozen countries
Along the way, Israel has bombed half a dozen countries which are not at war with it.

The silence of governments like ours imagines this dystopia as a new baseline. They will settle for negotiating the speed of Israel’s new crimes against the survivors of Palestine.

We utterly reject their selective amnesia — but each time we call out our complicit government, we need to call them forward and judge them against something better.

We do that by placing the value of human life at the centre of our understanding. People have laboured for a century and a half to embed a rights-based vision of human dignity and equality.

Rights are not an opinion; rights are the basis of international law and institutions. That today’s governments spit on Palestinians’ rights does not invalidate Palestinians’ rights. It raises the stakes.

Now we must fight for the vision even as we wield it.

Our baseline is a world in which people flourish with their basic needs and dignity ensured. We protest the deficits from that standard. We judge Israel and its powerful accomplices against the standard of an accountable, just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.

Daily erosion of our democracy
Even as our allies have taken the step of recognising Palestine, Luxon, Seymour and Peters cosy up to Donald Trump. We are reeling from their daily erosion of our democracy.

Our government’s position on Palestine and the value it places on our own lives follow from a single agenda. This government is harming far more people than it is benefiting. We find hope in the work that brings together a majority for change.

While Palestine has become the cement of a broad global movement, Zionism is shifting. Israel used its years of Zionist-Jewish permission to consolidate new sources of support. It is no longer dependent upon Jewish social licence.

Christian Zionism, long the majority of Zionism, is now an insider shaping American policy. Israel dedicates new budgets to influencing American Christians.

Christian Zionist influence is now being unsettled in turn by the far Right, as Zionism attracts support from the eschatological, racist and fascist extremes. Trump’s MAGA world is grappling with the rise of more radical White racist nationalism. Those extremists are seeking narrative position and influence.

In Aotearoa, Israel’s deputy foreign minister has met with Christian nationalist Brian Tamaki and Alfred Ngaio. There are five rabbis in this country, while 130 Christian Zionist clergy wrote together of their representatives’ time with Winston Peters before Peters declined to recognise Palestine.

In order to lend effective support to the liberation of Palestine, our protest needs to target the evolving structures and financial flows of Aotearoa’s Zionism.

This does not relieve the Zionist-Jewish community of responsibility. Globally, Zionist-Jewish institutions have eagerly wrapped Israel’s violence in the guise of Jewish identity, in order to place Israel’s genocidal actions beyond challenge.

Peace of the graveyard
Aotearoa’s Zionist-Jewish spokespeople still imagine only the peace of the graveyard, after which there might be a nicer Zionism.

A significant segment of Liberal-Zionist Jews seems to have turned against the war — although not against Zionism. That speaks to some capacity for change despite the institutions.

We welcome every effort to end this genocide. However, as principled anti-Zionists our goal is greater than the cessation of firing. In our own community and in Palestine, we must change the conditions that give rise to genocide. We need to decolonise the Jewishness that taught us to stake our future on the oppression and slaughter of others. There is no nicer Zionism.

To realise a liberatory Jewishness, we need new institutions with genuinely new communal leadership. We work for a future without Jewish supremacy or exceptionalism. Two-thirds of Jewish New Yorkers aged 18-44 just voted for Mayor Mamdani in one such act of qualitative, visionary change.

We will not displace this toxic new Right power by emulating their perpetual outrage. That would only turn us into the thing we oppose.

Outrage alone leaves one numb with grief and alienation. It stokes the identity politics which deny that we can live together. It leads to the despair which hardens the status quo.

We will only displace this power with an aspirational, broadly based vision of something better. We learn from the long, great works of our time: the works of peace, Indigenous rights, the common cause of dignified life in the hardest places.

Tangled roots of colonisation
That quality of holistic movement has coalesced around Palestine. We have never heard so many people acknowledge that the change must reach to the tangled roots of colonisation, racism, capitalism and fascism.

AJV brings to this our Jewish inheritance which recognises that social, ecological and material justice are inextricable. Together we will place life and justice at the centre of the work that needs doing, here and there.

In this dark time, hope is resistance and these are our ways forward.

In outrage and in aroha, we are Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa.

Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent. This article was first published by Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices and is republished with permission. The original article can be read here.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Once again Aotearoa New Zealand’s local elections were plagued by low voter turnout and a lack of engagement. Is the media coverage, or lack thereof, contributing to the problem — and what can it do to help?​

In dozens of campaign trail appearances, new Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown told audiences he planned to get rid of board members on the council-controlled organisations Auckland Transport and Eke Panuku.

But just days after his election victory, employment lawyer Barbara Buckett gave RNZ’s Morning Report what appeared to be surprising news on that repeated promise.

“There are legal processes and procedures that have to be followed [with board members’ employment],” she said.

“While he can influence, he certainly can’t interfere.”

Buckett added that the governing body of Auckland Council would have to consent to any changes to the boards.

Interviewer Guyon Espiner seemed startled.

‘He doesn’t have the power’
“So he doesn’t actually have power to do this?” he laughed. “He’s campaigned on something he can’t do?”

That reaction was understandable.

Despite admirable efforts from Stuff’s Todd Niall, the Herald’s Simon Wilson, The Spinoff and publicly-funded Local Democracy reporters, the promises and policies coming from mayoral candidates hadn’t received quite the same level of scrutiny they would have had if this were a general election.

If tough, fact-checking coverage was in comparatively short supply for the most high-profile mayoral election in the country, it was sometimes non-existent in ward races and less-heralded mayoral contests.

Pippa Coom, who lost her seat in Auckland’s Waitematā ward, told Mediawatch she didn’t see much coverage at all of her tight ward race against Mike Lee.

She said some media outlets didn’t publish their usual rundowns on ward races like hers, and as a result the “void was filled by misinformation and attack ads”.

“As a candidate I have to absolutely take responsibility for my own loss and for not reaching my potential supporters and not getting people out to vote,” she said.

“But the media coverage is such an important part of our democracy and our elections. So if it’s not there, it is going to … have an impact on election turnout and the result.”

Lack of coverage, engagement
The lack of coverage was matched by a lack of engagement from the public.

Turnout in this year’s election was around 40 percent across the country. In Auckland, it only reached 35 percent for the second election running.

Auckland Council carried out research where it quizzed non-voters on why they didn’t cast their ballot back in 2017.

The number one reason given was that they didn’t know anything about the candidates. Number two was that they didn’t know enough about the policies — and number three was that they couldn’t work out who to vote for.

In the weeks before the election, RNZ’s Lucy Xia vox-popped some Auckland students who told her that not only did they not vote, but they didn’t know the identity of the city’s mayor.

“I don’t really have an opinion,” one said. “Maybe for the prime minister next year. But for mayor? I don’t have views.”

The lack of engagement weighed on the mind of fill-in presenter John Campbell during last weekend’s episode of TVNZ’s Q+A.

Poorer suburbs lagged behind
In conversation with reporter Katie Bradford, he pointed to turnout in the poorer suburbs of Auckland, which — as usual — lagged behind richer areas.

“You have to say that a turnout below 20 percent in Ōtara is heartbreaking. It’s not good enough either,” he said.

“This is a dismal fail by someone.”

He went on to list some possible culprits for that — including central government, uninspiring local candidates and the election system itself.

There is some evidence pointing toward all of those.

In a BusinessDesk column, Pattrick Smellie said postal voting favours older homeowners, who are more likely to stick around at an address and to send letters than younger people and renters.

“It’s hardly news that no one under 40 has much experience of actually posting a letter. We’ve known for a while that postal voting skews local body voting to the asset-owning classes,” he wrote.

‘Boring’ consultation processes
Others criticised local government’s consultation processes, which are often boring and inaccessible for people with busy lives, along with the ratepayer roll which gives homeowners a vote for each property they own in different places.

But in response to Campbell, Bradford honed in on the media’s role in voter disengagement.

“I’m passionate about local government and there are lots of people out there who are. But how do we show people why it matters? It’s a frustration as a journalist,” she said.

Bradford told Mediawatch it was unclear whether the comparative paucity of media coverage on local government reflected a lack of public interest in the topic — or vice versa.

“It’s almost a chicken and egg situation. How much coverage the media does is so much based on what we think the public wants, and if people aren’t picking up the paper, or they’re switching off the radio or the TV when local government stories are on, they’re not going to run them,” Bradford told Mediawatch. 

TV and radio had particular difficulty producing interest stories about local government because council meetings aren’t renowned for creating interesting visuals or soundbites, Bradford said.

She thought it would help if stories explicitly connected council decisions to nationally-significant issues like the housing crisis or Wellington’s ongoing problems with its water and sewage.

‘Maybe media partly to blame’
“All of this stuff is so important and I think people think it’s always central government’s fault. They don’t necessarily think there’s council involvement and maybe the media is partly to blame for not explaining that stuff enough,” she said.

“But it’s not just our job. It’s also the job of Local Government NZ and councils to explain that.”

Bradford backed the idea of giving local government a similar amount of attention as central government, which is covered round-the-clock by teams of press gallery reporters.

But the economics of that move likely wouldn’t stack up for newsrooms, which are already experiencing significant financial constraints, she said.

She thought reporters could help by targeting the broken parts of the electoral system and shining a spotlight on the things that keep people from engaging with councils.

“This election shows that turnout didn’t get any better despite quite extensive coverage, despite a big campaign by LGNZ and others.

“Whatever we have right now is not working,” she said. “Something has to change.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Governor Lukas Enembe of Indonesia’s Melanesian province of Papua has been banned from travelling abroad by the state Directorate General of Immigration, Ministry of Law and Human Rights, preventing him undergoing vital medical treatment in the Philippines.

Governor Enembe, 55, was due to go to Manila this month. However, his hope of getting treatment there has been dashed by the ban from the Directorate General of Immigration.

The order preventing any overseas trip to Governor Lukas Enembe is in force until 7 March 2023.

It was issued in response to a Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) request to ban the governor from any overseas trip.

“Directorate of Immigration Supervision and Enforcement of the Directorate General of Immigration accepts the submission for prevention to subject an. Lukas Enembe from the Corruption Eradication Commission on Wednesday, September 7, 2022. Prevention is valid for six months,” said the Director of Immigration Supervision and Enforcement, I Nyoman Gede Surya Mataram in Jakarta.

Tabloid Jubi reports that during spontaneous demonstrations in protest by Enembe’s supporters in Jayapura last Monday over the steps taken by the KPK, Enembe’s lawyer, Stevanus Roy Rening, said governor was due to leave for his medical treatment that day.

“Last night, the Governor [explained] that it was actually Monday that he is supposed to leave [for treatment]. I repeat again, let the people know.

‘Roy, I’m sick’
“Governor said, ‘Roy, I’m sick. I have got permission from the Minister of Home Affairs. I said, ‘Sir, not yet, please delay! There is a letter from the KPK for you to attend on Monday’,” Rening.

Rening was worried that if Enembe left for treatment abroad on Monday, public opinion would form that Lukas Enembe had run away. However, Governor Enembe said he had never stolen the public’s money, so he would never be afraid.

“[I said], ‘later when you left, it will be said that Lukas Enembe is afraid, running away’. [He replied], ‘Roy, I am the leader of the Papuans. I’ve never been afraid, I’ve never corrupted’,” Rening said, reiterating Enembe’s explanation.

#Papuan #protesters warn #Jakarta – ‘don’t criminalise’ Governor Enembe #AsiaPacificReport #WestPapua #Indonesia @westpapuamedia @PNGAttitude @jasonbrown1965 @BennyWenda @LaurensIkinia https://t.co/zhrTkMWtsE pic.twitter.com/L5ha0lvn44

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) September 16, 2022

Governor Enembe’s personal medical physician, Dr Antonius Mote, said Governor Lukas Enembe was still ill.

The heavy pressure had caused health reactions such as swollen feet that make it difficult Governor Enembe.

According to Dr Mote as the Pacific Pos reports, in the last 6 months the governor began to experience several illnesses such as stroke, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and kidney complications.

He has routinely undergone check-ups in hospitals in Singapore and Manila, Philippines.

Return needed for medical
Dr Mote said that the governor should have returned to the doctor in Singapore for a medical appointment but this was cancelled because of a summons for an interview by the KPK.

“We really ask for his right to get medical treatment, in this case, he can go to a hospital abroad. Because he was very worried, the pressure he experienced could worsen his health condition,” said Dr Mote.

In response to the request from the Governor Enembe’s lawyer Rening over the treatment overseas, the Deputy Chair of the KPK, Alexander Marwata, said this would be facilitated — with certain conditions, reports Tempo.

Marwata gave the Governor an option to seek treatment at the Army Central Hospital or Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in Jakarta.

“If the disease can be treated in Indonesia, why do you have to go abroad?,” said Marwata.

Marwata said a doctor would decide whether Enembe could be treated in Indonesia or must go abroad for treatment.

If doctors in Indonesia “raised their hands”, he said, the KPK would grant Enembe permission to go abroad for treatment.

Chasing alleged ‘corruption’
Lawyer Rening said the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) seemed to be trying to find a case of alleged corruption involving Governor Enembe.

“It [has been] proven [by Luke Enembe]. During his [leadership] period, all audit results of [Regional Revenue and Expenditure Budget by] have been vetted by the Supreme Audit Agency [gained opinion]. There was no element of corruption found,” said Rening.

The Papuan Governor’s spokesperson, Rifai Darus, said the Governor’s home was still being closely guarded by thousands of people and close relatives of Enembe.

“He [Governor Enembe] asked not to have too many people there and asked them to return to their homes. These people came alone, without being asked, after seeing the information circulating on social media regarding the ‘criminalisation’ of the Governor,” said Darus.

He added that the Governor had also said the ongoing legal process was a “political struggle” and asked not to “politicise the situation”.

“He knows very well that the current situation is a process of ‘criminalising’ him by making the KPK the ‘front’ to deal with this case. The Governor has the right as stated in the 1945 Constitution Article 48a  that everyone has the right to live and defend his life,” said Darus.

The president of the Communion of Baptist Churches in West Papua, Dr Socratez Yoman, has revealed to news media that the KPK had three times tried to criminalise Governor Enembe.

‘Purely political goal’
“The effort to ‘criminalise’ Papuan Governor Lukas Enembe is purely a political goal or agenda for [the elections in] 2024, not a legal issue,” he said.

Reverend Yoman believes that other political parties in Indonesia felt “uncomfortable and insecure” about entering the political process in 2024 in Papua Province.

“So far, there have been people who have seen, observed and felt that the presence of Governor Enembe is a threat and obstacle for other political parties to become ‘number one’ in Papua province.

Reverend Yoman said there was no other way to “destroy the strong fortress” of the Governor Enembe, who is  chair of the Democratic DPD of Papua province. So the KPK was being used by certain political parties to ‘criminalise’ Enembe.

“On Wednesday, September 14, 2022, I met Governor Enembe at his residence in Koya Timur and he told me, Mr Yoman, the problem is now clear. It’s not a legal issue, it’s a political issue.

“Pak Budi Gunawan, the head of BIN (State Intelligence Agency) and PDIP (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) used the KPK to criminalise me. Mr Yoman, you should write an article so that everyone would know about this crime.

“How come state institutions can become tools for certain political parties,” Reverend Yoman quoted Governor Enembe as saying.

Money left for medical expenses
On that occasion, the Governor of Papua also conveyed about Rp 1 billion [NZ$112,000] to Socratez Yoman, where in March 2019, the Governor left for Jakarta at night because his health was getting worse.

This was during the covid-19 lockdown.

“When Enembe left, he kept Rp. 1 billion in the room. After three months in Jakarta, in May 2019, the Governor called Tono, who used to look after and organise Enembe’s house and yard.

“I asked Tono to go to my room and take the money in the room with a value of 1 billion. I asked Tono to send it through a BCA account. That’s my money, not money from corruption. This KPK is just claiming anything,” said Reverend Yoman quoting Governor Enembe.

Reverend Yoman appealed for support and prayers for Governor Enembe and his family.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan Masters in Communication Studies student at Auckland University of Technology who has been studying journalism. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz