Not just antisemitism: Protest that neither hates nor falsely equates

Members of Alternative Jewish Voices and Wellington Palestine sat down last weekend to explore the speech of protest that neither hates nor falsely equates.  

We find that language in the discourse of human rights, because rights are either everyone’s rights, or they are nothing. We reject any language which ethnically ranks and values human beings. Rights value us according to a single, shared human standard. Then the law can distinguish between the different obligations of occupier and occupied, and the wildly different proportions of actual harm.

We deplore the weapons of war because we are all flesh and blood and family. We mourn all of the deaths. We do not equate the dangers or the damages. We protest Israel’s regime, wherein the weapons are wielded so disproportionately by the powerful against the powerless. We call for legal accountability to replace the present, violent impunity.

That is not anti-Israel. Accountability…