AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Four hundred people rallied and marched here Dec. 21 against the massacre one week earlier of Jews celebrating the first day of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Speakers condemned the rise in Jew-hatred and the growing normalization of attacks on Jews in New Zealand, Australia and around the world. The action was sponsored by the NZ Jewish Council and NZ Against Hamas.
“The Hamas-led genocidal invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, began a new phase in the war against the Jewish people,” Jewish Council President Juliet Moses told the crowd. “There is no ceasefire in this war. It is coming from the far left, the far right and radical Islamists,” that has culminated in “murder in Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.; at a Manchester synagogue; and now murder at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach.”
Moses criticized “elites and institutions,” including “academics, NGOs, activist journalists, city councils, unions, professional organizations,” as well as politicians who “take Hamas at its word about everything, except its intent to destroy Israel.”
Lucy Rogers, founder of NZ Against Hamas, said she organized counterprotests at anti-Israel rallies here “every week for two years. Not once did I ever hear the Palestine Solidarity Network call on Hamas to release the hostages.”
Rogers’ press release about the action was headlined, “Never Again Is Now — Auckland March Against Jew Hatred.” In New Zealand, it said, “the two years before the Hamas attacks, there were no recorded anti-Semitic assaults, but there’ve been 15 in the two years since.”
Other speakers included representatives of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the Beth Shalom Progressive Community and the Indigenous Embassy of Jerusalem. Tawhiri Matea Littlejohn, from the Tai Tokerau iwi (Maori tribe) of the north, read out the names of the 15 people gunned down on Bondi Beach.
The rally was followed by a march with chants of “Jewish lives matter!”