Palestinian solidarity protests will continue and grow next weekend

By
John Minto
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46
690

PSNA met online tonight and decided to organise nationwide protests again next Saturday 22 May.

We were very pleased with the 4,000 people who turned out in 10 centres around the country last Saturday – the largest public protests on this issue for many years – and we expect this coming Saturday to be significantly bigger given the escalating attacks on Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, across the occupied West Bank, through Israel itself and now in cruel, cowardly attacks on Gaza.

The focus of the protest will again be the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and their failure to offer more than pious words and ineffective platitudes in the face of horrendous war crimes.

The very least the government can do is reinforce its existing bipartisan policy – support for United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334.

We agree with the sentiments of Professor Robert Patman from Otago University on Television One News tonight when he said the government should act on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 which was co-sponsored at the UN by the previous National government.

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Resolution 2334 provides a framework for a lasting peace which can only come based on justice for Palestinians. Giving this policy real teeth – accountability for Israel – would be the most important step New Zealand could take to move the region forward in a positive direction.

We have written to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister today along these lines.

46 COMMENTS

  2. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/125143868/thousands-march-aucklands-queen-st-in-support-of-palestinians

    What happens in NZ matters …

    “Despite our size and location, New Zealand played an important role in the fight against apartheid in South Africa,” Minto said.

    Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” ,,,, I would add ‘and it does not happen by itself ….

    ….Well done John ,,, Keep up the good work ,,, keep on getting the truth out.

    https://youtu.be/HnZSaKYmP2s?t=1560

  3. John Munro along with his follower supporters, including the Palestinians need to stop supporting Hamas, who discriminate against women, and kill people who are homosexuals.

    You will never hear them talking about the atrocious things Hamas does in Gaza because majority of them are anti-Semitic!

    Long live Israel!

    • I personally don’t know John Munro, who is her. Hamas was a democratically elected government. Apparently although you are appalled at the things they have done – Hamas that is, you support the apartheid state which has 65 laws that are against Palestinians living in the apartheid state of Israel.

      If I criticise Israel and the atrocities the government has carried out over the years does that make me anti-semitic, apparently in the eyes of many – but not all – Jews.

      I can think of many Jews who are appalled at what Israel has done, what are they?

    • Is it anti Semitic in your view that Israeli law forbids jewish women to have relations with non jewish males. Both parties face jail terms with the non jewish men serving longer. This is racism plain and simple.

  4. And in the meantime, let’s all forget about the rather larger number of civilian deaths in Myanmar, due the the Military there

    • Can’t you, like most HR activists walk and chew gum? This discussion isn’t about Myanmar in case you didn’t notice.

  5. “Western media and politicians are now firmly coalesced around the Israeli government narrative. Israel is unwillingly fighting a war of self-defence in Gaza after hostilities were commenced by aggressive Hamas military attack. The storming of Al Aqsa mosque, the shooting at people in prayer, the right wing mobs attacking East Jerusalem, the Krystallnacht style destruction of Palestinian businesses and lynching of Arab Israelis, none of that ever happened at all. What happened was that Hamas launched a missile war and Israel was obliged, ever so reluctantly, to exercise its right of self defence, with enormous care not to hit civilians, except that, entirely accidentally, the IDF has killed a couple of hundred civilians including scores of children.

    Palestinians die in the passive tense in western media. The media always says they “have died”; they were never “killed”, and there is virtually never any attribution of the death. By contrast, Israelis are active tense “killed by Hamas” or “killed by missile strikes”. Look out for this journalistic sophistry – once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

    I used to be a firm opponent of missile strikes from Gaza. My view was firstly, that they cannot be militarily targeted so constitute an attack on civilians, secondly that they were a gift to Israeli propaganda, and thirdly that they were militarily ineffective. All of those remain true, and yet my view has changed and I find myself celebrating the fact that Hamas has, against all odds, managed to acquire more and better missiles. Part of that change of view is that I have come to see that there is no such thing as an innocent adult coloniser. But the bigger part is that I cannot see what on earth else the Palestinians are supposed to do.”
    – Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/05/what-is-left-for-palestine/

  6. “All You Nations Sleeping”

    Israel’s slaughter goes on. Marking Eid, the holiest day of the holiest month in the Islamic calender, at least 87 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including 18 children; over 530 have been wounded, and hundreds have been left homeless after Israeli missiles targeted 17 homes and the 13-story al-Hanadi apartment building, which also housed business, medical and media offices.

    “Gaza will burn,” vowed right-wing, blood-soaked Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz in an explicit threat to commit war crimes, pledging to exceed the savagery of his 2014 Operation Protective Edge that killed over 2,200 Palestinians, including 550 children…

    Gaza is already a hellscape where “the sounds of children screaming are louder than the missiles.”

    The victims are random, innocent, beloved:
    – Awad Abuselmya, who was his family’s only survivor when Israeli bombs killed his parents and six siblings in 2006;
    – Munther Abd al-Karim Baraka, 21, and his sister Manar Abd al-Karim Baraka, 18, who were working on their family’s chicken farm;
    – Lina Iyad Shrir, 15, and both her parents;
    – Bashar Ahmad Samour, 17, a farmer who was harvesting parsely with two relatives; a family of six, including four children and their pregnant mother; many in their cars, some in their stores, one in a park; –
    – Reema Saad, a 30-year-old journalist, killed in an Israeli airstrike with her 3 year-old daughter, 5 year-old son, and husband Muhammed . She was four months pregnant. She is not a number. None of them are.

    “Here is what I want you to understand,” writes one resident of untenable life in the long-besieged Gaza. “We are bleeding here, anyway. Bleeding silently, all the time. Regardless of this or that war.. Why do I, why do we, have to choose between a quick death during a time of war, or a silent death under blockade?”

    Complicit in the Gazan nightmare, lest we forget, is the U.S. and its almost four billion dollars in military aid…

    “Hold the missiles, drones, bombs, cages, interrogations, detentions, incarceration, deportations, CIA covert missions, economic sanctions, torture, humiliation, forced evictions, land theft, broken promises, lies, empty gestures, hostilities, and most recently the vaccine apartheid.”

    The bottom line: “You don’t need to be Muslim to stand for GAZA. You just need to be HUMAN.”

    The call to an indifferent world is echoed by one small, ferocious Gazan boy:
    “All you nations sleeping through our pain – children are dying.”

    – Abby Zimet, 12/5/21
    All You Nations Sleeping

  7. Shooting Fish in a Barrel

    Nearly two million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip… It is one of the more densely populated places on earth.

    Some 50% of the population consists of children. One in 10 children there are stunted, in part because of food insecurity imposed by the Israeli blockade.

    Over 70 percent of the families in Gaza are refugees, having been ethnically cleansed from southern Israel.

    Gaza is not an independent state. Its people are stateless and at the mercy of the Israeli military.

    1.46 million registered refugees out of 1.9 million total population (approximately 73 per cent)

    The Israeli Air Force destroyed the Gaza airport and port. Israel is considered in international law the Occupying power in Gaza, but often takes steps inconsistent with its responsibilities in this regard. At one point in the zeros the Israeli military made a plan to only allow enough food into Gaza to keep the population from becoming malnourished, but nothing more.

    The unemployment rate in Gaza is 50%, the highest in the world. Half the population depends on food aid. The aquifer is polluted and increasingly salty from rising seas owing to climate change, so truly clean water is available to only about 5 percent of the population. Israel has several water purification plants. The Palestinians of Gaza do not.

    There is no equivalence between Israel and Gaza. Israel has the best-equipped military in the Middle East and has several hundred nuclear bombs, Its gross domestic product (nominal) per capita is on the order of $42,000 per year.

    The nominal GDP per capita in Palestine is $3000, and those who live in Gaza earn less yet.
    —–
    Excerpts from Juan Cole, 14/5/21 Shooting Fish in a Barrel

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