When genocide defenders visit

J-Wire is reporting that Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskell will slip into Auckland this weekend, quietly as a thief in the night. Winston Peters has been known to set his diplomatic encounters to music, but not this one.

If you’re not familiar with Heskell, here is her calling card.

Recall that this week’s Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice unanimously found that:

the State of Israel, as an occupying Power, is required to fulfil its obligations under international humanitarian law. These obligations include the following: … to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services.

Now watch as Haskell calmly justifies bombing the Al Shifa and Nasser hospitals in Gaza.

Our government makes threadbare comments about law and humanitarian concern. Then they issue a visa to a front-row proponent of Israel’s genocide. Token words, followed by acts of complicity and permission.

And what will Israel’s genocide defender be doing in Aotearoa? According to J-Wire, she will be shoring up business ties with anyone willing to forget that on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice admonished all states not to normalise, support or perpetuate Israel’s illegal occupation.

The profitable business ties that Heskell seeks are precisely those that the court has told us to end. Heskell’s visa mocks the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who have taken to the streets for law and justice.

To our disgust, she will also be bolstering Israel’s ties with the Zionist-Jewish community. Every one of our Jewish institutions has failed to condemn Israel’s genocide and call for Israel’s accountability. They have failed to value non-Jewish lives. For any Jewish institution to invite or interact with a minister of the Israeli government (whose leaders are wanted for genocide) is a Shonda – a shame of scandalous proportions.

We are a collective of Jewish New Zealanders from the Far North to Dunedin. On the day that Israel elected a pack of butchers, the tone of our statements changed. Israel’s current government did not represent a new direction of travel, but it manifestly did represent an escalation of the violent madness that has rampaged through occupied Palestine for more than two years. Our world has been altered by the experience of witnessing slaughter while being governed by its accomplices.

We reject utterly the boards, the decision-makers of Jewish institutions who have stayed silent and passive through two years of annihilation. We need new institutions.

The same goes for a government that mumbles about the rights of human beings and the laws of states while carrying on normal diplomatic and economic relations with the state of Israel. If we want that to change, we must change our government.

Sanction Israel. Suspend normal relations. Support war crimes investigations.

Recognise the state of Palestine. Demand the immediate, sufficient and unimpeded provision of humanitarian supplies by the UN and NGOs.

End the illegal occupation which is the cause of this carnage.

Alternative Jewish Voices