Why is Israel’s head of infantry doctrine addressing a Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ) leadership gathering? With genocide charges pending in international court, why is the UPJ’s 2025 fundraising campaign being led by an IDF major general?

The Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ) is the Australian-based umbrella for New Zealand and Australian synagogues in the Progressive stream of Jewish religion. Over the past 15 months, the UPJ has folded an uncritical militarism into its vision of the Israel which it supports.

Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV), a collective of anti-Zionist New Zealand Jews, is voicing their alarm.

In January 2025, the UPJ advertised a leadership forum for emerging Jewish community leaders. Among the featured speakers was Colonel Yaron Simsolo, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) head of infantry doctrine, pictured in his uniform. After some internal resistance, the event was re-branded in warm yellows as a “Shabbat gathering – a weekend with the UPJ”. Colonel Yaron’s image was removed, although he remains part of the event. The current UPJ newsletter also announces that an IDF major general will spearhead its 2025 fundraising appeal for Israel.

Infantry doctrine guides frontline troops. It is an inextricable part of the IDF’s strategy and guidance on matters including ammunition, targeting and the permissible levels of civilian death and destruction. Military doctrine thus displays the IDF’s respect or disregard for the laws of war and civilian protections.

For years, longitudinal studies have quantified Israel’s increasingly deadly selections of ammunition, its use of explosive weapons ever closer to Palestinian civilians with foreseeable increases in civilian casualties, and its explicit doctrines of disproportionate violence against civilian areas. These studies chart the deadly doctrinal path to the decimation of Gaza—which the International Court of Justice calls “plausible genocide”.

A deeper layer of scrutiny, as in this survey of operations from 1993 – 2014 points to the existence of “a second war doctrine — overt, but not officially written or institutionalized. The result is recurrent tension and dissonance owing to prevailing expectations within the IDF and in the public arena, based on official documents and the divergence from formal doctrinal documents.”

The IDF’s actions are now before the courts. In July, the International Court of Justice instructed all states not to normalise or advance Israel’s illegal actions. Israel’s civilian leaders of the IDF are charged with genocide.

Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices, says, “For the UPJ to hold up an IDF doctrine writer some kind of leadership role model is just plain ostrich-headed. People are already baffled and disillusioned that Jewish institutions seem so indifferent to Gaza’s suffering. It is beyond imagining that young Jewish New Zealanders will be lectured by a shaper of this doctrine, while Muslim New Zealanders are grieving for scores of thousands of their whānau—and while Gazans unearth their relatives’ remains. What are they thinking?

“Alternative Jewish Voices works hard to distinguish IDF accountability from the rights of Jewish New Zealanders. The UPJ’s actions blur the distinctions we are asking others to respect. This event is not merely insensitive. It also privileges violence above other ways of seeing our place in the world. Our Jewish community institutions absolutely must imagine a better future than that.”

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