“In war, truth is the first casualty”, so wrote the Greek dramatist Aeschylus around 500 BC. Experience has shown us that lies precede wars in order to facilitate them. As war rages, misleading propaganda accompanies the slaughter to render it tolerable and after, when war is won, lost or in abeyance, there are fresh lies to cover the criminal acts of the perpetrators.
While issuing statements affirming the unacceptability of Israeli settlement expansion, it has become fashionable for governments and UN institutions to also condemn what they describe as Palestinian ‘incitement’.
Zionist sympathisers make use of ideological myths and unjustifiable assumptions that attempt to exempt Israel from its obligations under international humanitarian law.
A recently-aired documentary by Al Jazeera, ‘The Lobby’, reveals the Israeli Embassy’s furtive dealings with British parliamentarians and political parties. It took a Middle East news channel to expose the extraordinary lengths to which Israel and its supporters will go to bury the truth and control minds, when neither the British security services nor news media were onto it.
The assertion by Juliet Moses on 6 January in the New Zealand Herald article, Israel vote was an affront to all New Zealanders, echoes the arrogance of Zionism’s unjustifiable claim to speak and act on behalf of all Jews.
On Saturday, 24 December 2016, the New Zealand Government issued a Press Release, NZ welcomes UN resolution on Middle East Peace Process, in which Foreign Minister Murray McCully announced that, “New Zealand voted for and co-sponsored the resolution because it is consistent with long-held New Zealand policy positions on the Palestinian question”.
UNICEF frequently reports widespread, systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli Army, with armed soldiers seizing children as young as 11 years and taking them prisoner. Palestinian homes, even in UN refugee camps, can offer no security for terrified children, who are dragged from their homes, often in the middle of the night.
As Israeli Gaza ceasefire violations this year top 1,000, the International Criminal Court (ICC) exposes the “scope and degree of control” that the military Occupation exercises over Gaza.
From 29 May 29 to 1 June 2016, more than 50 New Zealand business people, led by Spark CEO Simon Moutter, were guests at a trade mission in Israel, organised by the Israel Trade Commission and Trans-Tasman Business Circle. Described as the ‘innovation mission’, the purpose was to encourage collaboration between the governments of Israel and New Zealand and their respective business interests.
New Zealand has historically tended to follow in the footsteps of Britain, the US and other Western powers (the best and most honourable exception being our anti-nuclear policy) and it is no surprise, therefore, that our country supported the imposition of Zionist control over the Palestinian homeland through partitioning and colonisation.