Damien O’Connor vs Israeli Apologists decrying any criticism of their war crimes in Gaza as ‘antisemitic’

Labour’s Damien O’Connor goes against party policy in calling Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide’

A senior Labour MP stepped outside his party’s position in referring to Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

MPs yesterday passed a motion, calling on all those involved in the conflict to “take urgent steps towards establishing a ceasefire”.

Labour associate foreign affairs spokesperson Damien O’Connor, frustrated the government was not calling for an immediate ceasefire, ended up going further than his own party’s position.

“No person with any ounce of moral courage can see this as anything but horrific, nothing more than a genocide.”

As the butchery by Israel continues, anytime anyone calls these war crimes what they are, the Israeli Apologists scream ‘antisemitism’.

It’s a trick used by the zionist Free Speech Union, the Israel Institute of New Zealand and the wider Right.

It is surreal in the extreme that Israel can commit real time war crimes and call everyone else who is disgusted by their butchery ‘antisemites’.

Gordon Campbell’s blistering critique of media coverage is a must read…

On The Skewed Media Coverage Of Gaza

Now that he’s back as Foreign Minister, maybe Winston Peters should start reading the MFAT website. If he did, Peters would find MFAT celebrating the 25th anniversary of how New Zealand alerted the rest of the world to the genocide developing in Rwanda. Quote:

New Zealand played an important role in trying to bring global attention to the atrocities taking place in Rwanda. Calling for the Council to recognise that genocide was being perpetrated… New Zealand used its presidency to call for action.

How times have changed. In 2023, the government (and media) is clutching its pearls because senior Labour MP Damien O’Connor has dared to suggest that Gaza’s civilian population – already subjected to 16 years of an illegal embargo and living under apartheid laws – and who are now being herded together and slaughtered indiscriminately amid the destruction of their homes, schools, mosques and hospitals, are the victims of what amounts to a genocide.

No, no, no, says Peters and the government he serves, that’s out of line. We all have to await a formal definition by the International Criminal Court before invoking that term. In so many ways, Peters seems to be wilfully ignorant of history. New Zealand didn’t wait for an ICC ruling on Rwanda, and it has patted itself on the back ever since for being so fearlessly pro-active. Why are we shying away from showing the same gumption when it comes to Gaza?

The ”resolution” Peters got through Parliament yesterday was a capitulation. It called for all parties in the Gaza conflict to “take urgent steps towards establishing a ceasefire.” To her credit, Helen Clark has called out these weasel words: “It’s not steps towards a ceasefire we need… We need a ceasefire.”

As Clark added, the statement didn’t “deplore the carnage, which is happening in Gaza right now. Not to mention in the resolution this level of destruction of a community, and the attempt to herd it into an area around the Rafah border, which is roughly the size of the Heathrow Airport complex – 2.2 million people. It is unconscionable not to mention this [in the resolution]” Clark concluded.

Predictably, most of the subsequent media coverage of O’Connor’s use of the “g” word has framed it as him being out of line, and as evidence of disunity in the Labour ranks. Little effort has been expended on exploring the evidence for the term “genocide” or in considering the lack of resolve in Parliament’s timid “resolution.”. Once again, the narrow parameters of permissible media discourse on Gaza has been exposed.

Info Wars

In every country in the developed world, the media has struggled to offer even-handed commentary on the atrocities committed by Hamas, and on the atrocities committed by Israel. How come? Obviously, Israel has a unique relationship with the United States, and many of the West’s media outlets are either owned by American corporations or rely on US networks for much of their footage and news analysis. Meaning: The skew to Israel is inbuilt, especially at the higher levels of editorial decision-making.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This week, the Australian online news service Crikeyreported on the double standard whereby Aussie journalists are being warned by their editors not to sign open letters calling for better coverage of Gaza, lest that be seen as compromising their integrity and independence. In many cases, these warnings are coming from editors and journalists who, for years, have gone on junkets to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank paid for and organised by the Israeli government.

Crikey is compiling a running list of journalists and editors who have taken trips to the region that have been paid for in full or in part, by either Israeli or Palestinian official organisations. No similar concerns seem to exist here.

For obvious reasons, the Israelis have striven to convince the international media to (a) remain frozenly fixated on the horrors committed by Hamas on October 7 while (b) ignoring everything that happened before and (especially) since. To be clear: One does not exonerate the other; but equally, one does not condone the other.

In this country, a structure has become evident in the Gaza coverage. First off, there’s a preponderance of Israeli government/IDF spokespeople in the news bulletins. On a typical news day, the media will carry word of the latest IDF atrocity, then present audio of the IDF rationalisation for it, and subsequently… Someone else might get to describe the carnage on the ground.

The people providing that description will tend to be outsiders from the UN or Doctors Without Borders, or some other relief agency. Commonly, the Palestinian victims will appear only when in the throes of immense grief. The media’s interpretive framework for their suffering tends to be 95% Israeli.

It is also selectively Israeli. We’ve heard a lot in the past month from Benjamin Netanyahu’s mouthpiece and from the IDF spokesman. Perhaps I missed her (if she has ever been on RNZ,) but the celebrated Haaretz columnist Amira Hass is the only Jewish journalist I know of who has lived in Gaza, and now she lives in Ramallah on the West Bank. Hass and like-minded Jewish journalists (e.g. Gideon Levy) seem almost entirely absent from NZ media coverage.

Here’s her latest Haaretz article, in which Hass reports on the 2 million Gazans now being crammed into the southern half of Gaza, without food or water.

In addition to the contagious diseases that have been reported by medical officials – including respiratory infections, gastrointestinal ailments and skin diseases – there were reports last week that hepatitis A is spreading among some of the displaced people. This comes on top of the constant food shortage that particularly affects children and pregnant women, the shortage of medication for people with chronic diseases, and the difficulty in treating the tens of thousands of wounded in an ever-diminishing number of active hospitals – and without anaesthetics.

Hass went on to explain in detail how the space available for Gazans to find refuge from the IDF is quickly shrinking.

Before the war, the south’s three districts – Deir al-Balah, Khan Yunis and Rafah – held about 1 million people (out of about 2.2 million in all Gaza), with a density of 4,347 people per square kilometre. During the truce and after the displacement from eastern and northern Gaza, the population density could be estimated at about 11,000 people per square kilometre.

Now, the evacuation orders from the Khan Yunis region, and the…. ground invasion into this area – alongside or following bombardment from the air, sea and land – imply an intention to crowd around 2 million people into 110 square kilometres – 18,181 people per square kilometre. The water and power grids, the roads and the health care system – which even in quiet times fell short of the needs of around 1 million people and are hardly functioning now – will collapse under the strain of around 2 million people.

Given that so many civilians are being penned, bombed, shelled and fired upon in ever-shrinking parts of southern Gaza, the death toll is bound to sharply escalate. UNICEF has described the alleged “safe areas” in Gaza as “death traps.” The latest estimate is of 16,000 Palestinian civilian deaths, with 40 % of them being children. Can self defence be proportionate, if and when 6,000 children die as a result?

For the survivors, there is the pain of loss of family members, the denial of essential medicines, the targeting of medical staff and hospital facilities etc. etc. not to mention the unknown number of men, women and children who have died lingering deaths under the rubble.

If that suffering is unimaginable, the mindset behind the IDF actions often seems to be unspeakable. As Gideon Levy reported recently in Haaretz, there are senior IDF veterans widely regarded as moderates, such as Giora Eiland, former head of the military’s Operations and Planning Division, and head of the National Security Council. Yet Levy quotes Eiland as advocating the deliberate spreading of plague in southern Gaza as a potential IDF military tactic worthy of consideration:

“After all, severe epidemics in the southern Strip will bring victory closer and reduce fatalities among IDF soldiers,” he wrote this week in Yedioth Ahronoth. “One only has to wait for the daughters of Hamas’ leaders to contract the plague, and we’ve won.”

…the manifested malice of the Israels response to the Hamas attack tells you everything you need to know about an Apartheid Regime confronted by the bitter harvest of their occupation and like every abuser, they cement into place their denial and demand that you as a witness turn your eyes.

The repulsive lapse back into war crimes in the disproportionate response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7th by Israel has been made more grotesque by the latest news that the IDF had seen large scale intelligence reports highlighting the very attack Hamas launched…

Israel ‘obtained Hamas plans for Oct 7 attack more than a year before’

Israeli officials reportedly saw a blueprint for Hamas’s October 7 massacre more than a year before it was carried out, prompting fresh questions about intelligence failures over the attack that claimed 1,200 lives…

…the IDF arrogantly wrote the fears off.

The problem of America giving Israel $3.8B each year in military aid is that level of power and abuse of power over occupied Palestinians creates a false sense of security.

The failure of intelligence here is just breath taking in its scale of hubris.

The IDF refused to believe that the intense pressure of a 17 year blockade and continued theft of Palestinian land on the West Bank could generate the anger required to pull off the attack Hamas barbarically did.

900 dead soldiers, 300 civilians and 150 hostages do not justify killing over 15 000, 70% of whom are women and children!

Israel has killed more people in 2 months than Russia has managed against the Ukraine in 2 years of war and we are very clear about calling Putin’s violence a war crime!

The IDF dropped 6000 bombs on Gaza in the first week which was more than America dropped on Afghanistan in a year!

No one can pretend what Israel is pursuing here is a legitimate response, it is a brutal group punishment that steps well over the war crime definition!

Telling us repeatedly that the IDF doesn’t target civilians, they target Hamas – sure, fine and good. But when Hamas are under a Hospital, bombing it to hit the Hospital has the exact same outcome as targeting the civilians in the first place!

This isn’t eye for an eye, this is eye for a face, for a limb, for a body organ!

There are an estimated 4000 trapped under rubble, that added to the known death rate is pushing this to 20 000 dead.

This is a frenzied attack of hate and vengeance on a biblical scale.

People of conscience must keep calling for an immediate ceasefire, and let us all be very clear that criticising the disproportionate war crimes being committed on a civilian population in the manner Israel has conducted is not antisemitism!

This is carnage, unnecessary, cruel carnage and it must end.

No one of conscience can defend this any longer.

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