COMMENTARY: By Murray Horton
New Zealand needs to get tough with Israel. It’s not as if we haven’t done so before.
When NZ authorities busted a Mossad operation in Auckland 20 years ago, the government didn’t say: “Oh well, Israel has the right to defend itself.”
No, it arrested, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned and deported the Israeli agents, plus made them pay a big sum of damages. And it refused to restore normal diplomatic relations with Israel until Israel apologised to NZ. Which Israel did.
Today’s government needs to treat Israel the same way it treats other aggressors, like Russia, with the likes of sanctions.
And the government needs to designate Zionism as an inherently racist, terrorist ideology.
Everyone knows that the Gaza War would stop in five minutes if the US stopped arming Israel to the teeth and allowing it to commit genocide with impunity.
Israel is the mass murderer; the US is the enabler of mass murder.
New Zealand is part of the US Empire. The most useful thing we could do is to sever our ties to that empire, something we bravely started in the 1980s with the nuclear-free policy. Also, do these things:
- Develop a genuinely independent foreign policy;
- Get out of US wars, like the one in the Red Sea and Yemen;
- Get out of the Five Eyes spy alliance;
- Close the Waihopai spy base and the GCSB, the NZ agency which runs it;
- Kick out Rocket Lab, NZ’s newest American military base;
- Stop the process of getting entangled with NATO; and
- Stay out of AUKUS, which is simply building an alliance to fight a war with China.
I never thought I’d find myself on the same side of an issue as Don Brash and Richard Prebble but even they have strongly opposed AUKUS.
Zionism is the enemy of the Palestinian people.
US imperialism is the enemy of the Palestinian people and the New Zealand people.
Murray Horton is secretary/organiser of the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) and gave this speech last Saturday to a Palestinian solidarity rally at the Bridge of Remembrance, Christchurch.
