Fighting Monsters.

A Friend In Deed: Surrounded by allies and friends on the UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, not only felt free to accuse Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, but also to claim that they were profiting hugely from their victims’ destruction. She did not, however, feel under any obligation to respond to the angry challenges of Israel’s defenders. 

IT WAS HER LITTLE SMILE that said it all. UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, appearing before the UN Human Rights Council on 3 July 2025, had not only accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, but also of profiting hugely from their destruction.

Her report to the Council was warmly welcomed by the League of Arab States, Venezuela, Palestine, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Qatar. But, when Hillel Neuer from the United Nations Watch organisation demanded to know why, in her entire report, there wasn’t a single mention of the October 7 massacre, Hamas, Hezbollah, or that leading sponsor of terrorism across the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ms Albanese had nothing to say.

Surrounded by allies and friends, the UN Special Rapporteur was under no compulsion to answer Neuer’s questions. Hence her brief, but highly communicative, little smile.

Israel’s fury at the rest of the world’s failure to call its enemies to account is easily understood. Less easily forgiven is the Israeli state’s apparent loss of interest in trying to appraise the rest of humanity of its enemies’ ultimate purpose.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies clearly prefer to concentrate all their nation’s resources upon securing the complete destruction of Hamas and its allies. Very early in the Israel-Hamas War a decision was made that civilian casualties would no longer be permitted to impede Israel’s extirpation of Palestinian terrorism.

Previous forays into Gaza had been restrained by Israel’s sensitivity to global opinion. It understood that the civilian population of Gaza had become Hamas’s human ammunition against “The Zionist Enemy”. The more casualties inflicted by the Israeli Defence Force, the less international support there would be for the Israeli state. Hamas knew this. Indeed, Hamas was counting on it. The Israelis might slap its face, but they were not prepared to endure the consequences of cutting off its head.

The horrific atrocities and the unprecedented death toll – 1,200 people – of the October 7 2023 pogrom put an end to Israeli restraint.

On paper, Israel’s winning move was to do nothing. It should have refrained from firing a single bullet into Gaza, and from dropping a single bomb. Borrowing from Hamas’s own strategy, Israel should, instead, have taken on the role of victim, and used the massacre as a grisly illustration of the true nature of Palestinianism.

On paper.

But October 7 2023 did not unfold on paper. Rather than allowing the world to discern the true nature of Hamas, Israel opted, instead, to avenge its dead and abducted citizens by destroying the terrorist organisation completely – regardless of the civilian cost.

The warning of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche: “Have a care when fighting monsters, lest ye become a monster yourself”, went unheeded by Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty Zionist allies. Month by month, the breadth of their vision narrowed, until they could no longer perceive how decisively world opinion was being turned against Israel by a Hamas enemy whose supply of human ammunition – claims of Israeli genocide notwithstanding – showed every sign of being inexhaustible.

As Gaza was steadily transformed into an trackless waste of rubble, and the body-count climbed inexorably towards 60,000, it became increasingly plausible for the likes of Francesca Albanese to prosecute their charges of genocide. Certainly, the Muslim world raised no objections to such claims.

Israel was now in the terrifying predicament of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Seized by that grim realisation, Israel plunged on. Soon its bullets and bombs were pummelling Lebanon – and then Iran.

Darkness now gathers around Israel as, methodically, Gaza is being flattened out. In the desolation that used to be Rafah, the IDF is preparing to build a “Humanitarian City” of tents for 600,000, rising to two million, Palestinians. Around these tents the Israelis propose to string coil-after-coil of razor-wire. Doubtless, there will be searchlights and watchtowers. Certainly, once the Palestinians are driven into this terrible encampment, they will not be suffered to leave.

Imagine the terror of the Gazans, as they shuffle under the tutelage of Israeli firepower towards the gates of this hellish place. We can only pray that, when they lift their eyes, they do not read the words: “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

The Gates of Auschwitz.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 July 2025.

This Land Is Mine - by Nina Paley.

NINA PALEY is a Jewish-American illustrator and animator. The video clip posted here is from her larger work, Seder Masochism, which may be reached here. Paley heightens the power of her clip by having each wave of invaders keep the song going. This land is mine, they insist - until there is no land left to own, except by the Angel of Death. A grim, but very pertinent message.

Video courtesy of YouTube

This post is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Absence Of Consequences.

Excitement And Pride: The reason why normally kind and respectful people are capable of such appalling violence, the single factor that explains every pogrom, every lynching, in history: the absence of consequences. The knowledge that if you do terrible things, then nothing will happen to you. The realisation that those in authority do not care if you do them. Hell, they want you to do them!

WHEN THE SETTLERS from Har-Bracha approached the security checkpoint the Israeli Defence Force soldiers waved them through. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Not when the West Bank of the Jordan was a bubbling cauldron of hate and violence. The idea of allowing Israelis from the Jewish settlements to enter Palestinian territory should have been as unthinkable as allowing Palestinians to pass in the opposite direction. But, the soldiers – like everybody else in Israel – knew that, only the day before, two brothers from Har-Bracha had been killed by a Palestinian gunman. It was payback time. Ignoring their orders, knowing full well what was likely to happen, the soldiers opened the gates and let the settlers pass. Within the hour, the nearby Palestinian village of Zaatara was ablaze.

The forces of law and order do not exist in a social vacuum. They are members of their communities, citizens of their nation, and just as likely to get caught up in the ebb and flow of public emotion as everybody else. They’re not supposed to. In theory, they are expected to remain aloof from the tidal tug of popular passions: impartial upholders of the law; keepers of the peace.

In theory.

When the white police officers and/or sheriff’s deputies whose presence in the rigorously segregated black communities of the Jim Crow South suddenly disappeared from the streets, everybody knew that trouble was on the way. The unheralded withdrawal of these racially charged armies of occupation could only mean one thing. That, for the next few hours, law and order would take a terrifying leave of absence.

The photographic images that have come down to us from this America of a century ago are hard to look at. Not only on account of the “strange fruit” hanging from the poplar trees on the outskirts of town. More difficult to stomach, or even to comprehend, than the charred bodies are the lynch-mobs that gathered to witness and celebrate the victims’ agonising demise.

Men and women, resplendent in their boater hats and summer frocks, look directly at the camera, their faces alive with a chilling mixture of excitement and pride. There is no shame here, no guilt. Would they have brought their children with them to observe the spectacle if they believed they were doing wrong? They wanted their kids to understand that this was something that simply had to be done every once and a while – to keep the community safe.

The local newspapers would recount these lynchings in enthusiastic prose. The dastardly deeds that sparked the community’s righteous anger. The apprehension of the perpetrator by the aroused populace, and his inevitable demise. The grim warning left hanging where those most in need of its terrifying message could not fail to receive it.

Such blatant abrogations of the rule of law – be they in the Deep South of a century ago, last month on the West Bank of the River Jordan, or last weekend in Auckland’s Albert Park – are able to occur for one reason, and one reason only, because those participating in them do so in the confident belief that they are doing “the right thing”. Because the government, the news media, and even the forces of law and order have all conspired – wittingly or unwittingly – to convey the impression that the extra-legal enforcement of “the right thing” will incur no penalty.

Eye witness accounts of the attack upon Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull in Albert Park describe how the frenzy of the protesters suddenly increased when they realised that the Police were not going to interfere in their righteous punishment of the “Nazi-adjacent”, “anti-trans activist”.

And that’s the reason why normally kind and respectful people are capable of such appalling violence, the single factor that explains every pogrom, every lynching, in history: the absence of consequences. The knowledge that if you do these terrible things, then nothing will happen to you. The realisation that those in authority do not care if you do them. Hell, they want you to do them!

Considering that when the mob came, proudly bearing their threatening banners and placards, and the Police stood by and did nothing – not even when elderly people were being punched, kicked, thrown to the ground and begging the Police to assist them – it is a small miracle that “Posie Parker” escaped with her life.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 March 2023.

The Revolution All Around Us.

Revolutionary Formula: "A new Aotearoa is on the rise. Tangata Whenua (Māori) + Tangata Tiriti (all other ethnicities who are committed to a tiriti centric Aotearoa) = the Aotearoa I believe in fighting for." - Rawiri Waititi, Co-Leader of the Maori Party.

NEW ZEALAND is in the early stages of a revolution. No, not one of those revolutions. The streets are not overflowing with revolutionary crowds. The factories have not been taken over by the workers. The old constitutional order has not been cast aside. The nation’s historical time-line has not been reset to Year Zero. But, make no mistake, a revolution is underway.

At the heart of this revolution is an evolving understanding of what sort of country we live in – and would like to live in. The clearest description of this revolution and its ultimate objectives that I have read so far is contained in a tweet posted in the name of Maori Party co-leader, Rawiri Waititi. To describe the tweet as jarring would be something of an understatement:

The cau casity of Caucasian’s and their ‘active assimilation agenda’. Pay them no attention, their archaic species is becoming more extinct as new Aotearoa is on the rise. Tangata Whenua + Tangata Tiriti = Aotearoa > Tangata Whenua + Pakeha = Old Zealand.

Waititi was quick to distance himself from this message, describing it as the work of someone in his office who acted without his authority. Setting to one side the obvious question: “What kind of office is Waititi running?”, the tweet’s content offers New Zealanders a raw and unmediated synopsis of the Maori Party’s revolutionary agenda. “Transformative” barely covers it!

The first element to note is the highly charged racial vocabulary. “Caucasian” is being used, rather than Pakeha, in much the same way as the latter once referred to Maori as “Polynesians”, and for the same purpose. To subsume a geographically and culturally specific identity into a much larger and more general racial category.

Very clearly, it is not a nice category. In the exercise of their “caucacity”, Caucasians are accused of pursuing an “active assimilation agenda”.

This is a curious charge. Historically, “assimilation” was very much on the agenda of the New Zealand state. In the years after World War II, as Maori began migrating from the countryside to the big cities in large numbers, doing everything possible to turn them into “ordinary” New Zealanders was generally regarded as the most “progressive” policy response available to the authorities. Think of it as an early iteration of the “They are Us” formulation.

The intention was to create a “colour-blind” society. The key category was “citizen” – with all that implied about equality of access to gainful employment, housing, health and education. An excessive focus on racial identity was seen as unhelpful in this regard. The objective was a nation in which the terms “Maori” and “Pakeha” counted for much less than “New Zealander”. It is to the policy of assimilation that the members of “Hobson’s Pledge” pay homage with their insistence that we must all become “one people”.

What makes the tweet’s claim that an “active assimilation policy” is still part of the New Zealand state’s agenda so odd, is that the term “assimilation” long ago became a very dirty word in the corridors of power. From the 1980s onwards the clear policy of successive governments has been to support and strengthen the unique features of te ao Maori. From the Treaty of Waitangi Act of 1975 to the establishment of Kohanga Reo and the recognition of Maori as an official language, the direction of travel has been all one way: from mono-culturalism to bi-culturalism.

It was Donna Awatere, author of the seminal series of Broadsheet articles entitled “Maori Sovereignty”, who rejected this new goal of a bi-cultural New Zealand as insufficiently ambitious. Inspired by the irredentist national strategy of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, she argued for a sovereign Maori nation, freed from the constitutional, economic, political and cultural hegemony of the colonial culture which had, through the judicious application of force and guile, supplanted her own.

Following the Palestinians, Awatere argued for a strategy which is best described as “reverse colonisation”. On the one hand, delegitimise the colonisers’ occupation of lands that were never theirs; on the other, offer them the opportunity of assimilating themselves into Aotearoa, the sovereign Maori state that would slowly, surely, and non-violently, replace the colonial relic known as New Zealand. (Those with long memories will recall that for as long as it remained a revolutionary socialist organisation, the creation of a unitary, secular, Palestinian state, continued to be the PLO’s ultimate goal.)

Although Awatere’s personal evolution took her further and further away from the revolutionary vision that inspired “Maori Sovereignty”, her ideas and perspectives were taken up and developed by Maori nationalists across the country.

Perhaps the best way to get an idea of the revolutionary processes at work in this country, is to conduct a thought experiment involving another one.

Imagine that the Palestinians living in the occupied territories, rather than descending ever deeper into terrorism and religious zealotry, had adopted the non-violent civil-disobedience tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Further imagine that the progressive Israeli political parties, urged on by the Americans, had responded by negotiating seriously with the PLO.

Consider the speed with which the whole situation in Israel/Palestine might have been transformed; the exciting possibility that young Jews and Arabs, together, might have mapped out a future in which the land of Israel/Palestine was deemed to have physical and cultural space enough for both peoples. Who knows, they may even have persuaded their political leaders to set up a permanent tribunal to hear and settle the many grievances arising out of the excesses of Zionist colonisation.

Gradually, thanks in no small part to the state education system and state media, the fearless elucidation of Zionism’s manifest injustices might have persuaded a critical mass of young Israelis to abandon their country’s name altogether. Slowly, surely, non-violently, “Israel” might have come to be known, once again, as “Palestine”.

Impossible? Certainly, Israel/Palestine has a great many more obstacles to overcome than New Zealand/Aotearoa. Still, if Jew and Arab had stopped firing bullets at each other way back in the 1870s and started marrying each other in great numbers – who knows where that unfortunate land might be today?

Which brings us back to that interesting tweet: and to what is undoubtedly its most objectionable sentence: “Pay them no attention, their archaic species is becoming more extinct as new Aotearoa is on the rise.”

Now, viewed from the perspective of those whose ancestors were, at the turn of the 19th Century, confidently expected to become “die out”, this sort of gloating racism is, perhaps, forgivable. From the perspective of the descendants of the colonisers, however, it sounds unnervingly like a direct challenge – an existential threat.

That sentiments like these could so easily put the chant of the White Supremacists at Charlottesville: “You will not replace us!”; into the mouths of angry Pakeha, clearly never occurred to whoever sent out the tweet in Rawiri Waititi’s name. Or (and this is a much more distressing thought) maybe it did?

Waititi is, therefore, to be commended for the speed with which he moved to defuse this political IED. Within a few hours, he had re-written the tweet, and clarified his own position on the slow revolution unfolding all around us:

A new Aotearoa is on the rise. Tangata Whenua (Māori) + Tangata Tiriti (all other ethnicities who are committed to a tiriti centric Aotearoa) = the Aotearoa I believe in fighting for.

Strewth! When you put it like that, Rawiri, so do I.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 5 March 2021