Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour and Foreign Minister Winston Peters weigh in on developments in a possible Israel-Hamas peace plan. Video / Mark Mitchell
THE FACTS
Foreign Minister Winston Peters supports the US approach to peace in Gaza, emphasising a formal Cabinet process.
Cabinet’s position aligns with international law and is shared by countries like Germany and Japan, Matthew Hooton argues.
Donald Trump’s peace plan involves indirect negotiations in Egypt, backed by major global powers and regional players.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has been proven fully justified in backing the US’ approach to bringing peace to Gaza.
Despite his own Prime Minister initially said to be gung-ho about recognising a Palestinian state, Peters insisted on a formal Cabinet process, with NZ First, Act and Defence MinisterJudith Collins prevailing.
It’s highly unusual for a Prime Minister’s views on such matters not to be decisive, but Christopher Luxon may have more immediate worries.
In any case, it was a line-call. Other countries unorthodoxly recognising a state without control of territory and governed, if at all, by the terrorist group Hamas and the corrupt Fatah movement probably helped raise alarm in Israel that international support is slipping away. The killing of 67,000 Palestinians out of Gaza’s population of 2.1 million, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory, demands the toughest diplomatic response.
Peters’ position as adopted by Cabinet is consistent with international law and historical convention. It is shared by perfectly respectable countries, including Singapore, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and of course Germany, which sees ensuring Israel’s survival as one of the justifications for its own existence as a state after it murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust.
Nothing about the current situation – including the savagery of Israel’s response to attacks – can be understood except in the context of the trauma of the Holocaust and the nearly 2000 years of anti-Semitic persecution and violence preceding it, and which continues, including in New Zealand.
It bears repeating: even without the trauma of 2000 years of anti-Semitic violence, contemporary New Zealanders would surely demand the total destruction of the governing authorities and military capability of any smaller neighbouring regime that raped and murdered hundreds of young Kiwis at Rhythm & Vines and nearby communities.
How concerned would we really be about civilian casualties in pursuit of that goal? Hopefully we’ll never need to find out.
It isn’t a question of genocide. If that word is applied to Israel’s operations in Gaza, then another must be found to describe events such as the Holocaust, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields in the 1970s and the 1994 slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda.
After Hamas raped, murdered, mutilated or kidnapped more than 360 young Israelis at a music festival and hundreds of others two years ago this week, US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan turns out to be the best prospect of ending the slaughter.
Trump already has a record of success in the Middle East, with his Abraham Accords in 2020 normalising relations between Israel and the UAE, Morocco and later Sudan.
Extraordinarily, his Gaza plan sees Israel, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad negotiating indirectly in Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh beach resort this week. The process is backed by all the world’s other great powers, China, India and the EU, as well as the main players in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and the world’s most populous Muslim states, Indonesia and Pakistan.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is so intractable that perhaps only someone as unorthodox and unpredictable as Trump can resolve it. Despite earlier positioning Gaza as a real-estate opportunity, the former property developer seems capable of appreciating it is more about deep-seated resentments from centuries of real and perceived persecutions, perhaps consistent with his own experience of being looked down upon by New York’s establishment for hailing from Queens.
Even the world’s biggest Trump haters will have to concede that, if he pulls off a deal ending the current war, he will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he craves.
Among those haters are Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick and assorted C-list celebrities who have made Gaza their cause célèbre.
President Donald Trump looks over at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel during a dinner at the White House. Photo / Haiyun Jiang, The New York Times
It’s always difficult to know what truly motivates us, but compared with what they believe is the existential threat to humankind from rising temperatures, it’s odd that Gaza has become the primary concern of so many former climate activists. People can walk and chew gum at the same time, but Swarbrick’s primary mission seems to have been completely overwhelmed.
Gaza may not even be the worst slaughter under way in the world today, as civilians in war-torn regions of Sudan, Yemen or even Congo, Rwanda, Haiti, Nigeria and Myanmar might attest, or young Ukrainians and Russians dying on the front line in Luhansk and Donetsk.
When Swarbrick and others chant ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they surely know that both Jews and Palestinians understand it as meaning much more than the literal words
Pondering anti-Semitism’s endurance over millennia, Australian sociologist John Carroll suggests human beings “have little understanding of the rivers of subconscious, ancient collective memory that flow on and on through a culture, influencing the present”. He writes of “tremors of prejudice echoing from the long-distant past, like the shadow of Shakespeare’s Shylock, surfacing occasionally [as] twitches of blind reflex, attraction and repulsion that feed into current passions”.
The first pogroms against Jews were as early as 38 CE, soon after the death of Christ, in Alexandria in Egypt. Perhaps a quarter of Jews in Judaea were killed in the first Jewish-Roman War less than 50 years later, and anti-Semitic laws, wars and murders have continued ever since throughout Europe and the Middle East. Historically, Jews have been expelled from living in England, France, Spain and Portugal, among other countries.
They were blamed and killed for Europe’s Black Death of 1348-1351, which was probably brought by the Mongolians. As well as being branded Christ-killers and plague-spreaders, Jews have been expelled and killed for allegedly drinking the blood of Christian babies, poisoning wells, lending money for interest, operating as fifth columnists and being alien or even subhuman.
When Swarbrick and others chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they surely know that both Jews and Palestinians understand it as meaning much more than the literal words. If they are truly unaware the slogan is experienced by Jews as demanding their expulsion, subjugation or extermination, they lack both political and moral sophistication.
Campaigning against Israel’s actions in Gaza is entirely legitimate and justifiable. But to think the attention it attracts is entirely unrelated to 2000 years of anti-Semitism, you must believe something like this: that, for nearly 1950 years, anti-Semitism meant people in Europe and the Middle East hated the Jews without justification. Now, over the last 75 years, people in Europe and the Middle East have sufficiently progressed to no longer be anti-Semitic. Yet, by strange coincidence, over those same 75 years, the Jews have provided legitimate reasons to hate their state and them.
A genuinely reflective person considering how far to go in protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza might ask themselves the extent to which Carroll’s suggestion risks applying to them. Those throwing bricks through windows would certainly benefit from studying the unfortunate parallel between their actions and Kristallnacht in 1938.
Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland. He visited Israel and Palestine in 2017 as a guest of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
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