About 2000 New Zealand protesters marched through the heart of Auckland city today chanting “no justice, no peace” and many other calls as they demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the Israeli atrocities in its brutal war on the besieged Palestinian enclave.

For more than 73 days, Israel has blocked all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza, creating a man-made crisis with the Strip on the brink of a devastating famine.

Israel’s attacks killed more than 150 and wounded 450 in a day in a new barrage of attacks that aid workers described as “Gaza is bleeding before our eyes”.

in Auckland, several Palestinian and other speakers spoke of the anguish and distress of the global Gaza community in the face of Western indifference to the suffering in a rally before the march marking the 77th anniversary of the Nakba — the “Palestinian catastrophe”.

“There are cracks opening up all around the world that haven’t been there for 77 years,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair John Minto in an inspired speech to the protesters.

“Right through the news media, journalists are up in arms against their editors and bosses all around the world.

“We’ve got politicians in Britain speaking out for the first time. Some conservative politician got standing up the other day saying, ‘I supported Israel right or wrong for 20 years, and I was wrong.’

‘The world is coming right’
“Yet a lot of the world has been wrong for 77 years, but the world is coming right. We are on the right side of history, give us a big round of applause.”

Minto was highly critical of the public broadcasters, Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand, saying they relied too heavily on a narrow range of Western sources whose credibility had been challenged and eroded over the past 19 months.

He also condemned their “proximity” news value, blaming it for news editors’ lapse of judgment on news values because Israelis “spoke English”.

Minto told the crowd that that they should be monitoring Al Jazeera for a more balanced and nuanced coverage of the war on Palestine.

His comments echoed a similar theme of a speech at the Fickling Centre in Three Kings on Thursday night and protesters followed up by picketing the NZ Voyager Media Awards last night with a light show of killed Gazan journalists beamed on the hotel venue.

About 230 Gazan journalists have been killed in the war so far, many of them allegedly targeted by the Israeli forces.

Minto said he could not remember a previous time when a New Zealand government had remained silent in the face of industrial-scale killing of civilians anywhere in the world.

“We have livestreamed genocide happening and we have our government refusing to condemn any of Israel’s war crimes,” he said.

NZ ‘refusing to condemn war crimes’
“Yet we’ve got everybody in the leadership of this government having condemned every act of Palestinian resistance yet refused to condemn the war crimes, refused to condemn the bombing of civilians, and refused to condemn the mass starvation of 2.3 million people.

“What a bunch of depraved bastards run this country. Shame on all of them.”

Palestinian speaker Samer Almalalha spoke of the 1948 Nakba and the injustices against his people.

“Everything we were told about international law and human rights is bullshit. The only rights you have are the ones you take,” he said.

“So today we won’t stand here to plead, we are here to remind you of what happened to us. We are here to take what is ours. Today, and every day, we fight for a free Palestine.”

and he told a harrowing story from his homeland. As a 14-year-old boy, he and his family were driven out of Palestine during the Nakba.

He described “waking up to to the smell of gunpowder” — his home was close to the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, when Zionist militias attacked the village killing 107 people, including women and children.

‘Palestine will be free – and so will we’
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said: “What we stand for is truth, justice, peace and love.

“Palestine will be free and, in turn, so will we.”

She said only six more MPs were needed to have the numbers to have the Greens’ Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill passed in Parliament.

Israel has blocked all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza, creating a man-made crisis, with the integrated food security agency IPC warning that famine could be declared any time between now and September, reports Al Jazeera.

The head of the UN Children’s Fund, Catherine Russell, said the world should be shocked by the killing of 45 children in Israeli air strikes in just two days.

Instead, the slaughter of children in Gaza is “largely met with indifference”.

“More than 1 million children in Gaza are at risk of starvation. They are deprived of food, water and medicine,” Russell wrote in a post on social media.

“Nowhere is safe for children in Gaza,” she said.

“This horror must stop.”

Famine worst level of hunger
Famine is the worst level of hunger, where people face severe food shortages, widespread malnutrition, and high levels of death due to starvation.

According to the UN’s criteria, famine is declared when:

• At least 20 percent (one-fifth) of households face extreme food shortages;
• More than 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and
• At least two out of every 10,000 people or four out of every 10,000 children die each day from starvation or hunger-related causes.

Famine is not just about hunger; it is the worst humanitarian emergency, indicating a complete collapse of access to food, water and the systems necessary for survival.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), since Israel’s complete blockade began on March 2, at least 57 children have died from the effects of malnutrition.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As Israel drives the Palestinians deeper into another Nakba in Gaza with its assault on Rafah, the Palestine Youth Aotearoa (PYA) and solidarity supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand tonight commemorated the original Nakba — “the Catastrophe” — of 1948.

This was when Israeli militias slaughtered more than 15,000 people, perpetrated more than 70 massacres and occupied more than three quarters of Palestine, with 750,000 of the Palestinian population forced into becoming refugees from their own land.

The Nakba was a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing followed by the destruction of hundreds of villages, to prevent the return of the refugees — similar to what is being wrought now in Gaza.

The Nakba lies at the heart of 76 years of injustice for the Palestinians — and for the latest injustice, the seven-month long war on Gaza.

Participants told through their stories, poetry and songs by candlelight, they would not forget 1948 — “and we will not forget the genocide under way in Gaza.”

Photographs: David Robie

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

An open letter to The New Zealand Herald has challenged a full page Zionist advertisement this week for failing to acknowledge the “terrible injustices” suffered by the Palestinian people in Israel’s seven-month genocidal war on Gaza.

In the latest of several international reports that have condemned genocide against the people of Gaza while the International Court of Justice continues to investigate Israel for a plausible case for genocide, a human rights legal network of US universities has concluded that “Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing” and sought to “bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza”.

The University Network for Human Rights, along with the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School, conducted a legal analysis and the 100-page damning report, “Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of International Law and its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023.”

The Israeli military have killed more than 35,000 people — mostly women and children — and more than 78,000 people and the UN General Assembly voted by an overwhelming 134-9 votes to back Palestinian statehood on May 11.

In the full page Zionist advertisement in The New Zealand Herald on Tuesday, senior pastor Nigel Woodley of the Flaxmere Christian Fellowship Church in Hastings claimed “the current painful war is another episode in Israel’s history for survival” with no acknowledgement of the massive human cost on Palestinians.

The open letter by Reverend Chris Sullivan in response — dated the same day but not published by The Herald — says:

An advertisement in the Herald supports the creation of the State of Israel.

For the same reasons we should also support the creation of a Palestinian state; don’t Palestinians also deserve their own nation state?

Just as we decry Hitler’s Holocaust, so too must we raise our voices against the killing of 35,000 people in Gaza (most of them innocent civilians), the destruction of 70 percent of the housing, and imminent famine.

It is disingenuous to focus solely on the Arab invasions of Israel, without looking at their cause — the killing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which accompanied the creation of the modern state of Israel.

It is never too late for both sides to turn away from violence and war and build a lasting peace, based on mutual respect and a just solution to the terrible injustices the Palestinian people have suffered.

Rev Chris Sullivan
Auckland

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As Israel drives the Palestinians deeper into another Nakba in Gaza with its assault on Rafah, the Palestine Youth Aotearoa (PYA) and solidarity supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand tonight commemorated the original Nakba — “the Catastrophe” — of 1948.

This was when Israeli militias slaughtered more than 15,000 people, perpetrated more than 70 massacres and occupied more than three quarters of Palestine, with 750,000 of the Palestinian population forced into becoming refugees from their own land.

The Nakba was a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing followed by the destruction of hundreds of villages, to prevent the return of the refugees — similar to what is being wrought now in Gaza.

The Nakba lies at the heart of 76 years of injustice for the Palestinians — and for the latest injustice, the seven-month long war on Gaza.

Participants told through their stories, poetry and songs by candlelight, they would not forget 1948 — “and we will not forget the genocide under way in Gaza.”

Photographs: David Robie

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

About 1000 people in Aotearoa New Zealand gathered for a two-hour rally in central Auckland today and marched down Queen Street and returned to Aotea Square to mark the Nakba three days early — and protest over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

They called for an immediate ceasefire in the war as the death toll passed more than 35,000 people killed — mostly women and children – and chanted “hands off Rafah” as the Israeli military intensified their attack on the southern part of the besieged enclave.

Israel’s Defence Force (IDF) also deployed tanks in northern Gaza months after claiming that they had “dismantled” the resistance force Hamas in the area.

For the past seven months, protesters have staged rallies across New Zealand every week at more than 25 different towns and locations and they have rarely been reported by the country’s news media.

Ironically, today was also marked as Mother’s Day and many protesters carried placards and banners mourning the mothers and children killed in the seven-month war, such as “Every 15 min a Palestinian child dies”, “Israel/USA, how many kids did you kill today”, “Decolonise your mind — stand with Palestine”, and “Stop the genocide”.

Some protesters carried photographs of named children killed in the war, honouring their short and tragic lives, such as 13-year-old Hala Abu Sada, who “had a passion for the arts – she made educational and entertaining videos for deaf children”.

“Hala dreamed of becoming a singer.”

The Nakba – ‘ethnic cleansing’
Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, numbering about 12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948, reports Al Jazeera.

The Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland is 76 years old this year.

On that day, the State of Israel came into being. The creation of Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state — the wishes of the Zionist movement.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were forced out of their homeland and made refugees beyond the borders of the state.

Zionist forces seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

The current resolution does not give Palestinians full membership, but recognises them as qualified to join, and it gives Palestine more participation and some rights within the UNGA.

Thank you to the peoples of the world, nations, & majority of States who voted for Palestinian self-determination, for Palestinian existence & future. Thank you for standing for humanity, for the UN Charter, & for freedom & justice. Onwards, until 194th Member 🇵🇸🇺🇳 pic.twitter.com/H15egK4zwj

— State of Palestine (@Palestine_UN) May 10, 2024

Overwhelming UN vote backs Palestine
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) has overwhelmingly voted to support a Palestinian bid to become a full UN member by recognising it as qualified to join and recommending the UN Security Council “reconsider the matter favourably”.

Memberships can only be decided by the UN Security Council, and last month, the US vetoed a bid for full membership.

The current resolution does not give Palestinians full membership, but recognises them as qualified to join, and it gives Palestine more participation and some rights within the UNGA.

Voting yes for the resolution were 143 countries, including three UN Security Council permanent members, China, France and Russia and also Australia, New Zealand and Timor-Leste.

Nine countries voted against, with four Pacific nations, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Papua New Guinea among those joining Israel and the US.

Twenty five countries abstained, including UNSC permanent member United Kingdom and three Pacific countries, Fiji, Marshall Islands and Vanuatu.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When Marilyn Garson’s memoir of working in Gaza was published, Radio NZ scheduled an interview. On the day of the interview, RNZ first promoted and then cancelled it. In response to her OIA request, RNZ disclosed this internal email:

It reads in full, “Hi guys, given the huge flood of formal complaints we get any time we do a Palestine story without Israeli balance, [e]ither we have to drop it or set up another interview — which you would have to mention before and after tonights one.”

We hear about Israel casually, without always hearing from Palestine before and after. But we are not allowed to hear a first-person story of Gaza unless it is bookended by something, anything, from Israel. That’s not journalistic balance, that’s a one-way concession to the possible inconvenience of complaint.

On Sunday, May 15, Nakba Day, Wellington Mayor Andy Foster was advised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) to disallow an already-approved display of Palestinian colours on a public building.

Although the same building had recently displayed Ukrainian colours without evident concern for the Russian ambassador’s feelings, MFAT advised that “displaying the Palestinian colours could result in complaints from the Israeli ambassador and other Israeli groups.” The Mayor shut it down — leaving Justice for Palestine to get the job done on the following evening.

Again, Palestinian expression was forbidden because someone might complain. Forget the validity of the complaints – there were none to evaluate. The mere prospect of Palestinian stories or the display of a Palestinian flag was problematised in advance.

When the right to be Palestinian in public is made contingent, policy has become racially intolerant. We share this space and we are prevented from enjoying it equally. That makes the suppression of Palestine everyone’s issue.

MFAT’s advice angers us as Jews
MFAT’s advice is further inappropriate in ways that anger us as Jews. A government ministry issued advice that “displaying the Palestinian colours could result in complaints from the Israeli ambassador and other Israeli groups.”

The Israeli ambassador is a guest in Aotearoa, whose presence ought not to drive our municipal policy. Given the frequency with which his government is characterised as apartheid, and given the exceptional brutality it has displayed in the past week, he might benefit from seeing the healthy exercise of pluralist public expression.

See our joint open letter to the Prime Minister on the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and the desecration of her funeral procession by Israeli police.

And exactly who are these “other Israeli groups” whose sensitivities preempt citizens’ peaceful public expression? Is Mossad operating here again? Or does a ministry of our own government truly not know the difference between the Jewish community of New Zealand and an Israeli interest group — can that possibly be??

MFAT, RNZ, Mayor Foster; we are Aotearoa Jews and you need to outgrow your stereotypes of our community.

Members of Aotearoa’s Jewish community express our identities in many ways. Some Jews place a nationalist project called Israel at the centre of their identity.

We and other Jews who love justice oppose the apartheid that Israel enacts in our names. We sharply distinguish it from our Jewish identity and we accept a responsibility to pursue justice and peace for all who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

We hold equal citizenship
You do not aid Aotearoa’s Jews by marginalising our Palestinian neighbours. Do not prevent us from sharing our city and our airwaves by perpetuating such a zero/sum model of belonging. We hold equal citizenship and we enjoy equal rights to public space and expression.

We are members of a pluralist community that needs to unite against exclusion or racism in all of its forms.

Our support of Palestinian expression is pro-democratic, not anti-anyone. We uphold Palestinian rights as we expect others to stand with us when we need them.

Our safety lies in the mutual respect we build with our neighbours. That is a necessity, not a nicety. We live together in a dangerous time and we are each others’ best hope.

Alternative Jewish Voices. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

OPEN LETTER to the Foreign Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand, Nanaia Mahuta:

Kia ora Nanaia,

We have been informed that the Wellington City Council has been advised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to light up the Michael Fowler Centre in the colours of the Palestinian flag tomorrow — which has been arranged through councillor Tamatha Paul and approved by council — because Aotearoa New Zealand does not recognise a Palestinian state and this will cause offence to the Israeli Embassy in Wellington.

This is outrageous advice. We want you to intervene and immediately override this advice from your ministry officials so the Fowler Centre can be lit up tomorrow.

Firstly New Zealand’s official policy is to support a “two-state” solution in historic Palestine and this policy in effect recognises a Palestinian state. You cannot have a “two-state solution” with just one state.

Secondly it is deeply insulting to Palestinians to have official recognition of their national day — Nakba Day — effectively vetoed by ministry officials and the “sensitivities” of the Israeli embassy. It is Israel which is refusing to allow a Palestinian state to be formed.

The current Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, has said he refuses to meet with Palestinian leaders, refuses to negotiate a peace deal and will refuse to recognise a Palestinian state while he is Prime Minister.

Why should Israel’s veto over a Palestinian state dictate Aotearoa New Zealand’s support for Palestinians?

Why would we take any notice of the “sensitivities” of an embassy which is supporting and promoting what every international human rights organisation has declared to be an apartheid state?

Parliament has flown the Ukrainian flag in recent weeks over Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine so why shouldn’t New Zealand fly the Palestinian flag in recognition of Israel’s ongoing brutal military occupation of the entire area of historic Palestine?

Within the last 10 days an Israeli court has approved the eviction of 1000 more Palestinians from their land and homes in the occupied West Bank of Palestine and the Israeli regime has announced it is ready to approve the building of 4000 more Jewish-only homes in illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

And just this last week we have seen the brutal “cold-blooded murder” of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the shocking sight of pall bearers and mourners at her funeral being brutally attacked by Israeli state forces.

Aotearoa New Zealand is bigger than the venal, self-serving advice of cowardly MFAT officials.

Please direct your ministry officials to approve Wellington City Council lighting up the Fowler Centre tomorrow in the colours of the Palestinian flag.

Asia Pacific Report editors join the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) in solidarity with this open letter protest over the Nakba Day censorship and in memory of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh assassinated by Israeli troops last Wednesday.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Today is Nakba Day — this is the day marking the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and off their land by Israeli militias in 1948.

For 74 years Israel has refused to allow them to return to their homes and land in Palestine despite dozens of United Nations resolutions requiring them to do so.

The Nakba has continued every day since 1948 as Israel seizes more Palestinian land and creates more Palestinian refugees every day.

A random selection of photograph’s from today’s action in Auckland’s Aotea Square that also mourned the assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops last Wednesday.

Photographs by David Robie

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz