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