Luxon claimed the issue was ‘complex’ and New Zealanders should not expect a decision until well after his foreign minister Winston Peters has spoken on the matter at the United Nations in New York.

Advocacy group, Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), immediately issued a statement headlined: Genocide is not ‘complex’, it’s a ‘cowards’ way out’.

It the statement, PSNA co-spokesperson John Minto said the ‘complexity’ excuse for cabinet inaction on Palestine this morning is “a cowards’ way out for the government to avoid even the most tepid policy to oppose Israeli genocide in Gaza”.

John Minto, said the New Zealand Government recognised Palestine at the United Nations in 1947.

“It’s taken nearly 80 years to work out ways to make that real and it still can’t do it.

“(Winston) Peters needed very clear and strong instructions to take to the UN, where he could have joined the calls for the growing list of sanctions to be imposed on Israel,” John Minto said.

He added: “In just over two days last week, Israel demolished fifty of the tallest residential tower blocks in Gaza City.  That’s a rate of destruction of more than one every hour and thousands more people made homeless.

“There’s nothing about defending borders, or implementing a strategy of getting hostages released in all of this barbarous onslaught by Israel.  It’s self-declared ethnic cleansing.”

Minto said the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, must face up to Israel’s blatant violations of international laws and conventions.

“At the same time, Israel has tried to kill the Hamas negotiations team by bombing them in Qatar.  New Zealand has declared that the issues can only be resolved through negotiations, but has said not one word of complaint that Israel is murdering the negotiators.”

He said there is a “yawning gap” between the government’s policy towards Russia and that towards Israel.

“Winston Peters has just implemented its thirty-second sanction measure against Russia. That does not seem to be complex,” John Minto said.

It’s time that the nations of the world (or at least the influential western nations) accept the reality that all the lands that constituted 1920-1948 Mandatory Palestine should be formally recognised as a single nation-state; ideally called Palestine Israel or Israel-Palestine, but more realistically called Israel.

In other words, the never-viable notion of a two-nation-state division of ‘Israel’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eretz_Israel) should be dropped as a viable solution in favour of the promotion of a liberal bicultural (or multicultural) nation-state. The role model for change could be South Africa.

Jewish and Non-Jewish intellectuals (such as Hans Kohn, Shlomo Sand and Yanis Varoufakis) – on the political left – have been arguing for this ‘one-state-solution’ for over 100 years. It’s just that their voices have always been deamplified by those on the political centre and the political right. (On the centre, we think of people like Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, and their predecessors. On the right, we may consider former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a leader in the 1940s of the openly fascist Lehi, yet a moderate by today’s Israeli political standards.)

Shlomo Sand outlines the history of the arguments for a single ‘binational’ state in his 2024 book Israel-Palestine: Federation or Apartheid? His vision, which is not quite what I favour, emphasises binationalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/binationalism), and looks towards these successful liberal examples of bi- or multi- nationalism: Canada, Belgium, Switzerland.

The better framing of this approach, I believe, is biculturalism; though even that is not problem-free, because it is an exclusive concept. What I think would work best for Palestine Israel is also the same as what would work best for Aotearoa New Zealand: multiculturalism with a bicultural (treaty) emphasis. (Ireland could have become something similar, as in Irish rugby; but it went down a failed two-state path, and experienced two substantial civil wars last century.) The ideal is for Palestine Israel to become a liberal democracy in which all people born within its borders become citizens with equal citizenship rights; a nation state which commits to both the domestic and international norms of liberal democracy.

(In a bicultural nation-state, the principal divider is religion; normally people’s religious loyalties are discrete, meaning that being, say, a Muslim or Jew or Christian is mutually exclusive. The word ‘national’ is increasingly used in the 21st century as it was in the 19th century; to refer to a ‘people’ or a ‘race’ rather than to relate to a territory defined by its borders and its sovereign institutions. Ethnicity – the better word is ‘ancestry – is not a discrete concept such as ‘religion’; individual people have multiple ancestries, and should not be required to identify as one over another.)

How can this be achieved?

First, we should note that the status quo in Eretz Israel is at least as unacceptable as Apartheid South Africa was to our world of mostly ‘internationally-civilised’ nation-states. (An internationally civilised state is one that accepts agreed norms in the ways that it relates to other nation states, meaning that it does not indulge in offensive hard-power geopolitics – such as ‘gunboat diplomacy’; and it practises cultural equality. Terrorism is understood as criminality. Such a state does not have to be a ‘democracy’ in the Westminster or American sense; but it should meet open liberal standards in the ways it treats its resident denizens – non-citizens – and it should subscribe to international treaties on matters such as climate sustainability and nuclear energy and election authenticity.)

Second, this desired outcome will not come about by force. The community of liberal nations should simply recognise Eretz Israel as a nation state, based ideally on the prior borders of Mandatory Palestine.

While there should be no demands, such a new nation-state would be risking discriminatory sanctions if it abuses liberal norms; in particular if it implements laws (including civil-marriage laws) that discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, or ancestry. Again, the obvious model is Apartheid South Africa, and the ways that South Africa was excluded from international sport so long as it implemented laws which discriminated on the basis of ethnicity. (Palestinians and many Israelis have Levantine ethnicity. Many Israelis have European, African or Asian co-ethnicity; that non-indigeneity should never be held against them. Nor should the indigeneity of the Palestinians.)

In recognising Eretz Israel as Israel-Palestine (or even just under the name ‘Israel’), a Levantine nation state, Israel’s nuclear status should be addressed and normalised. (Likewise, India and Pakistan should be pressured to join the ‘nuclear club’. One of the most problematic regional asymmetries at present is the advanced nuclear-status of Israel versus the embryonic nuclear status of Iran; Israel at present hides behind its non-membership of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to make it seem that Iran is a bigger nuclear threat to the world than Israel is.)

Recognition of Eretz Israel as a sovereign nation state, under any name, should come with overt expectations of democracy, amnesty, truth, reconciliation, and press freedom. There should be no formal or informal mechanism of ‘settling scores’, no matter how reprehensible anyone’s past or present behaviour has been. Truth trumps vengeance cloaked as ‘accountability’.

Lebanon was an initially successful, but now largely failed, version of a similar attempt at creating a tolerant multicultural nation state in the Levant. Lebanon’s main problem was its belligerent southern neighbour. Israel-Palestine would not have Israel as a neighbour.

Abandon the naïve two-state solution.

There is no way a Palestinian nation-state can be viable. At the very best it could become like a mini-Pakistan or mini-Bangladesh; and even that would take decades. (And the last Israeli prime minister to formalise a two-state future – Yitzhak Rabin – was assassinated in 1995, having achieved a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.) The two-state-solution agenda seems to be more about deescalating sufficiently for the Palestine issue to disappear from its media prominence; and not at all about ending a forever war which began in 1948.

The present forever war – now in its hottest phase – followed a brutal war for Israeli-Jewish independence and non-Jewish expulsion waged by fascist and non-fascist ‘non-state actors’ from 1939 to 1948 against the British ‘protectors’. That, in turn, followed a prior Palestinian insurrection against the British and the settlers from 1936-1939 (though overshadowed in the international media by the Spanish Civil War), which in its turn followed the 1929 Palestine riots. That’s 96 years of escalating forever violence.

In Summary

Recognise a new expanded state, with or without a new name, but with certain (unenforceable, but well-publicised) expectations. This expectation should be a multi-cultural Levantine sovereign state, embracing adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths (as well as people of other religions, or no religion, as citizens; people born in Israel or Palestine, and documented immigrants): Levantine Jews, Levantine Muslims, Levantine Christians, plus others. All Israelis. And all Palestinians.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

To understand antisemitism, we need a meaning for ‘semitism’, and another -ism to contextualise semitism.

Literally, semitism means the promotion of the Semitic people, whoever they might be. The most appropriate comparator for ‘semitism’ is ‘hamitism’, relating to the ‘hamites’ or ‘Hamitic people’; analogous to the ‘Semitic people’. These are archaic terms, befitting the nineteenth century pseudo-sciences of eugenics, physiognomy and phrenology; semitism is a bible-derived concept of a preferred race, and of racism.

Our particular interest in 2024 is in two subsets: a racial subset of the Semitic people known as the ‘Jewish People’, or the Jewish ethnos or ‘nation’ (ie where a nation is a ‘people’ rather than a sovereign territory; and a racial subset of the Hamitic people, known today as ‘Palestinians’. Semite is named after Noah’s son ‘Shem’; hamite is named after Hoah’s son ‘Ham’. The biblical ‘curse of Ham’ was invoked in particular with regard to Ham’s youngest son Canaan, the putative father of the Canaanites, especially including today’s Palestinians.

While the Palestinian Arabs have been deemed by some Christians and Jews to belong to a cursed ethnicity, the mythistorical Jewish ethic line – descended from Shem – came to be known as a (or ‘the’) chosen people. Hence semitism (or philosemitism) is the presumption of the exceptionalism of the Jewish ethnicity. Antisemitism, then, can be regarded as a dislike or disapproval of the Jewish ‘race’. (For a few though, antisemitism seems to mean a denial of this presumption of exception.) Likewise, antihamitism, while it could be understood as a denial of the curse, is probably best understood as an analogue of antisemitism; as a dislike of or disapproval of the Palestinian ‘race’. In their most extreme forms, antisemitism and antihamitism are both presumptions in favour of the expulsion or genocide of an ethnic people. Both forms of discriminatory hatred need to be equally condemned.

While there is no scientific evidence that there was ever such a thing as a Jewish race or a Palestinian race, there are Jewish ethnicities (plural). Many people who have taken DNA tests will have some of their ancestry defined as Sephardic Jewish or Ashkenazi Jewish; but never simply ‘Jewish’. (Nobody will have Christian or Muslim as an ‘ethnicity’.) These Jewish ethnicities show in these tests because of widespread historical exclusions, within Jewish communities, of non-Jews as marriage partners; thus these initially religious communities may be classified as ancestral endogamies and, on that basis, as ethnicities. We should not be distracted; Judaism is the foremost (ie progenitor) of the monotheistic religions. Jewishness is a meme, not a gene. A ‘secular Jew’ – or a ‘secular Muslim’ – is an oxymoron; a non-religious adherent to a religion.

Endogamy cultures can be problematic, not so much because of inbreeding within a limited gene pool, but mainly because of the antipathies caused by self-segregation. In some places there has been widespread and mutual self-segregation; the West Russian ‘Pale of (Jewish) Settlement‘ which lasted formally for over a century (until World War 1; and informally for much longer) was one such territory in which endogamy bred hatred and hatred bred endogamy. Reciprocal apartheid. Further, the lands of that former Pale were particularly coveted in the 1930s by the German National Socialists for the realisation of their Lebensraum policy.

Antisemitism as a panoply of Christian Judeophobias

Orthodox Antisemitism

In the years between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Eastern Mediterranean was politically and then culturally, a ‘Hellenic’ (ie Greek) empire; a cultural empire which gained two unofficial capital cities, Byzantium and Alexandria. That empire was Romanised from the first century BCE; ie subject to the political (but not cultural) hegemony of Rome.

Judaism, as the vanguard for monotheism – a novel religio-cultural phenomenon – became a successful proselytising religion, especially within the Hellenic cultural sphere. In say 200 CE, by far the majority of Jews in the world were converts. Judaism’s spiritual home city was Jerusalem, the principal city of Judah/Judea. There were also many Jewish converts in the territories to the north and east of Jerusalem; and there were still rabbinical Jews in Babylon (in modern Iraq), which is where early Jewish intellectuals decamped to after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

With the rise of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century CE, this new aggressive monotheism largely displaced Judaism in the Roman empire; many Eastern Mediterranean Jews either converted to Christianity, or emigrated. Many of the emigrants travelled west; with many migrating Jews converting many of the ‘pagans’ (especially Berbers) of the Western Mediterranean to monotheism. These people, initially mostly in the African ‘Maghreb’, became the Sephardic Jews.

Just as in the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, the new aggressive faith used the rhetoric of cultural-racism against Judaism, the hitherto established faith. Thus Orthodox archbishops such as John Chrysostom of Constantinople waged a vicious rhetorical war against the Jews. (Refer Simon Schama, Story of the Jews, episode 2.) Central themes of this rhetoric were the alleged complicity of the Jewish priesthood in the execution of Jesus Christ (by Christians deifying Jesus, his crucifiers therefore became guilty of deicide); and a greater tolerance for the practice of moneylending, in particular the usurious practice of ‘making money from money’.

In turn, those loyal to Judaism saw the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity as a ‘slippery slope’ away from monotheism; ie, away from the First Commandment of Moses.

Schisms

Christianity may be understood as the first of the great schisms. Islam later became the second schism from the Jewish branch, and Roman Catholicism the second schism of the Christian branch. After that, Protestantism became the great schism from the Catholic branch, during the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Just as Calvinism became the most anti-Catholic form of Protestant Christianity around the year 1550, 1,200 years earlier the emerging Greek Christian Orthodoxy (based in Byzantium renamed Constantinople, now Istanbul) became the most virulently anti-Jewish form of Christianity. In contrast, the Islamic schism from Judaism did not promote a hatred of the parent religion. Islam was never antisemitic in the way that Orthodox Christianity was.

The Islamic – or Koranic – variant of ‘Abrahamic’ monotheism rapidly proselytised in North Africa and Southwest Asia; this process – both cultural and military – was known as ‘Jihad’. While Islam proved popular, in part because of its tax advantages in Islamised territories, it was tolerant towards monotheistic non-converts; Jews with Muslim overlords generally prospered. (Muslims became known as Ishmaelites, in reference to Ishmael, the eldest son of Abraham, the mythical father of the Islamised – largely ‘Hamitic’ – races.) Christianity was the least tolerant of the three monotheist branches of biblical Judaism.

The Russian Jews

In the second half of the first millennium, all three monotheisms were seeking converts among bordering polytheist populations. Judaism continued to make progress in two main areas, in addition to the Western Mediterranean. These were Yemen (and subsequently Ethiopia), and Khazaria.

Khazaria (the Khazar Khaganate; see map) was a mixed European and Turkic territory to the north of the Caucasus Mountains, in modern-day southwestern Russia; mountains which include Europe’s highest, Mt Elbrus.) It is this region that gave to people of European ethnicity the label ‘Caucasian‘.)

The Khazar Khaganate dates from 650 CE, and lasted in some form until the early 13th century.

In the eighth century, the Khazarian people – especially the ruling class, realising that it was not a matter of whether to convert to monotheism but to choose which faith to adopt – had three to choose from. Realising that they would have less socio-political autonomy if they adopted either of the two religions on their doorstep, they chose Judaism. As converted Jews, they were deemed subsequently to be descended from Ashkenaz, a son of Noah’s other son Japheth. The Khazarites became  the Ashkenazi Jews (albeit not a popular view within the twentyfirst-century Israeli secular priesthood; refer Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). In the year 1000 CE, for example, this was the most populous Jewish community in the world.

Around the year 1220, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish polities in those steppe-lands were erased by the Mongol invaders. The predominantly Jewish population of Khazaria fled into the emerging Russian territories; Slavic lands whose people were then consolidating their faith as Orthodox Christians. (Religious ‘water’ and ‘oil’ didn’t really mix; there would be minimal assimilation between these two populations.)

In later centuries, these Ashkenazi Jews almost certainly mixed with other Jewish groups who had moved east, especially from the Central Europe. (In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, Eran Elhaik, using DNA analysis, establishes the ethnic predominance of the Khazarites within those Jewish communities of the Pale.)

Catholic Antisemitism

The schism between the (Greek) Orthodox and (Roman) Catholic churches was a slow-moving affair, which covered most of the second half of the first millennium CE. By and large, Catholicism acquired the same antisemitism, though developed a greater degree of pragmatism towards Judaism.

Orthodox Christianity and Islam emerged as much bigger geopolitical threats than Judaism to Catholic western Europe. Judaism receded to the periphery of monotheistic West Eurasia (to use the sensible name adopted by James Belich in his 2022 book The World the Plague Made, noting that North and Northeast Africa also belonged to this geopolity).

The basics of the European geopolitical fracture that still stands today were established during the reign of the Frankish emperor, Charlemagne. By the early ninth century, Catholicism prevailed across the entirety of Western and Central Europe. (There were still ‘pagan’ pockets – eg, in Scandinavia; otherwise, the border established by Charlemagne is that of today’s European Union. We note that the Catholic parts of the former Yugoslavia are in the European Union, and the Orthodox and Muslim parts of that former union are not. We also may note that Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus are exceptions; they are more Orthodox than Catholic. And we note that the post-Catholic Protestantisation of northern Europe occurred many centuries after Charlemagne.)

Simon Schama (in his Story) notes that Judaism came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066; this suggests that the Frankish kingdoms (which became France) had been a significant recipient of the racially diverse Jewish refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean. And it suggests that the (still relatively small) Rhineland (western German) population of Jews in Medieval Europe also arrived via that French route.

In the centuries either side of 1000 CE, the fusion of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures seems to have created a synergy, creating a cultural high tide of tolerance and intellectual osmosis. An interesting consequence may have been the emergence of modern banking. Pure banking developed in a Mediterranean world in which money-lending (usuary; charging interest) was prohibited by Christian and Muslims, though was pragmatically tolerated when the money-lenders were Jews. (Early banking was a side-hustle of rich Italian and Spanish merchants, who made written promises – promissory notes – and ‘cleared’ them among each other. They invested the money in their possession – their mercantile profits – to finance ventures; as financier shareholders of each venture, they would take a share of the profits or losses.)

It was Christian Kings and Princes who did much of the borrowing from Jewish moneylenders; these entitled overlords had a propensity to turn to antisemitism when they become insolvent. The Catholic world became especially prickly towards its cultural rivals, including Judaism, in the later decades of the 12th century.

Antisemitism in western Europe seems to have emerged around the same time that Catholic Crusader groups had conquered much of the ‘Holy Lands’ (the Levant; modern Syria/Lebanon and Israel/Palestine) from both Muslim and Orthodox overlords. Tolerance and pragmatism towards Jews largely fell apart in Spain, England and France in the twelfth century, leading to expulsions of Jews from those countries; and the boosting of the Rhineland population of Jews. Shama mentions the problem of antisemitism emerging in England during the reign of the Crusader King (Richard ‘Lionheart’; 1189-1199); indeed, Richard’s mother Eleanor had been responsible for expelling Jews from her ancestral territory of Aquitaine. Jews were expelled from Spain in stages from the 12th to the 14th centuries; and from England during the 13th century.

This is about the same time (early twelfth century) as when the Khazarite Jews had to flee (northwest into West Russia) from the Golden Horde established by the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan.

Neither Shlomo Sand nor Simon Shama mentioned the terrible atrocities committed upon Jews – especially in western Germany and Switzerland – during the first and biggest round of the Black Death (1348 to 1352; the ‘Plague’). But it’s true. Many Jews were scapegoated and grotesquely murdered; accused of having poisoned the wells in many central European towns.

Christian Poland, which was less affected by the Black Death than Western Europe, gained a reputation for relative tolerance towards Jews. So, it is likely that Eastern and Western Europeans converged in the territories we today call Poland, creating a relatively cosmopolitan population of Jews; Jews who practiced their faith while also mixing more easily with their Catholic (and later Protestant) neighbours; that is, more easily than the larger populations of Jews further east were able to integrate with their Orthodox neighbours.

Protestant Antisemitism (including Christian Zionist Antisemitism)

While the Bible (Old Testament) became more important for Jewish populations in recent centuries, the newer Talmud was a substantially more important text in the practice of Judaism in the medieval period.

It was the Protestant Christians during and after the Reformation who first took to the Bible – both Testaments – as literal statements of history and prophecy. Jews suddenly played an affirmative role as the spiritual and biological ancestors of Christians; of particular importance, they played an important role in Christian prophecy (including apocalyptic prophecy), especially in the momentum to re-establish an ethnoreligious state called ‘Israel’.

Further, Protestantism – especially the more Evangelical forms (eg Calvinism) – was attractive to the expanding Plague-recovery mercantile communities of Northwest Europe. Under the auspices of the reformed Church, the sanctions against usury – sanctions against making money from money – were increasingly downplayed. Christians could do business with Jews again; soon enough though, these two mercantile-religious communities became rivals. While Jews were no longer proselytisers, the mercantile Protestants (especially the Dutch) were eager expansionists, expanding their new capitalist domains throughout the much of the world; although only encroaching on the coastal communities of the Islamic World of the Indian Ocean rim, and of the ‘Far East’.

Protestant antisemitism was born out of capitalist rivalry; and out of the new Christian racial tropes, which facilitated the acceptance of intensely racist forms of slavery. In the nineteenth century – in the era of emerging ethno-nationalism within Europe, and emerging racial supremacism – the Jewish ‘nation’ became a rivalrous irritant to increasingly nationalist Christianity. Further, as Shlomo Sand observed, in Eastern Europe, a more dangerous form of ethno-nationalism emerged; one which built on the original Orthodox tradition of antisemitism. This eastern rivalry had morphed from being mainly religious to mainly ethnic; especially Slavs versus Jews.

To the west of Europe, in the now geopolitically dominant United Kingdom, Christian Zionism became a thing. While (Protestant) Christian Zionism had its roots in the Puritan era of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 1650s, by the 1830s the upper crust of even Anglican society wanted Jews to be ‘over there’ rather than ‘over here’. Although the United Kingdom elected a Jewish Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli – in the 1860s, this only reinforced latent antisemitism amongst his dour political rivals. (Queen Victoria found Disraeli to be more personable than his political opponents.)

Anyway, through that century, there was increasing (mainly Christian) talk in the United Kingdom and Western Europe about re-establishing a Jewish homeland, though not necessarily in Jewish biblical home-lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. The possibility of an expansion of Jewish settlement in Palestine emerged, however, as the then overlords of the Levant – the Turkish Ottomans – appeared to be presiding over of a dying empire. The European ‘great powers’ were lining up to divide the ‘Middle East’ – an annoyingly Britocentric term – between them.

This possibility didn’t stop the British ruling-class antisemites from concocting (just after 1900) a plan to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ in Uganda. While Uganda is a pleasant and fertile territory in Africa, this resettlement proposal tells much about the irredeemable racism of West Europeans towards the presumed ‘inferior’ races; especially but not only Africans. And it shows zero sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities regarding their biblical homeland.

Meanwhile the antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe – mainly in the then Russian Empire – continued as Slavic nationalisms were gaining pace. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to their destinations of choice: United States and United Kingdom.

For European Jews, the interwar crisis began in 1924 when the United States closed down their immigration from Europe; and the United Kingdom pretty much did the same thing. The United States’ near-prohibition of Jewish immigration lasted until the mid-1950s. It was only after 1924 that large numbers of Eastern European Jews looked to emigrate to (British Mandatory) Palestine; that’s where British and American immigration policy deflected them to.

Then, in the 1930s, the German National Socialists (Nazis) started both scapegoating their Jewish residents (effectively blaming them for the Great Depression, on account of apparent Jewish overrepresentation in the finance industry) and coveting their lands in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the newly independent Baltic States, and especially Soviet Russia.

The new Jewish residents in British Palestine recreated the segregated lifestyles they had known in Russia, creating much animosity between them and their new Palestinian neighbours. Pretty much by definition, these settlers were Zionists, because they were recreating the biblical promised land of Zion, even though they would rather have gone to the United States. The indigenous Palestinian population resented the new settlers; not because of their ethnicity, but because of their insensitivity and exclusiveness; an insensitivity comparable with many prior experiences of other indigenous peoples in the face of settler-colonisation.

Many immigrants from the west Russian territories were Socialist Zionists; indeed, it was that leftish faction which largely ruled modern Israel from its formalisation in 1948 until the mid-1970s. Other interwar settlers included the fascist Zionists of the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. Still others – including the Irgun, which became Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party – were on the less-extreme political right. All of these settler-Zionist factions formed resistance militias that became anti-British (ie anti- the new post-Ottoman overlord of the southern Levant) and (after the 1929 uprising) anti-Palestinian. (Just as Hamas is a resistance militia today.) The anti-Palestinian aspect of this settler militancy became, over time, increasingly racist; it became antihamitic, a racial prejudice as problematic as antisemitism.

Around 1940, the Lehi fascists tried to do a deal with Adolf Hitler. Both the Nazis and the Lehi wanted the European Jews to leave Europe. The Lehi wanted a mass transfer of that population to their new Zion in the Levant. Great Britain, in particular, was in the way. From the British point-of-view, the time to create an exclusively Jewish homeland had passed; the logistics of a mass resettlement programme during World War Two were impossible, and racism had passed its peak in the United Kingdom.

For Hitler, those logistics of a mass transfer to Jews to Palestine were always going to be problematic; exponentially more so once Germany was at war with Britain. Instead, Hitler reconsidered the British antisemitic plan to transfer the European Jews to Africa. After May 1940 there was a pro-Nazi puppet government installed in Southern France – the Vichy regime – which had control over France’s imperial territories. Hitler formulated a plan to settle the Eastern European Jews to Madagascar! While never practical, Winston Churchill certainly made such a transfer quite impossible. The United Kingdom invaded and conquered the Vichy French territory of Madagascar in 1942. (Who said the British military was overstretched in 1942? In that year, Winston Churchill argued that Australian troops should stay in Europe. John Curtin, the new Australian Prime Minister, wanted those soldiers to return home to defend Australia.)

Hitler’s options for the Jews substantially narrowed. His antisemitism and desire for lebensraum had left him committed to the removal of this population, but with no destination to remove them to, and few resources to do the removing. The rest became tragic history – from 1942 to 1945 – of the worst possible kind.

Still – even after the Holocaust – the pro-Israel antisemitic United States denied immigration entry to Jews, except that is for a few handpicked ones. Most holocaust survivors of World War Two were left with only one option; to migrate to British Palestine or (after 1948) to Israel. The Lehi (who fought the British during WW2), the Irgun, and the socialistic Haganah all served as ‘freedom fighters’ from 1946 to 1948. This was a successful militant insurgency. The British departed as soon as the United Nations was formed; they couldn’t wait to leave. The United Kingdom supported the creation of an ethnocratic sovereign state as the eventual solution to its longstanding antisemitic project of resettlement, indeed hoping that large numbers of British-resident Jews would join the refugee Jews in the new state of Israel.

Israel had been a longstanding antisemitic project, with the object of both cleansing Europe of Jews and creating a Europe-ish sovereign state in the ‘Middle East’, a state that would help to project a European-style foreign policy in a region which was set to undergo full decolonisation.

Conclusion

Israel today has arisen as a consequence of two millenniums of antisemitism in its various Christian forms. Israel is a nation-state, which – if it wishes not to be a pariah state – must abide by the same rules as any other nation state. It is not exceptional – the rules do not allow for exceptionalism – and the rules do not allow for the new nation to promote an alternative form of racism that’s as bad as antisemitism.

Jews are an ethnically diverse people with a shared cultural heritage; Judaism is a culture rather than a nation. A significant number – though not a majority – of the Jewish people live in the nation-state of Israel, a nation state that’s 76 years-old and counting. It’s a nation which presently pursues a relatively soft form of antihamitic Apartheid within its internationally accepted boundaries, and a much harsher form of antihamitism within its occupied territories. There is a clear analogy between the occupied territories of Palestine today and the occupied (and client) territories of Europe’s belligerent powers in the 1940s.

All nation states’ governments are equally able to be criticised; by those countries’ citizens, by residents and by non-residents. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism; it’s criticism of the way that nation-state projects itself across the wider world, and about how it racially and culturally discriminates (sometimes with extreme violence) against people or peoples over which the Israeli authorities have a duty of care.

Past victims of racism have more reason than most to avoid being present perpetrators of racism.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In an analytical essay titled ‘A moment of friction’ political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan wrote how we are living within a decisive moment of world affairs.

Paul wrote of a decisive moment of transition for the world’s contrasting and conflicting powers, and stated that 2024 is significant; “… because it is the period where force has become the major arbiter of who rises and who falls in the systemic transitional shuffle.”

So in this podcast, the first episode of A View from Afar, Series 5, Paul and Selwyn focus on this writing, and take listeners on a journey through this example of strategic study, a discussion that will help us to place a context to the world, as we are currently experiencing it.

(Ref. https://www.kiwipolitico.com/2024/04/a-moment-of-friction/ )

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To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/ Remember to subscribe to the channel.

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RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

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In this the twelfth episode of A View from Afar for 2023 political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning note and discuss some of the big world events that have occurred and are occurring in 2023.

And in particular, Paul and Selwyn discuss the rise of the Global South; evaluate the the wars that continue to rage in Ukraine and Gaza; and tensions in the South China Sea.

Plus they note, with particular reference the trends that will become prominent in 2024, including the decline of Western democracies and a rightward turn in many places (including in Argentina and New Zealand in their respective 2023 elections).

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

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Supremacism is a cultural belief that an in-group of humanity is inherently superior to other groups, and that those other groups have lesser human rights as a consequence of their presumed inferiority or corruption.

The Jewish religion does have texts which can be understood as supremacist. That doesn’t make Judaism a supremacist faith, though it does mean that it is a religion vulnerable to supremacist interpretations within that faith; including such interpretations within that faith community. This interpretation manifests today as giving Jewish extremists – neozionists – a priority claim over a piece of real estate which may be called the Southern Levant; especially the lands of the Post WW1  British Mandate Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and between the Sinai Peninsula and the lands of ancient Phoenicia which we now call Lebanon. (Levant is most meaningfully understood as the relatively fertile lands of the eastern Mediterranean, extending from Gaza in the south to a small strip of modern Türkiye in the north.) The present government of Israel is dominated by neozionists; especially those ministers representing the small parties to the political right of Likud. They represent an ultra-extremist tail wagging a willing Likud dog in a divided Israel; a divided nation in which opposition forces only this year waged mass protests against the suppression of judicial independence (refer Listening Post 29 July 2023, second story; quote: “Israelis are describing the fight over judicial reform as a looming civil war”).

Referencing Amalek as a call to Genocide

The following two programmes on Al Jazeera (among others, including other media) – episodes of Listening Post (about the international media) and Inside Story – showed and cited clips from Israeli domestic sources of Prime Minister Netanyahu making biblical references in what amounts to a call to genocide. Over and above the actual content of these clip, clips that are not fake news, my concern is the degree of self-censorship on the part of the media outlets which western audiences have most access to. In some ways New Zealand is even worse than the United States. Clips about Netanyahu’s Amalek comments have circulated in United States media, unlike New Zealand media (although I did see this by Eugene Doyle: The Holocaust Should be a Lesson not a Template, Scoop 7 Nov 2023).

The Wikipedia page for Amalek refers in the second paragraph to “The Biblical commandments to kill all Amaleks”. (And see dictionary.com.) Benjamin Netanyahu speaks: “‘Remember what Amalek has done to you’ says our holy bible. We do remember. And we wage war.” That bible passage goes on to say: “Now go and smite Amalek … kill both man and woman, infant”. Hamas, the present administrators and ‘defenders’ of Gaza, is the new Amalek. The Palestinians – and, for the moment, especially the Gazans – are the Amalekites. Netanyahu goes on to refer to “this chain of Jewish heroes” from Joshua “3,000 years ago” to “the heroes of 1948”. The audience Netanyahu is speaking to knows the texts referred to and the analogies being spun. The reference to the terrorist militias in the years upto and including 1948 is particularly informative. I’ll return to that.

(And we note that, whereas the United States, hidebound by a constitution drawn up in the pre-industrial 1780s, a colonial state which took for granted a deeply racist version of slavery, modern Israel is – or claims to be – a colonising state culturally informed by episodes of violence in the human past which date further back than the iron age. Have we, as a species, not moved on? Is modernity little more than a veneer, a figleaf no longer able to hide our innate savageness? And are our liberal elites, who think of themselves as the most civilised among us, in fact our least noble savages?)

Before coming back to the formation of modern Israel, I’ll elaborate on the biblical references, noting that Netanyahu might also have mentioned the legendary David and Goliath story; indeed both the Philistines and the Amalekites, neighbours in the Southeast Mediterranean, to the Israelites were inferior less-deserving peoples. To be a ‘philistine’ today means to be an uncultured person. Goliath was a Philistine, and Philistia was an ancient version of Gaza; the words ‘Philistine’ and ‘Palestine’ have the same etymology. [Note Philistia, and the adjacent Amalec, in this Wikipedia entry for Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy); and Philistine City States in this Wikipedia entry for Kingdom of Israel (Samaria).]

(Also, before returning to modern Israel, I want to look at the issue of supremacist ideology and theology more generally.)

Ancestry and Race in the Bible

Because the Christian bible incorporates the Jewish bible, the origin stories of the Israelite tribe are very familiar in our Christian-dominated global culture. Further, Muslims have the same origin story. Pedigree is an important feature of the Jewish bible – the Old Testament – with the divergence of correct peoples from corrupt peoples linked to fraternal disputes and ex-nuptial hereditary lines. I will never forget the word ‘begat’.

The place of Amalek (a tribal leader) is comparable in Zionism to the place of Islam (a religion); both follow allegedly ‘inferior’ lines of descent. In Islamic texts Muhammed is descended from Ishmael, the ‘illegitimate’ older son of Abraham/Ibrahim. (Abraham was an immigrant to Canaan from the area we today call Iraq. Abraham’s people were not indigenous to Southern Levant.) The Israelites, on the other hand, trace their genealogy from Ishmael’s younger ‘legitimate’ brother Isaac; or, strictly, through Abraham’s grandson Jacob. Amalek, also descended from Isaac, was descended through Jacob’s bother Esau.

Esau and Jacob were fraternal twins. Esau, the elder, was impulsive and feckless while Jacob was clever, cunning and focussed. Esau was tricked by Jacob into giving up his rights as elder brother. Later, Esau contracted two exogamous marriages; tantamount to, in a community which strongly favoured endogamy, an egregious sin. So, Esau’s descendancy was corrupted; God chose Jacob’s ‘superior’ descendancy as the foundational line for Israel and Judaism.

Amalek was Esau’s illegitimate grandson. At least one classical scholar, Flavius Josephus, considered that Amalek was a ‘bastard’ in the derogatory sense (ref. Wikipedia). We may apply that same ‘inferior line’ or ‘corrupted line’ sentiment to unreconstructed Jewish perceptions of Arabic ancestry, and a certain conflation of the concepts of Arabism with Islam. There is also the sense that, on purely ancestral grounds, the Jewish tradition sees Islam as a ‘bastard’ Abrahamic religion, and that in itself is indicative of inferiority.

This is supremacism based on ancestral disdain, which – in that thought mode – confers the right of the righteous collective to inflict arbitrary mistreatment upon people belonging to the ancestrally ‘corrupted’ collectives. In the Israel case, we might call this example of supremacism ‘Semitism’, because it’s the counterpoint to the misused term ‘anti-semitism’ (used to mean either anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli). This language is inaccurate and problematic; the widespread use of ‘Semite’ in lieu of either ‘Jew’ or ‘Israeli’ should be discontinued by those who should know better. (We might note that the Jewish supremacism seen in present times is better called neozionism, which characterises only a minority of adherents to Judaism and a minority of Israeli citizens.)

Before Abraham

The ancestral demarcations in Genesis did not begin with Abraham’s sons. (And we note that Old Testament genealogy is heavily patriarchal, with daughters mainly absent from the storylines and ‘misbehaving’ mothers often a source of corruption.)

The story of Cain and Abel, the elder sons of Adam and Eve, is widely known. Cain killed his younger brother in a fit of jealousy. So Abel was not able to establish a line of descent. ‘Fortunately’ for humanity, Adam and Eve subsequently had a third son, Seth. So we have two lines of descent, Cain’s line and Seth’s line. Cain’s collective line, however, was corrupted by Cain’s egregious behaviour.

As the story goes, generations later Cain’s line would be subject to divine genocide, the original ‘Act of God’ which remains as legal terminology today. Noah was the uncorrupted man, allowed to live, and he was descended from Seth. (Presumably other descendants of Seth were corrupted in other ways, establishing lines of descent which would in the main also become victims of divine genocide. The exceptions were Noah’s daughters-in-law.)

The Flood – presented as the first genocide, as retribution upon those corrupted – created a new second start for humanity; a second start that contained the raw material for three new bloodlines.  (We learned this story of divine genocide at Sunday School, as if the ‘wicked’ citizens of Gomorrah and other places somehow deserved to die.) The ‘raw material’ for the new races was of course Noah’s daughters-in-law, though the racial bloodlines are named after Noah’s three sons: Shem, Japheth, and Ham.

The known world in Old Testament times comprised West Asia (including Arabia), Northeast Africa, and Southeast Europe (including the Caucasus). The descendants of Shem became Semites, and populated Asia. The descendants of Japheth became Europeans (aka Caucasians, a term used by police as a racial descriptor for Europeans). The descendants of Ham became Hamites – Africans – corrupted on account of the Curse of Ham. The Judeo-Christian biblical tradition thus gained a predisposition to anti-hamitism; a problem which clearly exists today, and which this decade has inspired the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.

Anti-semitism

Anti-semitism is a form of prejudice, which literally should target all persons of West Asian descent, not just people of Israelite descent. (And we should stop calling West Asians ‘Middle Easterners’. The term Middle East is itself a supremacist name, reflecting the perspective of Western Europe in recent centuries.  We don’t call East Asian people ‘Far Easterners’. We have already switched to the widespread use of the term ‘South Asian’, in line with the established ‘East Asian’ in preference to ‘oriental’. Rishi Sunak is a British citizen of South Asian heritage. We should replace the term ‘Middle Eastern’ with ‘West Asian’, forthwith.)

This linguistic problem, the continued partial use of archaic racial constructs, is particularly problematic when we try to apply the European construct of ‘anti-semitic’ to groups of Arabs or Muslims. In the traditions from which the term derived, Arabs were themselves very much Semites. Further, the whole ‘hatred of Jews’ tradition which came to be called anti-semitism is a Christian European thing, and only has meaning in a Christian European context. There is no comparable racial or religious prejudice in the Arab world, although there is an aversion to supremacist behaviours perpetrated by Zionist (and other) colonists.

The present hatred in West Asia is a hatred of the Zionist and Neozionist behaviours that led to the ethnic clearances in the Southern Levant in the twentieth century; clearances which continue in the twentyfirst century. Anti-Neozism is a valid political position, as was Anti-Nazism in the World War 2 era; neither are hate crimes. These sentiments are anti-ideology, not anti-identity.

While the traditional Jewish texts may predispose some followers of Judaism to adopt a supremacist ideology, that hardly makes someone a supremacist if they identify as Jewish or because they descend in a patrilinear manner from Isaac. (In a strict endogamy, where Judaism is understood as a closed ethnicity as well as a religious faith, all Jews today would descend patrilineally from Jacob. However, given the realities of relationship formation and the biological advantages of exogamy, based on the laws of probability and descent, and assuming that Jacob was a genuine historical person, every person today of European or West Asian descent would be descended from him several times over. If we go back 100 generations, we should each have approximately 1,267,650,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ancestors. Clearly there has been some doubling up!)

While anti-Jewish sentiments are unacceptable (an ‘identity offence’ if you will; I don’t like the expression ‘hate-crime’), being anti the politics of the Israeli government is acceptable. And, if we want to accuse people of being anti-Jewish, we should say ‘anti-Jewish’ rather than the archaic racial euphemism ‘antisemitic’. There can be little doubt that Israel at present has a neozionist government, and that it is right and proper to oppose that ideology on ethical grounds; yet without wishing harm on people – without hating people – because they happen to be Jewish by birth or by choice. And we should never hate people; including people who openly espouse a supremacist ideology.

While neozionist supremacism is derived from genealogy rather than ethnicity or theodicy, to some extent these amount to the same thing in this case, thanks to the historical self-segregationist proclivities of the Jewish people. Some genealogical websites treat Jewish as an ethnicity, including the Israel-based site My Heritage.

I will now look at two other fateful versions of supremacy, one based on religion, the other on ethnicity: Calvinism and Collective Darwinism.

The Reformation and Dutch/Calvinist Theo-Supremacism

The medieval Christian churches (Orthodox and Catholic) had their own versions of supremacy, in particular the ideas around hierarchy and priestly absolution. (While I am more familiar with Catholic than Orthodox doctrine, Peter Turchin details Orthodox supremacism in War and Peace and War, 2007.) But the Reformation took this to a substantively different level, especially the Calvinist variation of Protestantism which preached the doctrine of predestination; indeed double-predestination, under which damnation as well as salvation was predetermined. Under predestination, certain groups of people were born into supremacy; and belief in one’s own in-group’s supremacy had to be sustained by faith, even at the risk of being martyred (especially in the religious wars which peaked in West Europe in the third quarter of the 16th century).

The Calvinist doctrines were particularly attractive to Europe’s mercantile communities; with the ‘Low Countries’ – the Netherlands – already having Europe’s most developed mercantile culture. These mercenary sub-cultures (numismaphiles? lovers of money) were attracted to any doctrine for which money-accruing was a virtue, not a sin. In this sense, Calvinism had aspects in common with Judaism; and it is on the matter of moneylending that Judaism differs significantly from both Islam and historical Catholicism.

The Netherlands were riven by the Reformation, which created decades of severe sectarian violence amongst people who were ethnically pretty-much identical. This was the genesis of the split between the peoples of the provinces we now call Netherlands and those we call Belgium. In the culture wars of that time, Calvinist yahoos would terrorise Antwerp and Brussels and other places, inciting violence by calling the Pope the Anti-Christ. Devil-allegers and alleged Devils were everywhere.

The outcome was a 17th century in which Calvinist Netherlands – the successfully rebellious northern United Provinces – changed the world. As the Dutch global presence expanded, the inferior ‘other’ were decreasingly white Catholics, and increasingly black Africans (in South Africa, the South Caribbean, and New York) and brown Austronesians (in what became the Dutch East Indies, and Indonesia). The Dutch dominated world seaborne trade in the 17th century, creating ‘Dutch lakes’ in the North Sea and the Indian Ocean. One such Dutch voyage resulted in the extraordinary tragedy of the East-Indiaman ship ‘Batavia’ (see the actual ship, in Perth); another resulted in the European discoveries of Tasmania and Nieuw Zeeland.

Re the origins of white supremacism in the United States, it is important to note the rise of Calvinism in Scotland and Northern Ireland, under the name of the Presbyterian church. Various neo-Calvinisms followed, such as the Baptist church. It was subsequent settlement in the southeastern states of the United States; settlement – as in Cape Town in South Africa, rich in calvinist values – which created the United States ‘Bible Belt’, and the secessionist and segregationist Confederacy which brought about the United States Civil War. And we note that the sectarian-apartheid which underpinned the twentieth-century troubles in Northern Ireland is very much a manifestation of calvinist doctrine.

The theme of Dutch/Calvinist supremacism in the eastern Indian Ocean is particularly evocative of the Dutch project of global capitalism described by Amitav Ghosh as ‘omnicide’ (refer his The Nutmeg’s Curse, 2021). Well worth reading, also, for New Hollanders (Australians) and New Zealanders is Peter Fitzsimons’ 2011 book Batavia.

Afrikaner Calvinism formed the philosophical basis for the Apartheid state in South Africa, from 1948 to 1991. And not the starting date for that Apartheid regime.

Darwinism, secular European Supremacism, and Neoliberalism

We understand German Naziism as an extreme form of Teutonic supremacism. But this was the eventual tip of a very large iceberg. Further, the supremacism wasn’t particularly targeted at Jews. The Nazis scapegoated Jews as cunning, mercenary, and somewhat conspiratorial. But they were more inclined to see – or wanted to see – Hamitic people than Semitic people as inferior. Hence the deep frustration with the success of African-Americans at the Berlin Olympic games in 1936.

The more important though understated supremacism was the belief throughout northwest Europe in the superiority of the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon race. In the 1920s, for example, this ran deep (see The Great Interwar Crisis by Robert Boyce, 2009). It manifested as a division of Europe into a hierarchy of three principal ‘races’: from superior to inferior, the sequence was the Germanic peoples, the Latin peoples, and the Slavic peoples. Indeed, in both World Wars One and Two, the principal fight was between Germany and Slavic Eastern Europe. The first war was largely about the break-up of the two formerly great empires in the east: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and the contest for the oil reserves around the Caspian Sea. The second war was principally about Lebensraum, a supremacist grab for the lands and labour of the Slavs. The German Nazis were more interested in sidelining the British than defeating them. Jews became a scapegoat.

The anti-Judaism in Germany was more pretext than text. Less so in the Slavic lands – especially the Russian empire – where anti-Jewish Pogrom-culture developed. (This was not Slavic supremacism; more like anti-supremacist hate; and, in line with Peter Turchin’s arguments, possibly linked to Orthodox Christianity.) It was from these Eastern European lands that most Jewish emigration to the Southern Levant before 1940 took place, and which formed the breeding grounds for subsequent neozionism. Pogrom-culture spread into Central Europe in the interwar years, and ultimately was the genesis of the Holocaust of 1942 to 1945; a super-pogrom which was anti-Jewish but not only anti-Jewish. (There were earlier iterations of pogrom-culture in Europe, the most notorious being in the 13th and 14th century; culminating in the accusations that the Black Death was the result of Jews poisoning the water-wells. Many terrible retributions followed.)

Before 1948, many Jews lived relatively prosperous lives in other territories in which the predominant populations were Arabic and/or Muslim; those mainly African territories were not the seedbed of anti-Jewish hatred.

Charles Darwin should not be blamed for collective or ethno- Darwinism – supremacism linked to race rather than religion – although his social milieu played a substantial role in the propagation of ethno-supremacist ideas. Herbert Spencer‘s Social Darwinism – first published as Social Statics – preceded Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species by 8 years. (And for a literary take on Social Darwinist versions of supremacism, try Jack London’s Martin Eden – written in 1909 when these ideas were especially prominent – or the 2019 Italian movie based on that book.) Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton is regarded as having been the ‘father’ of Eugenics, a philosophy which became influential in New Zealand, especially in association with the founder of the Plunkett Society, Sir Truby King.

We should also contrast these collective identity supremacisms (Neozionism, Calvinism, Social Darwinism) with individualist supremacisms, such as those of Friedrich Nietzsche on the one hand and Ayn Rand on the other. These philosophies, though problematic, are different.

(Rand was particularly influential amongst the generation of men, mainly born in the 1930s and 1940s, who sequestered the 1970s’ inflation crisis to give ‘the west’ neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed neoliberalism, a revival of the monetary supremacism of the 1920s, is so cemented into today’s ‘liberal’ narratives that the pragmatist economic insights of John Maynard Keynes, developed in the 1920s and 1930s, cannot even get onto the agenda of policy discussions around governance, inflation, and the cost of living. Public finance, in New Zealand at least, has become an excruciating zero-sum game; an elite intellectual closed shop.)

Al Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’): 1948 and all that; Ethnic Clearances

The Israel neozionists have told us and shown us what they see as the long-term solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’ – at best ethnic clearance in Gaza and surveillance control in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank; at worst, genocide – and have the will and the means to carry out that solution. (Having the means depends, though, on United States’ cooperation.) Further, their predecessors – as Zionists – have already done what today’s neozionists wish to do. The re-creation of Israel was always going to be a ‘game of two halves’. 1948 was the first half. The 1967 Six-Day War might have been the beginning of the second half, but it wasn’t to be. Circumstances have come together once again, in 2023, to make it possible for the Israeli regime to return to the 1948 playbook, and complete their modern-era refoundation project.

Basically, after World War II, groups of Zionist settlers waged a terrorist campaign against the United Kingdom, which had a continued mandate to administer the Southern Levant; a British mandate which began as an outcome of World War 1. This campaign of terror was known as the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine. The insurgents had different factions. The relatively moderate faction was Haganah; the more extreme factions were Irgun and the Stern Gang (aka Lehi).

All three militias were involved in the 1947 Deir Yassin massacre, though it was lead by Irgun. Before 1948 Irgun was the Jewish equivalent of Hamas pre-2006. (In addition to being a sectarian resistance movement, Hamas today is the elected administration of the semi-state of Gaza.) It was Irgun who in 1946 blew up the King David Hotel, British administrative headquarters, although Irgun sought to implicate Haganah (NY Times, 27 July 1947). Further, Irgun can be understood as the institutional forerunner of Israel’s ruling Likud Party.

Israel’s founding fathers were linked to either Haganah or Irgun. Founding mother ‘Golda Meir’ was linked to the political wing of Haganah; she was heavily involved in fundraising in United States for the Israeli cause.

As soon as the new United Nations was formed, the United Kingdom couldn’t leave quickly enough. The Zionist insurgency was the exemplar for a successful terror campaign. (The father of my first wife served in the British Army during the 1945-1948 mandate. She mentioned to me that, when he was travelling on the back of an army truck, the man next to him was shot in the chest by a sniper, dying instantly. Such is the randomness of life and death, under fire.) The United Nations took over responsibility for Mandatory Palestine (the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River) from Britain, noting that the United Kingdom had various other postcolonial obligations to unravel.

The 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight involved a mass ethnic clearance; it was a land-grab. Gaza became a refugee ‘camp’, with responsibility held by both the United Nations (in the form of UNWRA) and Egypt. Most of the dispossessed fled to Gaza, though still claiming rights to the lands they had previously occupied and farmed. A substantial territory to the east of Mandatory Palestine – the ‘West Bank’ of the Jordan River – was not included in Israel, and was conjoined to Jordan after the 1948 post-independence Arab-Israeli war. This conjoined territory included East Jerusalem.

(This is an authorised American version of the foundation of modern Israel. And this is a summary of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.)

Partition of Mandatory Palestine, in Six Maps

Both the Washington Post and the BBC have sites showing six critical maps of the formation of Israel to date. The first map shows Mandatory Palestine from 1922. This is essentially the combined area which modern Israel possesses and occupies. (Additionally today, Israel possesses and occupies a little more area around the Syrian border; the Golan Heights.)

Each second map shows the United Nations’s November 1947 partition plan. The BBC map shows more clearly that the Palestinian partition is in fact three disjoint territories, although the ‘joins’ are very close. (It’s important to note that Jerusalem/Bethlehem is specified separately as an ‘international city’.)

This was the essence of the ‘two-state’ ethno-sectarian solution which has been revived today, and was a solution very much in the mould of Britain’s partition solution for India earlier that year. The Palestinians rejected the United Nations’ two-state solution, and no wonder given what was happening in the then dividing India. In the South Asia case, the partition created two ethno-sectarian nation states; with Pakistan located in two detached and culturally different parts. This created two major episodes of catastrophic violence, and many minor episodes. (See Why Pakistan and India remain in denial 70 years on from partition, Guardian, 6 August 2017; review of The Great Divide by William Dalrymple, New Yorker 22 June 2015; Violence against women during the Partition of India, Wikipedia; and 1950 East Pakistan riots, Wikipedia; Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, Wikipedia.) That ethno-sectarian India problem has rekindled since around 2010 with the accession to power of Narendra Modi, with the interesting (and worrying) pro-Zionist sympathy of the ruling Hindu nationalists (see the third story of the 11 Nov 2023 episode of The Listening Post). And ethno-sectarian violence against women remains a big problem in India.

The third map shows the outcome of the 1948/49 Arab/Israeli War, with the two parts we today think of as Palestine under occupation by Egypt (Gaza) and recently independent Jordan (West Bank; Jordan had been the British-mandated Trans-Jordan; see BBC first map). This 1949 map has a distinctly modern look.

The fourth map shows Israel’s annexation of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War. This could have been the completion of the Israeli project, but for the complications relating to Sinai, Egypt, and the closure of the Suez Canal. Eventually Egypt was able to reopen the Suez Canal in 1975, and its repossession of Sinai was formalised in 1982 (fifth map) following the 1978 Camp David Accords.

The Washington Post fifth map also mentions that Southern Lebanon was occupied by Israel from 1982 to 2000. The 1982 events were particularly nasty, though barely mentioned today because there is just so much other context to the present events. (Though we should note that present events include substantial militarisation and violence north and south of the Israel-Lebanon border.) This war largely took place under the cover of the British-Argentinean Falklands War, in June 1982. The nastiest single event, though, was the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, an aftermath to the Siege of Beirut.

The sixth map shows the situation of occupation in October 2023. (The BBC map shows Gaza only.) Of particular note is the extent to which Palestinians do not supervise the West Bank. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the West Bank’s fate as a slow Israeli land grab; an ethnic clearance accelerating under cover of the present War in Gaza. While the violence in Gaza has been full-on, the West Bank has been subject to huge amounts of petty violence which in its own way is as distressing.

One State, Two States, Three States?

The present Siege of Gaza began from 2005, after Israel closed its settlements there, and after Hamas acceded to government in Gaza. Gaza has been a ‘cage’, the “Gaza ghetto”, (see 20 November 2023 NZ Listener opinion-piece No Place to Call Home by Paul Oestreicher); a refugee enclosure since 1948 managed in large part by the United Nations in the form of UNRWA. Gaza and southern Lebanon were the major destinations for those 700,000 Palestinians dispossessed of their land during the Nakba.

Gaza once had an opportunity to become an independent nation-state; not an oil-state like Kuwait nor an entrepôt-state like Singapore, but a coherent small nation more along the lines of Malta or Cyprus. But the western obsession with a Two-State solution, with Gaza tagged onto the West Bank – like India and Pakistan (with Bangladesh concocted as a distant appendage, as East Pakistan) – put the kibosh on that.

Gaza became a semi-state under blockade, substantially dependent on aid from both foreign and besieging parties. Israel would utilise Gazan labour, to perform low-wage but essential tasks. Gaza – in a first-past-the post election in 2006 – chose Hamas as their administration and their military; Hamas gained a majority of seats but not a majority of votes. Hamas’ rival was Fatah, in control of the Palestine Authority in the West Bank. Gaza was voting for independence from the West Bank as well as from Israel.

People have been able to leave Gaza, but only in accordance with other countries’ immigration eligibility criteria. Thus, the Palestinian diaspora has taken place under a much more difficult ‘rules-based’ legal framework than the 2,000-year Jewish diaspora. (That’s not to understate the many difficulties Jews faced over the millennia in settling other parts of the world.) Persons in Gaza born to Palestinian refugees in 1948 would have led their entire 75-year-long lives in a United Nations supported refugee enclosure. There are few people alive in the Southern Levant today who have clear memories of life before 1948.

Hamas wants a one-state solution: one Palestine, no Israel. And it is mandated by a substantial minority of the Gazan people to remind Israel that it is still there and that it has aspirations to be much more than an enclosure of dispossessed people. Hamas-led Gaza has attacked Israel a number of other times since 2006, though with barely a ripple of international attention. (My recording of the 13 May 2023 Listening Post episode about surveillance of Palestinians in East Jerusalem shows this in the lower-screen news-ribbon: “Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip continue for the fifth consecutive day. Israeli military says at least 1,000 missiles have been launched from Gaza since Tuesday. Israel confirms killing a sixth commander of Islamic Jihad in air strikes on Gaza. At least 33 Palestinians killed and 120 injured in air strikes on Gaza. At least two people killed in Israeli raid on Balata Camp in Nablus in occupied West Bank”. Clearly Hamas had to do much more next time in order for the international community to take notice of the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people under siege and surveillance.) The world – and the news-cycle – follows an ‘out-of-sight out-of-mind’ reality. On 7 October 2023, Hamas did enough – probably more than enough – to be noticed. Egregious behaviour is rewarded with attention.

We should also understand that the willingness of many Palestinians to die in their struggle for freedom is not unique to them. Israel maintains a substantial monument to the Siege of Masada (by the Romans) in the year 0073. Apparently “The Jewish rebels had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and had killed each other, declaring ‘a glorious death … preferable to a life of infamy’.”

My sense is that an India-Pakistan-style two-state solution was never viable in the Southern Levant; just as it was never viable as a post-colonial solution to British India. The ‘two-state solution’ remains a fantasy of the self-proclaimed ‘liberal rules-based’ West. And, I suspect, it’s now too late for a three-state solution. Both Gaza and the West Bank have already been too substantially compromised. (A West Bank state has been compromised by the present degree of Israeli settlement there. There had been a possibility of a small landlocked independent state such as Eswatini, which – as Swaziland – ‘enjoyed’ an independent coexistence with Apartheid South Africa.) We should note the parallels between the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 with that of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and this story from Al Jazeera in 2015: Rabin’s assassination marked the end of the two-state solution.

The only viable long-term outcome that I can see is a one-state solution, possibly with that state being Israel. For a first-best outcome, we can draw some inspiration from post-Apartheid South Africa. In the Levantine context, an ideal state would neither be called Israel nor Palestine. An important feature of such a state would be a truth and reconciliation process. In the words of Paul Oestreicher: “There is still a fast-shrinking possibility that apartheid Israel could become a nation with equal rights for all of its inhabitants … a dream worth pursuing.” Such a state might be called ‘South Levant’.

My sense though is that Israel’s campaign of supremacist violence has already become a fait-accompli. The rest of the world probably needs to focus on achieving – this decade – the second-best one-state solution. The best that the West can offer the Southern Levant is a state of permanent limbo; a permanent cycle of escalating and de-escalating violence; this is a third-best or fourth-best outcome. Contemporary Gaza is like a turkey-enclosure before Thanksgiving; enduring its own Squid Gamepurgatory. And the West Bank has already become a Kafkaesque nightmare of Israeli-imposed bureaucracy and petty collective cruelties to those Palestinians – especially Muslims – who resist being chased off their lands.

Military realism today may be a more likely precursor to a long-term realisation of the living-together one-state dream than another permanent set of temporary impasses; than another 75 years of limbo and a continuance of the passions that the last 100 years have brought, not only to that region but to the whole world.

Military and geopolitical realism may see all the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River become Israel; eventually (hopefully by 2050) a depoliticised and de-zionised Israel. To avoid genocide this northern hemisphere summer, the 1940s’ architects and sponsors of Israel – especially the United States and the United Kingdom – will need to facilitate a substantial 2020s’ expansion of the already-large Palestinian diaspora. Israeli writers are already saying this: refer The West Should Welcome Gaza Refugees, by Danny Danon and Ram Ben-Barak, Wall Street Journal 13 Nov 2023. The sooner the purgatory is over, even if the short-term outcome is not first-best, then the sooner people who identify as Palestinians will once again be welcome in the lands of their ancestors; welcome as equals in a 2040s’ Israel or South Levant that is very different from the present Israel.

We note that the Netherlands of today – renowned for its pluralist tolerance – is quite different from the Calvinist Netherlands of 1600; although Netherlands still retains much from its Calvinist origins, including its own rural Bible Belt. Some forms of supremacism wither, when circumstances no longer sustain them. In addition to the Dutch, consider the more recent histories of the Germans, and the South Afrikaners. The United States remains a work in progress; white supremacism remains a problem there. And there are other supremacisms still alive, still rampant; in Myanmar, and in Darfur, which have not so far been mentioned here, and are not mentioned much anywhere else either. The West’s attention span remains too short.

Afterword

The Zionists and the Calvinists – the Jews and the Dutch – have, for better and/or worse, punched above their weight in world history, in the creation of the modern capitalist world. Likewise, we must give much credit to Darwinism as a positive force; the science of evolution and the evolution of science that is (not supremacist Darwinian pseudo-sciences!).

Supremacism will not go away. It will not be smashed by anti-supremacism. Israel cannot and should not be smashed, just as the Calvinist tradition in modern Christianity cannot be eradicated. Rather, supremacist cultures can be ‘domesticated’, their energies channelled in ways that construct rather than destroy, that sustain rather than deplete. Jewish people should be – and are – proud of what they have achieved and have endured, in collectives and as individuals; they don’t need Zionism or Neo-Zionism through which to express that pride.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In this the eleventh episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning examine how the post-World War II liberal internationalist system is being challenged by a fluid constellation of global and regional powers to influence the shape of an emerging new world order.

And Paul and Selwyn also assess how this massive shift in geopolitic demarcations is forming, relatively quickly, into a world of bipolarity where on one side we have a multipolar constellation of states, and on the other the traditional western liberal democracies.

The catalyst behind this rapidly forming bipolarity is conflict.

And, most recently, it is clear, that the Israel-Hamas war – and the atrocities committed initially by Hamas and more lately by Israel forces – is driving the world toward a transitional moment.

It appears, that what is emerging from the current multipolar system – and think here the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court among many other global bodies – is a situation that is not merely new-and-old Great Powers competing as nation-states.

But rather, what we see are groupings of fluid constellations of powers competing as blocs to influence the shape of what is to come.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn discuss and describe what is now evident, and sketch out what will likely emerge.

Of course, as mentioned, the Israel-Hamas war lays bare any claims of morality and exposes the hypocrisies of all sides in conflicts.

In particular the Hamas-Israel war exposes the west – led by the United States of America, the United Kingdom and various European states – to an argument that the west is morally moribund as it continues its colonial/post colonial attitudes of support of Israel as the latter commits an apparent disproportionate-defence offensive against Palestine’s peoples.

The argument appears to carry weight, especially as this western axis sustains its support for Israel’s war machine even while, on international humanitarian law grounds, the atrocities being committed against Palestine’s civilian population are morally indefensible and potentially legally enforceable as war crimes.

For example; retribution for the atrocities and despicable crimes committed by Hamas against defenceless Israeli citizens does not remove culpability for the State of Israel as it delivers on an apparent intention to annihilate Hamas and all people – children, the elderly, all innocents – who may surround Israel’s targets.

IHL shows how duty of care is not excused even if civilians are used as “human shields”, and at this juncture, it is not clear, whether that cited flawed-justification is founded on truth.

This is the position of what was once an authoritarian axis.

But what has formed is a multipolar-constellation that supports the Palestinian cause on postcolonial, Global South, and solidarity grounds.

The Questions:

So if all of this carnage is the catalyst for a new world order, what comes next?

Will we see the emergence of a parallel global institutional structure that develops as a counter-balance to the west’s post-WWII world order?

Has the west’s leading power lost its moral authority through its support for a war machine that has caused the deaths of over 10,000 people of innocent disposition, while itself refuses to be a signatory member state to the International Criminal Court and its principles of global justice?

And as such, has the west ceded persuasive moral authority to the rising constellation of once authoritarian-states that dominate the opposing bloc?

And does the west, as a consequence, find itself powerless to counter the migration of moderate independent states that are repelled by the immorality of the west’s arguments, laid bare by the Hamas-Israel war?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

The weekend’s surprise and brutal attack on Israel by Hamas fighters has the potential to reshape the Middle East – and will only further increase global geopolitical instability. As of Sunday night NZT, the initial 24 hours of the assault by Hamas on Israel had already taken at least 250 Israeli lives – easily making it the bloodiest day for Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In addition, dozens of Israelis have been kidnapped and taken back to Gaza to be used as bargaining chips. While there will be a range of motivations for why Hamas chose to act in the way it did now, the symbolic timing of Hamas’ assault – almost 50 years to the day after Yom Kippur – is unlikely to be a coincidence.

In recent years, Western countries such as New Zealand have largely taken their eye off the region to focus on the war in Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific. A staple of New Zealand’s world news diet in decades past, of late the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only rarely made the headlines. When it has, New Zealand has preferred not to become involved to any real extent beyond expressing sympathy with the victims. For example, when conflict broke out over Gaza in 2021, Jacinda Ardern cut an image that resembled more that of an observer or commentator, rather than of a participant in international affairs.

The new Hamas assault is a reminder of the continued power of the Middle East to shock and surprise. While it is too early to tell how the conflict will exactly unfold, one of the most concerning aspects will be the extent to which other nation-states become involved – particularly Iran, a close supporter of Hamas. The risk is that the war could spiral out of control and become a wider conflict with an even greater global impact, in an echo (or, potentially, an even more dangerous version) of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Determining New Zealand’s response to the new war in the Middle East will be one of the new New Zealand government’s first challenges – and as shown by the fierce reaction to the initial lack of direct condemnation of the Hamas assault by Nanaia Mahuta, it will not be an easy path to navigate. A sustainable and durable two-state solution is the only long-term answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with Israel now defending itself against a vicious and horrific attack by Hamas, and planning a new ground invasion of Gaza, this will not be on the table in the near future.

However, New Zealand should resist the temptation to lose hope or to see the war as simply someone else’s problem. As a small democracy far from the epicentre of the conflict, New Zealand could eventually play a role in peacemaking efforts – if it wanted to. We should not forget that as horrific as the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was, the Camp David Accords came just five years later in 1978. These led to Egypt signing a peace treaty with Israel, a settlement that has endured. The darkest moment can sometimes come before the dawn. There will absolutely be a need for de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy in the days, weeks, months and years ahead – and countries will be sorely needed to lead and support these efforts.

For now, these ambitions may seem like a pipe dream. But as the war in Ukraine has shown, even distant wars can have an outsized impact, even half a world away. Crude oil prices have already risen sharply this year – and combined with a strengthening US dollar, these have caused New Zealand petrol prices to head back up to levels last seen in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The pain caused by rising inflation and the cost-of-living crisis – the number one issue of the election campaign – may not be over yet.

Geoffrey Miller is the Democracy Project’s geopolitical analyst and writes on current New Zealand foreign policy and related geopolitical issues. He has lived in Germany and the Middle East and is a learner of Arabic and Russian. He is currently working on a PhD on New Zealand’s relations with the Gulf states.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. To subscriber, please visit the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz).

The New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis in the latest fighting in Israel/Palestine and must revisit its policy, says the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair John Minto.

“Whatever the eventual outcome of the Hamas attacks on Israel today [Saturday], the New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for the loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis,” he said in a statement.

“Like other Western countries, New Zealand has failed to hold Israel to account for its multiple crimes, including war crimes, against the Palestinian people, day after day, year after year and decade after decade.

“We have ignored human rights reports of Israel’s apartheid policies. Our government has been looking the other way.”

Hamas launched a large-scale military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” against Israel, describing it as in response to the desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and increased settler violence.

The group running the besieged Gaza Strip (population 2.1 million) said it had fired thousands of rockets and sent fighters into Israel. Early reports said at least 5 Israelis, had been killed, 35 people  taken captive and more than 500 had been wounded and taken to hospitals.

Repeated Israeli attacks
Minto described the Hamas attacks as “understandable”.

“Over recent months Western countries have turned a blind eye to the brutality of the Israeli army and settler groups engaging in repeated attacks on Palestinian towns and villages and the killing of civilians and children,” he said.

“The result is now playing out in more violence initiated by Israel’s brutal occupation — the longest military occupation in modern history. The occupation includes Israel’s 17-year-old blockade of the Gaza strip — the largest open-air prison in the world.”

Al Jazeera reports that almost 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces so far this year.

“New Zealand must reassess its policy on the Middle East and demand Israel adopt a timetable to implement international law and United Nations resolutions.”

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished. Politically and otherwise,” declared Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara, who says Israel has never learnt from history of colonialism.

“His arrogance has finally caught with him. No matter how many Palestinians this corrupt opportunist kills before his final downfall, he will go down in utter humiliation.

“Israel gets a glimpse of the real future days after Netanyahu cavalierly showed us at the United Nations future maps of the new Middle East centered around Israel — with no Palestine existence.”

Israel launched air strikes on Gaza in retaliation in an operation called “Iron Swords”.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) supporters are livid Labour is refusing to recognise the state of Palestine a full 104 years after the first Palestinian calls for an independent state.

It’s a disgraceful decision, both unprincipled and cowardly.

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson confirmed this decision when answering questions here:

Q – ??? about the Palestinian Representative in Australia to present his credentials here. That was announced formally.

Grant Robertson – There is a formal Foreign Policy part of the manifesto. We’re sticking with the long standing bi-partisan approach to a two-state solution in the Middle East and what we are doing is working with the Palestinian representative on closer discussions but that doesn’t make a change to a formal recognition. It just means that we open that dialogue up.

Q – So no formal recognition?

GR – Not until there is a state to recognise. But we have long stood for a two-state solution and what we have said is that we want to have more open and regular dialogue with Palestinian Representatives.

Labour implied in their manifesto release this week that they would recognise the state of Palestine although the wording was unclear and ambiguous. What is clear now is that the slippery wording was deliberately meant to mean all things to all people.

The disingenuous wording in the Labour manifesto says:

Labour is committed to an enduring and just two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the right of Israel to live in peace within secure borders internationally recognised and agreed by the parties, and reflecting the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people to also live in peace and security within their own state.

A re-elected Labour government will:

Invite the Head of the General Delegation of Palestine to present their credentials as an Ambassador to New Zealand.

One hundred and thirty eight other countries have recognised Palestine as a state and haven’t had the “problem” of recognition that Grant Robertson has manufactured for Labour.

It seems Labour has once more buckled to pressure from a tiny pro-Israel lobby group within the party. They are allowing these anti-Palestinian racists to veto any meaningful steps to support the Palestinian struggle for human rights.

It’s an indelible stain on Labour’s integrity.

Background to the 104 years
After 1918, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, each of the countries of that empire gained independence — except Palestine. The first Palestine National Congress was held in 1919 and called for independence from Britain which held the League of Nations mandate for Palestine.

Britain, however, refused independence and in the 104 years since, Western countries, including New Zealand, have colluded with Britain, then Israel and the US, to deny a Palestinian state or even equal rights for Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.

Western countries turned a blind eye to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1947–49 and look the other way today as Palestinians continue to be driven out of their homes and off their land by Israeli settlers, backed up by the Israeli military.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

If re-elected, Labour would invite Palestinian ambassador to Canberra to present credentials here. pic.twitter.com/UvzyOTd96T

— Thomas Coughlan (@coughlthom) October 1, 2023

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

During World War I, the New Zealand government took a big area of land at Raglan from the local Tainui Awhiro people to build an airfield and bunker as part of local war preparations.

The airfield was never built and, instead of returning the land to the people, the government used the Public Works Act in 1928 to give legal justification for the Crown keeping the land.

In 1967, local iwi were evicted from the land and forced to rebuild nearby with the government then selling the land for the Raglan Golf Course.

In the early 1970s, Tainui Awhiro, led by Māori activist Eva Rickard, began the fight to have the land returned and after much protest, marches, petitions, lobbying, occupations and arrests on the golf links themselves they were finally successful in 1983.

The land was handed back — but not until they had fought off a government “offer” requiring them to buy their land back from the Crown.

It was my first experience of being part, in a very small way, of a Māori land protest.
One of the important things I remember from Raglan, Bastion Pt and those early land protests were the messages of support and solidarity which came in from around the country and all over the world.

Typically, these would be read out at the start of a protest hui and local iwi and supporters took great heart from them. They lifted spirits and warmed hearts when things sometimes seemed bleak.

Long way to decolonisation
We have a long way to go in decolonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand but we have come a significant way from the crude government behaviour at Raglan.

On the other side of the world, colonisation in Palestine is continuing apace since the mass expulsions of Palestinians from their land in 1948 (more than700,000 people evicted from their homes and land by Israeli militias from more than 500 villages with dozens of civilian massacres along the way).

Every day for the past 74 years, more Palestinians have been evicted from their land using all manner of spurious, creative justifications, backed by a court system run by the Israeli colonisers.

In the spotlight today are 12 Palestinian villages with more than 1000 people who face eviction from their land in an area of the South Hebron Hills called Masafer Yatta.

An Israeli court has given the Israeli army the go-ahead to evict the people and take over their land for a “live firing range”. The range isn’t needed. The Israeli army already has close to 18 per cent of the occupied West Bank set aside for firing zones — it’s just a commonly used pretext for land theft.

If the Israeli army is able to evict these people, it will be the largest eviction of Palestinians in more than 50 years.

Like the early colonists in New Zealand, Israel wants the land without the people.

Palestine’s Raglan struggle
Masafer Yatta is Palestine’s Raglan Golf Course, albeit on a larger scale and as part of the longest-running military occupation in modern times.

The people of Masafer Yatta are fighting back with protests and vowing not to move despite five weeks of thuggish bullying by Israeli military with vehicles racing around the land in a massive show of force to intimidate and cower the people. Live bullets ripped through roofs of houses in the Khallat Al Dabea village during this “military training”.

The local Palestinian people are organising to defend their land and homes against Israel’s aggressive colonisation.

Young people are on the frontline. Co-founder of non-violent resistance group Youth of Samud (Sumud means “steadfastness”) Sami Hurraini was detained by the Israeli army in the hot sun for eight hours without food or water last week but is undaunted.

Despite receiving a demolition order for their centre in Masafer Yatta, Hurraini says, “Of course Israel won’t stop us! We will rebuild the centre every time they demolish it.”

The least we can do is add our voices of international support and solidarity to the people of Masafer Yatta. We need to let them know they are not alone — just as similar messages gave heart to Māori fighting land theft here.

And we have to let Israel know there are accountabilities for ethnic cleansing and the war crimes associated with colonisation of Palestinian land.

Palestinians are not looking for our sympathy — they are looking for practical solidarity. If enough voices are raised around the world Israel will be forced to back down.

The strongest voice we have is the government’s. We need to insist our government uses it on behalf of all of us.

John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

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

The absolute impunity which the Aotearoa New Zealand government has given to Israel’s racist apartheid regime over many decades and the cowering of the Aotearoa New Zealand media in the face of threats of false smears of anti-semitism from the racist pro-Israel lobby are key factors in the daily murder and mayhem conducted by Israeli troops in Palestine.

The latest killing is of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh which was described by Al Jazeera and eyewitnesses as an “assassination in cold-blood”.

This veteran journalist has been the “voice of the voiceless” as she has fearlessly reported for Al Jazeera on Israel’s military occupation of Palestine over many decades.

Her fearlessness is in sharp contrast to local media reporting on Israel/Palestine which includes multiple, repeated inaccuracies which reinforce Israel’s “justifications” for its brutality.

Most New Zealanders do not even know that Israel runs a military occupation over the entire area of historic Palestine.

With rare exceptions, our media simply provide a safe portal for Israeli propaganda.

Israel’s unbridled brutality
Meanwhile, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, if they say anything at all about Israel’s occupation or unbridled brutality are much more likely to criticise Palestinians than they are to criticise Israel.

If they spoke out about the Russian invasion of Ukraine like they do with the situation in the Middle East, they would be blaming Ukrainians for “provocations against Russian troops” and asking Ukrainians to exercise “maximum restraint” in the face of Russian brutality.

It’s hypocrisy on a grand scale.

We call out human rights abuses to a US agenda. We condemn Russia and China but look the other way with Israeli or Indonesian brutality (as in West Papua).

None of this has changed under the current minister Nanaia Mahuta who has been silent for more than 18 months on the Palestinian struggle.

Silence is never an option when it comes to human rights. It is the position of cowards.

Until Israel is called out for its racist apartheid policies and the consequences which flow from that, it will continue to murder with impunity.

We have yet again asked the minister to speak out and demand an independent investigation and accountability for Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination.

John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Palestine has lost a champion of the struggle against Israeli apartheid with the death of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, aged 90.

Tutu is known internationally as a leader of the struggle against white minority rule in South Africa and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work reconciling South Africans after the end of its brutal apartheid regime.

He was the moral conscience of the country and sometimes highly critical of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC)-led government, saying that some in the ANC leadership had stopped the apartheid gravy train “just long enough to jump on”.

Relationship with New Zealand
Archbishop Tutu was a warm friend of New Zealand and many New Zealanders across our political divides will feel a deep sadness at his passing.

In the early 1980s when Tutu faced court action from the South African authorities, a delegation of church leaders from New Zealand, led by former Anglican Archbishop of Aotearoa New Zealand, the late Sir Paul Reeves, went to South Africa in an act of international solidarity.

This was deeply appreciated by Archbishop Tutu.

During the protests against the 1981 Springbok rugby tour, one of the three Auckland protest squads was called Tutu Squad in his honour.

Later he came to New Zealand and at one point gave evidence as an expert witness on apartheid during a trial arising from 1981 tour protests.

Such was his charisma, his mana and the deep respect he commanded everywhere that when he was called to the witness stand by Hone Harawira, the entire courtroom stood.

In this case all the activists on trial were acquitted after the jury deliberated.

Support for Palestinians
Tutu was outspoken against injustices all around the world and in particular he condemned the racist policies faced by Palestinians from the Israeli regime. He frequently described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “worse” than that suffered by black South Africans.

He said international solidarity with Palestinians such as through BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) was critical to ending injustices like apartheid.

“I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing in the Holy Land that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under apartheid,” said Tutu.

“We could not have achieved our democracy without the help of people around the world, who through… non-violent means, such as boycotts and disinvestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime.”

In relation to Israeli policies towards Palestinians, Tutu said the world should “call it apartheid and boycott!”

In honouring Tutu’s legacy, freedom-loving people around the world should follow his advice and spurn Israel till everyone living in historic Palestine has equal rights.

Aotearoa New Zealand, the Palestinian struggle and the world have lost a dear friend and a great humanitarian.

John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and former national chair of HART (Halt all Racist Tours).

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The International Federation of Journalists has called for the urgent reinstatement of Nasser Abu Bakr, head of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, following his victimisation by the French news agency AFP.

Abu Bakr, who has worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP) for more than 20 years, was sacked without valid reason, in what the IFJ’s leading body has called “a clear case of victimisation for his trade union activities, in contravention of the law and international standards”.

The dismissal came following the agency’s concerns over his strong public defence of the rights of Palestinian journalists in his role as president of the PJS.

Abu Bakr, who is an elected member of the IFJ’s executive committee, had been instrumental in filing complaints about the systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces to the United Nations Special Rapporteurs and in documenting and exposing attacks on Palestinian journalists and media.

The IFJ will launch a global campaign to demand justice for Nasser.

Already support has flowed in from public bodies in Palestine, from unions around the world and from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions.

Journalists in Palestine have staged protests outside the offices of AFP. Unions representing staff at AFP’s headquarters and other offices around the world have pledged their support.

The IFJ has already been in contact with AFP management in Paris.

IFJ general secretary Anthony Bellanger said: “The dismissal of Nasser, an elected trade union leader, for nothing more than giving a voice to Palestinian journalists under threat and facing daily attacks is totally unacceptable.

“He must be reinstated.”

12 plus Palestinian journalists arrested
Al Jazeera reports that more than a dozen Palestinian journalists were recently arrested by Israeli authorities after attempting to report the news under often “extremely stressful and dangerous” conditions.

Wahbe Mikkieh, one of the journalists detained and later released, told Al Jazeera the message the Israeli police was trying to send was meant to frighten journalists.

“The occupation forces claimed that I tried to obstruct the arrest of my colleague Zeina [Halawani] and that I assaulted the occupation army. That did not happen,” said Mikkieh, who was hit on the head with the butt of a gun causing him to bleed, describing the five days in prison as the hardest in his life.

Republished from the International Federation of Journalists.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz