Gaza and the Government: How to ‘grow a spine’ – Simon Wilson

Why won't Prime Minister Christopher Luxon agree to recognise Palestine as a state? Photo / Mark Mitchell / Getty Images

THE FACTS

• The Government has deferred a decision on whether to recognise Palestine as a state.
• Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick called on Govt MPs “with a spine” to back a Green Party bill to sanction Israel.
• The war in Gaza is said to have killed 65,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

Last Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 223 people were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Seventy-five people were shot trying to get aid. Thirteen died of malnutrition. It’s now day 673 of Israel’s war on Gaza.

So far, says the Gaza Health Ministry, 65,000 people have died. The UN says the entire population of more than two million faces starvation.

About 270 journalists have been killed, says Al Jazeera, some apparently targeted. It’s not that the lives of journalists are more important than the lives of anyone else, but the war on journalists is a war on information getting to the world.

Such bravery. The Costs of War project says more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia and the US war in Afghanistan combined.

A funeral last week in Gaza City for journalists killed in an Israeli strike. Photo / Saher Alghorra / New York Times

Australia, Britain, France, Canada and more than 140 other countries have now recognised Palestine as a state, or announced they will do so.

New Zealand has not. I don’t believe this reluctance stems from some softly, softly diplomatic strategy. On the contrary, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost the plot”.

So why has the Government not joined with most of the rest of the world in recognising Palestine? Perhaps the strongest opposition to doing this has been voiced by Act MP Simon Court. Is that party calling the shots?

More questions. Is Israel committing genocide? Is it using famine deliberately as a weapon of war? Even if you don’t want to go that far, the horror is real.

While precision strikes are widely used against Hamas targets, the larger reality is that whole cities and towns are being annihilated. Beyond the campaign to eliminate Hamas terrorists, this is a war on a massive scale on a civilian population.

To me, this makes the Government’s inability to line up in defence of the people of Gaza a catastrophic moral failure. I assume New Zealanders who’ve been protesting weekly, across the country, would agree.

And, as Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick implied when she talked of needing to find coalition MPs “with a spine”, it is a failure of our own democracy.

I want to come back to Gaza, but first I want to look at what the impasse means for the authority of the Government and the future of MMP.

Isn’t it time for Parliament to grow a spine?

Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick speaking in Parliament during a debate on Palestine. Photo / Screengrab via Parliament TV

New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional representation system has been evolving for 29 years. For much of the time, the major parties have formed a succession of minority governments, with confidence-and-supply agreements from minor parties.

In 2005, for example, Labour’s Helen Clark needed the support of the Greens and NZ First, so had to create policies that were acceptable to both.

In 2008, John Key’s National Party won 58 seats, just short of a majority. All he needed to govern was support from either Act or the Māori Party, both of which had five seats. Cleverly, he didn’t choose one over the other but governed by toggling between them.

He didn’t have to agree to anything Act said, if the Māori Party supported him, and vice versa. This arrangement powerfully reinforced his political appeal as a centrist.

Labour’s Dame Jacinda Ardern, following him, found herself in a formal coalition with NZ First and the Greens. Policy agreements hammered out in coalition talks had to be honoured. Largely, though, it was the minor parties that had to swallow each other’s dead rats. Labour was less compromised.

In 2023, this changed again. Luxon arrived in Government with a pair of indestructible stone tablets hanging round his neck. Each contained a long list and ticking off those lists – the policy goals of Act and NZ First – has often seemed to be his main job.

The consequences have been ludicrous and damaging. The divisiveness of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, Shane Jones’ cheerleading for the fossil-fuel industry and NZ First’s culture-war barrage have undermined us socially, environmentally and economically.

But they have also undermined Luxon. Critics accuse him of inept and weak leadership, and he may find that impossible to shake off.

Prime Minister Christoper Luxon, in the foreign policy pool with Winston Peters and Judith Collins. Illustration / Rod Emmerson

The situation is now so absurd, the Prime Minister seems unable to wrest the lead away from Seymour on Gaza, even though the issue has nothing to do with their coalition agreement.

On this as on so much else, he seems traumatised, a proverbially trapped possum with the twin headlights of his minor partners’ truck close to running him over.

Is there a lesson to learn? The obvious one is that shopping-list coalition agreements are a blight on good government.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is. It’s called Parliament. From time to time, the major parties have agreed to agree and have passed good laws as a result.

This famously happened in 2007, when Labour and National supported Green Party MP Sue Bradford’s Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill, more commonly known as the anti-smacking law. Because of Parliament, decency prevailed.

Isn’t that the model for progress now? Parliament could agree to recognise Palestine, thus lining up with the pre-eminent diplomatic effort to end the war in Gaza.

What else could National propose, with support from Labour, to escape the tail-wags-dog mess it’s mired in now? Legislative respect for te ao Māori, which National used to understand quite deeply, would be a good place to start.

Meanwhile, people die every day in Gaza. And, incredibly, a recent poll found that almost 80% of Jewish Israelis believe Israel is making an effort to avoid causing suffering in Gaza.

But the tide may be turning in America. A recent Gallup poll found support for Israel’s war has fallen from 42% a year ago to 32% now. That’s the lowest it’s been since the war began, after Hamas’ horrifying attack on October 7, 2023, which claimed about 1200 lives.

And 52% of Americans view Netanyahu unfavourably. That’s his worst rating since 1997, the year after he first came to power.

Luxon isn’t going to wait until it’s just him and maybe Donald Trump holding out, is he?

Eighty years ago, over consecutive nights in February 1945, Allied bombers dropped 4000 tonnes of explosives and incendiary devices on Dresden, Germany. The bombs and the raging infernos they ignited killed 25,000 people, nearly all of them civilians.

The next month, the same thing was done to Tokyo, this time killing 100,000 civilians. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August escalated the terror twice more.

A protest in Gisborne against Israel's war on Gaza earlier this month, one of many that have been across the country. Photo / Gisborne Herald

After the war, the world adopted the Geneva Conventions, which, it was hoped, would prevent such horrors happening again. War crimes became a thing.

Democracy bombed those cities. No one was ever charged with war crimes, although we know now those bombings were wrong. Their purpose was to end the war, but in all four cities they were wildly out of scale with that purpose.

Just as it is out of scale in Gaza. In the same way, we know the war on the people of Gaza is wrong too.

We can’t make peace happen, but we can support those who might be able to.