Reportedly, the moral revulsion being felt around the world at Israel’s actions in Gaza has induced 24 countries to sign a joint letter calling on Israel to cease its onslaught, and to“end now” the Gaza conflict. While overdue, the letter would have carried more weight if – in the event of Israel’s (likely) non-compliance – it had included the threat of sweeping economic sanctions against Israel, with immediate effect.
After all…surely the world shouldn’t be trading for mutual profit with a state carrying out the kind of atrocities we have been seeing in Gaza for months, turning into years. In addition, the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) has overwhelmingly voted against the “two state”solution that we insist is the only fair and sustainable solution to the conflict. As for Israeli society as a whole, the majority appear to be concerned solely with the release of the Israeli hostages. Across Israel’s civil life, there seems to be a disconnect from the reality of what the IDF is doing to the Palestinians, on a daily basis.
As for us…there is no sign that our diplomatic expressions of moral concern have saved the life (or improved the health) of a single Palestinian child. Nearly 20,000 children have died while the world wrings its hands, sighs, and then goes back to making money with the firms from the state responsible for their killing.
So far, New Zealand has imposed sanctions selectively, on certain settler leaders and far right members of the Israeli Cabinet. We have imposed no trade sanctions on the state of Israel itself, or on the Netanyahu Cabinet that shares collective responsibility for the IDF actions. Given that the US will always bail out Israel, any effective trade embargo by other Western nations would have to include a boycott of those firms that continue to do business afterwards with Israel.
The recent UN report by Francesca Albanese – the UN Special Rapporteur on Gaza and the Occupied Territories – names and shames many of the firms that are not only trading with Israel, but – in some cases – supplying it with the weaponry and AI expertise that has enabled the IDF to fine -tune Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. Those firms include Palantir Technologies.
Palantir is us
Lest we forget…tech zillionaire and Palantir Technologies chairman Peter Thiel is also a New Zealand citizen. So you have to wonder whether Christopher Luxon and/or Winston Peters have ever got on the phone and asked Thiel to bring his influence to bear on the actions of the IDF, given Palantir’s active role in enhancing their lethal targeting capabilities.
Less controversially, has Luxon ever contacted Thiel to seek his possible intercession on our behalf with respect to US President Donald Trump’s on again/off again tariff programme? The Trump administration is currently intent on penalising the access by New Zealand exporters to US markets to the tune of 10%, and that rate could go higher. If Luxon hasn’t picked up the phone and asked Thiel for help, why not? After all, it was a National government that chose to make Thiel one of us.
Thiel may not be one of Trump’s regular Mar-a-Lago golfing buddies, but recent events have underlined his proximity to key White House decisions. Incredibly – and for no visible benefit in return – Trump recently chose to give China access to NVIDIA’s advanced H20 chip technology.
This was quite the turnaround. In April, Trump had blocked all sales to China of that particular chip and other hi-tech chips with strategic value. As Robert Kuttner wrote recently in his American Prospect column :
Since its inception, the Trump administration has been concerned that the Chinese military could use AI to develop weapons and to achieve global dominance of other technologies of the future. In January, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Congress during his nomination hearing that he thought NVIDIA and other tech companies “need to stop helping” China and stop allowing it to use “our tools to compete with us.”
The Chinese Communist party, Lutnick told a House sub-committee last month, seeks to become “the dominant culture of the world, and it uses our knowledge, our innovation and our entrepreneurial spirit against us.” In the race for AI supremacy, Lutnick continued, “it is vital to keep key aspects of US knowledge out of China’s hands, so they can’t copy us.”
Trump’s sudden decision to let his techie pals sell that knowledge to China is jaw dropping. In other forums, New Zealand is being urged by the US to spend up large on defence and join the AUKUS defence pact, in order to counter China’s growing military and economic might. At the same time, the US has no coherent policy on selling its AI technology to China, stuff that it only months ago declared to be of key strategic value.
China meanwhile, is doing the exact opposite, and has restricted US access to its EV battery technology. So how did the NVIDIA policy switcheroo occur? As the New York Times has reported, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with Trump both at Mar-a-Lago and in the Oval Office, and convinced him to change course.
Huang himself had been invited to Mar-a-Lago by David Sacks, who is Trump’s chef adviser on science and technology. Sacks is also Trump’s main adviser on Bitcoin and – as a major Silicon Valley investor- has had a very close relationship with Peter Thiel since the 1990s.
Years ago, Sacks and Thiel co-operated in founding and managing Paypal. In 1999, they co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth, an early tirade against the threat that multi-culturalism and political correctness allegedly pose to America’s intellectual vitality.
In that book, Thiel railed against how woke-ism had re-defined rape to include “seductions that are later regretted.” In 2016, he apologised for making that claim. In an infamous Cato Institute essay, Thiel claimed that the free world began to go to hell in a handbasket in 1920, what with the rise of welfarism and women getting the vote:
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
What a guy. As mentioned, Thiel is extremely close to the man who – only ten days ago – orchestrated a fundamental sea change in the US trade relationship with China. And to repeat: Huang/Sacks have convinced Trump to allow NVIDIA to sell their advanced chips to China, for no reciprocal concessions. They have also convinced Trump that in AI and other tech fields, the US can now suddenly go head to head with the likes of Huawei, despite the US previously blacklisting the firm as a security threat.
The US has blocked Huawei’s access to Western markets for the best part of a decade, and New Zealand dutifully fell into line with that effort. Because Trump is so inconsistent, it isn’t yet clear whether a Huawei phone can now be declared safe for Westerners to use.
Kleptocrats and trade wars
The US is waging a trade war with China with no coherent policy, led by a nunchi of techie frat brothers driven by short term personal gain, not national well-being. The contrast is pretty stark. In Beijing, the CCP is subsidising commercial/scientific platforms right across China’s entire economy, from AI to its champion EVcar-maker, BDS. It is a coordinated effort, with a decade long focus.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is cutting (by 34% !) the US science budget and is deporting large numbers of foreign-born students, and rapidly making the US an unattractive destination for the world’s most talented graduate students. These and other elements in knowledge generation were what formerly gave the US its military-industrial edge.
As for how this plays out in our region…policy coherence is in short supply. Even as he twists the arm of US allies to buy more American-made weapons and oppose China’s growing presence in the Pacific, Trump is (simultaneously) helping his cronies make a buck by selling AI expertise to China that’s highly likely to undermine the West’s security and economic competitiveness.
If Thiel, his pal David Sacks and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang can spin Trump around 180 degrees on this key trade issue, why not ask Thiel to do something similar for us, given that we provided him with a bolt-hole refuge here, at a bargain price? So far, Thiel has given nothing back to his star struck sponsors in the National Party. Christopher Luxon needs to ask Thiel to step up, big time. No harm in asking, right?
Footnote One: Reportedly, the stock value of Thiel’s Palantir firm has risen by 2,110% since 2022:
Palantir’s…claim to fame has been its unique, AI-inspired operating platforms, Gotham and Foundry. The former helps federal government’s plan and execute military missions, as well as collect data. Meanwhile, Foundry is an enterprise-focused software-as-a-service platform that helps businesses streamline their operations. No large-scale competitors exist that offer the same services as Palantir.
Reportedly, Gotham technology has been deployed to identify work sites and residences likely to contain undocumented migrant workers, that can then be raided by federal ICE agents, for deportation action.
There are no firms or state agencies publicly known to be making direct use of Gotham and Foundry in New Zealand. Across the Tasman, the story is different – or at least, is more transparent. Earlier this month, Palantir was accused of being embedded in Australia’s defence and security apparatus, and in its systens of policing. Palantir’s commercial clients are as varied as Coles department stores and Rio Tinto. Greens Senator David Shoebridge has recently expressed concern elsewhere about Palantir’s growing influence across Australian society.
Footnote Two: Palantir has been accused – by Amnesty International and within this recent report by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of assisting the IDF in the committing of war crimes in Gaza. Palantir denies that it helped to develop the AI automated targeting systems “Gospel,”“Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” widely alleged to have been a central cause of the exceptionally high death and injury toll among civilians in Gaza.
Those three targeting systems, Palantir claimed in a press release in April 2025, were in existence before the firm got involved in the Gaza conflict. Not that Thiel himself seems to be unduly concerned about the use of Palantir’s AI expertise to assist the IDF in Gaza. As Francesca Albanese stated (at para 42) in her UN report:
There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.[108] In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv “in solidarity”;[109] in April 2025, Palantir’s CEO responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, “mostly terrorists, that’s true”.[110] Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis Israel’s unlawful use of force, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.[111]
So…New Zealand has a couple of options. At one level, Luxon could call up Thiel to ask him to use his evident clout with the White House – directly, and indirectly through David Sacks – to help exempt our exporters from the higher tariff barriers they now face in US markets.
Secondly, shouldn’t New Zealand simply revoke Thiel’s joint New Zealand citizenship? This would be on the grounds of Thiel’s avowed complicity in supplying technology that’s being used by the IDF to help them commit in Gaza what the UN and human rights organisations have been describing as war crimes.
So long as Peter Thiel remains a New Zealand citizen, he is – arguably – tainting us all.
Disappearing Act
Every few years the story of Connie Converse gets retold, her music finds a fresh audience and then she recedes back into the unknown, until the next cycle of discovery. Short version: Elizabeth Eaton (Connie) Converse wrote and recorded some songs into a friend’s tape recorder in the kitchen of a New York City apartment in 1954. For the next 20 years, she worked as a writer and editor.
One day in August 1974 at the age of 50, she packed her belongings in her car and drove off, never to be heard from again. She left a note behind. It said: “This is the thin hard sublayer under all the parting messages I’m likely to have sent. Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.” Over 25 years later, those old tape recordings – just her voice and her guitar – were found in a cupboard, got played on the radio, found an audience and were released.
Arguably, as music critic Sophie Kemp says, Converse was the first DIY pop musician, and a forerunner of Joni Mitchell, Carole King and a later generation of female singer/songwriters. As she also says, Angel Olsen is maybe her closest current equivalent, as a sui generis talent. Kemp is on more solid ground when she talks about Converse as someone who accepted her loneliness, and made music– sad, funny, never self-pitying – out of her state of constant outsiderness. Until, finally, she disappeared.
Fittingly, each listener who can relate to Converse with find some tracks more significant to them than others. On “Two Tall Mountains” she finds solace in nature. She observes how humans come up short in the comparisons, pigs included:
The eery “One by One” sings of lovers walking together in the dark, essentially apart. Over to you whether you find in the last few lines a cause for optimism, or reason to feel even sadder:
Those two tracks risk making Converse sound like a sad sack. But her fleet wit is evident throughout. Like Kemp, I love that line (on Honeybee”) where she sings “So, honeybee/go and tell a starling/To go and tell my darling/To hurry home to me.” On “Father Neptune” she is aware that being unattainable is a big part of what makes her sailor love desirable, but also something of a narcissistic dork:
Finally, here she is as present as she will ever be. This has a Biblical text, she says wryly, as she thinks herself through the notion of turning herself into a lily, blooming for its own sweet sake:
Oh lilies toil not
Neither do they spin
I’m gonna take my working papers
And turn them in
I’m handing over my pencil and pen
I won’t be needing my room again
I’ll bloom by day, I’ll bloom by night
And blooming will be my delight