There are 30 million Christian Zionists in the United States, and there are only 16 million Jews on the planet.

Therefore the colonialist project known as Zionism is not primarily a Jewish force.

What’s more, with the rise of post-colonialist, anti-racist attitudes in the younger generation, the overlap between Jews and Zionists is getting steadily smaller.

In Aotearoa (New Zealand) where Marilyn comes from, there are 5 rabbis, 6 synagogues and 65 self-professed Christian Zionist clergy. As a consequence of that, the claim that campaigning for Palestinian human rights is antisemitic is getting steadily more difficult for politicians and police to justify.

They still try, though. There is a terrible tendency for people with a strong position in government circles to claim they speak for ‘communities’ which in truth they have little connection to, and no mandate from.

I suspect something similar happened in Hastings this year. Local Jewish people were puzzled when the annual Holocaust Memorial Day event was unexpectedly taken on by a mysterious new company called ‘Hastings Jewish Community‘.

Who speaks for you? It’s pretty poor when an organization you’ve never heard of and/or you have no control over is on the platform, ‘speaking for you’.

That’s why a group of anti-racist New Zealanders, including Garson’s group ‘Alternative Jewish Voices’ have just written a letter of protest to their government…

The letter opens with…

“We are Jewish New Zealanders, members of Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation. We understand that your office has scheduled a meeting this week with the NZ Jewish Council (NZJC) and additional ministers. We object in the strongest terms. The NZJC is unelected coterie, forever uncritically aligned with Israel. That is not the Jewish community.”

Those of us who, a few years ago, were attempting to bring socialism back into action in the UK Labour Party will recognize this dilemma. The more we learned about the ‘Jewish Labour Movement’ the more puzzled we became. Their members were not necessarily Jewish, and many of them were not even members of the Labour Party but they professed to be mortally wounded whenever we visibly campaigned for Palestinian freedom. The answer lay in the former title of the Jewish Labour Movement. It was a Zionist campaign group, wearing new colours in the Corbyn era.

Why does this matter? Here’s another statement from that letter…

“Let us say this clearly: there is nothing essentially Jewish about Zionism. Zionism is a project of colonisation, erasure, apartheid, ethnic cleansing—finally, of genocide. Institutions that wrap their nationalism in our Jewishness are shielding the brutality that we witness daily. In this country, the NZJC has been a leading voice in the campaign to confuse Jewish with Zionist, enabling decades of oppression in our names.”

What’s more in the UK, many of our hard-working socialist activists were being appallingly bullied, and quite a few summarily expelled from the Party, apparently as a result of their anti-racist activism – what was initially baffling was that many of them were Jewish socialists.

The Zionists amongst us seemed to me to be not ‘centrists’ as they claimed, but startlingly unreasonable, far-right apologists so I really wasn’t that surprised to see this…

“The NZJC does not serve, represent or account to the Jewish community. How many Jewish New Zealanders would choose a representative who, like NZJC president Juliet Moses, retweets defenses of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute?”

I wish AJV the very best of luck in persuading their government to believe that not all Jews think alike, and that it’s quite possible most Jews don’t think the way that ‘Jewish Council’ does. We in Hastings gathered to speak to Marilyn via a livestream from New Zealand on Saturday night, to learn more of her ambition to promote Jewish pluralism.

The evening was organized by Hastings and District PSC and Hastings Jews for Justice.

As Garson said to us, Jewish culture developed in diaspora. As a result it can and does embrace a fantastic, international variety of opinions and lifestyles, both secular and religious. That being the case, people like Marilyn are ideally placed to help develop the growing movement for united anti-racism across the world. It can, and it will – if we can help them shake off the establishment Holdfasts who are trying to cling to the barbaric idea that Jewish equals Zionist equals ‘let Israel kill Palestinians’.

As our contribution to this work, Circaidy Gregory is going to publish the UK edition of Marilyn’s book, Jewish not Zionist. It will be out in March, and will include an introduction by Leah Levane, co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour.

So – never forget – there are far more Zionists than there are Jews, and Jews are not necessarily Zionist, so if anyone tells you that campaigning for Palestinian human rights is antisemitic, you can tell them the numbers.

Most Zionists are not Jews, therefore to assume that Jews are upset by your campaign for Palestinian human rights is antisemitic.