Given the daily horrors of the Gaza genocide, there could hardly be a more appropriate time for New Zealand to join the community of nations in recognising that Palestine – and Palestinians – have a right to exist. Yet New Zealand has refused to make even a symbolic gesture in that direction. To find a comparable example of New Zealand putting itself on the wrong side of history, you would probably have to go all the way back to 1976, when a New Zealand rugby team chose to tour apartheid South Africa just after schoolchildren had been gunned down on the streets of Soweto.
Yet here we are, again. In the same week as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was being treated – justifiably – as a global pariah, Winston Peters and Christopher Luxon have chosen to give comfort to the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide, while simultaneously claiming to support a peaceful end to the conflict. The only peace that Israel is offering Palestinians is the peace of the grave.
In New York, Foreign Minister Winston Peters even had the gall to lecture the UN about its failure to provide leadership on serious issues, before offering none himself on the Israel/Palestine conflict. For his part, our Prime Minister then suggested that whatever New Zealand says or does on this issue won’t make any difference. Luxon not only failed to attend the 80th anniversary founding of the UN in New York last week. Rather than front the announcement on Palestine, Luxon chose instead to attend the Wallabies rugby match at Eden Park. Truly, a statesman for our time.
Bad faith diplomacy
Taken together, the Peters speech in New York and the Luxon press conference were a jumble of cliches, distortions, selective morality, and brazen recycling of Israeli propaganda points. Over the past month, Luxon and Peters have repeatedly insisted that it only a matter of “when, not if” that New Zealand would recognise the state of Palestine. Yet in reality, the pre-conditions they are demanding amount to “never.” Incredibly, New Zealand is requiring that there would need to be a fully formed and viable Palestinian state in existence, totally in command of its own territory. New Zealand is a global outlier in taking this extreme position as a pre-condition for recognising statehood.
Unlike us, the vast bulk of UN member nations are acting on the premise that as the world progressively recognises the legitimacy of Palestine’s national cause, this will serve to isolate Israel’s extremist government, and exert positive pressure on it to agree to a lasting ceasefire and an end to its illegal occupation – thereby bringing a two state solution closer to reality. Moreover, as Helen Clark pointed out, the recognition of Palestine is serving to bolster the position of the Palestinian Authority, the Hamas rival that the West is looking to as being the future governing body in Gaza. Our decision has undercut that process.
Our decision also runs counter to the logic accepted in recent weeks by Canada, France, the UK Australia, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Ireland etc etc. Basically, those countries are treating the recognition of Palestinian statehood as a positive step towards peace and an eventual resolution to the conflict. In the absence of any willingness to impose sanctions and boycotts on Israel, the recognition of Palestine’s right to exist is the least confrontational way of isolating the Netanyahu government that is (a) carrying out a genocide in Gaza, and that is (b) implacably opposed to the two state solution that New Zealand claims to support. Inexplicably and stupidly, Peters and Luxon have just thrown Netanyahu’s extremist government a diplomatic lifeline.
Here are a few examples of the selective morality/Israeli propaganda lines that Peters and Luxon are embracing in our name.
1. Bizarrely, Luxon has repeated the Israeli propaganda line that recognising statehood would be a reward to Hamas. This is untrue. It would be an overdue recognition of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. Using Luxon’s own logic, you could equally say that our refusal to recognise Palestine is a reward to Israel for committing a genocide. How Hamas might react is simply not a valid – or relevant – reason to refuse the recognition of Palestine. After all, we allegedly have an independent foreign policy.
2. The bias towards Israel has been evident in the language used by Peters and Luxon, and in their selective moral compass. At his press conference, Luxon spoke of the “1200 innocent lives” taken by Hamas in the October 7, 2023 attacks. (For the record, almost 400 of the 1200 people killed by Hamas on October 7 were armed Israeli military/security forces. That is not said to exonerate Hamas. It is a judgement on Luxon’s moral arithmetic.) Tellingly, Luxon did not even mention (let alone lament) the 60,000+ Palestinians killed by the IDF, 50 % of whom have been women and children. At least sixteen times more children have been killed by the IDF than the total number of Israelis and foreigners killed by Hamas on October 7.
In similar vein…at his initial press conference and since, Luxon has made repeated mention of the remaining 48 Israeli hostages (20 of whom are believed to be still alive) held by Hamas, and the need to immediately release all of them unconditionally. Yet Luxon has made no demands on Israel at all. He has made no similarly compassionate mention of the large numbers of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails in inhuman conditions – nor of the Gaza population being subjected to a deliberate famine, nor of the repeated displacements of an entire civilian population weakened by malnutrition. Luxon and Peters have also made no mention the systematic destruction of Gaza’s medical facilities, or the targeted killings of its medical professionals and journalists.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from Luxon’s selective emphasis on the evil perpetrated by Hamas is that our current political leaders regard Jewish lives as being more precious than the lives of Palestinians.
3.Despite the claims by Peters/Luxon to the contrary, Hamas has not been the chief obstacle to reaching a deal to end this conflict. Hamas has repeatedly agreed to proposals for a permanent end to the fighting, for a gradual exchange of hostages in return for Palestinians prisoners held by Israel, and for the setting up of a transitional administration in which Hamas has agreed not to participate.
Just as repeatedly, Israel has either undermined the terms agreed, refused to commit to anything beyond a temporary ceasefire and/or has ramped up its military onslaught even while the terms for a lasting peace are still being discussed. When taken together with Israel’s demands that (a) Hamas agree to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages and (b) unilaterally hand over all of its defensive weapons and (c) accept Israel’s agreement to only a temporary ceasefire, one can readily see why Hamas has baulked at such a one-sided “deal.”
Regardless, Peters and Luxon seem to be unfazed about putting the onus entirely on Hamas to negotiate on Israel’s terms. There has also been no criticism levelled at Israel for trying to murder the Hamas negotiating team right in the middle of the talks that were meant to be brokering “peace” in Gaza.
4. Luxon has claimed that now is not the right time to recognise Palestine, because in his view, Hamas is still “the de facto government” of Gaza. This may come as news to Luxon, but Gaza has been reduced to rubble by the IDF. There is no functioning society left for Hamas, or for anyone else, to govern. This is another example of our government being a willing echo chamber for Israeli propaganda, since – apparently – only the killing (or forced removal) of every single Palestinian in Gaza can qualify as signalling the conclusive defeat of Hamas.
Why are we so insistent on inflating the current threat posed by Hamas, whose military and governing wings have both been so severely degraded over the past 18 months? In every conceivable sense, the ruling power in Gaza is Israel, not Hamas. Israel is an illegal occupying force, but it is the de facto ruler of the territory, nonetheless. For reasons about which one can only speculate, Luxon seems to be religiously determined to keep alive the evil phantom of a palpable military/governmental threat posed by Hamas. The only beneficiary of this fixation is Israel, since it provides a pretext for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In classic Vietnam War logic, Israel is currently intent on destroying Gaza City in order to save it.
5. New Zealand’s stance on Palestine marks a sharp turnaround in the conduct of our foreign policy. In the early 1990s, New Zealand had valiantly used our UN platform to raise world awareness of the looming genocide in Rwanda. Likewise in the 1980s we eventually managed to atone for the 1976 rugby tour that left New Zealand such an outcast on the world stage that 29 nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics in protest at our presence. In future, we will have to find a way to repair the damage done to our international reputation by Peters and Luxon.
6. In narrow economic terms, any trade advantage Luxon might be hoping to gain from sucking up to the Trump administration over Palestine, will be outweighed by the damage this decision will do to our reputation in Europe, Asia, Africa and across the Middle East. This country used to be regarded as a reliable defender of international humanitarian law, and as a force for positive change in the world. Not any more, evidently.
This decision will go a long way towards trashing the progressive image that New Zealand has earned over the past 40 years via our anti-nuclear policy, and via the humane response that previous leaders made to the mosque shootings. Make no mistake. The decision to refuse statehood for Palestine is not only a disaster in moral, intellectual and reputational terms. It will also do harm to our trading relationships with almost every other country apart from the United States. Even on its own narrow terms, this attempt to monetise our foreign policy is likely to back-fire on us.
Trumpadelic!
Over the past decade in particular, there has been a lot of music written about Donald Trump, and almost all of it has been pretty bad. (I did like the idea behind “Hey Mr Tangerine Man” though). In a much neglected niche, you could also point to songs that weren’t performed by Donald Trump, but with hindsight, might well have been. Here’s a good example of this imaginary sub-genre: pompous, meandering, and interminably long. Take it away, Iron Butterfly:
For decades, Donald Trump has been channelling his inner Jim Morrison. Or maybe Morrison was channelling the Trump that he might have become. Either way this track in particular, sounds like a cosmic match… hey yeah, whoah yeah :