Recognising Palestine should be the first policy announcement of our new Foreign Minister after they are announced next week.
Successive New Zealand governments have claimed to take an “even-handed” approach to the Middle East but this is untrue. We have extensive bilateral arrangements with Israel but minimal interaction with Palestinians.
In making this appeal we are endorsing the call from Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices for New Zealand to recognise Palestine as a state.
Palestine is already recognised as a state by 138 member countries of the United Nations and the government should push this number to 139.
The final settlement of the Middle East conflict will be found through negotiations based on international law and United Nations resolutions but this is impossible at present because of the extreme imbalance of power between Israel and Palestinians.
How could there be a settlement based on justice if Israel and the US are on one side of the table and Palestinians on the other?
Recognising Palestine as a state will be an important step in helping redress the imbalance and preparing for peace – a situation which will benefit both Palestinians and Israelis.
Recognising Palestine would be the mark of the progressive government Labour claims to be and a welcome break from the contracting out of Foreign Affairs and Defence to New Zealand First in the previous term when Winston Peters was Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ron Mark was Minister of Defence.
During the last term Israeli brutality persisted unabated, the racist Nation State law was enacted and the intention to unilaterally annex the West Bank was announced while the government turned a blind eye.
The most significant step taken by a New Zealand government to support Palestine in a generation was the previous National government co-sponsoring United Nations Security Council resolution 2334.
Labour can surpass this by recognising Palestine as a state entity in the first 100 days of the new government.
Yes John.
And the other good news is that the biggest sponsor of state terrorism, the USA, is going down fast and soon won’t be able to keep pouring money and weapons into Israel.
There has been from the beginning of Israel an avalanche of well documented and disproportionate attacks and human rights violations by the Israeli govt. and the IDF against Palestinians that as we know have gone unpunished. There has not been a more opportune moment for the the NZ Labour Party to shrug off the chains that stop them from being a govt. that leads and sets an example that the world so badly needs. Unity is the only way this human tragedy will end. Thankyou John for another timely injection of values- driven logic.
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Labour can surpass this by recognising Palestine as a state entity in the first 100 days of the new government.
Absolutely. It would be tragic if they do not do this.
!00% Kheala.
Hear hear. It is way beyond time to recognise Palestine
James Shaw has sided with Israel against the Palestinians. He has spoken publicly against BDS, but avoids any condemnation of the years of genocide by Israel against the native Palestinian people.
The shill has to go and an actual leader of the Greens selected.
He has apologised for mangling the answer to the question asked in the Aro Valley meeting when he met with representatives of the Palestine Solidarity movement last week he is absolutely on the side of the Palestinians as are the whole Green caucus.
Thanks for the update Michal.
Do you have a link to James Shaw apologizing? that’s news to me
Michal having read and watched Jame’s little speech carefully, I don’t see he was struggling but was quite in opposition to BDS and stated why.
He did miscalculate the damage he was doing but can hardly retract from that position without risking being a hypocrite and dishonest person.
I would like to read his apology and how he explains his collusion against BDS and what are the nasty undercurrent to BDS he states as his reason for speaking against BDS.
I have yet to find Jame’s apology but it seems you may have. Do you have a link please.
How Israel Wages War on Palestinian History
by Jonathan Cook.
Excerpt:
For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterize them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.
The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.
These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.
The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.
Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.
Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.
The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.
Excerpt #2 from Erasing Palestinian History:
The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.
A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.
Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.
Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”. From: How Israel Wages War on Palestinian History by Jonathan Cook.
Excerpt #3 from “The War on Palestinian History”:
Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.
Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritized on these digital maps.
Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometer-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.
And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labeled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognized the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.
Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories. The War on Palestinian History
Gaby, there have been plenty of us trying to point out truth to a knee-jerking liar for ages, you never seem to get the message! If you really want to start showing some credibility, you could respond to Michal’s request. Although John Minto is a well-known human rights advocate and anti-Zionist, to date, no-one (yourself included) has ever presented evidence that he is antisemetic.
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