The world’s major news outlets now carry video of Israeli soldiers raping prisoners, kicking bodies off rooftops, decimating Gaza’s centres of learning and culture, and bombing humanitarian ‘safe’ spaces. Israeli government ministers do not hide their desire to starve civilians. Lebanon reels from thousands of bomblets set to explode indiscriminately in civilian homes and shops. In January, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘plausibly’ genocidal. In July, the highest court in the United Nations system declared Israel’s presence in occupied Palestine unlawful and instructed governments to act—together and individually—to bring this illegal occupation to an end ‘as rapidly as possible’.
People, particularly young people, and a growing number of states are refusing the world that Israel’s conduct shows them: a world entirely without civilian protections, where power does whatever comes into its warmongering head. A world where nothing is safe. This week 124 UN member states, including Aotearoa, chose the law over that abysmal vision. They voted to require Israel to leave the territories where its presence is unlawful.
Four pro-occupation responses to the UN vote show us what has and has not changed at the Zionist intersection of Aotearoa. A statement of 65 Christian church ministers reminds us that most Zionists are Christian. These church ministers ‘support the right of the Jewish State of Israel to protect its homeland’, without according any rights to Palestinians. Their stance explicitly contradicts the ICJ’s opinion that Israel’s self-declared security ambitions do not justify its illegal actions.
Explaining Aotearoa’s vote to uphold that ICJ opinion, Foreign Minister Winston Peters declared, ‘That advisory opinion aligns with New Zealand’s long-standing view that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful.’
The Israel Institute, a majority-Christian business entity, knows better. They claim that we and 124 UN member states are practising ‘diplomatic terrorism’.
The ‘Indigenous Embassy’, led by a Christian former director of the Israel Institute (and partner of a current director) is racially incendiary. It condemns the United Nations’ ‘expulsion of the Jewish people’, an evocative and wholly inappropriate phrase. Rather than upholding international law and the right of Indigenous Palestinians to self-determination, the statement claims that the UN is ‘affirming Islamic imperialism’.
The Christian statements strain to imagine Israel’s occupation as a religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. It is not religious; it never was. We must not allow people like this to make it so.
After the firestarters, it’s almost nostalgic to read the NZ Jewish Council recycle its retro claims to other people’s land in terms that have not changed since the 1970s.
The NZ Jewish Council worries that nothing is required of Palestinians in exchange for upholding the law. They fret that telling Israel to remove its army, settlers and settlements from illegally occupied Palestine ‘removes any incentive for Palestinians to negotiate, end violence and seek peace’.
They either haven’t read, or they haven’t understood the ICJ. Illegal occupation is not an incentive. When your home is invaded, you are not required to negotiate with the invaders to kindly let you have the use of the garden shed.
The ICJ, and this action to uphold it, are not a negotiating ploy. Israel’s occupation needs to end. Its genocidal violence on illegally occupied land needs to end. That is not the end goal; it is the starting point. Withdrawal will not constitute peace; it constitutes the first step.
Then come the hard questions of a just co-existence. The hard questions follow—they do not precede—the cessation of Israel’s unlawful acts of occupation, apartheid, and withholding of Palestinian self-determination. When those have ended, two self-determining parties will face the future questions.
Times and technologies have changed. At last, belatedly, the instrument of law is being applied and 124 UN member states—including ours—are calling for it to be observed. Israel’s presence in occupied Palestinian space is unlawful and that illegality must end.
Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa
Sh'ma Koleinu - Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) 