GUEST BLOG: Fairy Trina – Presenting a Pro-Palestinian Petition at Select Committee

I was at the select committee recently in Parliament with Moe Dahlan supporting his petition. He is asking the Government to open a humanitarian visa pathway for Palestinians. 

We were there to explain the genocide that is taking place, how Palestinians are suffering, and that we really, truly need immigration support. 

Greg O’Connor, Greg Fleming, Ricardo Menendez and Carl Bates were on the committee.

It was a strange affair. Niceties were exchanged in the hallway with various ministry representatives, as we shuffled our feet and waited nervously to enter. 

While it is important for Palestinians to be heard during a time of media and political silence and intense anti-Palestinian racism, it felt dystopic to sit in front of a group of politicians explaining why we would like them to consider our families, our brothers and sisters, our nieces and nephews, and our parents as worthy to receive the same immigration support that New Zealand has very recently extended to others. 

Did I really need to explain the horrific situation for our families in Palestine and where should I start? 

I sat in a swivel chair and looked up. In front of me was a microphone, such a small item that held such huge responsibility. Expectant faces waited opposite, as my mind began to scatter a myriad of thoughts, emotions and fears through my head, thoughts that have centred in every Palestinians life for over 10 months and traumatized millions of other cultures and peoples throughout the world. I don’t know one Palestinian in New Zealand who has not lost one or more family members and who can count at least ten dead friends or acquaintances.

How in a few minutes do you explain witnessing the most documented genocide in history, destruction on an industrial scale we have not seen in our modern history? 

Should I talk about the fear felt by our children in Gaza, that there is no such thing as post-traumatic stress for any Palestinian because nothing is ‘post’,  it is present and relentless, and has been for nearly 80 years. 

Israel is slowly and in the most horrific way, killing and targeting children whose little minds cannot process or cope with the intense fear they experience before they are slaughtered, starved to death, killed by disease or shot in the head and chest by snipers. 15,000 children have been systematically murdered and 21,000 are missing and separated from their families and this number increases every single minute.

I wondered if they were really going to listen. While waiting outside the session room, the screen dutifully displayed petition after petition hearing, starting from early in the morning. There were so many concerns to be shared. 

Moe began to speak first. I watched the faces on the panel whose eyebrows did not even move. Only Ricardo was furiously typing and nodding in acknowledgement. 

Perhaps I should casually mention the equivalent of nine atomic bombs dropped by Israel onto civilians.  That’s more than 70,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since last October, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II.  

Satellite technology has shown that Israel’s un-impinged fury and bombing is also more intense than in Ukraine and Syria. Would that convince them to help our loved ones escape death?

Perhaps they don’t know that snipers are shooting anyone who moves including ambulance workers transporting wounded civilians, many of whom lie outside or on concrete floors with no help, no running water, no medical supplies, no food and no end to Israel’s death trap. 90,000 of them, suffering in agony and terror. 

Or perhaps I could mention that Palestinians in Gaza who are waiting to be killed by Israel while the world watches, are now waiting with the dead as they set up tents in cemeteries. 

I’m not sure that some of the panel understood the severity of the situation and Israel’s illegal conduct. Greg O’Connor asked if MFAT had any officials on the ground in Gaza. It was as if he had no idea that Gaza right now is one of the most dangerous places on earth, that the designated ‘safe zones’ are places of horror and daily killing. 

Israel is in the highest court in the world for genocide, scholasticide, domesticide, intentionally causing death, starvation and bodily harm. The Human Rights Commission has accused it of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes. Israel itself has marked 83 percent of the Gaza Strip itself as unsafe for Palestinian civilians, either a no-go zone or under evacuation orders. Entire neighbourhoods have been demolished. Civilians evacuating under Israel’s constant orders have repeatedly come under fire.

The people of Gaza are not told where to go, which direction is safe and as they try to pack what little they have left, Israel is dropping dumb bombs on them, unguided bombs, intended to cause maximum devastation over large areas. They have banned media, medical help, the UN, foreign officials and aid from getting in. They have banned Palestinians from getting out. They certainly are not allowing New Zealand officials in, and I am certain, no New Zealand official would put their life on the line to enter the strip.

Staring at these faces, some devoid of expression and understanding, I felt my heart sink. Would they bring up the same old Stanford excuses that they can’t get out anyway, despite success in other countries with their visas and our own individual success (albeit with a lot of bribery and exorbitant payments that many can’t afford) in getting family across the border. Yes, they would and so would the officials.

Why were they not also focusing on the main issue preventing Palestinians from leaving the Gaza Strip – Israel’s shameful control of the border crossing in Palestine, a country they are illegally occupying? It’s as if the New Zealand Government believes there is some invisible barrier preventing departures, as if Israel does not have a hand in this. Sanctions and strong political policies and condemnation anyone?

Wondering why I had to explain why special category visas should also be extended to Palestinians, I could not help recalling Luxon on the 1 March 2022 condemning Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine:

“From my point of view, this is a man that’s completely unhinged and is doing something that’s unacceptable, a total affront to human rights, a total affront … to democracy, a total affront to peace and stability. There is no justification for this, it is just nothing but pain and hurt for everybody and it’s just a terrible thing. So, I mean from our point of view we condemn it very, very strongly”. 

Why has he said nothing in the face of such devastation in Palestine and Israel’s violence and brutality which is a total affront to humanity? 

Why has National, Act and NZ First refused to condemn Israel in these ten months? Even after the latest ICJ’s landmark legal advisory that Israel is not only an apartheid state, but is illegally occupying Palestine? In addition, after South Africa’s ICJ case of plausible genocide amongst other heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity, they are still silent. The bar for Israel’s crimes is set higher than any other democracy in the world.

• The  ICJ’s legally binding orders that Israel has to immediately allow aid into Gaza which it is still preventing, to allow unhindered medical aid to be distributed for thousands of civilians they have targeted, many of which are children, these parties are silent. 

• Israel has illegally cut Gaza’s electricity and water. These parties are silent. 
• From the flour massacre, the bombing of the refugee camps and the burning alive of children in their tents, the stealing of Palestinian money, the looting and torture of Palestinians in their thousands in illegal Israeli prisons, the catastrophic number of Palestinian children losing a limb (10 a day) because they have been the main target of Israels ethnic cleansing, now becoming the largest group of paediatric amputees in history. These parties are silent.

In discussing the visas, one cannot help but see the double standards of Immigration Minister Erica Stanford. This was evident in the shaky and unconvincing response from Immigration who were unable to provide adequate and robust reasons why they were holding out. It was uncomfortable to hear them speak, explaining that this was a difficult situation for them, that MBIE has empathy, and it is a conflict…

On the 9th of March 2022 Ms Stanford demanded the then Labour Government to provide an immediate immigration pathway to New Zealand for Ukrainians, saying 

“it’s been 14 days since Russian bombs started falling on Ukraine, yet the government has done nothing to expediate visas for wider family members of Kiwi-based Ukrainians. The situation in Ukraine is worsening by the day and Ukrainian Kiwis will be extremely worried about the safety of their family members back home. This is something New Zealand can do now to support our Ukrainian Kiwis to bring their wider family members here”. 

Apparently, Stanford’s humanity does not extend or apply to all Kiwis. She is still ‘monitoring’ the genocide and will act if things should change. What does that mean please? You are checking how the genocide is progressing or keeping the genocide under review? Are you systematically collecting and assessing if the numbers of children being killed is still larger than that of women? What about pregnant women, how are they progressing?

How do you monitor Genocide and war crimes? An explanation needs to be given.

Ms Stanford is blocking one of the only avenues of escape our families have. She understands they are dying in the most inhumane horrific circumstances; it is awful, she really does understand. Israel is slowly picking off Palestinians in one of the worst ethnic cleansing campaigns, executed industrial style, but opening a visa pathway would be giving ‘false hope’. Can’t we see?

Ms Stanford has also told us she is waiting to see what ‘like-minded’ partners like Canada are doing and then will likely follow suit. Except in May 2024, Canada announced a five-fold increase (5,000) of special visa’s because they were horrified at the Israeli attacks on Rafah and believe that having a visa programme up and running means that they are ready to help more people as the situation evolves. Isn’t this false hope Canada?

In a Newshub article on 7 May 2024 Ms Stanford said the reason she has refused to issue visas to Palestinians was because Cabinet had decided the existing visa settings must be retained. I wrote to the Minister and asked why this momentous decision of Cabinet refusing to open a special visa category had not been announced and what was discussed. 

Her response? That the Cabinet discussion was purely an informal oral update on visa applications – the number and types of applications made. At that time the Minister also sought the views of her colleagues on the continuation of current settings. Apparently, there are no papers supporting the discussion and no minutes of any decision. 

And so, my request for information under the Official Information Act was refused. No paper trail for significant decisions regarding one of the worst manmade humanitarian catastrophises in recent history that is directly impacting New Zealand communities. And one in which a precedent has already been set – Ukraine.  

At the committee, Ricardo Menendez asked officials about what advice they had given to Ms Stanford. Had any work commenced on special visa strategies for Palestine, and if not, why not? Had the Minister rejected these? 

MBIE continued to announce that they had managed to grant visitor visas for Palestinians. They did not disclose that less than a quarter of these ‘Palestinian’ visitor visas are not for Gazan Palestinians, most are from other countries and some from the West Bank. 

The number of Israeli visas granted now number 470, as opposed to 79 Palestinians, because there is not a viable visa pathway Palestinians can use.

MBIE also noted the challenges for New Zealand’s response because we are small. Yet the quota of 4000 special visas offered to Ukraine, of which 1200 were used, is far fewer than 450 Palestinian souls we are desperate to help. This number is declining because every week someone we know is cruelly taken from us by Israel’s systematic killing. Every day we wait to hear if they are alive, if they have been incinerated or shot.

When asked if MFAT could support humanitarian visa pathways if they were opened Johnathan Kerr responded that MFAT’S ability to support a humanitarian visa depended on the day-to-day goal posts that Israel keeps shifting. He explained that there was a wide spectrum on what that support could look like, and it depended on the specific circumstances, so MFAT could not readily answer it. 

Johnathan was fair and clear. However, the continual comparison of Israel and Palestine is devastatingly disrespectful, referring to “all civilians” and “all communities” ignoring that the daily civilian kill count is of Palestinians only. MFAT compares the suffering of the aggressor and the victim together.

We don’t want to continue to hear the meaningless platitudes designed to protect the Government and Ministers from criticism, about the ‘catastrophic and complex situation’, or as Ms Stanford describes a ‘difficult situation’. It is painful to keep hearing that the Minister feels for the community, yet she is always too busy to meet with us.  

Winston Peters has been more direct and said that he doesn’t have time. Yet they have time to meet with Israeli Jewish and Zionist community representatives, but there is no time for Palestinians or Jews. 

Perhaps this Government should remember that their international obligations, New Zealand’s support for international law and humanitarian law, and their role as representatives of the people of New Zealand trump their foreign policy desires to follow America and Israel.

What this committee process clearly echoed is that some people are more worthy than others, that in some conflicts human rights and lives are paramount, but not in all. 

We will see if Palestinian lives are worthy of the same passionate and principled support and care. It’s time for some honest answers.

Katrina is a Palestinian New Zealander and Activist