What happens in Aotearoa NZ when a Jew acknowledges Palestinians as her equals? What does anti-Zionist mean?

For the first time, Jewish, not Zionist tells a very personal story of Aotearoa’s Jewish solidarity with Palestine.

Marilyn Garson worked in Gaza for four years. Witnessing Israeli bombardments and total military siege on the lives of ordinary Palestinians, Garson asked herself, “What will I believe: everything I’ve ever been told or the world in front of my eyes?”

As she unlearned Zionism, she uncovered a rich, outward-looking Jewishness.

In her second book, she recounts her homecoming as a practising Jew seeking her faith community and justice for Palestine. Painfully excluded from her community, she slowly constructed a liberatory Jewish identity—both activist and spiritual. She co-founded Alternative Jewish Voices to call for justice in a pluralist, anti-racist Jewish voice.

In two parts, the book also carefully explores the power of a political definition of antisemitism to shield Israel’s unbearable violence and apartheid. It deconstructs the echo chamber of overlapping entities which purport to speak for the Jewish community. Throughout, the book offers timely analysis of the impact of the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion. In particular, Garson reinvigorates human rights as a radical politics for dehumanised Palestine.

A founding member of Global Jews for Palestine, Garson writes with the aroha of Gaza and an unwavering resolve learned on the front lines of the international movement for justice.

About Marilyn

Marilyn Garson grew up in Halifax, Canada, the youngest of four sisters. She has degrees in political science, philosophy and international development. A few weeks before she was due in law school, Marilyn discovered the backpack and absconded. Immigrating to Hokianga in the mid-1980s, she owned a weaving design label and taught other small business owners.

From 1998 she worked with marginalised communities affected by war, launching locally owned social enterprises. She worked with Cambodian former child combatants and people with disabilities (1998-2001), established an import channel for global handmade goods as the founding director of Worldstock.com (2001 – 2003), worked with Afghan family businesses and led an enterprise that employed at women at home in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2005 – 2010).

In 2011, she received an unsolicited offer to work and live in the Gaza Strip—an extraordinary invitation to live among people she had been told were her enemies. Her first book, Still Lives – a Memoir of Gaza tells the story of four years, two wars, and the most unlikely social enterprise. She wrote to add adjectives to public understanding of the community of Gaza: educated, ambitious, and audaciously human behind a blockade wall.

Garson returned to Aotearoa in late 2015 to live as a member of the Jewish community, settle down, and speak about the human rights of Palestinians. As she recounts in Jewish, not Zionist, it didn’t turn out that way.

Garson is the co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, and a steering committee member of Global Jews for Palestine. She co-leads the independent minyan Ranu! and blogs at www.ajv.org.nz