Government must condemn genocide in Gaza
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa is part of the organising group for this rally at parliament today.
As Israel’s rampage of indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza rolls on our new government has refused to utter even a single syllable of criticism of their actions despite heavily condemning the killing of Israeli civilians on October 7th.
The lives of Israeli civilians mean much more to the new government than the lives of Palestinian civilians.
Israel has now slaughtered over 10,000 children and infants according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor – the equivalent of all the children in 36 average sized New Zealand primary schools.
Mr Peters is unmoved.
Instead, he told diplomats yesterday he wants New Zealand to cosy up even closer to the US – the chief enabler of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Winston Peters is a liability to any sense of this country having self-respect or independence in our foreign policy.
He is set to be the first New Zealand Foreign Minister in all of our history to refuse to condemn a genocide taking place before the eyes of the world.
Sigh!
The sure indicator of a lost cause is support by John Minto.
It’s war and sadly civilians get caught in the crossfire, especially if one side hides behind women & children. Let’s not forget that the inhabitants of Gaza voted Hamas into office, just like Germans voted Hitler into power. This is their Dresden.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
H. L. Mencken
Hamas received 44% of the vote and that was in 2006. At least half of the population probably weren’t born or sure as hell didn’t vote. Why don’t you actually take a look before you make such judgments.
Germany invaded huge parts of Europe and attacked Great Britain so what sort of a comparison is a bunch of Israeli land thieves bombing fleeing civilians who haven’t invaded anyone. I don’t think fire bombing Dresden is anything to brag about either.
100% correct
Yes Andrew. That would seem to be justification for the slaughter. FFS idiot. Half the population weren’t even born when Hamas came to power.
I’ll lock you in the toilet and party in the rest of your house and when the neighbours throw in an AK – you’d throw it back out for fear of being flushed piece by piece down the dunny – cuck.
Andrew, that didn’t fail to disgust.
The comment above by “Andrew” is amoral, cynical and nasty. TDB needs to reconsider its policy of allowing anonymous comments which give people like “Andrew” freedom to preach hatred with impunity.
But let’s be clear. The bombing of Dresden was evil. The bombing of Hiroshima was likewise evil. The bombing of Gaza is evil.
Arthur “Bomber” Harris tried to justify the Dresden bombing by saying “the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany … the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.” Harris also is on record as saying that “the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand” and that “one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn” would solve the problem of Arab resistance to British rule.
Harris was being more honest than the IDF and its apologists, who follow the same genocidal strategy against the Arabs while claiming to be trying to avoid civilian casualties. Absolute nonsense. As was the case with Harris, the intention is to maximize civilian casualties and the destruction of civil infrastructure.
In one respect however the bombing of Gaza is worse than the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima because in Gaza the State of Israel is the aggressor, clear and simple. What happened on October 7 has nothing to do with it, because for decades the State of Israel has been seeking to starve the people of Gaza into submission. When that strategy was seen to have failed on 7 October, the State of Israel turned its attention to slaughtering the civilian population of Gaza with high explosives, and the Realm of New Zealand signaled its approval of the slaughter.
Which brings me to the main point. There is not much we can do to save the people of Gaza. We can however to bring an end to colonialist rule in Aotearoa, which has been complicit in the Gaza atrocity and in other crimes against humanity around the world and throughout the decades. We should never forget that in 1873 a New Zealand Premier contemplated a war of extermination against our own people that would have been conducted in a similar manner to the war on Gaza.
Now is the time to emphatically reject British sovereignty and the evils perpetrated by the colonialist regime and to restore rangatiratanga and mana motuhake to the people of Aotearoa.
Eisenhower ordered and exercised the final authorisation of the Dresden bombings, not Harris. It was a joint Allied operation.
Dresden was a highly militarised hub and essential to logistical troop and armament support and movement through Germany both N and S and to the east in particular to support the Nazi efforts on the eastern Russian front.
Dresden bombing was indeed brutal and escalatory but not without precedent, notably by both Cologne and Hamburg operations that preceded it. Not to forget the Luftwaffe’s operation’s on Coventry and London.
I am not concerned with who authorised the bombing of Dresden, but with the terrorist ideology propagated in this case by Air Marshal Harris, the man who conducted bombing campaigns for the British empire from the time of the First World War until the end of the Second. Harris said he did not need a military rationale. His object was to kill civilians and to destroy civil infrastructure on a mass scale, as is being done in Gaza at this very moment. The ideology of terrorism must be denounced, regardless of whether it is articulated by Islamists, the British, American, Israeli or New Zealand governments, “Andrew” in this thread or any other player.
After WWII the US sort to replace the British Empire as the world hegemon. Key to imperialist power in the modern world is control of the oil fields and resources of the Middle East. Even when Britain was under direct threat from German invasion The British Empire’s expeditionary empire forces from Canada Australia Britain and NZ were concentrated to fighting the German and Italian imperialist armies for control of North Africa and the Middle East.
After the global defeat of German Italian and Japanese Imperialism the victorious imperialist competed with each other for control of the spoils of war. Chief among these was control of the Middle East.
The state of Israel was founded after WWII with the connivance of the US who were trying to form a counterweight to the British Empire which at the end of the war was the dominant colonial power in the Middle East.
At the end of the war displaced Jewish refugees favoured destination was America. As well as making it hard for displaced persons to enter the US. The US authorities gave Zionists access to the refugee camps in their zone of control in Europe to gather recruits to go to Palestine. The British imperialists tried to resist the founding of the state of Israel and interned the Jewish refugees that the US had incited to go to Israel on the island of Cypress.
The Zionists have always been a proxy force for American imperialism in the Middle East.
The last gasp of the British Empire was the Suez Crisis. After that the US became the dominant Western imperialist power in the region. Israel became US colonialist unsinkable aircraft carrier threatening any Arabic country that opposed US domination of the region.
“just like Germans voted Hitler into power.”
– “Andrew”
Bullshit.
The German public never voted Hitler into power. Eventually his party managed to become the largest single party in the German parliament but never his nor any other commanded outright majority nor attracted enough coalition partnership to govern.
In early 1932 Hitler was appointed Chancellor by German President Hindenburg and military elites who thought they could control Hitler. Hitler then seized emergency powers and immediately proceeded to dismantle democratic processes and institutions to create a single party state.
Know your history.
“Andrew” raises the philosophical and moral question of whether people can be held responsible for the actions of their government. He, and the Israeli President Isaac Herzog believe that they can be, and furthermore that they may be held liable with their lives. To Herzog it is immaterial whether the government in question is democratic or despotic. If it is democratic, then the people are responsible because the people voted that government into office. If it is despotic, then the people are responsible because they failed to rise up and overthrow the despot. It is no coincidence that this is also the argument of terrorist. “Terrorism” is violence directed against the civilian population and the terrorist justifies his action on the grounds that the people must be complicit in the actions of their government and its security forces.
However there are a number of problems with Herzog’s reasoning. First his argument that the people of Gaza should have staged an uprising against the elected Hamas government takes us into dangerous territory. If the people are not only justified in but obligated to overthrow a democratically elected government which is seen to behave badly then no democratic government in the western world, including the State of Israel, could claim a defence of legitimacy in the face of a violent insurrection. There would be no settled order. Anyone and everyone could be morally compelled to overthrow the government of the day.
Second, it is not at all clear how citizens can be responsible for the actions of their government, even in the so-called democracies of the west. One can only be responsible for the actions of others (including governments) if one instructed or incited them to them to act in a certain way, or if one negligently failed to prevent them committing a criminal act when one had the means to do so. However the citizen in a democracy, no less than the citizen in a dictatorship, has no legal means controlling the actions of a government once that government has been voted into power. The citizen may petition the government (which includes demonstration, protest and so on) but cannot direct it. Furthermore, if the responsibility of the citizen derives from voting for the offending government, then it is only those who actually voted for that specific government who can be held in some way morally accountable for its actions. But who those guilty citizens may be we have no way of knowing when the ballot is held in secret as it is in virtually every modern “democracy”. It make no moral sense to punish the innocent who voted against a malevolent government along with the guilty who voted for it. Then what of the well meaning ones who were deceived into voting for a malevolent government by false promises and protestations? Should they also pay for their credulity with their lives?
No, there is no reason to Isaac Herzog’s argument, anymore than when that same argument comes from the mouth of an Islamic terrorist.
However, many of us will still feel in our hearts that citizens should in some way be held accountable for the actions of their governments. We feel that even if Herzog is wrong, in a properly organised world he would be right, and that would be fair comment. In a just world, the citizens of Israel, United States and New Zealand would be able to compel their governments to desist from acts of genocide. They would be able to over rule their governments at any time. They would also be able to avoid individual culpability by pointing to the way in which they used their vote. But most clearly people need to be allowed control over their governments before they can be held responsible for the actions of those governments, and the whole system of western “democracy” needs to be radically reformed before we can arrive at that point.
If nothing else, the genocide in Gaza should tell us that we can no longer suffer or condone the pseudo-democracy of the western states. At the very least we must move to the open ballot and a system of continuous election if the world is to avert further or even greater horrors.
Every single state in the world has a positive duty to intervene to prevent the Genocide in Gaza now, not after a court has reached a determination of genocide.
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/11/craig-murray-stopping-genocide/
The killing is not indiscriminate. Children are targeted because they will be the next generation of Hamas fighters. Women are targeted because they will produce the following generation of Hamas fighters. The State of Israel knows what it is doing, and Mr Peters understands what it is doing. So do Mr Luxon and Mr Seymour. However bombing and artillery barrages are an expensive way of taking human lives, and the focus will soon shift to starvation and disease as cheaper and more effective ways of reducing the Arab population to the point where they can be driven out of Gaza altogether. When that happens the colonial regime in New Zealand will still have Israel’s back.
You can say that because Hamas uses them as human shields, children are being killed by the Israeli army as it goes after the terrorists. But to say that the Israelis are deliberately targeting children is something else again. It’s raw antisemitism – the old blood libel, “The Jews are murdering us Christian babies for their blood”.
You are confused Terry. The majority of the babies and children being killed by the IDF are from Muslim, not Christian families. They are being killed out of vengeance, but more importantly because Israel needs to kill as many Arabs as possible if it is achieve its object of turning Gaza into a “paradise”, which by definition means a territory from which Arabs are completely absent. Hamas does not use Palestinian civilians as human shields for the simple reason that they know, as the whole world knows, that the IDF has no scruples about killing Palestinian civilians en masse or even Jewish civilians if it comes to that. So it is nonsense to talk about Hamas using civilians as human shields.
The Zionists uses them [Israeli citizens and settlers] as human shields by encouraging them to settle in the occupied territories and on stolen land hard up to the Gaza barrier and war zone, one baby was killed, [not ten babies were beheaded] by Hamas fighters as they went after the IDF. But to say that the Hamas deliberately targeted children is something else again. It’s raw antisemitism – the old blood libel, [Palestinians are Semites*] “They are murdering us Israeli babies for their blood”.
There ya’go Terry Coggan, fixed it for ya.
No don’t thank me.
*Semites
Oxford Dictionary Quick Reference
A member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs. The name comes via Latin from Greek Sēm ‘Shem’, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom these people were traditionally supposed to be descended.
From: Semite in The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable »
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100454199
Related content in Oxford Dictionary
Reference entries
Semite
in A Dictionary of World History (2)
Length: 22 words
Semites
in World Encyclopedia
Length: 42 words
Semites
in A Dictionary of the Bible (2)
Length: 87 words
To say that hostility to Arabs is also antisemitism because of an ancient geographical origin common to them and Jews is just trite sophistry which evades the real issue. Antisemitism, or to give it a more accurate name, Jew-hatred, is not just another type of race prejudice. It has a unique character, integrally bound up with the decay of world capitalism. The most significant thing politically to emerge from the events of the past two months is the stark reminder that its deadly danger is not a thing of the past.
In the decades of prosperity following World War 2 it was widely assumed that there could not be another economic depression like that of the 1930s. “They” had learnt how to manage things. Similarly, it was assumed that so horrific had been the experience of the Holocaust that it could not possibly be repeated. We now know that the first assumption was baseless, and are coming to see that so was the second. And for the same reason: both economic crises and Jew-hatred are inevitable products of a historically moribund capitalism.
Antisemitism has been vital for the capitalist rulers because it provides them with a scapegoat. It’s not the capitalist system that at fault: Rather, powerful Jewish bankers control the world’s financial organisations and actually profit from economic turmoil while honest working people are thrown into unemployment and destitution; Jewish agitators have been behind every major political upheaval in modern history; pandemic diseases somehow originate from “the Jewish bacillus”; and the Jews use their control of the media and influence in Hollywood to cover up these truths. From this analysis flows the conclusion that society’s problems can be fixed if their root cause, the Jews, are removed from the scene.
That was Hitler’s weltanschauung. But Jew-hatred, if it is allowed to grow, can again fuel and be fuelled by the growth of fascist currents that will inevitably emerge as the word crisis of capitalism deepens, and which will be turned to by the capitalists to save their system, as happened in in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Jews won’t be the only targets of the fascists. That’s why it is so important for the workers movement and other progressive forces to recognise and be prepared to fight the special danger of antisemitism. We have seen warning signs in various places recently: in Dagestan where a mob attacked passengers in a plane just because they were Jews; in the US and Europe where Jewish shops and restaurants whose owners had nothing to do with events in the Middle East were harassed; in New Zealand where school students of Jewish heritage have been taunted; and among some elements on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, who chant “Gas the Jews” and similar slogans. And of course Jew-hatred in all its malignant manifestations is there for all to see in the founding charter of Hamas, a document that has never been rescinded and which was acted upon on October 7.
And that offensive genocidal racist Gaby moans about the natural demographic increase and high birthrate of the Palestinian people, implying that the Palestinian population need to be culled before they outnumber the Israeli colonists.
In an echo of the Holocaust, Israel forces are experimenting in gassing the Palestinians.
As well as flooding the tunnels under Gaza with seawater to drown the inhabitants and contaminating the ground water, Israel is reported to be experimenting in using tear gas in the tunnels and decompression weapons to suck out the air. As well as demonstrating that Israel has little concern for the hostages, in the confines of a tunnel by displacing the air with tear gas or removing it with decompression weapons is as deadly as phosgene.
The first ever genuine collateral killing of civilians in Gaza.
IDF soldiers have shot and killed three unarmed and defenceless Israeli hostages. Now everybody knows what IDF do when they come upon genuine unarmed Palestinian civilians.
Despite all the Israeli lies that they are not targeting civilians, and American hand wringing over the fact that they obviously are, it is abundantly clear to the whole world that Israel are waging a war of extermination in Gaza, Israel’s goal is to expel or murder everybody in Gaza, this is the definition of genocide.