Asia Pacific Report
The Free Palestine Party has condemned the New Zealand government for its “shameful” failure to walk out of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the UN last month — as more than 70 protesting countries did — claiming it made New Zealand complicit in genocide.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” a party statement said citing a famous quote often used to describe the rise of fascism in Germany.
“It could be used in today’s world to describe what is happening with the Holocaust in Gaza and the Palestinian occupied Territories, and the attacks on Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, to name but a few,” the party said.
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“Except New Zealand doesn’t have good men in government — it has greedy, gutless, small-minded men,” the statement added.
The party said the New Zealand government’s “lack of a spine or any sort of independent foreign policy” meant that the country was “actively assisting this evil arising in the world”.
The NZ government maintained its alliances through the Five Eyes, ANZUS, and many other security arrangements with the US, which “makes us complicit in the Holocaust in Palestine and illegal attacks on Iran”.
New Zealand’s armed forces had participated in military exercises with the “genocidal forces of Israel”, in combined military exercises during the ongoing genocide (RIMPAC June-August 2024), said the Free Palestine Party.
40 NZ troops in Middle East
Currently 40 New Zealand Defence Force personnel were deployed in the Middle East, with 20 of these personnel stationed in Bahrain working for the combined maritime forces of the US Navy Central Command.
The New Zealand government “doubled down on its lack of an independent foreign policy in its gutless reaction to Trump’s speech at the UN, where [he] threatened to annihilate the entire civilisation of Iran in a veiled threat to use the US’s vast nuclear arsenal”, the party statement said.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ response to this threat by a country that had the capacity to carry out the biggest genocide in world history was “that is unhelpful”.
An independent foreign policy and getting out of all military alliances and security arrangements with the US and Western powers is a key platform point of the Free Palestine Party for New Zealand’s general election on November 7.
“Having these military and security arrangements makes New Zealand a mere vassal of the US and Western Europe,” the party said.
“To break with New Zealand’s imperial and colonial past, it must forge a new independent foreign policy, one that will allow us to take a moral stance and cut off all ties to the apartheid state of Israel and to sanction all economic activity with it.”
NZ military ties with US
The party cited the ties between the New Zealand military and government and the US that “New Zealanders may be unaware of”:
Joint Commercial Operations: Auckland hosts a global tracking and monitoring hub for this network, which integrates commercial satellite data for military and intelligence commands.
Operation Olympic Defender, designed to strengthen space dominance, has an embedded military officer at the US space command in Colorado Springs.
Artemis Accords, space cooperation with the US.
Project Arcadia, US Battlefield shared command AI system.
Project Convergence, rapid data sharing and automated targeting.
Combined Joint All-Dominance Command and Control, overarching US mega network targeting and tactical integration.
Wideband Global SATCOM network, Pentagon military satellite communications, New Zealand to help fund with the $24 million Partnership for Indo-Pacific industrial resilience, military supply chain defence cooperation.
