Recognising Palestine should be the first step for our new Minister of Foreign Affairs

By
John Minto
-
33
783

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.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

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.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

33 COMMENTS

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

    i

  3. 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.

    • Why would our government engage in such a meaningless, empty act with 2 warring factions, Hamas and Fatah, who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist, negotiate peace with Israel, or acknowledge Israel’s need for security against their ongoing terrorism (endless rocket fire, murderous incursions and pay-for-slay policy)? There has been no ‘Palestine’ since 1947 and there are no ‘Palestinians’, just a bunch of Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian, Lebanese Arabs who have failed to destroy Israel. When Minto and cronies talks about ‘Palestine’ they mean the erasure of Israel. a quote from one PLO Arab leader who told the truth:
      DESTROYING ISRAEL
      In March 1971 the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here’s what he said. “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel and for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people.
      “For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with de­fined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Pales­tinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheva and Jeru­salem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will wait not even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
      Arafat himself made a very de­finitive and unequivocal statement along these lines as late as 1993. It demonstrates conclusively that the Palestinian nationhood argument is the real strategic deception – one geared up to set up the destruction of Israel.

      • And yet all English maps printed before 1948 clearly have the region the Jews have taken over clearly designated Palestine, a British ‘Protectorate’ from the end of WW1 until the state of Israel was created after WW2 ended, and once Israel was established on the small portion of contested land, the part that was not under Jewish control was still Palestine.

        Britain has an awful lot to answer for.

      • Gaby: Well done – you have again managed to cut and paste easily found Israeli propaganda (Facebook this time?) without going back to the source to verify quotes in their original contexts.

      • Do you mean this BESA: “A new hawkish security think tank was launched Monday in Jerusalem that seeks to inject a dose of “realist” thinking into Israel’s public debate.
        The Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies was founded by and consist mainly of scholars and former officials who until recently belonged to another right-leaning think tank — Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA). They include Efraim Inbar, David M. Weinberg, Yaakov Amidror, Eran Lerman, Hillel Frisch and others.”
        By the way, this was taken from a Times of Israel report – hardly an extremist anti-semitic outfit.

  5. 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.

      • 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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

  9. The usual knee-jerk reactions labelling anyone with the guts to point out the truth a liar, troll etc as if all you bashers of Israel have access to some kind of oracle which cannot be contested.We all know what that oracle is. PM Ardern will never have anything to do with Minto’s group because she has already distanced herself from its eye-watering antisemitism. This journalist provides indisputable reasoning as to why Palestine is not a state and probably never will be.
    https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-there-is-no-palestinian-state/

    • Gaby to be believed, you would actually have to give information as to where I can find anti semitic comments made by Minto and you never seem to come up with this at all…

      Now the other small matter is ‘where do you live?’

        • You have said that John Minto has violated 5 of the 11 principles of the definition of the IHRA. Please get your facts straight. They are not principles, they are examples of antisemitism based on a non-binding working definition. The definition is: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” To suggest that John is guilty of breaching the definition by calling out the human rights abuses committed by a Zionist government is absurd. Even more absurd is to conflate the comments of another individual (Neil Scott) to Mr. Minto.

        • So what Gaby. Factual information stands no matter what interpretation you or others put on it.
          Attempting to silence any criticism with name calling deserves exposure and condemnation.

  10. 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.

    • Read response above. The UK’s jeremy Corbyn never actually made an outright antisemitic statement. He supported terrorists though, just as Minto does. The British people gave Corbyn his pedigree in the election because they knew the truth, and his party has just dropped him. New Zealanders know the truth about your nasty little group. That’s why they and the Govt. deplore you. Israel has nothing to worry about from Minto and his hate-raddled followers.

      • Gaby you are a constant source of abuse.
        Now you are picking on Corbyn who is proudly a jew and sticks up for human rights.

      • Despising the actions of the ISRAELI government is not and cannot be anti-semitic. It’s a government not a religion or a culture.

        You, Gaby, are conflating.

        When you can separate religion from secular government the story can move on.

        PS – If my land was being stolen, and my water; my stock and children slaughtered by advanced munitions and illegal mines; my home razed so some wretched American immigrant and his family could replace mine, I’d be the same.
        Get the bastards out.
        How could you possibly be hurt or surprised?

Comments are closed.