By New Zealander Bex Silver

My name is Bex, I was born to a Christian mother and Jewish father. My surname, originally Silberblatt, is an Ashkenazic Jewish name that was shortened to “Silver” in the face of anti-Semitism. I have family members who were victims of the catastrophe of Nazism, and I have family members who are perpetrators of the catastrophe of Zionism.

Growing up in Messianic Jewish circles in New Zealand, I was exposed early on to the idea that Israel is the ancestral and biblical homeland for Jews. There wasn’t any room for questioning the dominant narrative that Jews have a right to the land they call Israel.

At the age of 20, I travelled to Israel, visiting my family who had migrated there to pursue this idea of a Jewish utopia. By then, I’d already started to question the idea of ethno-centric ideologies and the “othering” of Palestinians. Hearing the way my family in Israel demonised Arabs and Palestinians upset me and I returned home with an eagerness to learn more about the history of Palestine.

Now it’s important to remember that while we talk about the importance of free press, Israel remains one of the biggest perpetrators of preventing Israelis and Jews from knowing the truth about the Nakba, the ongoing oppression of Palestinians and of course the genocide in Gaza.

Israel does everything possible to stop Jews from humanising Palestinians.

Israel does everything possible to stop Jews from humanising Palestinians. Because if we start to see each the humanity in one another, it becomes harder and harder to justify oppression; it becomes harder to justify occupation; it becomes harder to justify genocide. Journalism has the power to bring people together or to keep us apart.

While I was brainwashed for the first 20 years of my life, I soon learned about the Nakba, the ongoing oppression of Palestinians in their daily lives, the expansion of illegal settlements, restrictions of basic human needs, and ultimately the evils of Zionism.

So last year I decided to travel to the West Bank, against the knowledge of my Israeli family, to spend time in a refugee camp and volunteer. The inner turmoil of being Jewish, knowing how my own people have suffered throughout history and the reality that we have gone on to cause immense suffering of our own, led me to go on a journey to Palestine to reconcile this tension.

Lying just south of Bethlehem, where an 8m-high concrete wall separates the West Bank from Israel, I stayed in Dheisheh Refugee Camp. It’s home to 19,000 people living within just 1km². As I made my way through the narrow alleyways of this vertical concrete jungle, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between this camp and the Jewish ghettos of Europe in the 1940s.

During my four weeks in the camp, it was raided three times, with several young men arrested and one shot for taking videos of the soldiers. I woke up to the violent sounds of bombing and gunfire and would step out on to my street to see shattered buildings and debris.

This is normal for those living there and the social worker inside me pondered how Palestinians can heal from trauma when they have war so ever-present on their doorsteps. I had no idea what would unfold in Gaza just months after I returned home.

Like me, there are a growing number of Jews and Christians around the world who stand against Israel’s occupation and war on Gaza. We know that Israel’s actions undermine the very foundation of what it means to be Jewish. And yet our voices for justice are drowned out by those who wield the power of press.

Nearly 150 journalists have been murdered just for showing the world what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank; murdered for doing their jobs. We have to continue on their legacy and be the mouth-piece for truth. Justice for Palestine will require us to be loud and to change the false narratives that mainstream media perpetuates.

It’s time to decolonize the press and we all have a part to play. Here is my wero, my challenge to you all: write articles in your local papers, submit complaints to the broadcasting authority, comment on editorials, protest outside media headquarters, call radio stations, do anything you can to flip the script of false and unbalanced media. I was once a victim to the false narrative of Zionism, but there is power in truth and I am proof of that.