Recognising Palestine.

The Road Not Taken: Palestine’s half-completed parliament is still there, a dark and cavernous testimonial to diplomatic and moral failure. The building’s grey concrete walls are stained, as if by the tears of all those on both sides of the conflict who were forced to abandon their dream of a peaceful two-state future.

CHRISTOPHER LUXON has announced that by late-September 2025 New Zealand might be ready to recognise Palestinian statehood. This curiously equivocal statement contrasts sharply with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s firm commitment to recognise that unfortunate entity. Australia’s pledge matches those already given by France, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Of New Zealand’s ‘Five Eyes” partners, only the United States stands unequivocally behind Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s list of reliable allies grows thin.

But, does New Zealand’s reticence merit the criticisms levelled at it by supporters of the Palestinian cause? When the Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, can tell journalists that Australia is moving to recognise Palestine “while there is still a Palestine to recognise”, then, surely, New Zealand awaiting the outcome of the monstrous events currently convulsing Gaza and the West Bank bears all the hallmarks of wisdom?

It might also be prudent to ascertain exactly what sort of “state” New Zealand is being called upon to recognise. If we are talking about the partitioned territory offered to the Palestinians in 1947, the boundaries of which the Palestinian authorities, such as they were at the time, emphatically rejected, then the harsh truth of the matter is that, within those boundaries, there is precious little left out of which a recognisable state of any kind could be fashioned.

As anyone who watches the news networks is only too aware, the Gaza Strip (as it was known in 1947) has been turned into a grey waste of dust and rubble. In their biblically ferocious quest for vengeance, the Israeli Defence Force has done its best (and its best is terrifying) to leave not one stone standing upon another. Indeed, not since Rome conquered Carthage has the victors’ determination to utterly destroy their enemy been so openly displayed.

The Roman historian Tacitus famously observed that “Rome makes a desert and calls it peace.” Benjamin Netanyahu goes one better. He will not even talk of peace until he has made a desert out of Gaza – and strewn it with the bones of Hamas’s fighters.

The West Bank is larger than Gaza, but only marginally more favoured. Bisected by walls, bedevilled by endless checkpoints, its people are hemmed in on every side. Israeli soldiers and their bulldozers flatten whole blocks of the West Bank’s beleaguered towns – pour encourager les autres. The flower of Palestinian youth: those whose slingshot stones have not been repaid with the explosive bullets of Israeli snipers; rot in Israeli jails. Their grandparents’ olive groves burn in the night, their livestock are driven off. Those who venture out bravely in search of their stolen goats are beaten, stabbed, shot.

Because not all the hills of the West Bank have been disfigured by the Israeli occupation. Cascading down some hillsides are the gleaming homes and lush gardens of the settler communities. As beautiful as they are illegal these settlements are peopled by fanatics every bit as bright-eyed and implacable as Hamas. When it comes to their Palestinian “neighbours”, there is only one state these settlers are looking forward to recognising – their absence.

There was a time when the “two-state solution” promoted by the United Nations seemed a viable prospect. So much so that, with generous donations from the backers of a free, democratic, and independent Palestine, its presumptive rulers commenced constructing an impressive parliamentary complex for its legislators to sit in.

Elegant of line, impressive in its austere functionality, the structure took shape in Abu Dis a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem – the designated capital of the Palestinian state. In 2003, however, construction ceased. The Second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) was in the process of suffocating the Oslo Peace Accords in tear-gas, shrapnel and blood. The Israelis responded by building their infamous “Separation Wall”.

From the river to the sea there would be only one state.

Palestine’s half-completed parliament is still there, a dark and cavernous testimonial to diplomatic and moral failure. The building’s grey concrete walls are stained, as if by the tears of all those on both sides of the conflict who were forced to abandon their dream of a peaceful two-state future.

Nations that present the recognition of Palestine as some sort of panacea, should be made to argue their case from the cold concrete platforms of that doomed and gloomy monument. Hopefully, Christopher Luxon knows better than to sit there with them.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 August 2025.

Two States - But No Solutions.

My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend: Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, at the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, December 19, 1942. The elimination of the Jewish state has been the unwavering ambition of successive generations of Palestinian leaders.

AMIDST ALL THE HORROR of the Israel-Hamas War, the world’s hopes for peace remain pinned on the so-called “Two-State Solution”. Born of the 1993 Oslo Accords, where Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) jointly agreed to establish the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) the Two State Solution looked forward to the creation of an independent Palestinian state adjoining the State of Israel.

Naturally, there were sceptics.

Historians quite rightly pointed out that the option of two states, Israel and Palestine, both of them carved out of the League of Nation’s “Mandate” which the British had just relinquished, had been on the table as long ago as 1947.

It had been laid there by the newly-created United Nations, whose commissioners had drawn the borders of the proposed states as closely as possible around majority Arab and Jewish communities. The result, as with similar exercises undertaken in Ireland and India, left both sides angry and frustrated. After much soul-searching, however, the Jews of Palestine accepted the proposed partition. The Palestinian Arabs, determined to inherit an undivided Palestinian state, refused.

How different the world might have been had the Palestinian leaders followed the example of their Jewish counterparts. Gaza, today, might have been a sparkling Mediterranean city, as buzzing with entrepreneurship and innovation as Tel Aviv, just a few miles up the coast. In a single generation, the West Bank of the Jordan, bankrolled by the Arab oil states, would surely have been replicating Israel’s own economic miracle.

Palestine’s leaders, however, have always presented a problem.

In 1947, the most prominent Palestinian statesman was Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Scion of an aristocratic Arab family which traced its lineage all the way back to the Prophet, al-Husseini was implacably opposed to the Zionist project of recreating a Jewish homeland in what had been the Ottoman province of Palestine. So adamant was he in his opposition that, when the Second World War broke out, he’d allied himself with Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.

Al-Husseini presided over the Egyptian protectorate called the All Palestine Government, based in Gaza, from 1948 until 1953. While he and all those who shared his hatred of the Israeli state (recognised by the UN in 1948) remained in charge, there was no possibility of the original Two State Solution being revived.

It was only the extraordinary efforts of Norway’s peace negotiators outside Oslo that put the Two State Solution back on the table, and President Bill Clinton who “persuaded” al-Husseini’s distant cousin, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the PLO, to sign the accords. But, not even that silver-tongued son of Hope, Arkansas, could seduce Arafat into making the Two State Solution a reality.

It has come no nearer under Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor at the PNA. Even if he were willing, however, it is doubtful whether the Israelis would be all that keen on placing their nation’s hopes for peace in the hands of a man who, in 1984, published a book entitled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, in which Abbas accuses the Zionist movement and its leaders of being “fundamental partners” in the genocide of European Jewry alongside, and sharing equal responsibility with, the Nazis.

They came close, though. With the establishment of the PNA, the Israeli Government quietly removed its public objections to Abbas’s utterly false and outrageous lies. In pursuit of a Two State Solution, Abbas’s accusation that “every racist in the world was given the green light, and first and foremost Hitler and the Nazis, to do with the Jews as they wish, as long as it ensures Jewish immigration to Palestine”, along with many others, were quietly retired.

Which is more than can be said for Abbas. Eighty-eight years old and infamously corrupt, Abbas refuses to retire. Now President of the “State of Palestine”, he continues to survey the pitiful wreckage of his people’s homes and hopes.

While the Americans persist in claiming that two states are the only solution to the bitter and intractable problems that have plagued the region since 1948, at least some of Israel’s diplomats must smile encouragingly whenever the idea is mentioned. That said, very few ordinary Israelis still believe in it.

Entirely understandable, because, honestly, after the horror of 7 October 2023, what sane Israeli would risk one state for two?


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 October 2024.

An Unending Nightmare.

Hate Will Find A Way: Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

ACROSS THE WORLD, Jews and Palestinians have been remembering the events of 7 October 2023 in very different ways. Israelis, still traumatised by the savagery of Hamas’s pogrom, struggle to visualise a purposeful future unmediated by the contradictory impulses of vengeance and security. The Palestinians of Gaza, shattered and broken by Israel’s relentless bombardment, sustain themselves with a potent mixture of indignation and hate – brewed in the caldron of their unending national nightmare.

The rest of the world has fallen in behind the flags of these bitter antagonists, each side decrying the dangerous “disinformation” of the other. Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

Perhaps the smallest group, after twelve months of blood, fire, and torment, are the optimists. These brave (or idiotic) souls still insist that a “two-state solution” is the only viable way out of the unceasing tragedy that is Israel/Palestine. As if 7 October 2023, and its aftermath, can somehow be set aside. As if the trauma-stricken judgement of Israelis and Palestinians can somehow be rendered sufficiently calm and dispassionate to envisage something other than the utter annihilation of the national enemy.

What, then, is the solution to this, the Devil’s own most treasured problem? Given its constitutive role in the Israel/Palestine impasse, history may not be the most obvious of guides. But, where else can we turn? There is no war in the present that was not conceived, and brought to term, in the past. What the world has been watching these past twelve months is nothing that the world hasn’t witnessed many, many times before.

In spite of appearances, no conflict is endless. Wars end. Peace is restored. How?

Let’s begin in the aftermath of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire lies in ruins. Far away, in the commune of Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, the victors have drawn up a treaty which shares what’s left of the Ottoman possessions (after the territories agreed upon by Monsieur Picot and Mr Sykes have been deducted) between France, Britain, Italy and Greece.

Encouraged by the British prime minister, David Lloyd-George, who dreamed, madly, of resurrecting Byzantium, the Greeks did their best to oblige him.

Mustapha Kemal, whom New Zealanders had learned to fear at Gallipoli, was having none of it. His Turkish troops drove the Greek invaders, quite literally, into the sea. But, not before the contending armies’ Muslim and Christian commanders had distinguished themselves by permitting/encouraging multiple atrocities against the inhabitants of the helpless faith communities their forces over-ran.

A new, and much revised, treaty having been signed and sealed, this time in the Swiss city of Lausanne, Kemal turned to the problem of what to do with all the Greeks who continued to live in his new Republic of Turkey (now Türkiye).

Too much blood had flowed under too many bridges for Turks and Greeks to co-exist peacefully, as they had done for centuries under the Ottomans.

Ever the ruthless problem-solver, Kemal determined to rid his new republic of Greeks – quietly encouraging the defeated Greeks to rid their own kingdom of Turks at the same time. The human-beings caught up in this first example of “ethnic cleansing” got no say in the matter. They were simply ordered to leave. Enterprising tourists can still visit the decaying ruins of settlements from which Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks were summarily uprooted and deported in the 1920s.

So successful was Kemal’s “solution”, that the victorious allies of World War II adopted it as the most efficient means of emptying the states of Eastern Europe of their numerous German-speaking communities. With the example of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland before them, the Allies were in no mood to burden the region’s future with the witches’ brew of ethno-nationalism. The victims of Nazi oppression watched with cold eyes as millions of “displaced” Germans trudged westward. Few tears were shed.

The Palestinians insist that, in 1948, they, too, became the victims of ethnic cleansing. If true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Israelis made an uncharacteristically poor job of it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 October 2024.

Failing The “Leftist” Litmus Test.

Palestinian Lives Matter: What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

LIKE THE WAR in Ukraine, the war in Gaza is serving as a remarkable litmus test for the Left. It is testing its moral compass, its understanding of international law, its grasp of geopolitical realities and, not least, its awareness of what the PR mavens call “the optics”. A substantial portion, even, perhaps, a majority, of the Left is failing all of these tests – badly. That this should be the case points to what would appear to be a dangerous cognitive weakness in contemporary progressivism – and to a West under siege.

The moral and geopolitical confusion over the Russo-Ukrainian War is more readily understood than Israel’s war against Hamas. For the so-called “Tankies”, abandoning the cherished image of the Russian people, Nazism’s destroyers, as the world’s saviours, was an emotional wrench. Rejecting the argument that the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was a justifiable response to US and Nato provocation proved equally difficult. None of these considerations excused the Tankies’ defence of Russian aggression, but one could at least see where it was coming from.

That is certainly not the case with respect to the devastating pogrom unleashed upon the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel by the Jihadist terrorist organisation, Hamas. To encounter its historical equal, it is necessary to travel back in time to the genocidal pogroms set in motion by the antisemitic citizens of the Baltic states in anticipation of the Nazi einsatzgruppen’s arrival in 1941. Here, too, one encounters the same indiscriminate and unsparing cruelty, the same savage delight in rape, torture and murder, that characterised the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023.

As was the case in 1941, it is quite impossible to look upon the atrocities of 7/10/23 as anything other than a deliberate turning away from all civilised conduct. Unless, that is, one has already been convinced that against the Jews/Israelis any and all crimes are permitted – and justified.

That this was the belief of the Nazis is well-documented. That a burning desire to rid the world of the “Zionist Entity” is equally evident in every act of Arab aggression towards the State of Israel since 1948. The important distinction being that, while Egypt, Syria and Jordan only wanted to drive the Jews into the sea, the Jihadists of Hamas are religiously committed to making sure that every last one of them drowns.

What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

One possible answer is that they have seen the images of Palestinians shot and killed for daring to oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They have watched, aghast, as Israeli aircraft, Israeli artillery, have pounded the houses and apartment buildings of Gaza to rubble. Seen, also, the tiny victims of such bombardment, and heard the anguished cries of their mothers. “Lex Talionis!”, they cry. “An eye for an eye!”

But the moral vacuity of this position was as obvious to a Galilean rabbi back in 30AD, as it was to the Gujarat lawyer who declared in 1920AD that “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind”. A leftist who turns her face in fury and disgust from the IDF’s brutality on the West Bank, cannot, either logically or ethically, refrain from doing the same in the face of Hamas’ murderous fanaticism.

That Pro-Palestinian leftists cannot see the deeply cynical purpose behind Hamas’ attack is similarly baffling. Notwithstanding the facts of international law concerning the responsibility of all those exercising state (or state-like) authority to protect their citizens from harm, Hamas committed its atrocities in the certain knowledge that Israel – fulfilling its own legal duty to protect its citizens – would feel compelled to destroy those responsible for organising and committing them. That this would entail air and artillery strikes on Gaza was obvious to the whole world. But, Hamas did not shrink from Israeli retaliation, it welcomed it.

Why? Because it knew that if the IDF was coming after them, then it would also be coming after the apartment buildings, the office blocks, the schools and the hospitals from which it launches its rockets, and under which it locates its storehouses, fuel dumps, arsenals, factories and command centres. Does Hamas know that this is a blatant breach of the Geneva Conventions – a war crime? Of course it does. Doesn’t it care that its own people will be “collateral damage” when the Israeli missiles strike their targets? Not at all. A steadily rising civilian death-toll isn’t a bug in Hamas’ strategy, it’s a feature.

There was a time when, to be regarded as a serious leftist, one was obligated to inform oneself as well as possible about world affairs – especially the geopolitics of great power rivalry and its consequences. No longer. One can be a fervent supporter of the Palestinian cause without ever pausing to wonder from whom groups like Hamas and Hezbollah get their military supplies, their military training.

Today’s leftists do not know, or do not care, that it is the hand of the Islamic Republic of Iran that is moving these terrorist pieces on the Middle-East chessboard. The same Islamic Republic that murders women and girls for refusing to wear the hijab. The same Islamic Republic that is committed to the utter destruction of Israel – and is rapidly acquiring the nuclear capacity to do exactly that. Today’s leftists simply do not realise that, if this was the Lord of the Rings, they’d be on the side of Sauron – they’d be cheering on the orcs.

Don’t they care about the optics of all this? When Jewish students in New York have to barricade themselves in their university library, against pro-Palestinian leftists, and all the antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic “allies” standing right there beside them, pounding on the door, trying to get in. Does it not occur to them that people looking at the video clip of that incident posted on X might be reminded of something? When a supposed “leftist” stands up in Auckland’s Aotea Square and urges the multitude waving their Palestinian flags to “Globalise the Intifada!” – i.e. Let’s have pogroms everywhere! – and is cheered to the echo. What does he suppose New Zealand’s Jewish community sees?

Not leftism, but fascism. And so does every other leftist who still understands the meaning of the word.

This essay was originally posted on the Democracy Project website on Tuesday, 31 October 2023.

Three Angels.

“I have been hard at work,” replied the Avenging Angel, “and where I have been there is no shortage of blood. I was there, above the field at Re’im when the fighters of Hamas arrived. All those revellers, so young, so beautiful, they were dancing and singing, oblivious in their joy to the horror that was advancing fast upon them.

“TELL ME WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN”, cried the Angel of Justice. “I have been seated here for hours, watching the ripple of explosions lighting up the length of Gaza, tracing the rockets’ fiery arcs across the skies of Israel, of Palestine. It is my fate to weigh the guilt of men, but in this land that is no easy task. And now you interrupt my thoughts, your raiment torn, your wings all blood be-spattered, a wild light in your eyes.”

“Indeed, I have been hard at work,” replied the Avenging Angel, “and where I have been there is no shortage of blood. I was there, above the field at Re’im when the fighters of Hamas arrived. All those revellers, so young, so beautiful, they were dancing and singing, oblivious in their joy to the horror that was advancing fast upon them.

“Where was the Angel of Pity upon that terrible field?”

“Absent. But the hot rush of my wings was there to fan the flames of retribution in the gunmen’s hearts. To blow the tinnitus of hatred into their ears. It drowned out the pleas for mercy of the young women, overwhelmed the shouts of protest from the young men. Such a ringing there was in their ears as their weapons dealt out death all around.”

“And Pity absent”, whispered the Angel of Justice.

“Oh, yes, there was no trace of Pity as they stripped, and tortured, and raped, and killed. But, I was there. How often had they called upon me, the Angel of Vengeance, to deliver their enemy into their hands? Out of the ruins of their homes, over the bodies of their brothers and sisters, as the limp forms of their infant nieces and nephews were passed down solemnly, hand-to-hand, from the mounds of rubble. Out of all that grief and rage, how could I not hear their prayers, their summons, their calls to me, the Avenging Angel?”

“And you granted them their wish,” said the Angel of Justice, casting a wrathful glance in the direction of his companion.

“I did, my friend, but only because their calls to you, for Justice, had for so long gone unanswered. And where Pity and Justice are absent, or unheeding, what is left but Vengeance?”

“Justice in Palestine? In the land of Israel? And exactly when, my friend, would you have me set that clock ticking? With Vespasian and his legions? With the destruction of the Temple? With a people dispersed to, as it says in the Hatikvah, “the ends of the East”. Shall I start the clock then – in Roman times? Or, perhaps you would have me begin with the first medieval pogrom? Or, with the greatest? With the Shoah, the Holocaust, and all that mechanised Nazi terror? If I remember rightly, Pity was also absent at Auschwitz. The Jews have reclaimed their ancient homeland because they have learned, from the bitterest experience, that they are never truly safe in anybody else’s.”

“But Palestine is somebody else’s homeland, also, my friend. The memory of the Arab is no less poignant than the memory of the Jew.”

“True enough, but when that same Arab has tried, on three occasions, to drive the Jew into the sea, it is difficult for the Jew to resist the temptation to call upon you, the Avenging Angel, to even the score. Because, as I recall, it was your swift sword that avenged the slaying of Israel’s Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. Your wings that blew sand in the faces of the Egyptians and Syrians just one year later in the war that began on Yom Kippur.

“It is difficult, is it not, my friend, to rightly distinguish Vengeance from Justice? But – hush! What is that sound!”

The two angels’ wings lifted them high above the mountaintop, their eyes searching the cracked rocks and bare sands below for the sound’s source. While they looked, the heart-rending wailing, born of that worst of mixtures – grief and rage – throbbed louder and louder, as if to set the whole of Israel, the whole of Palestine, vibrating with its inconsolable misery.

At length, the Angels’ gaze fell upon the source of the sound. Sobbing, beneath a bare and bitter thorn tree, sat the one so many in Israel/Palestine speak of, but so very few speak to: the Angel of Peace.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 October 2023.

A Grim Template.

Witnesses To A Massacre? The New Zealand Mounted Field Ambulance served in Sinai and Palestine in the latter years of the First World War. What connection, if any, did it have to the bloody events at Surafend? Major Alexander M. Trotter (the author’s grandfather) is seated on the right in the second row.

I DON’T BELIEVE my grandfather participated in the Surafend Massacre, but it’s possible he treated some of the wounded. He was definitely “in theatre” at the time. That is to say he was in Palestine. Riding with the New Zealand Mounted Field Ambulance and the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade alongside the Australian Light Horse. The latter two entities were up to their bloody armpits in the Surafend Massacre, but for the most part the attack was led by ordinary rank-and-file troopers – not their officers. Which is not to say that their officers didn’t look the other way when their men descended upon the little Palestinian village to avenge their mate, Trooper Lesley Lowry, tragically murdered by a Palestinian thief on 9 December 1918 – just 28 days after the war officially came to an end.

Certainly New Zealand and Australian officers remained steadfastly tight-lipped in the faces of the investigation team sent by a furious General Edmund Allenby. The British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force demanded the identities of the troopers involved in the killing of 30 Palestinian civilians. Denied even a single name, Allenby vented his spleen on the New Zealand and Australian perpetrators. He did not mince his words:

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

Allenby’s words came close to provoking a mutiny among the Australian and New Zealand troops, and he was soon forced to retract them.

The Jewish settlers of Rishon LeZion, a Zionist settlement not far from Surafend could not understand what all the fuss was about. Even in 1918 (some might say especially in 1918, barely a year since the Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a homeland in Palestine) there was no love lost between Jew and Arab.

The inhabitants of Rishon LeZion had, however, erected a memorial to the New Zealanders who had fallen twelve months earlier in the Battle of Ayun Kara. The shrewd Zionists of Rishon LeZion understood both the vital importance of freeing Palestine from Ottoman Control and how critical it was that the British Empire become the Holy Land’s new overlord. And they never forgot the New Zealanders. For many years after the First World War, the leaders of Rishon LeZion would send a Christmas message to New Zealand newspapers:

[T]he memory of the New Zealand and Australian troops, Anzac, remains carved in our hearts. You won the highest praise for your splendid valour right throughout the campaign and no less than your valour in battle was your chivalry to the people of the country.

Not a sentiment the villagers of Surafend were likely to endorse, but the Zionists of Rishon LeZion understood that the State of Israel they were so determined to build would always be in need of friends.

How disturbing it would be to discover that the destruction of Surafend by the New Zealanders and Australians in 1918 served as a grim template for what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” – those terrible days in 1948 and 1949 when Jewish militias fell upon the towns and villages of Palestinian Arabs and drove more than half-a-million of their inhabitants into exile. Without these mass expulsions – this ethnic cleansing – the State of Israel could not have been securely established.

Terror has its uses. In spite of his fury at the Surafend Massacre, General Allenby soon found it expedient to employ the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse in quelling the anti-imperialist uprisings that erupted across British-occupied Egypt in March-April of 1919. The mere prospect of receiving a visit from the General’s Surafend “murderers” was usually sufficient to quieten-down any ungrateful and unruly wards of the King-Emperor.

Did my grandfather, a country doctor for 40 years in Herbert, North Otago, listening to news bulletins on the radio receiver he’d built himself, ever recall those long ago events? He must have known about Surafend – especially after Allenby’s outburst. His copy of Lieutenant-Colonel C. Guy Powles The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine is sitting on my desk as I write these words. The “disturbance” at Surafend is described. When he heard about the bitter events of May 1948, did he recall their deadly precursor of December 1918?

What were his feelings when he read those Christmas messages from Rishon LeZion in the Otago Daily Times?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 12 May 2023.

F***ing Things Up.

Primal Fears: The relentless process of extremist escalation is given added impetus by individuals, organisations, nation states, and even international bodies, expressing their support for aggrieved minorities. Such moral approbation produces two, often deadly, effects. First, it contributes to the minorities’ conviction that their cause is just, rendering their actions – no matter how heinous – morally unassailable. Second, it enrages the “oppressive” majority and inspires them to embark on their own grim journey of escalation.

TWO DAYS AGO*, two brothers, Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank of the River Jordan were murdered by a Palestinian gunman. Hardly news, one might say. Over the past months upwards of 60 Palestinians and more than a dozen Israelis have died in a series of brutal confrontations in the occupied territories.

What elevated this latest incident above the commonplace, however, was the response of the Jewish inhabitants of the settlement from which the murdered brothers came. In the most shocking instance of communal violence since 2000, scores of enraged and armed settlers descended upon the Palestinian village of Zaatara and set it ablaze. Thirty houses and dozens of cars were torched, and at least one Palestinian villager was murdered.

Naturally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly deplored the violence and urged both sides to refrain from taking the law into their own hands. Within his coalition government (the most right-wing in Israeli history) however, other voices were raised which were very far from being conciliatory. One far-right MP declared that if Palestinians come to murder Israelis, then their homes should burn – “metaphorically-speaking”. No one on either side believed she was speaking metaphorically.

This latest example of political stimulus and response from the troubled land of Israel/Palestine is merely the most shocking demonstration of the process of extremist escalation that is gathering strength all over the planet. Aggrieved minorities, many of them justifiably angry about their treatment at the hands of hostile majorities, move from remonstrance to protest, protest to overt threats and, ultimately, from overt threats to actual violence.

Often, this process of escalation is given added impetus by individuals, organisations, nation states, and even international bodies, expressing their support for these aggrieved minorities. Such moral approbation produces two, often deadly, effects. First, it contributes to the minority’s conviction that their cause is just, rendering their actions – no matter how heinous – morally unassailable. Second, it enrages the “oppressive” majority and inspires them to embark on their own grim journey of escalation.

One aspect, in particular, of this alleged “encouragement” of minority extremism infuriates the majority: the extraordinary double-standard which excuses or (much worse) celebrates the violence of “freedom-fighters”. The majority’s sense of grievance is only intensified when their administrative and/or military responses to extremism are not only condemned, but also presented as the reason for the minority’s “understandable” resort to extreme tactics. Rightly or wrongly, the impression is conveyed to the majority that their values, their institutions, even their lives, are worth less than those of the minority.

The anger generated by this misrepresentation of the majority’s position is often overlooked by those standing in solidarity with the “oppressed” minority. Being in “the wrong”, the majority’s feelings are dismissed as irrelevant by the minority’s defenders. This is a particularly short-sighted response on the part of those who believe themselves to be engaged in bending the arc of history towards justice. It encourages those dismissed as “deplorables” to discount altogether the moral arguments of their detractors as “fake news”.

A particularly moving analysis of this phenomenon was penned by the Chilean socialist and author Ariel Dorfman. Looking back at the conduct of himself and his comrades in the heady days of Salvador Allende’s radically left-wing Popular Unity Coalition Government (1970-73) this is what he wrote:

It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who … were on our side, who should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future.

Those are sentiments which the Pasifika poet, Tusiata Avia, might want to take to heart. Her poetry collection, The Savage Coloniser features a poem entitled “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”. Having celebrated Cook’s murder and cannibalisation, Avia fantasises about doing something similar to those who came after him:

These days
we’re driving round
in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants
or any of your incarnations
cos, you know
ay, bitch?
We’re gonna F… YOU UP.

Poetic hyperbole? An entirely justifiable symbolic rendering of the colonial experience from the point of view of the colonised? Maybe. It is equally arguable, however, that sentiments such as these, were they to become widely repeated, could very easily cause millions of New Zealanders to “fear for their safety and their future.”

It is worth remembering that it was the momios, those millions of Chileans who lived in “primal fear” of the Left’s programme, who gave General Pinochet the social licence he needed to overthrow Allende and his Popular Unity Coalition. Momios, too, this time wearing military uniforms, who shot him down in Chile’s Presidential Palace.

It is easy to believe that you are on the side of the angels when everybody who matters to you is cheering you on. No doubt the Palestinian gunman who opened-up on those two Israeli settlers as they attempted to get out of their car, which he had just rammed, believed himself to be fighting for his people’s freedom against Zionist colonisation.

But, that is not how the two brothers’ family, friends and neighbours saw it. That’s why they headed for Zaatara with their guns and their cans of petrol. That’s why the Israeli soldiers stood aside and let them pass.

So they could really F… THEM UP.

* Monday, 27 February 2023

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 March 2023.

Between The Motion, And The Act, Falls The Shadow.

The Politics Of Gesture: It must be exhilarating to stand shoulder to shoulder with your Green Party comrades on the streets of a New Zealand city, while all around you angry young men and women chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” So easy to get carried away beneath a forest of red, green, black and white Palestinian flags, your ears ringing with righteous indignation. Why not promise to table a motion seeking Palestinian statehood? What else could you do?

THE GREENS have failed to win parliamentary support for a motion supporting Palestinian statehood. Sponsored by the Greens’ foreign affairs spokesperson, Golriz Ghahraman, the motion reaffirmed “the right of Palestine to self-determination and statehood”, and called upon the government of New Zealand to “recognise the State of Palestine among our community of nations”. Both National and Act were quick to signal their opposition to recognising Palestine as a sovereign state. The right-wing parties’ objections abruptly ended Ghahraman’s initiative. Without securing the unanimous permission of the whole House, her motion could not even be introduced – let alone debated.

The Right’s veto was probably welcomed by the Labour Government. Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta hardly needs to be warned by her diplomatic staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that the merest suggestion of New Zealand recognising Palestinian statehood would immediately pitch this country’s relationship with Israel into crisis.

Nor would such recognition be unanimously received by New Zealanders as either justified or wise. Sympathy for the Palestinian civilians caught up in the military exchanges between Hamas and the Israeli Defence Force may be universal, but it should not be construed as support for this country recognising Palestine as a sovereign state. Too many Kiwis have too many questions about what that would amount to in the only place that matters – on the ground – to simply wave Ghahraman’s proposition through the checkpoint of political scrutiny.

Not when so many people on Twitter have read Green MP Ricardo Menendez March’s tweet declaring “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Not when so many television news viewers have seen Ghahraman, herself, protesting against “Israeli aggression” under placards and banners proclaiming exactly the same sentiments.

Surely, the Greens are aware of how Israelis interpret this Palestinian slogan? That if Palestine occupies all of the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, then the State of Israel must have ceased to exist.

Ghahraman cannot be so naïve as to believe that the so-called “Two State Solution” is about Israel and Palestine occupying the same territory! Not when Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank of the Jordan River lies at the heart of the conflict. No, to assert that the sovereign state of Palestine will extend “from the river to the sea”, is to declare one’s support for driving the Jews into it.

This is not, of course, what Ghahraman is saying. Announcing her intention of tabling her statehood motion on the Greens’ website, she states: “The path forward from the latest bout of violence must be lasting peace, supported by the international community. Statehood as part of a two state solution would uphold and celebrate the inherent rights and dignity of Palestinians.”

Well, it might, but an awful lot of things would have to happen first.

For example, Hamas (still designated as a terrorist organisation by the New Zealand government) would have to recognise the State of Israel’s right to exist. Also, the roughly 600,000 Israeli settlers currently living on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem would have to abandon their illegal settlements and return to Israel. The Palestinian Authority, which, fearful of a Hamas victory, recently cancelled the elections which threatened to deliver just that, would have to re-establish democracy on the West Bank and Gaza. (The people of Gaza have not been permitted to cast a vote since they were incautious enough to elect Hamas in 2006.) Similarly, Israeli voters would have to summon up the courage to elect someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister. (Instead of voting over and over and over and over again to make such a transfer of power impossible.) And, last of all, American politicians would have to collectively decide to tell the all-powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to find someone else to intimidate into backing the State of Israel – no matter what it does.

After making all those things happen, the Two State Solution will be a piece of cake!

Politics, politics, politics: it’s no more avoidable in Israel/Palestine than it is in New Zealand. The tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank is not an accident, it is the culmination of a series of self-interested political moves undertaken by the most ruthless players on both sides of the conflict.

Netanyahu is fighting for his political life – and to stay out of jail. He is willing to do whatever it takes to win the support he needs to stay in office. If that means throwing red meat to the most extreme Zionist parties, then so be it. Raising the tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Holy City makes perfect sense if you’re desperate to prevent your political rivals from enlisting the support of Arab-Israeli parties in a government of national unity.

Likewise, if you are Hamas. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of the rage being stirred up by Netanyahu and his Zionist allies in East Jerusalem and around the Al Aksa Mosque? Why wouldn’t you demonstrate to the Palestinian people who the true defenders of the Motherland are? Especially in the wake of the Palestinian Authority, a body mired in corruption, calling off the scheduled elections. Get those rockets in the air. Bring down the wrath of Israel’s jets. Watch the body-count grow and grow – as it always does.

Suits Netanyahu. Suits Hamas. A government of national unity made up of Jews and Arabs, ready to at least think about peace, serves the interests of neither.

It must be exhilarating to stand shoulder to shoulder with your Green Party comrades on the streets of a New Zealand city, while all around you angry young men and women chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” So easy to get carried away beneath a forest of red, green, black and white Palestinian flags, your ears ringing with righteous indignation. Why not promise to table a motion seeking Palestinian statehood? What else could you do?

Well, you could listen to a couple of anthems. The first is called Palestine’s Freedom Song, written and recorded by a pair of young Palestinian sisters brim-full of courage and determination. This is what they sing:

We own this home
We own this land
From the river to the sea
Our motherland
We’ll set it free
We’ve got our stones
And the olive tree

The second is called Hatikvah (The Hope) and it really is an anthem – the national anthem of the State of Israel. This is what the Israelis sing:

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

If Golriz Ghahraman, or anybody else, can think of a way to reconcile the irreconcilable aspirations expressed in these two anthems, then the world would love to hear it. But people of good will have been searching for a very long time – and nobody has found it yet.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 20 May 2021.

The Birth Of Israel: Wrong At The Right Time.

Before The Birth: Israel’s most fervent supporters set their clocks ticking in Biblical times. They cite the kingdoms of David and Solomon as proof that, in the words of the Exodus movie’s theme-song: “This land is mine.” The majority of Israel’s backers, however, start their clocks in 1933 – the year Adolf Hitler and his Nazis took over Germany – setting in motion the dreadful sequence of events that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

IN ANY DISCUSSION about the morality of Israel’s conduct, the most important question is: “When did you start your clock?” Meaning? In assessing the ethics of the Israeli state, exactly when, historically-speaking, do you begin?

Many critics of Israel start their clocks in 1948, the year of Israel’s birth. Others prefer 1917 – the year in which Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, declared his government in favour of establishing a “national home” for the Jewish people in what was then the Ottoman province of Palestine. A few even start their clocks in 1897, when Theodore Herzl’s international Zionist movement held its first conference in Basle, Switzerland.

Israel’s most fervent supporters, by contrast, generally prefer to start much further back. Setting their clocks ticking in Biblical times, they cite the kingdoms of David and Solomon as proof that, in the words of the Exodus movie’s theme-song: “This land is mine.” The majority of Israel’s backers, however, start their clocks in 1933 – the year Adolf Hitler and his Nazis took over Germany – setting in motion the dreadful sequence of events that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

Setting the clock ticking in 1933 makes perfect sense. What happened in Germany, and then throughout Europe, between 1933 and 1945, provided incontrovertible proof of the Zionists’ contention that Jews could never be safe in other peoples’ countries. Those who had argued that the national laws emancipating and conferring citizenship upon European Jewry offered sufficient protection against the continent’s endemic antisemitism had been proved tragically mistaken. In a world shocked and stunned by the Nazi death-camps, the argument that only under the protection of their own nation-state could the Jews of the world be safe resonated strongly.

For Israel’s critics, however, the year 1948 offers the most telling evidence of the moral deficiency built into the Israeli state. 1948 was a year of Jewish outrages and massacres: of terrible crimes committed against the Arab population of Palestine by armed Jewish terrorists. The purpose of these attacks was to facilitate what would later be called “ethnic cleansing”. A viable “State of Israel” required the expulsion and dispossession of as many Palestinian Arabs as possible. 1948, the year of the Palestinian “Nakba” (Catastrophe), is thus presented as the source from which flows all the other wrongs committed by Israel over the subsequent 70 years.

The Nakba (Catastrophe) - Palestinian Arabs driven from Israel, 1948.

What Israel’s critics fail to acknowledge about the years immediately following the end of World War II, however, is that, throughout Europe, the displacement of millions of human-beings – most of them ethnic Germans – had been sanctioned and facilitated by the victorious allies.

Ethnic cleansing did not begin in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it began in the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe in the 1940s. The victorious powers had witnessed the malign consequences of leaving large ethnic minorities in the midst of other people’s countries. They remembered the trouble caused by the Sudeten Germans. How Hitler’s Germany had exploited their nationalist grievances to break up Czechoslovakia in the late-1930s. Accordingly, it became the official policy of the Allies to eliminate ethnic German enclaves completely from Eastern Europe. Whole communities: families who had lived in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Russia for centuries; were ruthlessly uprooted and “repatriated” to Germany.

Few objected to this brutal exercise. In the minds of most people living in the war’s aftermath, Germany and the Germans had it coming. To secure a peaceful future “inconvenient” communities simply had to be moved on. What strikes us, at the remove of 75 years, as a deeply immoral policy, struck the people of the immediate post-war world as a tough but fair solution. After all, they had just spent 6 years proving the proposition that when reason and persuasion fail, and all-out war becomes the only option, then the over-riding priority is to do whatever is necessary to end it – as quickly as possible.

This was the moral environment in which the State of Israel took shape and was declared. Starting your clock in 1948, as if everything that happened in the preceding 15 years had no bearing on the behaviour of those determined to establish a secure national home for the Jewish people, is not a strategy with high prospects of success. The grim shadow of 1933, and all that followed, will always obscure the foundational sins – if sins they be – of the Israeli state.

For as long as the vast and unprecedented immorality of the Holocaust weighs upon the conscience of the World, the unethical conduct of the Israeli state will continue to be, if not forgiven, then unresisted.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 5 December 2019.

A Fool Rushes In.

Seeking Refuge: Were Jesus, Mary and Joseph fleeing persecution in Palestine or Judea? Were they Palestinians or Jews? Green MP, Golriz Ghahraman, in describing the Holy Family as Palestinian refugees, touched off a firestorm of controversy, demonstrating the sinister ease with which history and propaganda can be confused.

ONLY RARELY has History been press-ganged so brutally into the service of political propaganda. The moment Golriz Ghahraman bestowed the status of Palestinian refugees on Jesus, Mary and Joseph, everybody with an opinion on Israel/Palestine immediately rushed to their respective corners and, following a quick word with their trainers, came out swinging.

What was Ms Ghahraman thinking when she tweeted her opinion on the nationality of the Holy Family? The easiest answer would have to be: she wasn’t. Caught up in the endless cut-and-thrust of the pathologically politicised Twittersphere, the Greens’ foreign affairs spokesperson was simply slashing back wildly with her rhetorical cutless.

If the Christian Right was asserting that members of its faith community were under no moral obligation to assist refugees, then it was only fitting that they should be reminded that Jesus, Mary and Joseph had once been refugees – and Palestinian refugees at that!

It is interesting to speculate how long it took Ms Ghahraman to grasp the full political consequences of her outburst. Given the instantaneity of the Internet, one must assume that the realisation came quickly. Certainly, the speed with which she was prevailed upon to issue a fulsome apology to the Jewish community suggests that her colleagues recognised the magnitude of Ms Ghahraman’s insult more-or-less immediately.

For insult it was. Deliberate or unintentional? It hardly matters. To characterise Jesus, Mary and Joseph as anything other than a Jewish family is to locate oneself in the midst of the very worst kind of antisemitism.

It was, after all, the Nazis who insisted that Jesus was an Aryan.

How could he not be? To claim that Jesus of Nazareth; a Galilean carpenter; and a subject of Herod, King of Judea; was a Jew; is tantamount to suggesting that the fount of all the World’s evil, is also, somehow, the source of its redeemer. No anti-Semite could possibly accept such a slander on the founder of the Christian religion.

That the Christian churches of Germany did not protest loudly against these theological and historical calumnies indicates how deeply the notion of Jesus’s non-Jewishness was imbedded in the popular imagination of Christendom. For centuries, ordinary Christians had been fed the “blood libel” that the Jews killed Christ. It seemed obvious, to Catholic peasant and Protestant townsman alike, that the Jews were hardly likely to murder one of their own.

For citizens and supporters of the State of Israel, the import of Ms Ghahraman’s message was equally alarming.

To claim Jesus, Mary and Joseph for the Palestinian cause is to make of Israel an interloper and a coloniser: the malignant cuckoo in the Arab peoples’ historical nest. Even worse, Ms Ghahraman’s characterisation neatly reverses the foundation myth of the Israeli state. Rather than the Jews returning to their ancient homeland, it is the Palestinians who are seeking to restore the status quo ante.

The name Palestine is recorded in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, chiseled a thousand years before the Roman Empire ever sent its legions a-conquering. By this reckoning, the people between the Jordan River and the sea have always been Palestinians. Therefore, the people calling themselves Jews have no claim. They came a-conquering from somewhere else.

Israel’s answer to such revisionism is an emphatic “No!”

The presence of the Jewish people in the lands between the Jordan River and the sea in the early years of the Christian Era is an indisputable historical fact. When the Roman Empire’s man in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, had a religious rabble-rouser called Jesus crucified, it was for the crime of allowing himself to be called “King of the Jews” – not “King of the Palestinians”!

It would be another 100 years before Rome renamed the territory between the river and the sea “Palestine”. After repeated revolts, culminating in the ruthless expulsion of what remained of territory’s inhabitants, the Emperor Hadrian determined to make it as if the homeland of the Jews had never existed.

And yet, no matter where they landed, the great Jewish diaspora did not forget. Passover after Passover, century after century, they lifted their cups and vowed: L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim – Next year in Jerusalem!

Small wonder that Ms Ghahraman apologised so speedily. Her foolish and inflammatory tweet blundered into a world where, today, angels themselves fear to tread. The riddle of Israel, Palestine, and their holy refugees, renders even Twitter mute.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 July 2019.

How Should One Deal With A Psychopathic State?

A State Attached To An Army: Palestinian leaders must give up the tactic of launching tens-of-thousands of young people against the border-fence separating Gaza from Israel. The deepening psychopathology of the Israeli state makes its response to such tactics as predictable as it has been deadly.

THE TRAGEDY UNFOLDING in Gaza poses the question: How does one deal with a psychopathic state?

Israel was founded in violence and dispossession. Many of its founding fathers were active members of terrorist organisations with blood on their hands. A much larger number came to the British mandated territory of Palestine from Europe in the years immediately following World War II – the deeply traumatised survivors of Nazi Germany’s attempt to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It is difficult to imagine a less auspicious beginning for any nation state. That it would grow into a trusting, generous and peace-loving member of the family of nations was always a very long shot.

The problem confronting Israel’s neighbours has always been one of determining how best to deal with this extraordinarily vicious cuckoo in the Palestinian Arab’s nest. Unsurprisingly, the first response of the nation’s adjoining the State of Israel was to answer its violence and dispossession in kind. Unfortunately for the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians, the Israeli armed forces proved extremely difficult to overcome. Even worse, in repelling the Arab armies, the Israelis came to the unshakeable conclusion that they constituted an unappeasable and existential threat to the survival of their state.

The hatred bubbled away furiously on both sides of Israel’s disputed borders, poisoning the minds of every combatant. Even more tragically, however, it poisoned all hope of peace for the Palestinians who now found themselves cast as the wronged victims of Zionism; the people for whom the rest of the Arab world was pledged to drive the Jews into the sea. Not fighting the Israelis was unthinkable: honour demanded that the struggle for Palestine – by Palestinians – must not cease until, finally, they and their children were free to return to their olive groves and pastures and reoccupy the houses and shops of their stolen inheritance.

For Israel, a nation founded by terrorists, the emergence of armed Palestinian militias and terrorist cells came as absolutely no surprise. They had driven the British out of Palestine by employing all the techniques of terrorism: bombings, assassinations, kidnappings. Not only did they know what to expect, but they also knew how to resist it. Decency, fair-play, the traditional rules of war: these were what the British had at least paid lip-service to in their fight against Irgun and the Stern Gang. The Israelis, however, knew exactly what those who attempted to fight terrorism with a rule book were called – The Losers.

In the aftermath of the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, the Israeli Prime Minister gathered her military and intelligence advisers around her and ordered them to hunt down and kill every member of the Palestinian “Black September” organisation involved in planning the attack. Not one of the planners survived. When a Palestinian fighter was captured by the Israelis, he or she was by no means the only person to be punished. The perpetrator’s family’s house would be bulldozed flat by the Israeli army and their farms and businesses destroyed. The price paid by the Palestinian people for their unceasing war against the State of Israel climbed higher and higher. With deadly symmetry, the terrorist responses of the Palestinians became commensurately lethal and indiscriminate.

After 70 years, the question must surely be asked: can Israel be defeated by force? Protected as it is by the most powerful nation on earth, is Israel even the most appropriate object of the Palestinian people’s quest for nationhood and freedom? If the withdrawal of United States support is the absolutely unavoidable precondition for Israel negotiating a viable “two-state solution” to the conflict, then the place where Palestinian statehood will ultimately be won is in the living-rooms of ordinary, decent Americans. But to win there, the Palestinians must first reinvent themselves entirely: forsaking forever the techniques of terrorism in favour of a political narrative stressing peaceful co-operation and mutual respect.

As part of that process, Palestinian leaders must give up the tactic of launching tens-of-thousands of young people against the border-fence separating Gaza from Israel. The deepening psychopathology of the Israeli state makes its response to such tactics as predictable as it has been deadly. In persisting with its campaign to send the inhabitants of Gaza “home”, the Palestinian leadership is displaying either the most reckless ignorance, or, the most chilling cynicism. If it is the former, then the first incoming live rounds from the Israeli Defence Force’s snipers should have wised them up. If it’s the latter, then these demonstrations are nothing more than invitations to martyrdom. The watching world recoils in horror from the actions of both antagonists.

On one side of the border fence stands the army of a psychopathic state which regards the pitiless murder of teenagers as the only viable means of guaranteeing Israel’s national security. On the other, a national liberation movement utterly convinced that the only hope of healing the broken body of Palestine is by nourishing it constantly with the blood of its children.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 17 May 2018.

The Kiwi Connection In Palestine.

New Zealand's Collective Punishers: “I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.” - Major-General Sir Edmund Allenby addressing New Zealand and Australian troops after the Surafend Massacre, December 1918.

I DON’T KNOW which is more embarrassing: to have a lawyer called Trotter defending a woman who prostituted her own daughter; or a PhD history candidate called Trotter “Exploring the Kiwi connection as Israel turns70”.

On balance, I’d have to say that the PhD history candidate is the more embarrassing of the two. That our justice system goes out of its way to ensure that every accused person is provided with effective legal representation is something of which we should all be proud. So, I doff my hat to Karl Trotter for his defence of the indefensible. To Sheree Trotter, however, I have only questions to offer – not the least of which is: How could a PhD history candidate’s description of Israel’s “Kiwi connection” not include the moving ceremony at Rishon LeZion and the brutal massacre at Surafend?

Rishon LeZion (The First of Zion) was one of those settlements involved in what was, rather quaintly, referred to as, “the upbuilding of Palestine”. On 4 November 1917, New Zealand troops had participated in the Battle of Ayun Kara, located very close to Rishon LeZion. Twelve months later, the leader of the Zionist settlement invited the New Zealanders (who were still encamped close by) to a commemorative ceremony.

The small Jewish community had erected an obelisk in memory of the New Zealanders who fell at Ayun Kara, and its Mayor had prepared a speech:

“These dead have not only fought for their country, they have planted the flag of justice and lit the torch of liberty. Its light will never be extinguished. You have placed marking stones along the route to the future. These markers, formed by your tombs, will cause those who come after to meditate: ‘It is just about a thousand years’ they will say, ‘since, on this very soil, Western lords came with the sacred flame of religion and in the name of the Cross to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. And now, after long delay, these same children of the West have come again in their thousands, glowing with ardour, animated by the thirst for liberty, justice, and fraternity, to liberate the same country from the yoke it has borne for nearly five centuries.”

Stirring words – and they clearly left a deep impression on the Kiwis. Because, just over a month after the ceremony at Rishon LeZion, on 10 December 1918, animated no doubt by their thirst for “liberty, justice and fraternity” troopers of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, backed by their comrades in the Australian Light Horse, inflicted a gruesome collective punishment upon the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Surafend.

The night before, in the course of a botched robbery, a Palestinian Arab had shot and killed a New Zealand soldier, Trooper Leslie Lowry. The offender had been tracked back to Surafend and the Kiwis ordered the villagers to hand him over for punishment. When the villagers refused, the Kiwis and their Aussie mates, some 200 men altogether, marched the women and children out of the village and then proceeded to attack the men and boys who remained.

Their weapons of choice were pick-axe handles and the heavy, canvass-sheathed chains used to haul supply wagons and field guns. They swung these with deadly effect against the Arab defenders. By the time the Kiwi and Aussie troopers marched out of Surafend, by now a smoking ruin, more than 40 Palestinian Arabs had been killed or wounded.

The massacre had taken place in defiance of the Brigade’s commanders and with the connivance of more than a few junior officers. The Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force – the occupier of Palestine following the cessation of hostilities – Major-General Edmund Allenby, was furious. Forming the ANZAC’s into a hollow square he unleashed a tongue-lashing the like of which no British or Empire troops had heard for many, many years:

“I was proud of you as brave soldiers but now I am ashamed of you as cold-blooded murderers.”

This outburst aroused such mutinous resentment among the New Zealand and Australian troops that Allenby was soon forced to retract his words. In the weeks ahead, as the British tightened their grip on the former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, they would have need of that ANZAC muscle. When the New Zealand and Australian troopers were ordered into action against protesting Arab nationalists, the dreadful reputation they had fashioned for themselves at Surafend rode ahead of them.

Thus, was the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, given effect. Such, was the Kiwi connection with one of the earliest Zionist communities in Palestine. That sorrow-filled stretch of earth which would, forty years later, become the State of Israel.

The lesson imparted by those murderous Kiwi and Australian soldiers on the night of 10 December 1918 – that Palestinian Arabs could be collectively punished with impunity – was one the Zionists never forgot.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 24 April 2018.

Lorde: Turning The Green Light Red.

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: What possessed Lorde to include Tel Aviv on her 2018 touring schedule? If there is one shark school a young performing artist should avoid at all costs – it’s the Middle East. Put your foot into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and you may be sure of only one thing: you will be bitten. The smartest move is always to give Israel/Palestine a very wide berth.

“THOSE GREAT WHITES, they have big teeth”, sings Ella Yelich-O’Connor (Lorde) in “Green Light”. Her decisions to play – and then not to play – Tel Aviv are showing how much damage those teeth can inflict. Right now, there’s a lot of blood in the water and, unfortunately, most of it is hers.

How did it come to this? What possessed Lorde to include Tel Aviv on her 2018 touring schedule? If there is one shark school a young performing artist should avoid at all costs – it’s the Middle East. Put your foot into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and you may be sure of only one thing: you will be bitten. The smartest move is always to give Israel/Palestine a very wide berth.

That’s not so easy, however, when Lucian Grainge, the CEO of your record label, the Universal Music Group (UMG) is the 2013 recipient of the Foundation For Ethnic Understanding’s (FFEU) 2013 Humanitarian Award.

The FFEU was established in 1989 by Rabbi Marc Schneier to promote understanding and reconciliation between Muslims and Jews. Presumably, the decisions of the UMG’s chief executive were seen as contributing significantly to that worthy objective. Presumably, that’s why they honoured him. Presumably, that’s also why building bridges between Israelis and Palestinians is seen as “a good thing” in Lucien Grainge’s UMG.

Did Lorde know about this? When she saw Tel Aviv on her 2018 touring schedule, did her interior moral traffic light flash green or red? Was she reassured that playing Tel Aviv was “a good thing” because it promoted understanding between Muslims and Jews? Did her “people” tell her that the boss of UMG believed very strongly in the power of music to bring people together? Is that why, like that other big UMG star, Elton John, she agreed to perform in Israel?

Standing back from all this, it is difficult not to see Lorde as a pawn in a whole host of people’s games.

As a propaganda tool, the music industry is every bit as effective as the film and television industries – maybe more so. It would be naïve in the extreme to think that the Israeli Government and its “assets” in the Jewish diaspora were ignorant of the effect Lorde’s playing Tel Aviv would have had on global opinion. How else to explain their reaction to her green light switching to red?

But, if Lorde has been treated as a pawn by Israel’s friends in the global music industry, her treatment by the ‘Boycott, Disinvest, Sanctions’ (BDS) movement hasn’t been much better.

When the BDS movement discovered Lorde was scheduled to play Tel Aviv, it must have whooped with delight. Here, at the mercy of the social media platforms it has learned to manipulate so ruthlessly, was a young singer-songwriter earnestly committed to doing good in the world. How long would she be able to resist the orchestrated pressures of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? Not long – as it turned out.

The Great White Sharks are not confined to corporate waters exclusively. The Left have teeth of their own.

Pity is an emotion all-too-easily evoked: and the situation of Palestinians living on the West Bank and Gaza is pitiable in the extreme. That the BDS movement exploits their pitiable circumstances is unsurprising – Public Relations 101.

Beseeching Lorde and her fans to boycott “Apartheid Israel” offers them the opportunity to strike a blow without firing a shot. What young entertainer anxious to prove her progressive credentials is going to turn down an offer to become the John Minto of her generation?

Upon closer inspection, however, the BDS movement is nothing more than a sophisticated front organisation in the service of Palestinian nationalism. Just one more weapon in a war that has been raging since 1947. It’s never been a war for two states in the Holy Land. Rather, it’s been a war to determine who inherits the Holy Land – Jews or Arabs? Sometimes the war’s been fought with fighter-bombers, tanks and artillery; sometimes with martyrs on buses wearing explosive vests; and, yes, sometimes with singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Nick Cave and Elton John.

The BDS movement hasn’t the slightest chance of defeating the State of Israel, nor of liberating the Palestinians. What it can deliver, however, is the occasional, morale-boosting, Palestinian propaganda victory.

On this occasion, that victory’s collateral damage was Ella Yelich-O’Connor.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 January 2018.

Trump Recognises Jerusalem: The Zionist End-Game Begins.

There Can be Only One: No matter how eloquently the partisans of a Jewish homeland reassured their Arab neighbours that they had nothing to fear from a future State of Israel, the brute logic of Zionism argued against the longevity of any such attempt at cultural and religious cohabitation. Sooner or later, the sheer impossibility of the two communities, Jewish and Arab, rubbing along together in peaceful coexistence would become apparent. And when that happened, one of those communities would have to go.

“APOCALYPSE IN THE VALLEY OF ARMAGEDDON”. The Daily Blog editor, Martyn Bradbury, certainly displays a gift for evocative language! On the subject of President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, however, I believe Martyn’s evocation of the apocalypse is premature. Trump’s decision is less a sign that Armageddon is imminent, and more a signal that the Zionists’ end-game is about to begin.

By announcing the United States recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Trump has sent two very important messages to the extreme Zionist elements in Israeli society. The first message is brutally simple: the so-called “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead. The second, to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, is that, as the political logic of the two-state solution’s demise is followed to its inevitable and brutal conclusion, the United States has got Israel’s back. Not just at the UN Security Council, but everywhere Israel needs American support.

The political logic of the two-state solution’s demise is inextricably bound up with the relentless colonisation of the West Bank by extreme Zionist “settlers”. Essentially, the so-called “settlements” were planted on the West Bank in order to render the formation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. The larger those settlements grow, the tighter the hands of Israeli politicians are bound. The political cost of dismantling the settlements has risen so high that no sensible Israeli any longer believes that a Palestinian state is achievable.

This leaves the Israeli authorities with two options. They can either continue to act as an army of occupation on the West Bank of the Jordan River: controlling every aspect of the Palestinian people’s lives, while Zionist settlements metastasise into every corner of Palestine’s shrinking body. Or, they could simply transform the West Bank into a Palestinian-Free Zone.

This latter option has lain dormant in Zionism from its very inception. No matter how eloquently the partisans of a Jewish homeland reassured their Arab neighbours that they had nothing to fear from a future State of Israel, the brute logic of Zionism argued against the longevity of any such attempt at cultural and religious cohabitation. Sooner or later, the sheer impossibility of the two communities, Jewish and Arab, rubbing along together in peaceful coexistence would become apparent. And when that happened, one of those communities would have to go.

Ethnically cleansing the West Bank would, of course, be a gross violation of international law. It would constitute a crime against humanity on a scale not seen since the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide and, more recently, the expulsion of the Rohingya people from Myanmar.

Protected by Donald Trump and the American veto in the UN Security Council, however, Israel is unlikely to much care what the world thinks or does. When all is said and done, isn’t its fifty-year occupation of the West Bank a blatant contravention of international law? And, haven’t Israel’s repeated incursions into Lebanon, and its brutal bombing of the civilian population of Gaza, occasioned many crimes against humanity?

If a decision to expel the Palestinians from the West Bank is taken by the Israeli authorities, it would undoubtedly provoke fury in the Arab world. So great is Israel’s military power, however, that launching any kind of meaningful retaliation against such forced expulsions would risk a potentially devastating Israeli counter-strike.

Some of the most extreme Zionists might even welcome an Arab attack. What better justification for levelling the Al-Aqsa Mosque and laying the foundation-stone for the Third Temple?

Certainly, the rebuilding of “Solomon’s Temple” and the expansion of the State of Israel to the full extent of its biblical boundaries would be welcomed by the tens-of-thousands of so-called “Christian-Zionists” (and fervent Trump supporters) living in the United States. In their eyes, such developments would constitute proof-positive that the “End Times” had well and truly begun.

“Apocalypse in the Valley of Armageddon” would only be the beginning.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 December 2017