Doikaytn in Oceania

Eds. note: This article incorporates vocabulary from the Māori and Wiradjuri languages. Please scroll to the bottom of this page for a glossary of terms used.

Ngaru Nui, Ngaru Roa, Ngaru Paewhenua is a piece by Nikau Hindin, an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. She is actively engaged in the revitalization of tapa (barkcloth) making using the aute plant –– a practice that had previously been lost in Aotearoa (also known as New Zealand). This work records the ancient oceanic migration routes taken by Māori tūpuna (ancestors) as they navigated vast stretches of the Pacific from the homelands of Hawaiki. It was along these journeys that aute itself was carried and first introduced to the islands.

Nikau’s work reminds us of the diasporic origins of the Māori people before they cultivated “hereness” in Aotearoa and became tangata whenua (people of the land). She is of Ngāpuhi and Te Rarawa descent, tracing whakapapa (lineage) directly from such first arrivals. She also carries another heritage, most clearly reflected in our shared surname, to a later arrival of diasporans scattering from our family hometowns in Pale of Settlement. While she does not identify as Jewish herself, she has Jewish family through her mother’s side, including distantly, myself. 

The migration routes that the Jews followed to Aotearoa were paved by empire. Like in Australia, their first arrivals were with the earliest British settlers. Diasporic generations followed across the ocean in bursts of exile from deepening waves of violence in the Old Country. Their refuge was and continues to be predicated upon the further exile of Indigenous nations and peoples from the lands and waters they have stewarded for millennia.

Jews across the diaspora have increasingly unsettled and rejected the heightened colonial contradictions of the state which claims to represent them, which have manifested most recently in the genocide in Gaza. In response, they are turning to new ways to belong where they are. But what does claiming “hereness” mean when where they are is also on stolen land? To what extent is being “here” dependent on the decision of the diasporic guests themselves? 

In the Oceanic outposts of the diaspora, from Aotearoa to Dharug and Arrernte Countries (Australia), a plurality of doikaytn (the Yiddish plural form for doikayt, or “hereness”) have sprouted from entwined experiences of Indigenous and diasporic exile, illuminating paths towards rootedness beyond colonial domination, and belonging beyond “uniquely Jewish practice[s] of inhabitation.” Glimpses of their emergence are traced in the knowledge shared by Ashkenazi and Wiradjuri Jews, as well as Nikau herself.

Aotearoa

Sarah Cole and Jeremy Rose are two Jews living in Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington who are involved with Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV), an anti-Zionist collective based on the North Island. They joined the organization around the time when it was founded a decade ago by Jewish activists Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert. Sarah and Jeremy both belong to Jewish families exiled from Ukraine/Poland and Austria, respectively, and both trace familial and intellectual lineages to the Jewish Labor Bund. 

AJV represents a profoundly new kind of Jewish organization in Aotearoa. As Jeremy shares, “traditionally in New Zealand, there was really no way to be Jewish that was not Zionist and not religious” before the group’s founding. Growing up in secular, leftist households, they lived outside of the mainstream Jewish community. As kids, they both participated in the 1981 protest movements surrounding the Springbok tour, a pivotal moment of Māori protest and anti-colonial solidarity in opposition to South African apartheid. Jeremy recalls the participation of other nonaligned Jews:

“During the Springbok tour, which was a very crucial time in New Zealand, we had a kids’ anti-apartheid movement. I remember looking around at one stage, and among what we call Pākehā –– white European New Zealanders –– at least five of us had a Jewish refugee parent, but none of us were part of the Jewish community as such.”

Sarah shares a similar experience of disconnection from identity and community as a result of her secular, anti-Zionist upbringing:

“We weren’t religious Jews, and we weren’t Zionists. We didn’t go to Jewish youth group. Because in New Zealand there was either the religious youth group, Bnei Akiva, or Habonim Dror [a socialist Zionist youth movement], and we couldn’t go to either!”

Although not part of mainstream Jewry, Jeremy and Sarah recounted their diasporic resonances with the people of the land. When Sarah was little, her mother “was the only Pākehā woman in a suburban Māori language learning group.” She identified strongly with the Māori struggle, and supported the construction of a local marae (Māori communal place). Jeremy’s mother also learned te reo (the Māori language), and volunteered at the nation’s first kōhanga reo (total immersion preschool). He jokes about diasporic multilingual affinities, as opposed to British settler monolingualism: 

“As far as learning second languages, [Pākehā] are absolutely terrible. I mean, probably worse than the British. But the immigrants, they’re all really good.” 

It was against this backdrop of excluded Jewishness, disconnection from Zionism, and khavershaft with Māori struggle that both Sarah and Jeremy embraced legacies of the Bund. Years ago, Jeremy met up with members of the Bund’s oldest surviving branch, including renowned Bundist writer Arnold Zable, on a visit to Naarm/Melbourne. After sharing a meal, the members sang Di Shvue to Jeremy’s son, while Arnold translated in real time from Yiddish to English. Jeremy recalls Arnold saying to him that day: “you know Jeremy, I think we won!”    

Although not explicitly a Bundist organization, Alternative Jewish Voices emerged as an organized space for Jews like Sarah and Jeremy where there was none before. Reflecting the politics of its members, the group outwardly expresses commitments to anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity, as well as “mana motuhake [self-determination] of tangata whenua across Aotearoa.” It collaborates with Dayenu, an organization of “Jews against occupation” of which Sarah is a member, within Aotearoa’s Palestine solidarity movement. 

Justine Sachs, a Jew of Lithuanian descent (via South Africa), co-founded Dayenu out of a desire to educate Jewish community members about the realities of Palestinian occupation. The group’s early work largely centered around solidarity with Palestinian student organizations, including the promotion of BDS tactics. Justine received global notoriety in 2017 when she co-wrote an open letter to Kiwi singer Lorde urging her not to play a show in Tel Aviv. Lorde went on to cancel the show, earning Justine and her co-author Nadia Abu-Shanab a 45,000-shekel fine ordered by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. 

Justine shares how Dayenu’s alternative diasporic vision was nourished by the land’s pre-existing alternatives, such as in the Treaty of Waitangi, a document signed in 1840 by over 500 Māori chiefs and the British Crown. Nikau explains:

“[Te Tiriti] is an aspirational document and if it had been honoured our country would be in a far more prosperous state. It's also what we call our first migratory document. So it allows for non-Māori to enter into our country and defines the rules of engagement. Essentially it asserts the mana of tangata whenua: our spiritual and eternal connection to the land as Māori –– as many nations within Aotearoa. [.....] And the treaty is about self governance and thriving together. It's about, ‘wow you guys have technology and tools and some things that we might benefit from, we have this landmass that we are bound to and understand how to share and do things collectively on, and we’ll look after you if you are not lawless and abide by our tikanga.’ So it's really an amazing blueprint for how Indigenous and nonindigenous can engage, a document that envisions how we can be together.”

For Justine, Te ao Māori, the Māori worldview and Te Tiriti o Waitangi are seen as an  “alternative to the horrors of capitalist colonialism. And that is such an inspiration to us, and gives us such a strong foundation as anti-Zionist Jews.” 

Living within the relations of Te Tiriti, as Justine explains, is central to what doikayt means in Aotearoa:

“There’s a kind of new term called tangata Tiriti, or ‘people of the treaty,’ and what that means is that you recognize that your place here is on the basis of this covenant, this agreement, this promise to Māori. And so you have an obligation there, and there’s responsibility that falls out of that [........]. And for me that's what doikayt means. It is an anticolonial socialist politics rooted in a kind of internationalism that doesn’t take any European kind of hegemonic worldview for granted, but is really rooted in the people and places we're in.”

Jeremy echoes this vision of doikayt – one that unwaveringly asserts belonging to a place without assimilating or imposing: 

“I feel very strongly that peoples’ right to be somewhere, even if they’re an illegal boat person who’s just gotten off, is inherent. That’s just a right. And that’s what doikayt is for me. It says you belong where you are, celebrate it, doesn’t let anybody say you have to assimilate; you are who you are and you have that right. But you have no right to impose that on anyone else.” 

Of course, while Te Tiriti provides a meaningful guide towards achieving this kind of doikayt, the document is just what Nikau describes –– aspirational. It represents a model that must be continuously strived toward in the face of constant transgression by the settler state. 

In May 2024, the Fast-track Approvals bill was introduced by a right-wing coalition in order to bypass environmental checks and open up lands for resource extraction and urban development. Members of the Ngāti Toa, an iwi/tribe based primarily in the southern North Island, led hundreds to Parliament in protest against the state’s unilateral capture of lands and waters and violation of Māori sovereignty. Today, the bill is law. 

The right-wing ACT Party came for Te Tiriti directly when they introduced the Treaty Principles Bill in November 2024. The proposition sought to fully subsume Te Tiriti’s authority within the legislation of the settler state –– replacing itself as the arbiter of relations between lands and peoples under the guise of liberal equality. 

In late November, Te Pāti Māori (Māori Party) MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke led a haka in Parliament, ripping up a copy of the proposed bill. What followed was the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti (March for the Treaty) –- one of the biggest protest movements in Aotearoa’s history. Tens of thousands of Māori and Pākehā marched from all over Aotearoa, brandishing the flag of tino rangatiratanga (absolute sovereignty). Within it, Justine marched alongside other members of Dayenu as ngā Hūrai mō te Tiriti (Jews for the Treaty).

Jewish khavershaft with Māori against the settler state emanates from the obligations of nurturing doikayt as tangata Tiriti. At the same time, building coalitions with diasporas and Indigenous peoples – exilic groups that, as Sarah puts it, “threaten the modern concept of a nation state” – bolsters mutual protection from a rising far right:

“We know that the same people, they could attack a Mosque or they could attack a Synagogue, or they could attack a marae [Māori communal place], to them it's all the same.”

But if doikaytn on unceded lands are to transcend replications of colonial hierarchy and domination, they must entwine deeper than arenas of settler activism and class reductionist ideals. Understanding land beyond settler extractivist and proprietary logics requires other kinds of knowledge, including those which Māori have held for centuries, and towards which Jewish tradition offers paths.

Nikau speaks of “timeplace,” an ontological non-separateness of time and place within the lifeways of the Māori and other Indigenous groups. It persists in tension with the flattening, European time that colonialism has haphazardly grafted onto distant lands:

“We celebrate Christmas in the summertime, right? But that is kind of wrong, that's why we have Matariki, the Maori new year, in the middle of winter [on 20 June this year]. We should be having rest and holidays in the middle of winter, and that's when we should be inside with our families. And our time for that is called Matariki, which has just become a public holiday. But there is this tension with the Western Gregorian calendar, and all of its dates that are not right for this land. From a Māori perspective, I would approach the concept of time as your connection place. Because time comes from the land. The determiners of time come from the environment. And the lunar calendar follows much more in alignment with the land.”

Jewish ritual time –– the lunar cycles of our months, the solar cycles of our parashot, the weekly cycles of shabbat; the marking of Rosh Chodesh with the birth of a new moon, or of havdalah with the sight of stars –– connects our memory of ancestors, events, and places with the cycles of where we are. The lands and knowledges of Aotearoa thus become sites of remembrance of our own lineages in the face of the Zionist amnesia, as Justine shares: 

“Zionism is predicated on forgetting; forget that world, forget those people, we’re indigenous to Israel! But Jewishness is about remembering. And interactions with the Māori world and the importance of whakapapa helps in keeping that knowledge and recognizing that harm.” 

Unlike Māori, however, our diasporic whakapapa is not one that is ancestrally connected to Aotearoa. Unlike te reo, our languages did not emerge to describe the intricacies of that land, and unlike tikanga (Māori traditions and customs), our own customs did not develop around how, specifically, to share and steward it. As newcomers arriving within a colonial project, “hereness” entails both unlearning and co-healing, upholding the roles of tangata Tiriti and imagining hybrid practices of Jewish tradition that are situated in local lands and forms of knowledge.

Not all settler societies, however, have treaties to turn to as horizons for solidarity and land sharing with Indigenous peoples. In fact, the state of Australia has never signed a formal treaty with any of the hundreds of nations that first stewarded the lands of the continent. Conversations with Jews living on Dharug and Arrernte Countries (Australia) expand on the limits of activism and Jewishness as doikaytn are nurtured on a continent of nations violently rendered Terra Nullius.

Dharug and Arrente Countries

Just across the “Tasman,” doikaytn are sprouting across Australia’s unceded lands. Caoimhe Hanrahan-Lawrence is a Wiradjuri woman whose family comes from near Dubbo in what is today the Australian state of New South Wales. She is also a Masorti Jew, having converted around three years ago, now living on Cadigal-Wangal lands of Dharug Country (Sydney). Caoimhe shares how she encountered Judaism while already grounded in anti-Zionism:

“I suppose my anti-Zionism sort of predated my Jewish identity, which made the conversion process very...interesting. You do have to keep schtum about a lot of things.”

Nevertheless, she was always aware that Judaism existed beyond Zionism:

“I did have connections with a few anti-Zionist Jews prior to conversion and maintained those connections. And we were doing anti-Zionist seders throughout my conversion journey. I didn’t have a really cohesive group of anti-Zionist Jews during my conversion, that came later. But I was familiar with the existence of anti-Zionist Judaism and Jews, I wouldn't've converted otherwise.”

Caoimhe is now involved in Masorti community in Dharug Country, Yiddishist communities there and in Naarm/Melbourne, as well as in the Tzedek Collective – “an anti-zionist space based on the principle of doikayt and committed to anticolonial action for furthering Indigenous sovereignty and Palestinian liberation” based around the unceded Dharug and Tharawal lands that now constitute Sydney.

Although the Collective has been active for years in the city’s Palestine movement, Caoimhe’s role centers primarily around the work of spiritual community building. Last year, she helped organize a traditional Kol Nidre, building ritual space for the community to move beyond their own unfulfillable commitments and “let go of ideas of being a good activist.” Indeed, as Caoimhe shares, rooting meaningfully among First Nations requires more than just activist encounters:

“Building connections with Indigenous people and thinking about fights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights as something that we’re committed to is important, and feels natural to recognize as people on the left. But I think putting that in practice is very different to holding it as an ideal. Especially as anti-Zionist Jews, we’re so used to going to Palestine protests and being celebrated for being there, and that is not how, as a predominantly settler group, you build those relationships with Indigenous activists. It’s really about those one-on-one relationships and that understanding of where you fit in terms of your community and your positionality. You can’t expect five people in Tzedek shirts to show up to a Black deaths in custody rally and have that relationship be made. It's more relational, rather than organizational.”  

Asymmetries arise, she continues, when Jewish activists dwell unmovingly within such spaces of praise, or uphold unholistic positionings against colonialism: 

“Another thing that I have noticed is sort of a reticence to put Black Indigenous struggles on the same levels as the work that we do for Palestine. Palestine always has to be there, it can’t just be about Indigenous struggles.” 

Palestine solidarity itself becomes a site of settler domination when anti-Zionism does not hold the same space for Israeli and local colonialisms; or Palestinian and local Indigenous resistances. And while Palestine has become a symbol for global anticolonial resistance, and serves as the activation point for many Jews into diasporic consciousness, the work of nourishing doikayt means not stopping there. 

After all, ongoing colonialism in the lands of Palestine and Australia are linked in ways much more directly than their physical distance might suggest, as was elaborated in my conversation with Gem Walsh, a Jewish activist and educator from the Loud Jew Collective who lives on  Arrernte Country in the town of Mparntwe/Alice Springs. 

Gem, like Justine, also traces her Jewish roots to Lithuania via South Africa. She was born and raised in the only Jewish family in her regional town in New South Wales, hours away from any Jewish institutions. Her upbringing was thus secular by geography, influenced through early involvements with socialist and anti-racist organizations, and underpinned by a deep yearning for Jewish community beyond Zionism: 

“I knew myself to be a Jewish person but didn’t find belonging or ethical resonance within that community for a decade, and I stopped trying.”

About a decade ago, Gem moved to Mparntwe, a rural town in the “Northern Territory” which sits roughly in the center of the continent. Her experiences living there, she recalls, brought a return to Jewishness through witnessing the violence of racial capitalism:

“I’ve been living in the Northern Territory for 10 years in Alice Springs –– Mparntwe – the land of the Arrernte people.  Culture is very actively practiced where I live and in the surrounding desert communities, and is under constant attack from white supremacy, assimilation and state violence. Living in the desert alongside First Nations people who are in deep relationship  with  traditional law, with homelands and with ritual practices helped me understand how First Nations knowledge systems threaten and undermine capitalism. Judaism — a traditionally land-based religion, organised around lunar cycles, custodianship of the earth and ritualised accountability — has the potential to foster resistance to capitalist, colonial hegemony. Ultimately it was living on spiritually powerful Arrernte land and witnessing what it is to truly safeguard and belong to land that encouraged me to return to Jewishness, and understand that my estrangement from Jewishness was an act of assimilationist violence serving colonial capitalism. From this understanding, a return to Jewish modes of knowing and being has felt not just possible but essential for me.”

Like Justine, whose entanglements with Māori helped her recognize the severing of her own whakapapa, Gem’s experience in Mparntwe brought about an awareness of exile and colonial wounds, as well as paths towards healing them, including those towards the land through Jewish ritual time.

About four and a half years ago, she joined the newly-organized Loud Jew Collective, a Naarm/Melbourne-based group standing against Zionism and “responsive to the Aboriginal law that governs the lands and waters we inhabit.” With them, while continuing to live in Arrernte Country, she began facilitating new spaces for Jewish communal healing around ritual, song sharing, and ancestral plant knowledge.  

In Mparntwe, the interconnectedness of the apparatuses of global colonialism comes into clear view. Just 18 kilometers southwest of the town lies Pine Gap, a sprawling “joint defense facility” co-run by the Australian Defence Force and the American CIA, NSA, and NRO. 

From Pine Gap, the United States operates two geosynchronous satellites over the Indian Ocean which actively monitor vast swaths of Europe, West Asia, and Africa, contributing significantly to Five Eyes SIGINT (signals intelligence). Their direct surveillance of the Gaza Strip has provided information directly to the Israeli government for years. The current genocide in Gaza is thus directly abetted by the exile of Arrernte from their lands over 12,000 kilometers away. 

This nexus of coloniality has brought together an exilic coalition of Indigenous people and settler/diasporic dwellers in Arrernte Country in Mparntwe for Falastin, a local organising network that emerged in November 2023 in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Gem participated in the campaign:

“At the beginning of the genocide we blockaded the entrance road to the Pine Gap US Joint Defense Facility with  local Arrernte activists who have been fighting for years to get this stolen land back. Pine Gap provides surveillance and geolocation intelligence to the US military & NSA, which is then shared with Israel to locate precision targets and enable drone strikes and targeted assassinations. That this violence is conducted on unceded Arrernte land is an ongoing assault on Arrernte sovereignty, rendering Pine Gap a site of colonial violence against First Nations people on this continent and globally. This was the most tangible action that I’ve been involved in that both responded to local Indigenous land back struggles and the genocide in Gaza, and I felt called to participate as a white settler and a Jew.” 

In Gem’s experience, doikayt enables the living practice of autonomous kinds of Jewishness, but not without continuously unearthing the accompanying complicities of settler positionality, and resisting hierarchies within anti-Zionist spaces that still pedestal Jewish voices:

“Practicing doikayt compels us to contextualise our experiences and perspectives with acknowledgement of the structural privilege we hold. I’m Jewish, I’m also a white settler with an upper middle class background, living on unceded Arrernte land. My understanding of the world arises from a distinct perspective and part of my ongoing work is learning when to share that perspective and when to listen. And learning how to utilise my privilege to uplift the perspectives of those who are systematically silenced. Philosemitism is strong in civil discourse, white Jewish voices are so often preferenced over Palestinian voices, First Nations voices. Doikayt reminds us to critique this silencing, and always amplify the voices of those most proximal to the struggle at hand. And beneath this, to explore the links between justice struggles, to understand ‘No prisons in Olam haBa’ [Jewish concept of ‘the world to come’] to mean solidarity always across campaigns, from First Nations deaths in custody, to the indefinite offshore detention of refugees to Palestinian hostages in IOF jails.”

Being “here” means more than just not being “there” –– it is a continuous, processual, and dialogical unfolding that, on unceded lands, cannot simply be asserted in momentary declarations of belonging. The latter kind of doikayt, which Rokhl Kafrissen condemned in Haaretz as amounting to “mechanical meme-ification,” brings us right back to the Zionist styles of imposition that diasporists are seeking to transcend. 

Caoimhe illustrates this slow and purposeful process of nourishing hereness using the Wiradjuri concept of Yindyamarra, connecting it to her deepening connections with Torres Strait Islander communities: 

“Yindyamarra is this concept of doing things slowly with respect and permission. And you can get this permission from land, not always just from people. But it’s about taking this slowly. So especially in an anti-Zionist context, there is this sense of urgency and that a lot of the damage has been done here, whereas there is still the feeling that there is something to halt in Palestine. That urgency, I think, is not useful here, because while there is definitely still damage being done and there are moments for urgency, in terms of building a meaningful philosophy, connection, and identity within these countries, it is all about that slowness and purposefulness. I’m building a lot of connections now up in the Torres Strait Islands, and there is such a cultural difference that I can’t express, so I take my time and prioritize respect. It’s not a ‘to-do list,’ but an example of this is being a bit more porous with your personal norms. I keep kosher very strictly but when I go to the Torres I’ll eat turtle and dugong because that is a point of porosity that I can offer to that community. And I’m not saying break halakha to spend more time with Indigenous people, but personal sticking points need to be explored when seeking that openness to engage with different ways of knowing, being, and doing.” 

Of course, visions of doikayt entail the empowerment, and not constraint, of free and continued practice of Jewish tradition across different lands. Although possibilities for personal hybridity arise as traditions entwine, solidarities between them serve to uphold the potentials for each tradition to carry on in their own unique and unbounded ways.

At the same time, impetuses towards Yindyamarra and the slow attunement to lands and peoples lie not only within the holes of Yiddishkeit, but can come from within Jewish tradition and ritual itself. Just as Nikau and Gem describe glimpses of timeplace through lunar calendars, Caoimhe raises the potentials of Jewish time as a way to root in land:

“There is some work we’re doing in terms of seasonality and, especially as Southern Hemisphere Jews, that can resonate a lot wider with Indigenous ways of knowing being and doing, and concepts of space and time. But I think that this is very much in its nascent stages, because there is a bit of fear about connecting with land. In the Southern Hemisphere, even in my conversion class, concepts of seasonality were very diminished. So I saw the potential for that to be a point of similarity, but I think that because it's a troubling point for Zionist Jews to connect to the seasons in a country that is on the other side of the planet, there’s no real focus on that.”

Overcoming this fear of connection to land, Caoimhe reminds us, accompanies unlearning colonial logics of land ownership – looking to the land itself for permission, not just to who we presume to be its proprietors.

This slow learning and unlearning – cultivating relationships across Countries; connecting Jewish ritual time with land – coincides with, and does not replace, direct action and protest solidarity with Indigenous peoples, including Palestinians. Both experiences entwine as doikaytn are cultivated from concurrent positionalities of settlerhood, diaspora, and exile.

Ultimately, “diasporic” and “Indigenous” are not fixed, essential, or mutually exclusive binaries of peoplehood. Rather, they arise as different relationships to land under state sovereignty and settler colonialism. As Jamal Nablusi wrote, “[Indigenous sovereignty] is a concept inherently forged by Indigenous struggle.” And while Indigenous groups arise as such in response to colonizing states, their relations to lands surpass and submerge below national borders, following diasporic routes/roots of their own. Nikau illustrates such migrations in her artwork, and recalls her own diasporic positionality as a guest in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland:

“I am here on Te Kawerau ā Maki land, and that is not my iwi, so you could say that I am a diasporic Māori person. My iwi is in the Far North but I did not grow up there on my papakāinga [ancestral homeland], where my family has an unbroken ancestral connection to for hundreds of years. So here I am a manuhiri [guest].” 

Belonging “here” is not a metaphor. On new, non-ancestral lands, planting roots requires more than unilateral entitlement or refusal to be elsewhere –– it entails unique responsibilities and attunements to local ways of knowing, being, and doing. Among the Jews of Oceania, such understandings are emerging in doikaytn that are no longer bound solely to the politics of the Old Country or the opposition to Zionism, though they include and come from both. Their growths are nourished in overlapping exile from colonial and statist entities that have rendered peoples as “Indigenous” or “diasporic.” 

In a world where such apparatuses sprawl interlinked across continents — from Pine Gap to Palestine — practices of doikayt do not sideline the genocide in Gaza, but situate it holistically within planetary systems of domination. My interlocutors do not simply reject Zionism as a political project — they seek to resist the contrapuntal settler logics that underpin it, both at home and overseas. Their work provokes urgent reflections and commitments to consistent anticolonial solidarity across the settler diasporas that Jews inhabit, and reminds us that being “here” isn’t only up to us.

Māori language glossary

Aotearoa: The Māori place name originally used to refer to the North Island, but now encompassing the entire modern state of New Zealand.

Aute: The paper mulberry plant, introduced to Aotearoa by the ancestors of the Māori people

Hīkoi: Protest march, often spanning over days or weeks

Hīkoi mō te Tiriti: March for the Treaty – a Māori protest movement in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill in mid-November 2024

Iwi: People, nation, or tribe of Māori people – the largest social unit of Māori organization. Often subdivided into hapū (subtribes/clans)

Kaiāwhina: Helper, assistant, or, in the context of a hīkoi, a protest steward 

Mana motuhake: Autonomy, self-rule, separate identity

Marae: Māori meeting place, serving multiple social and religious functions 

Manuhiri: Visitor, guest, someone who is not tangata whenua [people of the land]

Matariki: Celebration of the first rising of the Pleiades star cluster (also called Matariki) in late June or early July, marking the beginning of the lunar year

Ngā Hūrai mō te Tiriti: Slogan used by Jewish groups, particularly in the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, translating to “Jews for the Treaty” 

Pākehā: Term for non-Polynesian person in Aotearoa, but most specifically used to refer to white European, and particularly British New Zealanders

Papakāinga: Māori ancestral homeland, whereupon a person or iwi can trace long, unbroken lineages of inhabitation

Tangata whenua: “People of the land,” or people who trace lineages of connection to specific lands, as opposed to manuhiri [guests]

Tapa: Barkcloth made from the aute plant

Te ao Māori: The Māori worldview, including language, cosmology, philosophy, and spirituality 

Te Tiriti o Waitangi: The Treaty of Waitangi, a foundational document signed in 1840 between the British crown and over 500 Māori chiefs establishing a basis for partnership between peoples    

Te reo: “The language,” used specifically to refer to the Māori language.

Tikanga: Māori customary laws and practices

Tino rangatiratanga: Absolute sovereignty, self-determination

Tūpuna: Ancestors

Whakapapa: Ancestral lineage to communities, lands, and spiritual traditions

Whenua: Land

Wiradjuri language glossary

Yindyamarra: Wiradjuri philosophical principle of slowness, respect, and accountability