New Zealand’s response to the Palestine crisis

Palestine has been a weeping sore on the world’s body politic for decades.

In 2002 John Pilger released a documentary Palestine is still the issue and it starts with this passage:

If we are to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed … what has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have risen up against Israel’s huge military regime, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But, for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle, to be free.

That was 21 years ago but what Pilger said is even more relevant now than it was then.

Because the body count suggests that one side is the oppressor and the other side is the oppressed.

There have been a lot of International attention paid to the recent event at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza where an explosion reportedly killed nearly 500 Palestinians.  Hamas has laid the blame at Israel’s feet.The Israelis and others claimed that a Hamas rocket is to blame.

I would have a greater ability to concede that there is the chance that Israel is innocent in relation to this particular incident if it was not for their insistence that the northern edge of the Gaza Strip needs to be emptied of people, or if there were not other instances of hospitals or ambulances being targeted, or if an Israeli air strike had not hit a school run by the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza’s Al-Maghazi refugee camp.  Or if it had not cut power and water to Gaza which any level is an atrocious thing to do.  Or it had not been blocking aid from arriving in Gaza.

Or if it had not previously lied about the killing of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli army sniper or subsequently disrupted her funeral by Israeli defence forces because there was a Palestinian flag on her coffin.

Or if there had not been repeated instances where Palestinian children and teenagers had been killed by Israeli snipers.

Or if it had not previously illegally intercepting the Freedom Flotilla in International Waters because they wanted to provide solar panels and medical supplies with the spurious claim that this would somehow undermine Israel’s security.  Of course the reality is that the brutal unprincipled immoral way in which Israel treats Palestine is Israel’s greatest threat, not solar panels.

This is nothing new.  In 2021 I wrote about another smaller event in these terms:

In the last few days in its attempts to take out Hamas the Israeli Defence Force has managed to:

Some of the individual losses are appalling.  Like the loss of Dr Ayman Abu al-Ouf who was head of internal medicine at Al-Shifa hospital and was killed along with members of his family in an early morning missile attack.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that “Israel is doing everything possible to avoid harming innocent civilians.”

I would hate to see what would happen if it was not being so careful.

To augment the body count there have been other incidents of clear breaches of International Law, like continuous land grabs that even National realised were illegal.

At the risk of being accused of being anti semitic and, if I was in the United Kingdom, facing expulsion from the Labour Party can I just say that the senseless killing and destruction of civilian areas is wrong.  Hamas is wrong to engage in this.  And the Israeli Government is also wrong in engaging in this senseless behaviour.

The local response has been interesting.

I thought Nanaia Mahuta’s initial response was appropriate and well weighted.

But it attracted considerable blow back from not only National but also Labour leader Chris Hipkins.  From Radio New Zealand:

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Chris Hipkins on Sunday afternoon told reporters New Zealand “condemns unequivocally the Hamas attacks on Israel, we are appalled by the targeting of civilians and the taking of hostages which violate fundamental international humanitarian principles”.

“New Zealand’s designated the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organisation, we recognise Israel’s right to defend itself, we are concerned that the situation will escalate in the coming days and New Zealand again calls for restraint, the protection of non-combatants, and the upholding of international humanitarian law by all parties.”

Christopher Luxon also adopted the messaging that Israel was entitled to defend itself.  Again from RNZ:

Luxon’s statement was a tweet at 10am, saying he was “shocked and saddened by the attacks overnight against Israel. We condemn these Hamas attacks on Israel and the violence and suffering being inflicted on innocent civilians. There is no justification for these attacks and Israel has a right to defend itself.”

He repeated that to reporters in the afternoon, and said the party also condemned “the impact that [attack] is having on the pain and suffering that is happening on innocent civilians, and we also respect Israel’s right to defend itself”.

But as time has passed some have formed the view that Mahuta’s more nuanced response was appropriate.

And her latest response concerning the bombing of the hospital is quite remarkable and I wonder what input National had into its crafting.

Note she was careful not to blame either side for what happened.  But the “targeting of innocent civilians” is in my view more than a hint to Israel that it should not be doing what it is doing.

The Middle East is more unstable right now than it has been for some time.  Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the levels of hostility will decrease.  We need leadership like that displayed by Mahuta.

Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress