The state of fascist Zionism continues its systematic extermination and social media is full of its supporters.

Thank you to this list from my friend Mike Huett on how to spot and combat hasbara trolls.

(Hasbara is the communications arm of Mossad, the Zionist state’s secret service and it has long tentacles employing trained journalists who work in the mainstream as well as social media influencers. Some — self included — turned down working on or off that toxic pay roll but others lap up and spit out the propaganda.)

• READ MORE: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to shift narratives in its favour
• Other hasbara reports

Typical hasbara “tell” signs:

1. Excessive and inappropriate use of the “laughing” emoji.
2. Calling people “retards”, or other derogatory terms based on assumed cognitive/intellectual ability.
3. Frequent attempts to avoid answering direct questions by way of irrelevant “whataboutery”, or other forms of deflection.
4. Frequent attempts to reframe Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, or violent attacks against other countries, as a religious war; Islam versus Judaism/Christianity.
5. Appeals to a mythological past with biblical claims to the land of Palestine; coupled with erasure of Palestine as an historically recognised place, and a similar denial of the existence of Palestinian people (instead labelling them as Arabs, or the “descendants” of Muslim invaders).
6. Accusing commentators who support Palestinians of being antisemitic, and even of being Nazis.
7. Mirroring the observations of critical commentators; e.g. if you point out their racism or support for genocide they will immediately accuse you of being racist or genocidal towards Israelis. “Mirroring” is a tactic used frequently.
8. If they do not like how you respond, do not be surprised if they comment, then block you — as if having the “last word”, is an achievement. Also, they frequently delete their offensive comments to make it appear you are ranting incoherently for no reason.

In my experience they will also unblock you and try to spring from your platform again and again.

Humanitarians defamed
One hasbara operative in New Zealand has defamed humanitarians I know (John Minto and MP Damien O’Connor). I proved he was doing this by contacting them directly and quoting his malicious quotes to them.

Of course, they were appalled. These are people who are supported by humanitarian Jews.

Presented with the facts, that man, who is influential in the entertainment/media industry did not retract.

He doubled down, equating anti-Zionism and anti-genocide with anti-semitism.

He is wrong. There was always a counter movement to Zionism. The Bund. Not all Jews believe that Jews should have a Jewish state. Zionism is a policy of supremacism, one group of people receiving more rights than another is never right.

In Israel, those who don’t submit to this policy are demonised, expelled, killed.

The right of return for Palestinians is a human right. Peace comes when you open the door rather than building apartheid behind a wall and invading other countries — Lebanon, Syria etc etc. The state of Zionism is expanding, it does not have borders.

Ignored background
Here is the background on what the social media influencers who are pro-genocide choose to ignore.

Controlling the narrative is the strategy of these predators. They fail to acknowledge the 1948 Nakba. Yes, the Nakba — the real start — long before October 7, 2023.

The Nakba is when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes under a British imperial policy to replace Palestinians with Jews. Yes Palestine was used by Britain as a holocaust refugee dumping ground for refugees Europe did not want.

The social media influencers who influence genocide ignore the thousands of Palestinians who were killed in massacres since 1948 (about 16,000). Women, men, children.

Murdered.

Yes, they ignore the tens of thousands killed in the decades since the establishment of a Zionist state in 1948.

The social media influencers for genocide who operate for the Mossad (hasbara) ignore the massacre in Qibya in 1953, when 69 Palestinians were murdered.

They ignore the massacre in Khan Yunis in 1956 when more than 275 Palestinias were murdered.

Colonialism on steroids
They ignore the massacre in Rafah in 1956 when more than 111 people were murdered. Women. Men. Children. Little children.

They ignore the way the Zionist state — a state of colonialism on steroids — enabled the genocide of Palestinians in the the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

More than 3000 Palestinians sheltering, seeking refuge in Lebanon were slaughtered.

The mercenary Israeli army shone the lights on that genocide. Literally.

Many Zionists hold two passports, their get-out card is the US. US emigration to the Zionist state is massive. But this is ignored. The genociders are aided by the US. They are predators. They are invaders. They are lethal.

I went to Is-hell as a starry-eyed kibbutznik and I witnessed the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese were killed. I remember an Israeli commenting that if so many people had not been against that invasion “we would probably have invaded Turkey by now”.

The social media influencers who work for Mossad ignore the fact that 2000 Palestinians were killed during the first Intifada 1987–1993.

They ignore about 3300 Palestinians killed during the Second Intifada (2000–2005).

Subsequent invasions
They ignore the subsequent invasions and murders during operations by the Zionist offensive mercenary army in Gaza during 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 which claimed several thousand more Palestinian lives.

They ignore this genocide. They laugh at it. They mock it. They support it. They refuse to call it by its name but it is a genocide.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry and international documentation as of late 2026, direct reported deaths of Palestinians have surpassed 75,000 to 81,000. When will it ever end?

Actually it’s all worse than this. The real death toll estimates including the number of missing “under-the-rubble” put this genocide at around 186,000–335,500. These are stats from health organisations.

Think about it, bodies decaying under the rubble, including children. And Trump and Netanyahu want to turn it into a playboy’s playground.

What can we do?

Don’t buy products that pay for genocide. Go to this site and look at the list of products to avoid buying in Aotearoa: https://bdsaotearoa.nz

This is the terror
So when you see the laughing emojis or people claiming that that the Zionist state is doing this in the name of God, or some holy ordinance, or against terror, remember that this is the terror, that these people, paid to communicate that this is OK are terrorists.

They are invaders of land and social space who support the murder of children, of women, of people with disabilities.

I will never forget the footage of the poor youth who could not walk or run and who was burned to death in his tent. Writhing, writhing.

I will never forget the sound of a little girl screaming for help and I will never forget that not only did the mercenary army of the state of Zionism riddle her — that little crying girl — with bullets, they destroyed the aid workers that came to rescue her. Turned people to rubble.

I will not forget the mothers and fathers and widows and widowers who were handed bags of human flesh when they went to collect their loved ones.

Right now the only good people in that country are those who stand against genocide and they are telling the truth about it, rather than denying it.

And many of us are being “ghosted” because meta is run by genocide supporters.

Many people won’t even see this. So share it.

What you can do
And what can you do — my keyboard warriors? You can wage a keyboard warrior war against the communications arm of Mossad:

When you see the laughing emojis or statements denying genocide:
Go to the often-fake profile and click on the three dots then scroll to block them, confirm block.

Don’t give them space. They want to spring from other people’s platforms and they are funded to promote the lies that support genocide.

Don’t engage.

Educate others by copying and sharing the facts and figures about when the oppression, exile and extermination started.

Don’t give space to genociders. Block the genociders.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to 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.

• READ MORE: Netanyahu’s UN belligerence wins cheers at home as world walks out
• Palestinians, US journalist attacked in West Bank pogrom: What we know
• Vote progressive parties – if you seek justice for Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“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.

The Kingmakers debate on TVNZ last night was won by the two Queens, Chlöe Swarbrick (Greens) and Qiulae Wong (Opportunity), but I think Te Pāti Māori’s co-leader Rawiri Waititi landed a killer blow to Winston Peters (New Zealand First) that he won’t recover from.

By throwing into Winston’s face his infamous 1975 quote about Māori losing their land, culture and language and becoming “kahki” Europeans, Rawiri reminded the entire country that Winston has been around so long that he has become a political hypocrite.

That is devastating because very few would remember that quote and resets Winston more recent Treaty of Waitangi bashing with the radicalism of his youth.

• READ MORE: Other NZ 2026 general election reports

That moment alone allowed Rawiri to land a knock out punch while Winston spent the rest of the debate reeling.

It was New Zealand vs Old Zealand.

The TVNZ polling clearly shows Māori voters understanding the Te Pāti Māori candidate strategy and the rush to the Greens continues to back up that vote splitting strategy.

Māori strategic voters will decide the 2026 Election.

Martyn Bradbury is publisher and editor of The Daily Blog. This article was first published by TDB and is republished with permission.

People running foodbanks in South Auckland say poverty is deepening among the Pacific community, and the high demand they are seeing is the just tip of the iceberg.

Persistent high rents and basic living costs, plus nagging debt, continue to leave Pasifika families facing tough decisions on whether to pay bills or feed their children.

As New Zealand gets ready to head to the polls on November 7, and the cost of living looms as the biggest issue for voters, the government has been touting its stewardship of the economy and signs of recovery.

• READ MORE: Other New Zealand election reports

But it is a different picture at the frontline of foodbanks such as Vinnies Tāmaki Makaurau – based in Onehunga – which is part of the national organisation of the Society of St Vincent de Paul.

Households from the Pasifika and Māori communities make up the majority of families who come to their foodbank or to access budgeting support, counselling, youth development or help with employment pathways.

“We used to see people come once every three months. Now we’re seeing people try and register with us and apply every week, every fortnight, and we just wish we weren’t the capability to do that,” Henry Elliot, a triage coordinator and financial mentor with Vinnies, said.

He said while housing insecurity, chronic illness, disability, mental health difficulties, domestic violence and other factors contributed to food insecurity, Vinnies did not have enough resources to meet the high demand.

The Onehunga base had 31,000 engagements last year — that is, people reaching out and getting responded to, either by phone, face to face meetings, online engagement, workshops, sessions, or programme participation.

Post-pandemic deprivation
According to Elliot, Vinnies has seen the level of need among Pasifika deepen since the covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid brought the need up, and then when covid kind of disappeared, and we were supposed to go back to normal lives, for lots of people their jobs were never there again; they had no work.

“Some of them still have no work, or they’re on part time, or their hours are cut. So while covid disappeared and the funding disappeared, the need for food did not.”

Meanwhile, the government this term introduced a host of sanctions on beneficiaries, which he said had left a number of people in the Pacific community needing help from Vinnies.

“Two three years into those those new rules, we’re seeing the effects. People are coming in unsure why their benefit was cut or why their benefit was slashed altogether, and then finding out that it’s because they missed a meeting, a conference, a phone call, and those sanctions that are imposed on them happen very quickly.”

A new survey by the New Zealand Food Network found that one in every three households is struggling to provide affordable, nutritious meals, with the burden falling heaviest on single parents, Pacific communities, disabled people and renters.

‘The gap is widening’
Vinnies Tāmaki Makaurau general manager Delphina Soti said it was increasingly clear that many Pasifika families were struggling to afford basics.

“Like we understand that the cost of living has gone up, inflation’s gone up, like all sorts of different things have gone up, but what people are getting paid is not going up,” Soti noted.

“So it’s 9 percent that rent’s gone up, and then cost of living — 5 percent. Then you look at income, Work and Income, our most vulnerable, 2.2 percent; and then you look at how much the incomes have gone up, it’s like 4 percent.”

She said that only about 16 percent of Pasifika in New Zealand owned homes, compared with 42.1 percent of all New Zealanders, while around two-thirds of Pasifika were renting homes.

“So if the rent is shooting through the clouds, their income is coming down, and Work and Income is coming down, what kind of planning is this as a government?

‘The poor are becoming poorer, and the gap is widening.”

This is echoed by Mangere Budgeting Services Trust CEO Lara Dolan, who said in each of the past two financial years, her organsation supported around 4000 families with food support and budgeting advice.

She said Pasifika made up 60 percent of those people.

‘Struggling big time’
“The demand for our services, financial mentoring services, has increased by 61 percent in the last two years, and the demand for food has increased by more than 100 percent, which tells me that people are struggling big time.”

Dolan said people coming to them for help were often working people drowning in debt and the high cost of living.

“Everything is getting more expensive but salaries of people are not keeping up with inflation.

“We see a lot of people who are ‘working poor’, like teachers, builders, and health care workers coming in.”

Because Vinnies does not offer food deliveries, people need to come to them to get the food packages. But getting all the way to Onehunga is too hard for some families.

Elliot said another barrier is the shame some Pacific people feel about reaching out for help.

“It’s that sense of shame or whakamā. So we try and provide that safe space where it’s as simple as going to a New World or a Pak’nSave, they don’t have to feel like they’re coming to a charity.

‘Weight off their shoulders’
“We notice that when we give them the food, a small weight’s lifted off their shoulders every time.

“Every time the person puts food in their car or in their trolley or whatever, that small weight is okay — ‘of all the problems I have in my life right now, at least I know I’ve got a meal tonight, and so do my kids.'”

Soti said Vinnies was probably only seeing about 50 percent of the families who were in need of help.

“We’ve had people here who’ve struggled to come here. We watch cars do ueys [u-turns]. They keep on turning around and going back until somebody goes. Henry goes out and waves them down — ‘come’. and they come trembling.

“They don’t want to ask, but they are connected to a whole lot of other people who are doing it tough as well. We reckon about 50 percent. We only see the tip of the iceberg.”

Community ‘come to party’
Vinnies gets some funding from the Ministry of Social Development, and then other funding from private sources and church donations.

Soti said Vinnies was grateful government support for its foodbanks, but it was nowhere near the level they needed.

However, the Pacific community has come to the party as much as it can.

“Amidst all of this, there’s so much hope. We ask our young people, ‘hey, you can be part of this food system, you can really make an impact’,” she explained.

“So they turn around and collect cans, and they don’t just collect cans. They collect to the value of $30,000 worth of cans,

Elliot said the sense of community is strong within Pacific people, which gives them resilience.

“I will say this: they’ve known struggle and poverty their entire lives, especially if they’re from New Zealand. So they know how to make it work if need be,” he said.

Families in wider context
“And while they may be shy to come to us because we are a Pacific community, they do know that the community will rally around people that need support in the long run, whether that be through their church or their village communities that operate here in New Zealand, or their families in a wider context.”

Soti said that in Aotearoa there was enough to go around — and that no one should go hungry.

“I think there is enough. You got people who’ve got billions, and then you’ve got people with absolutely nothing, and so it’s just thinking, coming back to human beings.

“Poverty seeps in when we forget that we belong to each other on a really human level. If we remember that, maybe it’s time to pull some of those resources towards those who don’t have enough of the blanket.”

Vote for the three progressive parties — Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori — in next month’s general election if you want to see a principled Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy stance based on international law and justice.

Here is how Aotearoa New Zealand’s political parties stand on the Palestinian solidarity movement’s four key demands this election:

This year’s election provides the movement a crucial opportunity to educate and encourage the public to elect representatives who will take a stand for justice and be accountable to us, the people.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Party reports

Rating footnotes:
However, Opportunity wants any goods and services produced inside the Zionist state to be “unaffected” by sanctions.

Te Pāti Māori, the Greens and Labour have committed to comprehensive sanctions, using a framework based on the Russia Sanctions Act.

The language of this Bill would offer the solidarity movement the possibility to organise together for wider-ranging sanctions (eg. targeting complicit states and international financial backers of the genocide and occupation).

While Te Pāti Māori has had the clearest and strongest position on Palestine and related issues throughout the past 3 years, their campaign is calling for electorate votes only.

Te Pāti Māori is encouraging voters to cast their party vote for the Greens or Labour.

The Opportunity Party’s commitment to sanctions targets goods produced in illegal settlements and travel bans on individuals. Opportunity would consider divesting public money if it fit UN criteria of supporting the illegal occupation.

This scorecard is endorsed by Justice for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and Dayenu.

The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded this year’s prize to Navi Pillay for her lifelong commitment to human rights, justice and accountability.

Following a long and distinguished career as a human rights-focused jurist, South African-born Pillay was appointed chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 2021.

Quite predictably, within hours of the announcement of her award, President Trump said he should have won eight “Noble” (sic) prizes, that the decision was an indelible stain on Norway, and he would impose fresh sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) established to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

• READ MORE: Nobel Peace Prize honours Navi Pillay for lifelong commitment to human rights, justice and accountability
• A triumph for global justice – why Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize is beyond reproach

Happy to do his master’s bidding, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US would punish the choice of Pillay by “dismantling the ICC brick by brick, … we will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate”.

In lockstep with his US patron, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared the choice of Pillay “a gross weaponisation of the Nobel Peace Prize…  If there was an award for lies, hatred and blood libel, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender, she’d be a front runner”.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has said nothing. Despite repeated claims to respect international law, a fearful silence is the best Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong can offer, a tactic suggesting a

cowardly sheltering behind the diatribes from Trump and Netanyahu.

A champion of human rights
In complete contrast to the Netanyahu criminality invective, Judge Pillay has promoted universal human rights, advocated respect for humanitarian law and, through her kindness and generosity, has represented the ideals of a common humanity.

Citations explaining Navi Pillay’s record explain why she is regarded as a champion of peace with justice and why so much is at stake in this controversy over her Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Committee explained their choice: “For her efforts to promote peace and international law.” … “History has shown that a world operating without the rule of law is unjust, unwise, and inhumane.”

A year earlier, Navi Pillay received the Sydney Peace Prize whose citation included reference to “a lifetime of advocating for the fundamental human rights of women”, due recognition of Judge Pillay’s campaigns to abolish female genital mutilation and forced child marriages.

Where is the gratitude?
Navi’s lifetime work has included a period as a judge on the ICC, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and chair of the UN Commission inquiring into war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Ever since her appointment as the first coloured, female judge to be appointed to the South African High Court, Navi Pillay has spoken and acted courageously.

Such a virtue has prompted ire from Israel and silence from Australia.

In her report to the UN, Judge Pillay concluded, “The State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Reference to Australian human rights abuses
Judge Pillay has also condemned Australia’s mandatory detention policy, repeatedly criticised offshore processing arrangements and the Northern Territory’s “imperialist, discriminatory attitude towards Indigenous communities”.

To tolerate criticism and still manage to act generously usually requires a touch of courage. In which case Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong still have a chance to congratulate Navi Pillay, if only because they regard themselves as champions of international humanitarian law.

Penny Wong’s silence is particularly notable, given her support for Venezuelan 2025 Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who handed her prize to Donald Trump.

An Australian government statement of support for the UN, for the Nobel Committee and for Navi Pillay’s humanity-saving achievements would still be invaluable.

But support for the Nobel choice of Navi Pillay cannot be expressed by silence.

Millions of people asking the same question: How is this still happening?

For three years, we have watched the destruction of Gaza. Homes, hospitals, schools and churches. Entire families erased. Children killed, maimed, orphaned and left to starve. Premature babies intentionally left to die in their incubators.

The videos. The images. The screams.

• READ MORE: Aotearoa marches, vigils kick-off ‘global day of action’ for Palestine with mass protests in dozens of countries
• Other Palestine reports

What we have witnessed is worse than any horror film I’ve ever seen — and these are real people. Our people.

And our history did not begin on October 7th.

For 78 years, Palestinians have been fighting for their freedom, dignity and the right to live in our own land.

What is happening to Palestine is the tip of the spear of so much that is wrong with our world: hypocrisy, double standards, selective accountability, and political agendas placed above human lives.

And it has spread to Sudan, Yemen, Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Iran.

Dystopian world
We live in a dystopian world. A world where the Epstein class get away with pedophilia and human trafficking and worse, while those speaking up against the murder of children are deemed problematic and extremists.

A world where wealth buys access, power buys protection, and accountability depends on who you are.

And that is why we are so frustrated.

We have presented the evidence. We have marched. We have petitioned. We have appealed to our governments and international institutions.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

A UN commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide, and later reported the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children.

Journalists have documented it. Doctors have testified. Palestinians have shown the world their own suffering, day after day.

And still, it goes on.

Biggest atrocity of our time
What more do our leaders need? How many more reports? How many more testimonies? How many more children?

Governments lecture us about human rights, international law and so-called “Western values” — then turn a blind eye to the biggest atrocity of our time.

Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York last month despite an ICC arrest warrant.

And in the West Bank, Palestinians have faced killings, displacement and the destruction of their communities.

We are exhausted by the distance between what our leaders say and what they are prepared to do.

We are done with statements of concern without consequences. Of accountability that reaches the powerless but stops at the powerful.

Palestinian lives cannot remain the price of somebody else’s profit.

Independent access denied
Now, one year into a so-called “ceasefire”, Israel continues to deny international journalists independent access to Gaza, while Palestinian journalists continue to risk their lives to show us what is happening.

Palestinian voices suppressed online. Artists face consequences for speaking out. Prominent figures pressured into silence.

Yet our stories continue to reach people.

They have killed our journalists, but they have not buried the truth.

And despite every effort to silence us, look around you. Across the world, people are listening, organising and marching beside us.

They cannot make the world unsee what it has seen.

Demonstrators gathered at Parliament Lawn in Wellington, New Zealand, on Saturday for the Hikoi for Palestine / Global March for Palestine, marching to Te Ngakau Civic Square. https://t.co/5iOylRtBqv

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 11, 2026

There is no going back. But awareness alone will not free Palestine.

We hold them accountable
Now we hold them accountable. Our politicians. Our representatives. Our leaders.

They talk about “fixing the basics”, but where is their action against the deliberate killing of children?

Start with the basics of humanity. From this October until the next, we escalate our peaceful pressure.

We demand sanctions. We boycott Israeli products. We demand the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador and the cutting of political and economic ties with Israel. We demand visa restrictions on those responsible for atrocities.

We are done asking for accountability. We demand it as our right. We demand commitments, deadlines and action.

Hardest year in life
On a personal note, this year has been without a doubt the hardest year of my life. This year we lost Roger Fowler to cancer, one of our most just leaders and advocates for humanity in here in Aotearoa.

During the last moments I had with him, he was still pushing for us to continue the fight for people in Palestine.

My father, who was born in the Nakba on May 15, 1948, is currently continuing his 2 year battle with cancer, leaving me with the ever-growing pressure to uproot my life here and move to Australia to be with him and my mother, both of whom can only be described as angels on earth and I count my blessings everyday that I was lucky enough to have them as my parents.

This year we also lost my grandmother Elena at the age of 96. One of the last things she told me was how much she wished she could go back to her home in Palestine. The place where she played with her friends, where she grew up, where she got married.

We should not have had to wait 78 years. We cannot let another generation inherit this same abandonment.

This year I also witnessed and experienced a cancer of a different kind, a cancer within our movement both locally and internationally. Where bullying, personal agendas and censorship were allowed to thrive while our shared values of transparency equality and fair treatment were cast aside.

How can we push and demand accountability externally when we cannot practise that internally? I understand it’s because we are all frustrated, but there’s no room for that here.

Collective power
Let us turn our collective frustration into collective power. Stand up against bullying against personal agendas and saviour mentalities. We’re all in this together, and silence is the ultimate killer.

I do not want to live in a world where a child’s life is negotiable. And I know I am not alone.

We are the closest we’ve ever been to a better world. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Let us take our world back — and make it a world where every child can live in freedom and safety.

Free Palestine.

Youssef Sammour is a Palestinian Christian and a construction project manager who has been on board three Gaza Freedom Flotilla humanitarian aid missions for the besieged Palestinian enclave. This article is adapted from a speech he made at the Global March for Palestine last Saturday and is republished with permission.

THE LARGEST GLOBAL MOVEMENT IN THE WORLD…
Today marks the 37th national pro-Palestinian protest in London, joining more than 250 demonstrations across 60 countries worldwide.

UNPRECEDENTED.
Over the past three years, at least 51,000 pro-Palestinian protests have been documented across the world.

— Earth Hippy (@hippyygoat) October 10, 2026

COMMENTARY: By Nick Bollinger

I have to confess to a degree of imposter syndrome.

I was the wrong age and in the wrong place to be any part of this visionary organisation.

When the small group first gathered in the 1970s to plan what would be the foundations of the Ponsonby People’s Union (PPU), I would have been 12 or 13 and just starting secondary school at Onslow College in Johnsonville, near Wellington.

• READ MORE: From Resistance to the Ponsonby People’s Union, a courageous tale of struggle for justice — David Robie
• Honouring the people’s fight against hardship, repression and racism — Tony Fala
• Other Ponsonby People’s Union reports

But even then, it would have been hard not to notice that there were things going on, out in the world beyond our school walls, that were challenging the way society was being run; that sought fairness and justice and peace.

For the past five or six years New Zealand had been involved in a war, waged by America against the Vietnamese, and it didn’t take much to see that this was completely wrong. There were marches through town on Friday nights, organised by people just a few years older than me; some who our government were trying to force into military training, perhaps even to fight in this unjust war.

And these were some of the first activities that me and my Onslow friends would join in on, that could be seen as part of the challenge to the powers that governed our society.

There were other things happening too that I wanted to be part of. Some were deadly serious, like the movement against nuclear weapons or apartheid in South Africa. And there were others that just looked like more fun than the mainstream version of life in New Zealand that was being offered – rock concerts and festivals, communes, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Hope, ideas, action
It was a time of hope, ideas, and action.

It felt, however loosely, like a movement.

It looked to me like an attempt to change the world.

And in many ways I think it did.

Sometimes that things that changed would change back again, as the forces of the establishment regrouped. Some things may have had destructive side-effects that no one really questioned enough at the time.

But there were also lives that were meaningfully improved, perhaps even saved, because of the ideals and the efforts of people who, in different ways, made up this movement.

It would take me a good few decades to get around to it, but a few years ago I set out to write a history of all of this, which I loosely termed the counterculture (because that is how other historians around the world had defined it — and versions of this movement did take place all over the world.)

Just too young
As I had been just too young to really be more than an observer, I wanted to fill in some gaps in my experience. I wanted to know more about the people who had driven the movement in this country, where their ideas had come from, how they had developed them and put them into action and, ultimately, what had happened as a result.

I began interviewing people who had been involved – whether it had been in the protest activities, or the early bookshops, or the music festivals.

And I would always ask these people who they thought I should talk to; who else had been involved and might have valuable stories to share?

A name that would come up with amazing frequency was that of Roger Fowler.

Now as I’ve said in the introduction to this book, Roger would no doubt have been embarrassed to find his name in the first sentence because – as I discovered when I met him – his ethos was always one of co-operation, the power of people working together to achieve a common goal rather that the celebration of the individual.

As I worked on my project I began to see that sometimes a shared energy and sense of purpose can help unite a group of likeminded people who might not otherwise have found a focus for their own energies.

And I’m sure that for many people that is what Roger provided, and that was one of his great gifts.

Roger was involved in many, many causes and projects, both before and after the PPU, but it’s the PPU that we’re celebrating here today and it is a great example of something he achieved and how it was achieved.

Jumping Sundays
When I completed my book about the counterculture in Aotearoa, I named it after something else Roger was involved with, something perhaps more frivolous but which seemed to me to be a symbol of those times: I called it Jumping Sundays, which was the name by which people referred to the Sunday afternoon people’s festivals that took place in Albert Park, and where Roger would often perform with his band, the Frank E. Evans Memorial Lunchtime Entertainment Band.

In Jumping Sundays, I attempted, perhaps over-ambitiously, to look at all the aspects of this movement and show some of the connections and even contradictions between its different facets. So there’s a chapter on the Vietnam War but also one on communes; a chapter about alternative media – the underground newspapers and the Resistance Bookshop (something else Roger was involved with) – but there are also chapters on drugs and sex and rock’n’roll.

To fit it all in, I had to compress an awful lot of information. I believe that in the index to Jumping Sundays there are four entries for the People’s Union, but really it adds up to just a couple of pages in which I couldn’t do much more than outline how this organisation came about, who was involved and a few of the things that they did.

So I’m very glad that this new book has been put together from the memories and stories and writings and photographs of the people who were actually there. It’s like zooming in on those few paragraphs I wrote and expanding it to show us all the detail and colour that I could only hint at.

I’m hoping other people today will talk about some of the specific things the Ponsonby People’s Union achieved – whether it was providing cheap food for hungry families or staging occupations of substandard housing when landlords needed an extra nudge; the bus visits to prisons, or the way they worked with other groups like the Polynesian Panthers to fight racism on this city’s streets.

But the final thing I’d like to say is that, looking back on the counterculture era, in all its different dimensions, which ranged from the revolutionary to the ridiculous, the PPU for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most practical, principled, and inspiring example of countercultural ideals put into action.

This book is a reminder of what is possible. I believe that back then they used to call it “survival pending revolution”.

And we’ve never needed that more than now.

Nick Bollinger is a Wellington-based writer, historian, broadcaster and critic. He was a music columnist for The Listener for more than 20 years, has written for Mojo and been the voice of Radio New Zealand’s music review programme The Sampler.

Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.

Thousands of people took to the streets across Aotearoa New Zealand on Saturday, standing in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Global Day of Action. Yet where was the media coverage?

From Auckland to Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and communities across the country, people turned out to demand justice, freedom and an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

These are not insignificant gatherings. These are people exercising their democratic right to protest, raising their voices against injustice and demanding accountability.

• READ MORE: Aotearoa marches, vigils kick-off ‘global day of action’ for Palestine with mass protests in dozens of countries
• Tens of thousands join pro-Palestinian march in New Zealand — coverage in 2025
• Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza rises to 74,370, says Health Ministry
• Other Palestine reports

When thousands take to the streets for Palestine, that is news. When their voices are barely heard, that raises serious questions about media priorities.

Whose voices are being amplified, and whose are being pushed to the margins?

New Zealanders deserve journalism that reflects what is happening in their communities — not selective silence when the issue is Palestine.

The media cannot claim to represent the public while overlooking thousands of people demanding justice.

Palestine is not going away. Our voices are not going away. And neither is our demand for justice.

Do your job. Cover the protests. Let the public see what is happening.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Mass pro-Palestine protests across at least 60 countries in more than 250 locations worldwide were launched as part of a Global Day of Action beginning in Aotearoa New Zealand today.

Thousands of people took part in solidarity rallies and marches in the three largest cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — and vigils and actions happened at least 23 other places around the country.

An estimated 15,000 people, including representives of more than 50 organisations and movements backing the global action took part in the march up Queen Street from downtown Te Komititanga Square next to the Waitemata transport hub to Albert Park.

• READ MORE: Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza rises to 74,370, says Health Ministry
• Other Palestine reports

Giant banners proclaiming “Genocide is a crime — Free Palestine” and “Global March for Palestine – NZ Sanction Israel now” were carried by lead marchers, and posters displaying slogans such as “The genocide feeds on the silence”, “Freedom for Palestine”, and “Bombing and shooting kids is not self-defence — Free Palestine” were carried throughout the crowd.

One cardboard poster said “The intifada is global now” and another “The Epstein class are killers”, referring to allegations in the United States against members of the elite, including President Donald Trump.

A counter-protest was staged by supporters of Israel and the Shah’s regime in Iran — waving Israeli, Lion and Sun flags of the ousted monarchy, Stars and Stripes and Union Jack flags — but this was dwarfed by the pro-Palestine rally.

Police kept the peace and 1News reported just one minor incident.

Detained and tortured
Before the march began, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a coalition of groups, two protesters who had been on Gaza freedom flotillas in humanitarian aid efforts to break the siege and had been detained and tortured by Israeli security forces talked of their experiences.

Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto), son-in-law of the late Kia Ora Gaza activist Roger Fowler, condemned a recent “Indigenous” delegation from New Zealand hosted by Israel and said this was undermining Tangata Whenua solidarity with Palestinians.

“We know what settler colonialism is,” he said.

Youssef Sammour, a Palestinian Christian who has joined three peace flotillas to Gaza, spoke about the question being asked by millions of people around the world: “How is this still happening?”

“For three years, we have watched the destruction of Gaza. Homes, hospitals, schools and churches. Entire families erased. Children killed, maimed, orphaned and left to starve.

“Premature babies intentionally left to die in their incubators. The videos. The images. The screams.

“For 78 years, Palestinians have been fighting for their freedom, dignity and the right to live in our own land.”

In Albert Park, representatives of opposition parties pledged their support for a change in government policy in active support for Palestine if elected on November 7.

The Labour Party foreign affairs spokesperson Vanushi Walters told the crowd that New Zealand could not stand by in the face of genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and ongoing violations of international law.

The party has made it clear that a Labour-led government would recognise the State of Palestine, including diplomatically with presentation of credentials, impose economic sanctions on Israel via new laws similar to the Russian Sanctions Act, support South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and ensure our Super Fund and ACC divest from companies identified by the UN as operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Today was the third anniversary of protests against the Israeli genocide.

Major global protests
Meanwhile, the Middle East Eye reports that capital cities across the globe will see major protests and actions in support of Palestine today, according to the Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP).

The statement says that more than 200 organisations will be mobilising for a mass “synchronised Global Day of Action”, involving civil society groups, trade unions, student federations and human rights networks across 60 countries.

The global event is organised by GAFP alongside the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and Global Coalition Against Occupation of Palestine (SANED).

The Global March for Palestine action in Christchurch Ōtautahi today. Video: PSNA

“As governments actively fund, arm, and protect Israel from any legal accountability, grassroots movements are refusing to allow this genocide to become normalised as the status quo,” GAFP wrote.

It added that the event “marks a decisive shift, moving beyond symbolic protest toward direct civil intervention to shut down public complicity and demand systemic accountability for Israel’s war crimes and genocide”.

Anas Altikriti, secretary-general of the Global Alliance for Palestine, said that the third anniversary marking Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza was a “stark, devastating reminder of the unbearable terror and suffering that the Palestinian people had been forced to endure every single day for three years”.

“As world powers remain silent and complicit, civil society is rising,” he added, saying that the global demonstration is a a direct response to “this ongoing horror”.

‘Global conscience’
Altikriti described the event as a “declaration that the global conscience will not stand idly by as a genocide is normalised”.

“We are taking to the streets to demand total accountability, an immediate end to the siege, and a free Palestine.”

Participating organisations in more than 250 locations worldwide are expected to shut down civic squares, encircle government buildings and blockade corporate entities directly tied to military supply chains.

“The objective is clear: render normal commerce and political diplomacy impossible while Israel’s genocide continues uninterrupted.”

As well as mass protests in major capitals worldwide, in cities like Athens and Modena, the coalition indicated that “actions will extend across multiple days with cultural sit-ins, public teach-ins, and large-scale visual projections highlighting Israel’s war crimes directly onto government and corporate buildings”.

“Three years into Israel’s genocide, the global movement for Palestine has grown in power, unity, and resolve,” the statement added.

27 February 1933 was a momentous turning point in German history; a lightning rod for what was to follow.

It enabled Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party to quickly transition Germany from a formal democracy (Weimar Republic) to a fascist dictatorship (inspired by Benito Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy).

On that day, an unemployed Dutch construction worker named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag (German Parliament) building, causing considerable damage.

• READ MORE: Trump says US will not strike Iran before midterm elections
• Other Donald Trump reports

The Nazis first falsely blamed the communists for the fire and then claimed emergency powers to crush all opposition, not just those it blamed.

The event was contrived by the newly formed Nazi government to turn public opinion against its opponents and consequently to successfully achieve these fascist objectives.

This began with the emergency law decree for the Protection of the People and State which restricted free speech and freedom of the press, and allowed the imprisonment of enemies without trial.

Scene setting for US-style ‘Reichstag Fire’
Fintan O’Toole is an advising editor at the New York Review of Books (NYRB). An award-winning journalist and recognised public intellectual, he is a former editor The Irish Times where he still continues as a longstanding columnist.

On 25 July 2025 he began an article (paywalled) in the NYRB on the direction of the United States under President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement with the above-mentioned “Reichstag Fire”: A show of force stepping stone towards a ‘Reichstag Fire’.

O’Toole analysed Trump’s endeavours to militarise American politics and politicise the American military describing them as unfinished business. This meant:

“…defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations [and] … dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the President but to the Constitution.”

This analysis continued on to the much reported brutally derogatory narrative and actions (including armed force) against immigrants (which got much worse since the article was published) and Trump’s dishonest delusional endeavour to portray himself as having known “military life”.

This delusional military self-image contrasts with Adolf Hitler’s actual record of being a decorated (Iron Cross) German soldier in the First World War.

It also contrasts with other past dictators; in particular, Benito Mussolini (Italy), Francisco Franco (Spain) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile).

O’Toole refers to Trump’s speech to his supporters at the 6 January 2021 insurrection;

“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Language and form to achieve absolute military obedience
At the time of the article’s publication in the NYRB, Donald Trump’s militarism was primarily about language and form, including supporting references to the Confederate insurrectionists of the American Civil War in the 1860s.

Pointingly, Fintan O’Toole notes that Trump:

“… is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience.”

This is the opposite of the military non-partisanship that is necessary in order to defend the US Constitution.

Fintan O’Toole has convincingly outlined an analysis that under Donald Trump’s presidency this emerging authoritarianism in the United States is evolving towards fascism.

In this process, Trump is seeking his own “Reichstag Fire”. This includes seeking in various ways to use his position to rig the mid-term elections in early November for the Congress (House of Representatives) and one-third of the Senate.

Currently he controls both but is likely to lose the former and possibly the latter. Losing control of both is a realistic outcome given popular feeling and mobilisation.

Desperation to seize mid-term US elections
Thirteen months after the above NYRB article was published, the UK newspaper The Independent discussed this endeavour further (August 18): Trump desperate to seize elections.

Journalist Alex Woodward outlined the Trump administration’s numerous roadblocks with courts in his attempts to seize control of these federal elections by establishing a national voter registration list that would be used to decide who is eligible to cast a ballot.

Trump has also not dismissed the idea of declaring a national security emergency to unilaterally enforce his takeover of federal elections. In his reported words:

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK. I’ll leave it at that.”

Woodward reports that Trump could also threaten to use federal troops or law enforcement “…to seize voting equipment or ballots, which would disrupt ballot collection and vote-tallying and insert a hunt for alleged fraud to satisfy his conspiracy theories.”

In another measure to rig the mid-term elections, the Trump administration has abruptly removed the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency tasked with supporting election officials.

The practical effect is to leave the key bipartisan agency effectively paralysed weeks before election day.

Election officials are behind-the-scenes public servants. However, they are increasingly on the frontlines of conspiracy theory-fuelled threats.

Woodward reports an annual poll of elections revealing that at least 38 percent of election officials have experienced threats, harassment and abuse because of their job, with more than 60 percent of those threats delivered in person. More than half feared for their safety.

Now is the right time to compare US politics to Nazi Germany
In response to the question “when is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era”, The Guardian said “now” on October 3: US politics today compares with Nazi politics in Germany.

Washington DC based British Guardian journalist David Smith writes about a book on the declining white Christian influence in the United States managing to fuel an alliance with Trump and working to reshape its “democracy”.

The book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn against Democracy, is by Robert P Jones arising out of a consideration of studied US demographic numbers, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s use of the language of racial purity. This led him to his inescapable conclusion that “This is our 1933”.

Jones began with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches.

He cites a Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, who was eventually imprisoned for opposing Hitler. Niemöller is famously remembered for the powerful poem “First They Came”.

For the first four years of Hitler’s reign Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Revival of white Christian nationalism strengthens drive to US fascism
David Smith argues convincingly that US democracy is experiencing a severe “backslide” that is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, including Donald Trump’s language on the campaign trail. Further:

“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes.”

Smith then refers to Trump’s repeated use of the concept of genetic inheritance. Addressing a mostly white crowd in Minnesota in 2020, Trump declared:

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

In his diagnosis, Jones links Trump’s language to the influence and activism of white Christian nationalism:

… white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country’s autocratic slide.

Jones notes that whereas in 2008 white Christian Americans constituted 54 percent of the US population, by 2026 it had dropped to 41 percent. The decline among white evangelicals is even steeper. In 2000, they represented 25 percent of all Americans; today it is 13 percent.

Jones then observes:

“Trump loves to talk about the art of the deal and, in many ways, there’s been a massive quid pro quo deal struck between a declining white evangelical population and Trump. His big appeal to them was less about policy and more anti-immigrant: I’m going to restore an America that looks like you, and I’m going to restore power to the Christian churches.

“He was literally saying on the campaign trail: this is a quid pro quo deal. Give me your votes and you won’t even have to vote again. I’ll fix it so you don’t have to vote again.”

And now for Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung is an interesting German word meaning synchronisation or coordination.

In the context of German history it was used to describe the process of Nazification in the mid-1930s; that is, establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society.

On 1 June, I posted on Gleichschaltung in Political Bytes: Gleichschaltung and the far right momentum:

“The NZ First party is a toned-down version of the MAGA movement with deputy leader Shane Jones the loudest proponent of its rhetoric.”

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, my narrative in this post includes the following observation:

“New Zealand is a long way away from Nazi Germany in 1933. We are also long way away from having a Gleichschaltung. But, when certain stars align, the unexpected can occur very quickly.

“Donald Trump has succeeded by both synchronisation and coordination over the past nearly 18 months in turning immigrants in the United States into the Jews of Nazi Germany in 1933-35.

“A tipping point leading to our own Gleichschaltung should not be dismissed out-of-hand even if the recipe’s ingredients might be different.”

‘First they came . . .’
It is appropriate to come back to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem (English translation of the original German version):

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest

In terms of Donald Trump’s “1933 trajectory” towards the mid-term elections, should he succeed then he will be well-placed to control the institutions necessary to ensure authoritarianism’s success.

This may well include declaring a national emergency based on a false manufactured pretext as was the case with the Reichstag fire in 1933.

However, his vote rigging attempts, along with the growing unpopularity of his presidency, appear to be arousing much public contempt; sufficient for him to lose control of both the Congress and Senate.

As a narcissist who is devoid of empathy, Trump sees strategic and tactical decision making through a limiting narrow lens.

Anything is possible over how responds to such a plausible mid-terms defeat; attempted dictatorial actions stronger than declaring a state of emergency should be anticipated.

In these circumstances concerted political opposition within the Congress and Senate are important, including impeachment moves and investigations into illegalities and corruption.

However, what will be most decisive is popular mobilisation against this drive towards a fascist state in the world’s strongest military power, whether or not Trump’s electoral vote rigging succeeds.

Organising the popular will is the critical task. “Power to people” as the old but permanently relevant slogan goes.

The final word
Meanwhile let’s leave the final word to Robert P Jones. In the epilogue to his above-discussed book he writes:

“Just as God asked Niemöller where he was between 1933 and 1937, God will ask us where we were between 2025 and 2028. Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing.”

Not just powerful words; very timely and directly relevant words as well. Time will tell whether Trump and his MAGA movement will achieve this endorsement; but it is not inevitable.

History does not have to repeat itself nor even rhyme a lot. Germany 1933 does not have to be United States 2025-28.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

Labour will recognise Palestine, put in place economic sanctions on Israel, and join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

These are among highlights of Labour’s foreign policy stance and the action the party says it will take if elected as the government next month.

Labour’s foreign policy spokesperson Vanushi Walters made that clear in her recent speech alongside the Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, as part of Diplosphere’s foreign policy election series at Parliament.

• READ MORE: Labour sums up its foreign policy approach as ‘independent, principled and unafraid’
• The full Labour foreign policy speech
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Explaining what was meant by “restoring our independent foreign policy”, she said independence was pivotal to New Zealand’s foreign policy approach.

Independence was about agency.

New Zealand’s silence this term on breaches of the United Nations Charter “has been noticed” globally.

“This government’s silence as one after the other States recognised Palestine has been noticed.”

Silence over Palestine
She said the National-led coalition government’s “silence in failing to stand up [with] a sanctions regime, following the ICJ [International Court of Justice] decision on the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, continues to be loud”.

“New Zealand’s abstentions this term, on the floor of the UN whether it be about the reappointment of the High Commissioner of Human Rights or a vote abstaining on indigenous participation at the UN, have been met with confusion by our colleagues in the international space.

“We do not grow our agency if we stand for nothing because that too is a choice that has consequences.

“We lose our reputation as an honest broker and a consistent champion of international law. Make no mistake, the choice to shrink from the moral challenges we face will diminish our agency not expand it.”

Walters said a Labour government would “make full use” of the foreign policy tool box.

“There is a time for quiet diplomacy and there is a time when quiet diplomacy must bend to moral clarity — that is undeniably the case when the scale of human rights abuses is so stark that it amounts to genocide, to ethnic cleansing.

“Labour will recognise the State of Palestine. Labour will place economic sanctions on Israel and ensure the NZ Super Fund and ACC divest from holdings on the UN list of companies operating in the occupied territories.

Labour to join South Africa at ICJ
“Labour will intervene in support of South Africa’s case at the [ICJ] in respect of a breach of the Genocide Convention.”

Walters said that in this time of tension, “we must also remember there are seeds being planted”.

“International Courts continue to perform with diligence the duty of their statutes, people protest with astonishing courage in defence of their rights, humanitarians place everything on the line in the pursuit of development and peace for all, like-minded countries have begun acting on their desire to revisit creative diplomacy in defining new alliances,” she said.

She acknowledged Foreign Minister Winston Peters for his service during this term and under prior governments.

“We disagree on critical aspects regarding the role New Zealand must play in a fraught world, but not on all aspects of foreign policy, and I want to acknowledge in particular the breadth of his travel and the relationships he has maintained in the Pacific as hallmarks of his time in the role.”

Tracing the illegal land, sea and air siege of the Gaza enclave by Israel:

2006: Hamas elected in the last Palestinian legislative election
Israel withheld Palestinian tax revenues and imposed further restrictions on Gaza. Major international donors suspended direct funding to the Palestinian Authority.

That summer Israel launched a major attack on Gaza. On June 28, Israel destroyed all six transformers at Gaza’s only power station.

• READ MORE: Fear and a far-right lurch: How October 7 reshaped Israel
• How Israel’s genocide in Gaza pulled Britons into the Palestine movement
• Three years of Israel’s mass dispossession of West Bank Palestinians
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

2007: Gaza ghetto was sealed
Israel imposed an unlawful land, sea and air blockade on Gaza. For the next 16 years, more than 2 million people were trapped in a strip of land about 40 km long with illegal occupation forces controlling their borders, airspace and territorial waters. Most people could not leave without Israel’s permission. Israel restricted imports, virtually eliminated exports for years, restricted fishing waters and prevented people from accessing farmland along the perimeter.

The United Nations described Gaza’s population as “locked in”. UN bodies repeatedly described Israel’s blockade as collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment.

Children born when Israel imposed the blockade were 16 years old by October 2023.

And inside the ghetto came Israel’s attacks:

2008–09: Operation Cast Lead
Israel killed 1383 Palestinians in three weeks — more than the resistance attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

2012: Operation Pillar of Defense
Israel killed 174 Palestinians in eight days.

2014: Israel attacked Gaza for 51 days
Israel killed 2251 Palestinians, including 551 children — more than October 7, 2023.

Then Palestinians tried peaceful resistance.

2018–19: The Great March of Return
For almost two years, Palestinians marched against Israel’s blockade and for their right of return. Israel put snipers on the ghetto walls and shot them.

Illegal occupation forces killed more than 200 people and shot and crippled thousands more during the demonstrations. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli snipers intentionally shot children, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities who were recognisable as such.

In 2020, Israeli newspaper Haaretz interviewed the snipers. One Israeli sniper described shooting 42 knees in a single day.

It was the end of peaceful resistance in illegally occupied Gaza.

2021: Israel bombed Gaza again
Israel killed 261 Palestinians, including 67 children.

2022: Israel killed another 49 Palestinians, including 17 children.

May 2023: Israel killed another 33 Palestinians.

By October 2023, an entire generation had been born and raised inside Gaza Ghetto under an unlawful Israeli blockade, through repeated Israeli attacks, electricity shortages, polluted water, economic strangulation and an Israeli permit system controlling whether people could leave.

Then came 7 October 2023 — Al-Aqsa Flood.
Al Qassam Brigades and other armed groups broke through the ghetto walls and attacked Israeli military bases and communities.

7 October 2023 was not Year Zero
It came after sixteen years of unlawful blockade.

It came after Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza and killed thousands of people.

It came after the people marched against their imprisonment and Israeli snipers shot them from high on the wall.

It came after decades of illegal occupation.

And what followed is genocide by Israel.

Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians according to the recorded death toll alone. The real number is substantially higher.

As early as July 2024, when the recorded direct death toll stood at 37,396, public-health researchers writing in The Lancet estimated that, once indirect deaths were included, a death toll of 186,000 or more attributable to Israel’s attack on Gaza was plausible.

Israel has displaced almost the entire population of Gaza, many repeatedly. Israel has destroyed homes, neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, universities, water systems, sanitation systems and much of the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention, with genocidal intent. Its conclusion was unequivocal: Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful. The Court has also confirmed that the law of occupation applies in Gaza and treats Israel as the occupying power there.

For 20 years Israel told the world that history begins and ends when Israel suffers.

It does not.

Al-Aqsa Flood belongs to history. It was never Year Zero.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

Palestine Forum of New Zealand stands with Palestinians in Aotearoa and around the world, remembering generations of dispossession and struggle, honouring those who have been lost, and reaffirming the Palestinian people’s enduring demand for freedom, dignity and justice.

We remember. We resist. We remain.

Palestinian history did not begin yesterday, and it will not end today.

• READ MORE: October 7: How three years of Israel’s genocidal war have changed Gaza

For generations, Palestinians have remained connected to their homeland, their families, their culture and their identity despite displacement, occupation and profound loss.

Our story is not defined by a single day.

It is a story of steadfastness, memory, resilience and an unwavering determination to see Palestine free.

From the river to the sea, and across the diaspora, we will continue to speak, organise and stand for justice.

Survived for generations
Palestinians have survived generations of displacement, dispossession and attempts to erase their history and identity. Yet we remain.

Remembering is not about looking backwards. It is about understanding why Palestinians continue to demand freedom and justice and why the world must not look away.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand calls on Aotearoa New Zealand to stand consistently for human rights, international law, Palestinian self-determination and accountability, and to recognise that Palestinian lives, land, history and dignity cannot be treated as secondary or expendable.

We will not be silent. We will continue to speak, organise and advocate. We will continue to stand alongside Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and throughout the diaspora.

For us, remembrance is also resistance. Every Palestinian story preserved, every family connection maintained, every child taught their history, and every voice raised for justice is an affirmation that Palestine and its people cannot be erased.

The Palestinian struggle is a struggle for the right to live freely, safely and with dignity in the land to which generations of Palestinians remain connected.

We remember.

We resist.

We remain.

And we will continue to work for a future in which Palestinians are free.

Palestine will be free.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand will be the first to kick off a Global Day of Action next Saturday marking 1100 days of Israeli genocide with a rally and march in the heart of the country’s largest city.

Many other protests will be carried out across the country in a wave of solidarity for the people of Palestine suffering from genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank under illegal Israeli occupation.

The Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP) has issued an urgent call for support worldwide for upholding international law.

• READ MORE: Challenging apartheid, defending human rights and amplifying global solidarity for Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“In Aotearoa New Zealand, our kaupapa/purpose is to build a landmark demonstration here as part of this worldwide global mobilisation for Palestine, with demonstrations in every major city,” the local organisers for a grand coalition of activist groups, churches and solidarity movements.

“Why does it matter? This mobilisation marks three years — 1100 days — of Israel’s systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Media contact Rana Hamida for the Global March for Palestine Coalition (Tāmaki Makaurau) said: “International law is not optional. On October 10, we the people of the world and here in Aotearoa, demand an end to the violence, complicity and the enabling of a system that fuels crimes against humanity.

“New Zealand has the responsibility to stand on the right side of history, and we will hold our elected government accountable.”

Ceasefire ‘fiction’
The coalition’s statement said that despite diplomatic language and the “fiction of a ceasefire, the bombing of Gaza has not stopped”.

More than 74,200 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, including more than 18,000 children, and about 70 percent of buildings in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.

In the West Bank, land seizures and forced displacement continue.

The protest coalition said the New Zealand government had refused to “act meaningfully against this genocide. This is complicity.” The following “lack of action” was cited:

• Silence on illegal land seizures — Even when 22 countries, including Australia, Britain and Canada, condemned the latest West Bank land seizure, New Zealand stayed silent;
• Refusal to recognise Palestine — The coalition had the chance to recognise Palestine alongside Australia, the UK and Canada, but refused, calling it a matter of “when, not if” — then did nothing;
• Blocking sanctions — Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill was denied even a first reading;
• Failure to support the ICJ case — The government does not support South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which centres on Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza;
• Refusal to ban IDF holiday visas — The government will not alter the Working Holiday Scheme with Israel;
• Ignoring Rocket Lab and Black Sky concerns — The Palestine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa raised concerns with then Defence Minister Judith Collins in November 2024; she refused to investigate. On 12 August 2026, court proceedings were filed in the High Court of Wellington challenging the government’s approval of BlackSky satellites launched from the Rocket Lab site at Māhia, for spying for Israel over Gaza;
• Ongoing military cooperation — The NZDF sent its largest contingent in a decade to RIMPAC 2026, alongside Israel and the US; and
• Denying evidence of illegal abduction and torture. The government has dismissed evidence that Israel illegally abducted and tortured New Zealand citizens and tangata whenua during the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian mission, including videos posted by Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir himself showing him taunting and abusing detained flotilla participants.

23+ protests nationwide
More than 23 demonstrations will take place across the motu/nation on October 10, from Whangārei in the north to Waihōpai Invercargill in the south — making this one of the largest coordinated days of action for Palestine ever seen in this country,” said the protest coalition statement.

“In Tāmaki Makaurau alone, more than 50 organisations have endorsed the Auckland rally and march, which will assemble at 2pm at Te Komititanga/Britomart Square before marching to Albert Park,” the statement said.

Groups taking part include 350 Aotearoa, Alternative Jewish Voices, Amnesty International Aotearoa, Auckland Peace Action, Banners for Palestine, Bayan Aotearoa New Zealand, Council of Islamic Organisations of New Zealand, Dayenu: New Zealand Jews against Occupation, Global Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa, ISO – University of Auckland, Justice for Palestine, Kaiāwhina, Kia Ora Gaza, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, Palestinian Forum of New Zealand, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, Pax Christi Aotearoa, Polynesian Panther Party Aotearoa, Stop Wars Aotearoa, Students’ Justice for Palestine, Toitū te Tiriti, and Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Aotearoa.

The march will feature speakers spanning human rights and social justice organisations, political parties, Palestinian families and performances from local artists.

The protesters are demanding:

• Sanction Israel immediately and isolate the apartheid regime. Introduce comprehensive sanctions now, particularly targeting companies supporting illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This includes imposing an immediate arms embargo, supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, and backing Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill;
• Uphold international law and end impunity. This includes supporting South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice;
• Recognise the State of Palestine;
• End complicity in military supply chains. Halt the export of surveillance technology and other dual-use goods that aid Israel’s military operations, including the launch of BlackSky satellites from Rocket Lab’s Māhia site;
• Expel the Israeli Ambassador and stop the diplomatic cover;
• Revoke the IDF holiday visas programme;
• Permit Palestinian families to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand, as was done for Ukrainian families; and Exit RIMPAC and Five Eyes for a robust, independent foreign policy.

Nurlan Yermekbayev is one of those very important people most of us in the West have never heard of. I had been travelling with him for two days in the Xinjiang Region of China before I even realised who this quiet, dignified man was.

As the Secretary-General of the SCO — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — Yermekbayev helms a multi-state organisation that is helping drive, in their own words, tectonic shifts in global politics, economy, and other spheres of international relations.

How I got an interview with him was almost comedic.

• READ MORE: Other Eugene Doyle articles

I was part of a group of international journalists, politicians, academics and analysts who were hosted on a tour of Xinjiang last month and invited to attend an international conference with the region’s leaders.

It turned out that the main reason the Secretary-General was in the region was for a series of meetings with Party Secretary Chen Xiaojiang and other officials of the region.

Xinjiang is home to 25 million people, about 45 percent of whom are ethnic Uyghur. It is also China’s key gateway to the rest of Eurasia and what many believe will be tomorrow’s new world order.

Our group visited a variety of sites associated with the Belt and Road Initiative, including the Khorgos Gate on the border with Kazakhstan. Khorgos is a centrepiece, a key node in the chains that are binding the countries of Eurasia into a modern Silk Road stretching from Europe to the Sea of Japan. Seeing Khorgos was Yermekbayev’s idea of a bit of R&R.

Massive scale
The scale of what has been — and is being — created across Xinjiang is something you have to see to believe. Long ranks and files of rail freight crossing the border, massive factories and logistics centres popping up like spring mushrooms, millions of new housing units for the population and its booming economy, the caravans of trucks, the endless fingers of pipelines and telecommunications cables extending into the distance and which eventually criss-cross the SCO member states — China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus.

While the rest of the world follows US President Donald Trump’s latest antics, these countries are quietly spending trillions of dollars to create an integrated Eurasia.

Over breakfast one day in the State Guesthouse in Yining, a Brazilian journalist, Nelson de Sá, leant towards me and whispered: “Do you know who that guy there is?” I had seen and greeted the man he was referring to but had no idea.

True, I had been puzzled why, wherever we went, there was a small accompanying motorcade of black sedans, and a mini-bus out of which emerged minders, a few distinguished delegates and various athletic men in suits. “He’s the Secretary-General of the SCO,” de Sá whispered.

“[Expletive!] If I get a chance I’m definitely going to ask for an interview,” I told the Brazilian journalist. The next day at lunch Yermekbayev was seated with Bhokin Bhalakula, Thailand’s former Deputy Prime Minister who was also part of our party. I joined them and we talked about Émile Zola, the Dreyfus Affair, and geopolitics.

At the end of the lunch I asked if the Secretary-General would accept a short interview. Yes. That afternoon.

Immediately before joining our tour, Yermekbayev had been with Presidents Xi Jinping, Putin, Pezeshkian and Erdoğan along with a host of other leaders, including India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attending the 26th SCO Council of Heads of State summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

40% of global population
The SCO members account for 40 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP and 60 percent of the vast Eurasian landmass, with coastlines on the Indian Ocean, the Arctic and the Pacific. It has seven times the population of the EU, eight times the land area and more than double ($71 trillion) the EU’s GDP (PPP).

It is not a military bloc but it is worth noting that its members include four nuclear-weapon states — China, Russia, India and Pakistan. As I wrote a few years ago: when Eurasia awakes our world will shake. The organisation sees itself as the driver of a fairer multipolar world order that is slowly overtaking the Western-dominated system. This is the Quiet General’s day job.

Over a small table in the hotel in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Yermekbayev spoke in a soft Central Asian accent; a rumbling voice, a bit like an idling tank. He is a former Defence Minister in Kazakhstan, a lieutenant-general, and a long-standing diplomat who has the wonderful title of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. A graduate of Moscow’s Military Red Banner Institute, a sinologist, an author, and a PhD fluent in Mandarin and English, the Secretary-General discreetly commands attention.

Years ago, as Secretary of the Security Council in Kazakhstan he was tasked with dealing with Islamist militants within his country and cross-border counter-terrorism. As with Xinjiang, and, of course, Pakistan, Iran and others in the region, Kazakhstan had serious challenges from militants. The US war on Afghanistan was still raging, with knock-on impacts across the region.

Yermekbayev recalls that the SCO was initially formed as a security organisation in 2001 to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism within the member countries before evolving into the social, economic, security and infrastructure facilitator it is today.

“We realised that sustainable security cannot be provided without solving social and economic issues. And it can’t exist without building trust between our member countries — that’s why building trust is one of the major pillars of our organisation,” Yermekbayev told me.

As the US continues to weaponise the dollar-denominated global trading system, SCO countries are moving closer to the creation of alternative systems. Bilateral trading in national currencies to bypass Western sanctions is growing steadily.

Bilateral commerce
Russia and China, for example, settle over 90 percent of their bilateral commerce in rubles and yuan. Various SCO countries tap into China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) for bilateral trades. The establishment of an SCO development bank capable of fully protecting Eurasia from Western coercive measures is still, however, on the drawing board.

Yermekbayev stresses the centrality of accepting different systems of governance as one of the keys to the SCO’s success.

“We have parliamentary countries like India and Pakistan. We have Iran and Pakistan which are Islamic republics. But at the same time, we have presidential republics in Central Asia. We have Russia. We have Belarus. So location, ethnic traditions, organisation of the state system may differ, but still all these countries manage to find compromise, manage to sit at the table and discuss issues.”

Yermekbayev also emphasised the “Shanghai Spirit” that drives the organisation — a commitment to multilateralism centred around an agreed code.

“There are six principles. One of them is what you just mentioned: respect for cultural and civilisational diversity. The other principles include mutual equality, mutual trust, mutual profit, and striving for common development. One more important principle is to solve all issues only through negotiations and consultations.

“That’s why, regardless of the size of the country — for example, China is very big — all are equal. It is strictly followed at all levels: junior experts, at the level of ministers, and at the level of heads of state.”

“Regarding the multipolar world — there is a misperception that the SCO is a kind of ‘anti-somebody’ bloc. SCO is not a military-political bloc. For example, in NATO, they have so-called collective security principle (Article 5). We don’t have this.

Multipolar, more fair, world order
“But our leaders consistently declare — and it is written in our declaration — that we stand for a multipolar, more fair, more democratic new world order — one which will better represent the interests of the global south, of developing countries, and also which will be guided by United Nations, by the UN articles, and by international law. So it is a priority for us: international law and United Nations regulations.”

Yermekbayev believes these values and principles are acting as a magnet for new SCO members that is as powerful as the economic factors driving Eurasian expansion.

The Secretary-General is determined to accelerate the SCO’s emergence as a key international institution particularly at this time of rising tensions, unilateral wars and the constant violations of the UN Charter. He told the audience at the Shangri-La Dialogue earlier this year:

“In these conditions, the role of regional organisations continues to steadily increase, with a greater responsibility falling on their shoulders for the affairs in their regions.”

Watch this space. It’s called Eurasia.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz.

Pro-Palestine protesters targeted Christchurch’s Te Pae Convention Centre yesterday to highlight the National Aerospace Summit’s alleged ties with Israeli military.

The protesters from Peace Action Ōtautahi started their action at Victoria Park from 7am, Allied Media reports.

Police said two men, aged 56 and 23, had been arrested after vehicles were allegedly used to block emergency entrances to the aerospace summit.

• READ MORE: Two arrested as anti-Israel protesters target New Zealand Aerospace Summit
  
• Protesters block Aerospace Summit in Christchurch in 2025
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Last year 30 people were arrested during a similar protest.

The protesters aimed to raise public awareness of what it said were ties between the aerospace sector, the United States military, and Israeli Defence Force, which has been condemned worldwide for its almost three years of genocide in Gaza killing at least 74,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Along with Palestinian flags, protesters’ banners declared “Stop arming Israel”, “No weapons in Ōtautahi,” “Keep space for peace”, “If the [NZ] government won’t shut down war criminals, the people will”, and “Sanction Israel for genocide”.

About 600 delegates were reportedly attending the summit, with speakers and delegations from the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Representatives from the European Union and European Space Agency were also taking part.

Police Superintendent Lane Todd said officers respected the right to peaceful protest, but “will not tolerate actions that threaten public safety or intimidate others exercising their lawful rights”.

A Peace Action Ōtautahi spokesperson said its “Swarm the Summit” protest concerns centred on the dual-use nature of aerospace technology and links between some summit exhibitors and military operations.

The seeds of resistance and later community empowerment began in Tāmaki Makaurau in a humble but lively bookshop in a rundown two-storeyed shop at 436 Queen Street. Called the Resistance Bookshop, it became the headquarters for protesters in 1969 for three years as anti-Vietnam War action grew and grew.

This was where many students, workers and radicals gathered — including the young Roger Fowler — to plan their protest action. Many of them lived in dilapidated inner-city flats within a stone’s throw of the bookshop.

As the anti-war movement gained momentum, many young men faced conscription into the New Zealand army and there were fears that conscripts would be drafted to fight in Vietnam — as was their fate in the United States and Australia.

• READ MORE: Other Roger Fowler reports

Fowler, an icon of Aotearoa protest and community empowerment, recalled how those men whose “number came up” in the archaic Compulsory Military Training (CMT) “lottery law” were ordered to report to a special train at Auckland Railway Station.

They were “transported to the Waiouru army camp to endure a harsh, three-month course of military training plus follow-up camps,” wrote Fowler.

“My number was drawn and I refused to go; instead burning my draft card at a demonstration at the US Consul’s Paritai Drive mansion.

“I organised a protest at the railway station, where fellow Resistance supporters and I handed out leaflets, encouraging the young conscripts on the train to disembark and refuse to go.

“I was later arrested for refusing to attend the army call-up, then locked up in Mt Eden prison for about three weeks for refusing the pay the fine.”

Fowler recalled that this period of “defiant non-compliance” by conscripts led to the founding of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS). Eventually, the pressure paid off when the Norman Kirk-led Labour government was elected in November 1972 — and it immediately scrapped CMT.

This saga is one of many stories of the people’s resistance that are recounted in a new book being launched next Saturday, Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, with an overview written by Roger Fowler in the months before he died earlier this year. Many activists from the era, including his wife and fellow campaigner, Dr Lyn Doherty (Ngati Porou and Ngāpuhi), have also contributed.

Arrested 20 times
He was arrested or charged more than 20 times “during those turbulent years”, and was imprisoned four times for refusing to pay fines — a political prisoner.

Reading about this period was particularly poignant for me because in 1969 I was living in Melbourne as the young activist editor of the independent Sunday Observer and being threatened with prosecution for writing an editorial urging young Australians to burn their draft cards.

I didn’t know Roger, Lyn and their whānau then. This came many years later, especially when we crossed paths over our Palestine activism with Roger founding and campaigning with the Kia Ora Gaza project in a sustained effort to break the cruel Israeli siege of the Gaza enclave to deliver humanitarian aid.

Veteran activist Roger Fowler, co-founder of the Ponsonby People’s Union and a founding member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, died on 21 February 2026, aged 77. His whānau have put in tremendous mahi in their effort to try to complete this remarkable book before his death, and it is a compelling testament to his life, and to the comrades and activist supporters.

Fowler’s “vision, energy and guitar helped sustain a remarkable initiative in collective action” for a fairer and better community.

Back to the Resistance Bookshop.

In fact, there were three of them – one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. They were at the “forefront of this vibrant groundswell of protest and rebellion”. Young people, including many students, spearheaded new forms of activism such as “sit-ins, street theatre, graffiti, leaflets, protest songs and pickets”.

‘Bowels of the underground’
Countless leaflets and screen-printed posters were produced from what was dubbed “the bowels of the underground”.

Auckland’s Resistance Bookshop was also a popular rendezvous for Australian and US draft dodgers who had fled to New Zealand to escape the Vietnam War.

The Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) was at the forefront of street protests venting outrage at the pointless slaughter in Vietnam and the “brutal oppression in apartheid South Africa”.

Within walking distance of the Resistance Bookshop — few protesters had cars back then — were two popular hangouts: the Babel restaurant in Victoria Street, and the Kiwi Tavern pub in Symonds Street.

The Vietnam War protests peaked with about 35,000 taking part but eased off as NZ troops were gradually withdrawn from 1971 onwards. Committed activists began looking for a fresh “meaningful direction”.

Many of the serious radicals who had left the bookshop formed an inner city Marxist study group exploring works by Mao Zedong and Lenin, and other more modern authors analysing class struggles against capitalism.

“PMY activist and secretary Cliff Kelsall and I became friends and workmates as labourers on various building sites,” wrote Fowler. ”We started exploring ideas about urban activism, especially inspired by the appeal of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson to ‘bring the war back home’, by Newton’s concept of grassroots community organising, building a global network of ‘revolutionary intercommunalism’, and by Seale’s clarion call to ‘Seize the time’.”

North Vietnamese meeting
In 1972, a group of the “young radicals” were invited to meet a visiting North Vietnamese delegation, including the mayor of Hanoi, at the Auckland University Student Union building.

“Among issues discussed,” recalled Fowler, “I asked about the idea that had been quietly floating about, of organising an international militia to support the Vietnamese struggle — similar to the International Brigades that about a dozen young Kiwis had joined up with in the 1930s to fight Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War.”

Several New Zealand medics had volunteered then too, explained Fowler, including the activist and late Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt’s aunt, Rene Shadbolt.

“The startled visitors politely responded: “Thanks, but no thanks.” The Vietnamese suggested that the New Zealanders should instead support their struggle by building a “homegrown revolutionary movement”.

“Advice some of us took to heart,” noted Fowler.

This led to the foundation of an urban movement to organise around “real life struggles and developing survival skills” — useful for the then working class neighbourhoods of Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Freeman’s Bay and Newton.

From the Resistance Bookshop, the movement had now graduated to become the Ponsonby People’s Union for Survival and Freedom (PU, for short), with its headquarters at 15 Ponsonby Road in a rundown block of shops skirting Western Park, a block long since demolished to provide more space in the reserve.

‘Clear sense of purpose’
“We decided we needed to start with a clear unified sense of purpose,” wrote Fowler. “A Ten Point Statement of Direction evolved, inspired by the Ten Point Programme adopted earlier by the US Black Panther Party.

“This statement was to become our set of guiding principles for positive practical actions and for addressing the key issues facing our community – such as substandard housing, police harassment, poor education and health services, racism, women’s rights, costly food, arbitrary evictions, and the isolation of prisoners, often in faraway prisons, from their families and loved ones, and advancing social cohesion.”

As Fowler summed up the problem-solving objective, “we aimed to advance the wellbeing, resilience, social cohesion and survival of our community and to strive for civil liberties and freedom from oppression”.

Although clearly influenced by Newton and the Black Panthers — but never a “copycat” movement, PU often operated as a “sister organisation” cooperating with the Polynesian Panthers — of anti-Dawn Raids fame — the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ), PYM, Ngā Tamatoa, ACORD and “other left activist groups of the day”.

While deciding on PU’s programmes, Cliff Kelsall and Fowler met Polynesian Panthers leaders at their office in Three Lamps, Ponsonby (honoured today with a pavement panther tile), and forged a warm rapport and community partnership that lasted for the seven-year life of the union and beyond. First up for collaboration was a community food co-op.

“We wanted the co-op to engage with people and encourage them to work together as volunteers around the common goal of sustaining our households with fresh, low-cost food,” wrote Fowler.

And the movement introduced itself in 1972 through leaflets as “a community-based group of people getting together to try to solve common problems and build a real community with control over its own destiny”.

Borrowed old trucks
The Ponsonby headquarters had four upstairs bedrooms and a meeting room (plus garage space and a courtyard), so Kelsall and Fowler immediately moved in with others to help pay the rent — at $15 a week!

To get the food co-op underway, the collective borrowed old trucks from their networks, collated food orders and bought fresh vegetables and fruit in bulk from the downtown Turners & Growers markets each Monday morning.

“By cutting out the middlemen, up to half of the retail prices were slashed. And we knew the goods were fresh,” Fowler wrote.

“We would choose to buy – at rock bottom prices – spotted apples and misshapen pumpkins that no retailer wanted on their display shelves.”

The co-op was an ideal platform for supporting other struggles, especially during the 1977 Timber Workers’ Union dispute — “when we dispatched our truck packed to the roof with donated food to support workers on the picket line at Kawerau”.

The PU also helped about 300 locked out workers at the NZMC Honda car assembly plant and set up a co-op distribution depot at the Panmure Town Hall.

People’s Union activists carried on taking part in anti-Vietnam War protests and over “other issues of the day”. One of the memorable banners read: “Learn from the Vietnamese — unite to defeat our common enemies”.

China ‘educational tour’
In 1975, the NZ China Friendship Society facilitated a “workers’ educational tour” of China, which included six People’s Union activists — including Roger Fowler, his wife Lyn Doherty, and the late mayor Tim Shadbolt of Invercargill: “We visited communal farms, big worksites, and met renowned NZ author Rewi Alley.”

This was six years before I also — now living back in Aotearoa after several years in Paris, France, following the 1968 student riots — went on a Friendship Society visit to China and wrote a series of articles for The Auckland Star.

Now as a semi-retired journalist with also strong beliefs about community-owned and independent media, I was heartened to read Roger Fowler’s chapter on the PU’s independent information efforts.

Fowler wrote about this PU initiative saying: “The People’s Union started to attract the interest of some established media, though unlike other left organisations, we never courted the media. We believed it was more important for people to develop our own independent ‘people’s media’.

“However, a journalist from the Women’s Weekly followed the food co-op for her scoop one day and wrote a sympathetic article.”

In 2016, Roger Fowler and former Polynesian Panther Party members Tigilau Ness and Tuu’ulenana Iluli attended the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In 2025, Fowler and Ness collaborated with a vinyl album, “Songs of  Struggle and Solidarity”.

Prison whānau bus trips
Among the many projects of the PU was in 1972 starting a visitors’ weekly free bus run to Pāremoremo maximum security prison near Albany, and a monthly bus trip to Waikēria Borstal near Te Awamutu.

“These services were very popular, as both prisons were purposely located far away from any viable public transport, making family or community relationships difficult for many,” Fowler wrote.

“We once crowded about 80 people into a 55-seater bus to Waikēria. Polynesian Panther Party leader Tigilau Ness brought along his guitar and would get a big singalong going from the back seat – his ‘American Pie’ got everyone joining in the chorus, ‘Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie . . . “

The People’s Union food co-op became a key organising tool and platform, recalled Fowler, for another important “problem solving” programme – defending tenants. The PU centre became the “go-to place for local people facing issues inflicted by rapacious landlords, a major problem that plagued the area”.

Fowler pays tribute to community activist Betty Wark and her 1976 Tole Street “tent city” occupation of a public park in Ponsonby in protest for “decent housing”.

In a page devoted to her campaigning, Helene Connor is quoted saying; “Housing the homeless and utilising the buildings to their full extent became a passion for Betty. The Tole Street tent ‘village’ kept going for several months while Betty continued to look for suitable accommodation to house the group.”

Vasau family eviction
Fowler recalled “one of our most high-profile housing cases was the eviction of the Vasau family from their home in Norfolk Street, Ponsonby, in 1974”.

“A new owner had told the family to leave their family home of five years, so he could bang the rent up. They had nowhere to go, so had no choice but to stay and fight.

“One day when nobody was home the landlord seized the chance to break in and toss the family’s furniture and belongings outside.”

The People’s Union was called and activists along with neighbours moved the family’s belongings back inside and barricaded the house. Eventually, six months later the landlord returned along with a senior police officer and a court order.

The good news was that the court order along with community support actually helped the family gain a new state house in South Auckland for their home.

Police harassment “was often a problem for some of the people we worked with,” recalled Fowler. A police “task force” would parade through the streets and stop outside local pubs.

“They would intimidate people, usually in an arrogant, racist manner. They called this ‘team policing’, but the People’s Union newspaper compared them to an invading army.”

Defining historical event
The Māori Land March in 1975 “was a defining event in the history of Aotearoa — People’s Union members supported the march in many ways, whether joining with the marchers on the road, feeding them, or supplying the bus so that kaumatua could rest when they needed to”.

Fowler devoted an inspired chapter to the struggle of Takaparawhau–Bastion Point. On 6 January 1977, Ngāti Whātua’s Ōrākei Action Committee “put out an urgent call for supporters to join a tent protest” at Takaparawhau, Bastion Point.

“The vast area of open fields was under direct threat by the Muldoon government, which intended to develop the land as elite real estate for upmarket housing.”

Fowler quoted Sharon Hawke, one of the protest occupiers and the daughter of Joe Hawke, one of the leaders, declaring in Takaparawhau, the people’s story: “This was to become one of the greatest shows of strength in modern [NZ] history.”

“The protest camp evolved into a formidable village occupation that stood firm on the disputed land, until evicted by 600 police 506 days later. The uniting catchcry was: ‘Bastion Point is Māori Land’.”

People’s Union activists were there in the protest from the beginning. The land was “unprotected, windswept terrain exposed to the elements which can be very harsh”. The PU advocated the need to build shelters and huts rather than relying on tents. Some people were able to bring on caravans.

Activists from the PU hired a large rotary hoe to help dig vegetable gardens and the protest community rapidly grew into a “living village” — it was “transformed into a vibrant marae”.

Lyn Doherty and Roger Fowler lived in the protest village “in a little tin shack at the rear of Arohanui [the wharenui] — cooking toasted sandwiches for breakfast on a small methylated spirits burner each morning”.

Shameful Bastion Point raid
On 25 May 1978, a massive police operation moved to evict and demolish the village. On that fateful morning, 222 Ngāti Whātua and supporters were arrested and all the buildings were demolished and removed in a shameful repressive action by the state.

“But although we lost the battle,” recalled Fowler, “we won the war — the land remains as public space under Ngāti Whātua control.”

The Ponsonby food co-op grew until about 600 local households were taking part by the end of the 1970s. But the inner Auckland suburbs of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and their demographics were rapidly changing. Old houses were being sold and renovated as the suburbs were being “gentrified” and rundown shops were being converted into cafes, restaurants and fashion boutiques.

Sadly, the final edition of People’s Union community newspaper in April 1979 announced the closure of the Ponsonby People’s Union, saying “the need for an ‘umbrella’ organisation to coordinate a wide range of community action (from prison visiting to food co-ops) is no longer necessary”.

However, Roger Fowler and whānau expanded their community activism to their new home in Māngere East, where Roger drove buses and was an Engineers Union delegate before managing the Mangere East Community Learning Centre.

In 1999, he was awarded the Queens Service Medal for community service.

Roger and Lyn have four children — Tawera, Hone, Maia and Kahutia — and 11 mokopuna.

Besides the book’s overview by Roger Fowler, there are 22 contributed chapters by activists in an 18-page section titled “Other activists’ voices”. This includes essays by Sir Bob Harvey, David Williams, Dr Lyn Doherty (“The shooting of Daniel Houpapa – a gross miscarriage of justice”), Vivian Hutchinson, Wayne Toleafoa, Rod Davis, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua, Anna and Barry Lee, Catherine Manning (a profile on her mother Pat Hammond), Joris de Bres, Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau, and Tigilau Ness (“A legacy to pass onto our children”).

As well as the historical record of a remarkable era in the 1970s, the book is adorned with a superb gallery of photographs and graphic art. The Fowler whānau have worked extraordinarily hard to bring this publication to fruition after Roger’s death. A labour of love.

Something new that I learned from reading the book is that along with being such an influential activist and strategic organiser, protest entertainer and singer, Roger Fowler was also a gifted political cartoonist. Such extraordinary talent.

In the foreword, Nick Bollinger sums up: “Even though Roger writes in this book that ‘we never considered ourselves as part of a “youth culture” or so-called “alternative counterculture”, when I look back the People’s Union for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most inspiring application of countercultural ideals. I am very glad its story — and Roger’s — is at last being told in these pages.”

And so am I.

• Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.
• Two book launch events: Saturday, 3 October 2026, 1pm-3.30pm, The Ponsonby Community Centre, 20 Ponsonby Terrace, Auckland.
  Sunday, 11 October 2026, 1-4pm, Whare Wānanga, Level 2, Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero – Auckland Central Library, 44/46 Lorne St, CBD.

AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The ferocity with which sections of the New Zealand right have moved to discredit Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work before even turning a page tells its own story.

It is the same reflexive hostility that has greeted every major investigation Hager has produced over the past three decades: a rush to delegitimise, to sneer, to dismiss, all before the evidence has been examined.

But this time the haste has been almost comical. Within hours of the book’s release, Newstalk ZB’s Tim Beveridge — who could not possibly have read it — declared it “junk” and banned callers from discussing it on his overnight show.

• READ MORE: Other Nicky Hager reports

Beveridge’s contempt was not grounded in analysis; it was a strike against uncomfortable truths. His close association with Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union, a regular guest on Beveridge’s Saturday afternoon show, only underscores how tightly woven these networks of mutual reinforcement have become. When a book threatens the legitimacy of that ecosystem, the ecosystem responds like a single organism.

National Party MP and former minister Chris Penk, too, performed the same ritual denunciation. In a column for Stuff, he admitted he had not read Dirty Work — then proceeded to attack it anyway.

Penk reduced Hager’s investigation to a caricature: “a person with left-wing views disagrees with people with right-wing views.”

Penk’s dismissal was not an argument; it was another conservative signal that the book should be treated as illegitimate and unworthy of engagement.

But more revealing still was the intervention of Dane Giraud, a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and a committed Zionist defender of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. According to Giraud, those who take Hager seriously belong to an “elite intelligentsia” suffering from something he calls “Free Speech Union derangement”.  This “elite (liberal) intelligentsia” is apparently inherently hostile to an organisation like the FSU because it is an authentic grassroots movement representing everyday working-class people.

FSU’s dishonest portrayal
This is a thoroughly dishonest portrayal of the FSU. It is not a working-class organisation that has emerged organically from within the workplace. It is a rebranded conservative lobby group, born out of the Taxpayers’ Union in 2018 and co-founded by corporate and political operatives including Jordan Williams. Its board includes several committed Zionists, and its campaigns consistently align with the interests of the political right.

To describe such an organisation as “grassroots” is not merely dishonest; it is an appropriation of working-class language for elite political ends. Traditional unions are democratic institutions funded and governed by workers themselves. They exist to bargain collectively, to protect wages, to improve safety, to build solidarity.

The FSU, by contrast, operates as a top-down lobby group focused on legal interventions, media pressure campaigns, and cultural warfare. It is structurally indistinguishable from the constellation of conservative advocacy outfits that have proliferated over the past decade — groups that claim to defend “free speech” while consistently mobilising against progressive movements, academic institutions, and public broadcasters.

Giraud’s rhetorical manoeuvre — painting critics as elitist while presenting the FSU as authentically proletarian — is a classic deflection. It shifts attention away from the organisation’s funding sources, political alliances, and ideological commitments. It reframes scrutiny as snobbery.

But Hager’s work has never been about cultural disdain; it has been about mapping the hidden architecture of influence. Dirty Politics exposed how attack blogs, political strategists, and wealthy donors coordinated smear campaigns. Dirty Work continues that tradition by tracing how lobby groups like the Taxpayers’ Union and their offshoots shape public debate while presenting themselves as neutral civic actors. To investigate such structures is not “derangement”. It is democratic hygiene.

The right’s panic over Dirty Work is therefore unsurprising. Hager’s investigations threaten the mythology that groups like the FSU and the Taxpayers Union depend on: the myth of independence, the myth of grassroots authenticity, the myth of representing “ordinary New Zealanders” rather than well-connected political networks.

When those myths are punctured, the public can see these organisations for what they are — professionalised advocacy machines that weaponise culture-war grievances to advance conservative interests.

A shadow infrastructure
From a left-wing perspective, Dirty Work is invaluable precisely because it illuminates the machinery of contemporary conservative politics. It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated, and how lobby groups coordinate narratives across platforms. It reveals the connective tissue linking talkback hosts, political operatives, advocacy groups, and sympathetic MPs.

Furthermore, it does not claim that these actors are engaged in a grand conspiracy; rather, it shows how shared interests, ideological alignment, and personal networks create a shadow infrastructure of influence that operates largely out of public view.

If the book has a limitation, it is that it stops short of connecting these dynamics to the deeper failures of capitalism itself — the structural incentives that reward polarisation, the economic interests that benefit from deregulation and austerity, the corporate funding streams that sustain lobby groups committed to shrinking the public sphere.

But even without that broader analysis, Dirty Work arms progressives with the factual ammunition needed to challenge the narratives that dominate New Zealand’s political discourse. It exposes the machinery behind the manufactured outrage, the faux-populism, and the relentless attacks on public institutions.

The right’s rush to bury the book before reading it is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of fear. Hager has once again pulled back the curtain, and those who prefer to operate in the shadows are scrambling to turn off the lights.

Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current with permission.

• Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right, by Nicky Hager, 2026 (Potton & Burton).

After facing public scrutiny, some of the members of different Māori delegations to Israel have spoken out about the trip.

The trips were reported to have been organised and funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with conflicting claims over whether they were fully or partially funded. The Israeli Embassy has declined to confirm the details.

The trip was advertised under the banner of “business and innovation”.

• READ MORE: ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• Māori delegation’s Israel trip under scrutiny over funding and itinerary
• Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission of Inquiry finds
• Other Gaza reports

But questions remained on why Māori leaders were going to Israel, while its government is committing a genocide in Gaza.

‘The other side of the story’
One of the people who have just recently come back from the trip was Iwi leader Renata Hakiwai, who believed the trip was to promote Israel and to “provide the other side of the story”.

He claims the trip was partly due to personal reasons as well.

“I have interest in business technology and innovation, and the cohort was about business technology and innovation,” he said.

“As a child, you learn around the Bible, and as a Christian, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a good opportunity for me to visit some of these sites’.”

Before going, Hakiwai stated he had “anti-Semitic thoughts”, but his mind was changed after the visit.

He called himself a “truth seeker” and pointed to social media’s algorithm for people believing certain stories over others, which was one of the reasons he went.

“One thing I found is that you get an algorithm on TikTok or social media, and it can totally consume someone’s brain with a certain subject, and I had to check myself.

“I started learning the other side, and some of the history, and some of the reasons as to why things have been happening, and that’s sort of the reason why I thought, ‘Actually, I need to go and hear what’s on the ground and some of the truths’.

“And so it changed my mind totally.

“I haven’t swung right to the other side, but I think my view is probably a little bit more balanced.”

Hakiwai admits he did not speak to any Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, but did visit the Gaza Envelope, an area of southern Israel bordering the Gaza Strip.

When asked by Te Ao with Moana whether he could present a balanced view without speaking to people in Gaza and the West Bank, he instead pointed to the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023.

“I think to myself, if my daughter or my young fellow or kids were at that concert, I would want ultimate revenge.

“Obviously, Israel came down hard. Have they come down too hard? Potentially,” said Hakiwai.

“I didn’t read too much into the UN stuff, because I even know at the UN there’s opposing views depending on what side of the board you sit on,” said Hakiwai.

He also said he did not believe a two-state solution would work because of Hamas.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN finds        Video: UNNews

‘They didn’t really like being asked the hard questions’
Indigenous lawyer Maui Solomon was invited on the trip but was later excluded for asking “hard questions”.

“I was maybe half an hour talking with [the organiser], and I just did not have a good vibe because I was asking the hard questions. And to be fair to Riki [Manarangi], actually, he said, ‘Ask the hard questions’. But yeah, they didn’t really like being asked the hard questions,” he told Te Ao with Moana.

Solomon said he had already intended not to go before being kicked out of the group.

He claims to have tried showing those in the delegation what happened to Māori who supported Palestine in Israel.

“I also posted to the group a video of Hāhona Ormsby, a Māori who had been there as part of the flotilla delivering aid into Gaza. He says in that video that he was captured, he was bound, he was beaten, he was tortured, he was kneed in the genitals. And he was singled out because he was Māori. He’s got a full mataora.

“As a result of that, I was excluded because I was ‘fear-mongering’.

“So I was merely highlighting what some of the concerns were, but then I was accused of just buying into all of the fear-mongering, and someone accused me of being an algorithm.”

He believes the trip was to promote the people of Israel as “Indigenous”, not a “business and innovation” trip.

“I’d also heard that Israel had been bringing Indigenous peoples from Australia and Canada and the United States over there.

“But that’s what seems to be the agenda is for the State of Israel to say they have the support of Indigenous peoples around the world, and therefore they are also Indigenous.

“Some of the comments I’ve heard from former delegates who have been there is exactly that. It’s all been pro-Israel, State of Israel, and that they are Indigenous to the region, so whether there’s been a brainwashing going on or whatever?”

Solomon said it’s concerning that the Israeli government was reaching out to Aotearoa.

In saying that, adding that he might have gone if there was more transparency and the delegation was allowed to enter Gaza to see what was happening first-hand.

‘I want to make decisions myself’
Former Broadcaster Neil Waka went on the 2025 delegation after being shoulder-tapped to join.

He told Te Ao with Moana he “hesitantly” said yes.

Waka said he did not regret going to Israel, despite the deaths happening in Gaza — more than 75,000, mostly women and children, have been killed since October 2023.

“People are very ferocious about their thinking around Israel and Gaza. I know they are, but I don’t have to agree with them because they think a certain way, and I certainly don’t follow trends.

“I want to make decisions myself over whether or not I believe certain things, and it all came back to the ideologies to me.

“It just came back to this organisation wants a complete eradication of Israel. This organisation wants to just exist,” said Waka.

When questioned on whether he spoke to any Palestinian people in their own space, Waka immediately said: “No, I never wanted to”.

“For me, personally, I didn’t trust that that was a place [Gaza] that I’d be safe.”

Similar to Hakiwai, the former broadcaster doesn’t believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

“Yeah, look, some people can say it is, but a genocide is the absolute ethnic cleansing or eradication of a people. That’s not happening.

“That’s just not happening because Israel has the power to do that if they wanted to. Now, if they did that, if they threw in nukes and just cleaned up the whole of Gaza, evil. They’re not doing that.”

He instead blames the current state of Gaza on Hamas, not Israel.

Te Ao with Moana pointed out similarities between Waka’s talking points and those of the Israeli government.

“I’m just going on what my feeling is. Did I feel comfortable being there all the time? No. Did I feel comfortable that I could talk to whomever I wanted to? Yes. Do I agree with everything that happens on both sides? No.

“I don’t think anyone’s perfect in this. What I find the most fascinating is that one side is being globally attacked.”

First published by Te Ao Māori News and republished with permission.

• Watch Te Ao with Moana on Māori+, every Monday at 8 pm.

The Palestine Forum (PFNZ) has challenged New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters over the country’s response to the Gaza as a test of commitment to international law, human rights and self-determination, saying “meaningful action” is needed now.

“Words alone do not end occupation,” said Maher Nazzal, chair of PFNZ.

“Statements alone do not stop settlement expansion. Humanitarian assistance alone does not deliver self-determination.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Forum reports

“And ‘when, not if’ is not a timetable.”

Nazzal said Peters had presented Palestinian statehood recognition as an example of New Zealand pursuing an “independent, multi-directional foreign policy” including where New Zealand has differed from some of its closest partners.

“Palestine is not a talking point or a diplomatic case study,” Nazzal said in a statement.

In 2025, New Zealand had decided not to recognise the State of Palestine, while several close partner countries, including Australia and the UK, had proceeded with recognition.

‘When, not if’
The NZ government had argued that recognition needed to make a “tangible contribution” to a lasting two-state solution.

“Now, in September 2026, Peters is again saying Palestinian statehood is a matter of ‘when, not if’.

“So when?” asked Nazzal.

He said Palestinians had waited generations for freedom, justice and self-determination.

“An independent foreign policy should not mean simply having the freedom to delay,” Nazzal said.

“It should mean having the courage to act according to principles — even when doing so is uncomfortable, politically difficult or inconvenient for powerful partners.

“New Zealand has repeatedly affirmed the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and support for a two-state solution.

Forum’s wish list
“If Palestinian statehood is genuinely a matter of ‘when, not if’, then Palestinians should not be expected to wait indefinitely for New Zealand to decide that the time is right.”

The Palestine Forum calls on New Zealand to:

• Recognise the State of Palestine without further unnecessary delay;
• Uphold international law consistently and without double standards;
• Strengthen accountability for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law;
• Take meaningful action against settlement expansion and settler violence;
• Ensure humanitarian assistance reaches Palestinians in need;
• Support Palestinian self-determination and political agency; and
• Use New Zealand’s diplomatic voice to pursue an end to the occupation and a just and lasting peace.”

This is a photo of me in the desert in Saudi Arabia 19 years ago. Was I covered? You bet.

I recall receiving a letter from a white feminist friend who told me my feminism must have been skewed by my experience in the Middle East.

Actually I met so many feisty feminists in the Middle East and I found a Middle East very different to the one I’d seen on the mainstream media.

• READ MORE: Other Saige England reports

My Middle East was a Middle East of moons and stars and tents and light garments draped like tents. My Middle East was the Middle East of palaces in the desert and mysterious winds.

Were there things that were wrong there? Yes. Just as there are in the US. But I saw and experienced much that was good. I rose in my employment, I managed and supervised and I met other women who were managers and supervisors.

As one Italian woman said: “It is easier for me to rise as a woman here.” I found that too. I found work easily in Qatar. I found it difficult here in Aotearoa to rise, no matter how well I did in terms of qualifications and awards.

New Zealand is only free if you don’t write about certain matters. If you don’t rock the boat. If you aren’t too much — too pro the environment or too pro indigenous rights. I still write about those aspects of life.

Relatively speaking
There, in Qatar, I worked with women who were covered and women who were uncovered. Relatively speaking.

I met women who covered from choice. I met women who were forced to cover (and that is wrong). I met women who were conservative and who didn’t cover. I met feminists who covered. I met women who wore the veil and the abbaya because they were radical — it was a way of giving the finger to the US.

Speaking of the US — US military bases were everywhere. The US had invaded Iraq. The military wives often drank a lot.

I interviewed US soldiers and found them worrying. Their education had been conservative, fundamentalist, narrow.

Many US soldiers were bright but they supported the US nuclear bombing of Japan, they supported nuclear everything. They thought all Arabs and environmentalists were terrorists.

When I first arrived, the Twin Towers had been bombed and I’d heard lots of reports about Al Qaeda. I used to leap into taxis vowing that I was not American. I was told that “it is ok, lady, we aren’t like those crazies” (people who blow up buildings).

The people I met were peaceful hospitable people. The women I met wanted careers.

Issues were the same
One of my friends, an Aussie, was a psychologist. I asked her if the problems her female clients faced were different — did Western expat women have different issues to Qatari or Lebanese or Egyptian or Pakistani women? Nope. The issues were all the same: “Is my husband cheating on me?”, “Are my children OK?”

When I arrived in Qatar the divorce rate of the local population was 51 per cent. Many young women chose not to marry.

In Qatar and Bahrain women covered, or didn’t, by choice. Some told me they wore the garments because they were easy and affordable. They could dress up after uni but they could just grab the robe by day. Some wore the veil on a bad hair day. Oh, there were a raft of reasons.

What saddens and sickens me is that I’m often not believed about this. I’ve been accused of betraying the feminist cause. The kind of feminists who don’t ask other women what they want. Those kind of feminists tell me I compromised.

But I felt the compromise when I attended a tupperware party here where the whole room except me launched into racist jibes about Indians. Ye Gods, spare me.

Back here, a few years back, I befriended Fatin who came from Singapore and who lived here in Aotearoa while studying. Fatin was bright and so lovely, so open and kind and free. A poet. She read 30 books in a year. She loved the author, Elif Shafak, a favourite author of mine. We bonded.

But Fatin was often abused in Ōtautahi by people who told her she shouldn’t be wearing the veil or the robe. They felt sorry for her, they said. Fatin said she felt sorry for them for judging others.

‘No judgment’ . . . a favourite
“No judgement” was one of Fatin’s favourite sayings. I learned so much from her. Sadly, she had to leave because she couldn’t gain a residency visa.

Women wear clothing for all sorts of reasons. What concerns me far more than what we wear is unnecessary body surgery. I saw boob jobs and lip jobs, and jaw-broken jobs in the Middle East just as I see them in the West.

I see women manufacturing themselves as products to please men. It makes me sick. Don’t do it. Don’t. Be yourself.

I wore the robe and the veil that hot day in Saudi because it kept the sun and the hot dry wind off my face and body. Like so many women, I was naked underneath. I felt that warm wind caress me.

I loathe the men who make women wear what they don’t want to wear. I’ve always resisted that. I didn’t throw out my hippy skirt when my ex wanted me to, I kept it, cherished it, I sparkled and shone. But I’ve also felt shamed by women who tell me I shouldn’t bother using a towel to shield myself while getting dressed on the beach or while camping.

My choice sometimes is to cover. Sometimes the robe feels good. I like the feeling of having my own wee house and being safe underneath. That is my choice. If I lived differently or had different experiences or had never been abused in this Western world perhaps I would think differently but that is my experience.

I fight the predators in my own way. And I know that freedom is not here yet.

Western abuse insidious
The abuse in the West is insidious. It is often denied. We believe we are free but we are not free. There is another form of control.

Women are bombarded with social messages that tell us to straighten our noses or lighten our skin. They are everywhere.

They appear on my feed as they probably appear on yours.

I’ve aged in an age where I’ve watched young women pout and lie and become “influencers” selling all sorts of fake garbage and sadly, faking themselves. It isn’t good for their mental health. It isn’t good at all. Are they free? I don’t think so.

How do we unpick the social fabric of inequity especially when it tells us we are free.

Freedom is the freedom to choose. Freedom is the freedom to vote. Freedom is the freedom to use our voices and to wear what we want to wear. Freedom is the freedom and the choice not to turn ourselves into objects for the pleasure of others.

Freedom is the freedom to not be raped or abused or killed. Freedom is the freedom to love and learn. Freedom is the freedom to work — to work outside or inside and not be pressured to do both.

Women deserve freedom.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

A national advocacy group congratulated the Invercargill City Council for voting today to end procurement of goods or services from companies profiting from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

Invercargill is the seventh local body to pass similar motions sanctioning Israel, said the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

The other bodies are Christchurch, Nelson and Palmerston city councils, Environment Canterbury and Environment Southland while the capital, Wellington, has banned investment in Israeli government bonds.

• WATCH: The Invercargill City Council debate
• READ MORE: Other NZ sanctions against Israel

“Thank you, Invercargill,” said PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi in a statement. “You represent the best of New Zealand. You have stood up while our [Christopher Luxon National Party-led coalition] government sits on its hands.”

“Palestine will remember your simple but significant stand for Palestinian human rights just as it will remember the complicity of the New Zealand government.”

Today’s resolution ends the council’s purchase of goods or services from companies on a UN Human Rights Council list which are accused of supporting illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Mayor Tom Campbell moved a motion to oppose the Palestine Solidarity motion. But seven councillors in a row spoke against his motion and in favour of sanctioning Israel.

Voted as council policy
Campbell’s motion was decisively lost and the resolution was voted in as council policy.

“The greatest problem in Israel/Palestine is that Israel has never been held to account for its war crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide being live-streamed from Gaza,” Tamimi said.

The Invercargill City Council debate on the illegal Israeli settlements.   Video: ICC

“By itself, the Invercargill resolution won’t force Israel to give Palestinians equal rights, but it is an important step for this country to apply BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) on Israel as requested by Palestinians civil society.

“PSNA expects more councils to have similar votes in the coming weeks.”

Republished from PSNA.

Fifty-four years ago, this very day, martial law was declared across the entire Philippines under then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

On 21 September 1972, Proclamation No. 1081 was signed — marking the beginning of a terrible, dark time in Philippines history.

So today especially, more than any other day, we Filipino people, remember.

• READ MORE: Questions for Marcos Jr 40 years after Philippines ‘People Power’ revolt
• Other martial law reports

This 21 September 2026, we join our fellow Filipinos in the homeland, and across the diaspora, to commemorate the heroes and martyrs, the citizens and allies who fought against the dictatorship and its many, many documented human rights abuses.

We recognise the power of collective memory as a testament to the past. And we say, never again!

Disinformation campaigns grossly distorting the reality of martial law are rife across traditional and social media, incorporated in modern education curricula and taught in classrooms across the Philippines.

Aimed at new generations, these campaigns even go so far as claiming martial law was a “necessary good”. This we categorically reject. Our collective memory and experience are a most powerful antidote to this historical revisionism. We remember. Never Again!

Honouring the martyrs
So, we are most glad for your solidarity here, now. Thank you for being here, as we honour our revolutionary martyrs; the men and women; the students, the workers, the activists, and journalists, the farmers, religious workers, our indigenous, the youth and old alike — ordinary citizens detained, imprisoned, tortured, raped, disappeared, and for what crimes? For speaking truth against a dictatorship.

For demanding what is only right, what is true, and just. For aspiring to a life of dignity and freedom.

We will not dishonour their memory. Never Again!

Never forget, the documented, targeted and sustained human rights abuses under 14 years of martial law in which

• 70,000 people were incarcerated. That’s the entire population of Napier to put it into perspective;
• 35,000 documented tortures; and
• More than 3000 extrajudicial killings, Yet only 11,000 victims have been officially recognised and given reparations by the Philippine government through the tireless advocacy of human rights groups KARAPATAN and SELDA — the group of former political prisoners and their supporters.

Under this regime, six out of 10 Filipino families became entrenched in poverty; wages fell by 30 percent. The cost of commodities tripled. Even our precious natural resources were not spared, as almost half of our Philippines forests were denuded.

External debt skyrocketed to almost $27 billion dollars by the end of 1986, binding the future of the Philippines even more to the chains of Western imperialism and US hegemony.

Women vital in resistance
Of the recognised, documented human rights abuses cases, 15 percent were perpetrated against women. Women played a vital role in the resistance, standing on the frontlines.

• Liliosa Hilao, a student leader and journalist remembered as the first political prisoner to die under torture and detention;
• Eugena Apostol, a publisher and journalist who founded alternative publications critical of the regime;
• Coracion “Waling Waling” Chiva, a veteran guerilla from the Second World War who opened her home and shared her experiences to support young anti-martial law activists;
• Margarita “Maita” Gomes and Nelia Sancho, former beauty queens who turned activists; and
• Maria Lorena Barrios, founder of MAKIBAKA — a rallying cry for solidarity meaning “to struggle” — which helped articulate the plight of all women within the broader framework of national and class oppression.

These women, and many others, were subjected to untold atrocities, not surprisingly to include extreme gender based, sexual violence . Tactics that continue to be employed today by the state to terrorise citizens all around the globe, from Gaza and the West Bank, the United States and Occupied Palestine, to our beloved homeland, the Philippines.

A very recent case in point — the Banjawan sisters, Pauline and Fatima, detained in 2024 and 2025 and subjected to torture and interrogation under incarceration. Pauline is still in prison — she is currently suffering a severe mental health breakdown in a Batangas prison cell. She desperately needs aid.

Free the Banjawan sisters.

Which brings us to the present.

Here we are in 2026, and yet another Marcos — this time the late dictator’s only son — continues his father’s legacy. The plague of political family dynasties “continues to bear diseased, rotten fruit as the same spectres of graft and corruption, of bureaucrat capitalism and Western imperialism flourish under yet another Marcos regime”.

The Philippines may no longer be under martial law, but the violence inflicted on our people is still real, and even more insidious.

For Marcos Jr is selling us out. He is selling our land from under us, without our consent; our precious resources to imperialists intent on warmongering.

Even as the Filipino people continue to be mired in poverty, forced to swim in flood waters or mourn loved ones swept away by the deluge; even as we demand justice for flood control projects that have never come to fruition because the money was stolen — yet again — to fund corrupt politicians and their so called nepo babies’ lavish lifestyles.

As the price of oil at the pump keeps climbing and the cost-of-living crisis bites even harder, all directly attributable to America and its war against Iran. Where is the accountability? Where is justice? Where is the rule of law?

Make no mistake — our precious natural resources are being offered up freely to US imperialists and the “fake state” of Israel via the Pax Silica initiative. The United States will have free reign to plunder our water, our land, our minerals for technologies used in endless war, in the genocides in Gaza, Congo, the Sudan.

Palantir, the surveillance company founded by billionaire super villain Peter Thiel, will have first dibs on materials needed for AI surveillance, which has proven to have been used to target and kill children, women, innocent civilians.

And decimate entire populations.

Pax Silica proponents claim it will bring thousands of jobs and will stimulate the Philippines economy to new heights. In truth? Those promised jobs will be on the lowest end of the production scale; low paid and exploitative.

Land — 1600 hectares of ancestral land which rightfully belongs to the indigenous Aeta people who have tended to it for centuries — will be taken for spoils; poisoned, polluted, and plundered, the indigenous living there forcibly displaced.

Our water — hard enough to get as it is — will be used to cool gigantic data centres, diverted from our communities and our farmers who grow our food and feed us. All to feed the Imperialist War Machine.

This is violence, state sanctioned and abetted. This is our government actively working against its own citizens’ interests

No one is free, until we are all free.

And the Philippines has never been truly free. Our sovereignty and self-determination thwarted by the three hundred years of Spanish colonisation, and the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, to of course, US imperialism that has coloured every aspect of Philippine daily life, without the people’s general consent or approval.

Centuries of colonisation, semi-feudalism and Western imperialism have driven millions of Filipinos — including our women, to leave their families and their children in search of financial security, to take care of your children, your elderly, your wounded and hurt, you, even as they experience discrimination, racism and unjustified hate.

We need your international solidarity, most especially now before Pax Silica is fully entrenched in material reality. Our people, our women, our children — the Collective Future — are at stake. Now is the time to agitate, organise and mobilise. Fascism is playing in our faces.

What will be your response? Will you stand with us? Free all political prisoners.

Melissa Cruz is secretary-general of GABRIELA Auckland, the General Assembly Binding Women for Reforms, Integrity, Equality, Leadership and Action. The movement is named after Gabriela Silang, a Filipino woman general revolutionary who led troops, fought and died for Philippine independence from Spain in the 18th century. This article was edited from her speech at Te Komititanga Square, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand, on 21 September 2026.

There is something grotesque about taking one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history — a technology capable of translating languages, modelling proteins, accelerating scientific discovery, assisting doctors, educating children and placing an astonishing repository of human knowledge at an ordinary person’s fingertips — and harnessing it to the ancient government business of deciding who may be killed.

States hardly needed technological assistance with that.

For as long as states have made war, they have assassinated, disappeared, tortured and executed.

• READ MORE: Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
• The controversial documentary NAZA: 10 reasons to defend this whistleblower war on Gaza film
• Other AI killing in Gaza

They have acted on rotten intelligence, mistaken civilians for enemies, bombed the wrong houses and buried the innocent alongside the intended target.

Humanity has accumulated centuries of law in an attempt to restrain that capacity for violence.

Now we have given it an algorithm.

A +972 Magazine investigation into Israel’s “Lavender” system used in the Gaza genocide describes an AI-assisted process that marked tens of thousands of Palestinians as suspected militants for potential assassination. Six Israeli intelligence sources described enormous target lists, scant human scrutiny and predetermined tolerances for civilian deaths.

Significance of Lavender
The significance of Lavender reaches far beyond one system, one military, or one war.

Artificial intelligence does not hate anyone. It has no territory to conquer, no frightened electorate to appease, no flag to salute and no enemy it wants dead.

It cannot decide that one nationality, ethnicity or political movement is hateful. It cannot lust for revenge.

Humans supply the malice

And AI offers governments a hideous new possibility: not merely to make lethal decisions, but to industrialise them.

A human life can become data, the data a probability, the probability a classification and the classification a target. Somewhere along that progression, the unique, precious universe of a living person — somebody’s child, parent, lover, neighbour — disappears into a machine-generated assessment which can be processed thousands of times faster than any human being could properly investigate the people concerned.

That isn’t intelligence replacing human cruelty — it is human cruelty acquiring computational power.

Recreated in machinery
Alan Turing wondered whether machines could think. John McCarthy gave artificial intelligence its name. Claude Shannon helped establish the mathematics on which our information age was built. Marvin Minsky devoted much of his life to understanding whether intelligence itself could be recreated in machinery.

They helped begin an intellectual adventure of almost preposterous ambition: to understand intelligence sufficiently well that we might reproduce some part of it.

Today Demis Hassabis speaks of developing AI to benefit humanity. Dario Amodei leads Anthropic, founded around the problem of making immensely powerful AI safe.

Sam Altman heads OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity.

Surely this cannot be what benefiting humanity was supposed to mean.

AI may help us understand disease, proteins, climate, mathematics, language and perhaps eventually the nature of intelligence itself. Yet the same extraordinary capacity to detect patterns across quantities of information beyond the reach of a human mind can be turned towards finding patterns in a population and deciding which people resemble the people a state wants dead.

And therein lies another danger.

Human judgement, evidence
When a human intelligence officer says, “I believe this person is a combatant,” we understand that a human being has made a judgment and can demand the evidence behind it.

When a machine assigns a probability, the mathematics can lend the conclusion an entirely undeserved aura of objectivity. But an algorithm cannot cleanse dubious intelligence, discriminatory assumptions or corrupted data merely by processing them at enormous speed.

Nor can it assume responsibility.

The analyst can point to the algorithm. The commander can point to the analyst. The politician can invoke the demands of war. The engineer can say the machine was only an advisory tool.

The machine, magnificently innocent of everything, points nowhere.

That is why human responsibility must remain absolute. I would go so far as to say that any use of AI in warfare should be prohibited.

Artificial intelligence must never become moral laundering for state violence. A computer-generated confidence score does not acquire the moral weight of evidence merely because mathematics produced it.

10,000 suspicions
Processing 10,000 suspicions in the time a human being could properly investigate 10 does not make those suspicions more reliable. It merely makes killing scalable.

Turing did not ask whether machines could think so that governments could think less.

Human beings have finally built machines capable of doing things our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

If one of the achievements of artificial intelligence is that it enables us to kill people faster, we will not have taught machines something new.

We will simply have taught them something terribly old.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

Julian Assange is officially back on X/Twitter, restoring to the world an important voice we were robbed of by the US empire’s years-long campaign to silence the WikiLeaks founder via lifelong imprisonment for forbidden acts of journalism.

Not everyone will remember it but there was a time when this was almost impossible to imagine. It seemed almost certain that this man was going to die in Belmarsh Prison or spend his remaining years in some hellhole in America.

Now whenever my nephew catches me or my husband expressing pessimism about something working out, he tells us “Hey. Assange is free now.” It’s become our family code for “Anything’s possible. Don’t give up hope.”

• LISTEN: Video reading by Tim Foley
• Other Caitlln Johnstone reports

Assange returns                                                 Video: Caitlin Johnstone

We should really try to appreciate this. Never let hope die. A better world is possible. Anything can be.

In other news, it’s good to see the world rejecting Ed Sheeran’s policy of feigned neutrality on the Gaza issue. “I don’t pick sides” is a fallacy when there’s a massive power imbalance and a clear aggressor, especially when your own country is partially responsible for what’s happening.

I’m back. https://t.co/2e58azeJkt

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) September 17, 2026

If your husband is abusing your child and you do nothing, you’re not a neutral party in that scenario, and when your kid grows up you’ll probably be blamed just as much as the father.

A modern military force hammering a giant concentration camp full of colonised people using high-tech weapons of mass murder with the help of your tax dollars is not a “war” that you get to be “neutral” towards. It’s a genocide, and you’re either for it or against it.

There is no comfortable third option where you get to avoid picking a side and also avoid looking like an asshole.

One of the most idiotic talking points you’ll see these days is that it’s bad to criticise Israel without also criticising Hamas. It’s like, what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t criticise a nuclear-armed high-tech military committing war crimes with the backing of my own country and its allies unless I also criticise a tiny group of besieged militants?

You’re telling me I can’t say anything about the abuses of an apartheid state whose supporters are relentlessly assaulting my right to free speech and eroding civil liberties throughout the Western world, unless I in the same breath also criticise a few thousand Palestinian resistance fighters who have done me no wrong? What the hell are you even talking about?

No I’m just going to criticise Israel, thank you very much. I am going to criticise the state whose genocidal atrocities are supported by the power structure under which I live and pay taxes, whose support network is systematically demolishing the rights of me and my countrymen. If you don’t like it, go screw yourself.

If you want to enrage an Israel apologist, tell them you won’t listen to the mountains upon mountains of verbiage they throw at you explaining why it’s actually fine to drop bombs on buildings full of children. pic.twitter.com/61JI50IozZ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 15, 2026

I have a few more thoughts for today:
Firstly, I love it when I see Israel apologists whining about people responding to their screeds with “I ain’t reading all that. Free Palestine.” All hasbarists have is endless mountains of verbiage explaining why it’s fine and normal to drop military explosives on buildings full of children, so it enrages them when someone takes away their only weapon.

They don’t have truth and morality on their side, so all they have is words, words, words, words, words. Take that away from them and they’ve got nothing, and they know it.

Imagine for 1 second that you have it wrong and Jews are telling the truth. That the genocide libel is bs. That Hamas are terrorists. That you are being manipulated to desire the removal of Jews from society.

Do you understand if we’re right, that makes you the millions of…

— Jonah Platt (@JonahPlatt) September 16, 2026

And finally, new rule: if you deny that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, then the onus is on you to provide a convincing explanation for why every human rights group on earth (including the Israeli ones) agrees it’s a genocide.

If you hold that there’s an antisemitic conspiracy between all human rights groups, then the burden of proof is on you to show that conspiracy taking place.

If you hold that there has been an Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate all human rights groups, then you need to provide proof of that conspiracy.

If you hold that there is no conspiracy and it’s just a coincidence that all human rights groups happen to think Israel is committing human rights abuses, then you need to provide a convincing argument why every institution of human rights experts coincidentally came to the same conclusion and are still incorrect.

You can’t just say “I disagree with their findings” or “That one group made an argument I find weak” or “It’s not a genocide because blah blah blah”. You need to address the unanimous consensus, because that’s part of the debate now.

Even flat earthers and climate deniers who claim all the experts are wrong at least try to provide arguments for why there’s a secret conspiracy to amplify faulty conclusions in the scientific community, but deniers of the Gaza genocide somehow seem to think they don’t need to address their dissent with the overwhelming consensus of experts in the relevant field.

You don’t get to do that, guys. That’s not a thing. If you’re claiming the experts are lying about one specific country, then you need to provide a detailed and believable explanation for why that might be.

I’ve yet to encounter a single genocide denier who can do this, online or otherwise. Not one.

PS: Claiming you can’t accuse Israel of genocide until the ICJ rules it a genocide is exactly the same as claiming you can’t say Charlie Kirk was murdered until his killer has been officially convicted of murder.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Thousands took part in today’s Greenpeace-led March for Nature in the heart of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Tāmaki Makaurau.

Critics of the coalition government’s controversial proposed Conservation Amendment Bill say this would allow selling off of conservation land, weaken environmental protections, and put short-term profit ahead of people and endanger the future of the planet.

“If Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” said Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party MP.

“This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Organisers of the rally — partnered by Forest and Bird — in Albert Park followed by a march down Queen Street say 35,000 people took part.

Placards and banners declared “Honour Te Tiriti [of Waitangi],”More hoot, less loot,” “Hands off conservation land”, “You can’t rehabilitate exploited land”, and “I’m $hane . . . bribe me!” in apparent reference to an unpopular minister.

Plenty of Palestinian flags were among the marchers. This rally coincided with the 155th consecutive week of protest over Israel’s genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

• Photographs: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
  
• More images/videos

Greenpeace March for Nature

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“If Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” he said. “This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by, while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Greenpeace was supported at the march by Forest and Bird.

“The message to every political party from the people of New Zealand is clear — if you stand up for nature, we will stand with you, but if you sell off our conservation land, weaken environmental protections or put short-term profit ahead of our future, we will not stand by and let it happen,” said Forest & Bird policy and advocacy group manager Richard Capie.

Greenpeace claimed about 35,000 people attended the protest, although police reported a maximum of 6000, with no incidents resulting.

This story was first published on

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand (PFNZ) has appealed to the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi (NZCTU) to follow the lead of the UK trade union movement and take meaningful action in support of Palestinian rights.

The call follows a key decision by the UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), representing more than 5.3 million workers, which has unanimously backed a motion supporting the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The motion calls for action to oppose what it describes as the “catastrophic destruction” of Gaza and Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

• READ MORE: UK trade unions back motion to boycott and sanction Israel
• Other BDS sanctions reports
• The BDS movement

It includes calls for an end to military cooperation and arms deals with Israel, wide-ranging sanctions, divestment from companies complicit in violations of international law, and support for trade union-led workplace action.

The Palestine Forum said in a statement it was time for the New Zealand trade union movement to now have the same conversation.

“New Zealand workers and trade unions have a long history of standing up for justice, human rights and workers’ rights internationally,” said Maher Nazzal, founder and spokesperson of the forum.

“The UK trade union movement has taken a clear position that solidarity with Palestinian workers cannot stop at statements. It is calling for collective action against complicity.

Consider ‘meaningful action’
“We are asking NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi to consider what meaningful action New Zealand’s trade union movement can take.

“This is not about asking one organisation to speak for everyone. It is about opening a serious conversation within the New Zealand labour movement about what solidarity with Palestinian workers and the Palestinian people should look like in practice.”

The PFNZ is calling on NZCTU to:

• publicly consider and support Palestinian-led BDS initiatives;
• review trade union investments, procurement and relationships to identify links with companies involved in or benefiting from violations of Palestinian rights;
• support measures to end military and economic complicity with violations of international law;
• strengthen solidarity with Palestinian trade unions and workers;
• support workplace and union-led initiatives for Palestinian rights; and
• raise these issues with the New Zealand government, including the need for stronger action concerning the occupation, settlements and settler violence.

International partners
New Zealand has already joined international partners in sanctions targeting individuals and entities involved in financing and enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Forum said in the statement that the question was now whether New Zealand’s civil society and trade union movements were prepared to build on that position.

“Workers’ solidarity has always crossed borders,” Nazzal said.

“Palestinian workers and trade unionists are part of the global labour movement. When workers elsewhere face injustice, trade unions have historically understood that solidarity means more than words.

“We encourage NZCTU to engage with its affiliated unions, Palestinian representatives and civil society organisations and consider following the example now being set by the UK trade union movement.

“The UK has shown that trade unions can act collectively. We are asking New Zealand’s trade union movement to consider doing the same.”

The New Zealand government has so far declined to join the United Kingdom and announce sanctions on goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The UK is one of 12 countries, including France and Canada, which have announced similar trade restrictions or an intention to do so. The goal is to rescue an eventual two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

The sanctions are in response to what UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband described as “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians […] perpetrated by settler terrorists”, with the Israeli military “complicit” in those actions.

• READ MORE: Pioneer of Palestine protest in NZ warns against the IDF ‘obscenity’ becoming normalised
• Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine
• Other Israeli illegal settlements in Palestine reports

While condemning the increase in illegal settlements, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand “has not traditionally used trade measures to address foreign policy issues”.

To do so would be complex and require a full policy process. We are not in a position to do that ahead of the election.

The official response to the UK initiative can be questioned on several grounds.

First, New Zealand has used trade measures in the past to address foreign policy issues, most notably against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Imports of gold, oil and gas are prohibited and there is a 35 percent tariff on all imported Russian goods.

Second, while New Zealand needs to adopt special legislation to impose sanctions outside the United Nations regime, the Russian Sanctions Act — passed in 2022 just three weeks after the invasion of Ukraine — shows it can be done swiftly.

The precise nature of the sanctions may be complex to implement, as the UK has acknowledged. But the intent comes first.

Third, the proximity of a general election should not prevent New Zealand complying with its obligations under international law — especially when the opposition Labour Party has indicated it strongly supports adopting sanctions.

Israeli settler colonialism, explained in 15 seconds https://t.co/WFNekm8uhK pic.twitter.com/j0xgONzYyy

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) September 15, 2026

Saving a two-state solution
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, dates from 1967 and was characterised as a “flagrant violation of international law” by the UN Security Council in 2016.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel’s actions amount to an illegal annexation of territory and are contrary to the prohibition on the use of force and the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Despite this, Israel has built around 160 settlements housing 700,000 people since 1967. In the past 18 months, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has estimated more than 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers (with 20 Israelis killed by Palestinians in the same period), and more than 6000 Palestinians displaced.

In August 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a plan to construct 3000 settlement homes east of occupied East Jerusalem, known as the E1 settlement plan. This would split the West Bank and isolate East Jerusalem, which Palestine regards as its capital.

This is intentional. Smotrich has asserted the E1 settlement plan “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”. In August this year, Israel opened tenders for the construction of 1200 settlement homes, prompting the UK sanctions response.

These UK sanctions go further than the limited restrictions on arms exports to Israel introduced in 2024 (extended in 2026), targeted sanctions on individual settlers and Israeli ministers, and even the UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state in 2025.

While trade more generally between Israel and the UK is unaffected, Israel has reacted furiously, closing the British consulate in Jerusalem (which operates as the de facto British Embassy in Palestine) and banning 12 British MPs from entering the country.

Israel in Panic: The Truth About UK Sanctions Revealed! @Lowkey0nline pic.twitter.com/61NhAACTh0

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) September 14, 2026

Support for a rules-based order
All states have an obligation under customary international law to cooperate to bring an end to serious breaches of certain fundamental rules, including the prohibition on the use of force, illegal occupation of territory, and the right of self-determination.

The International Court of Justice explicitly highlighted this obligation in its 2024 Advisory Opinion which stipulated that states must not recognise Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They must also “abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” concerning the territories.

For New Zealand, joining trade (and other) sanctions adopted (or slated to be adopted) by 12 other countries would be an appropriate way to comply with this obligation.

Not doing so further risks undermining the international rules-based order on which New Zealand relies to protect its interests in trade, security and the environment — at a time when that order is under extraordinary strain.

New Zealand is already an outlier, given its refusal to join the 157 countries — including Australia and a majority of European countries — that have recognised Palestine as a state.

To join the UK and other nations sanctioning goods produced in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in no way denies the existence of Israel itself as a state.

But by adopting comparable sanctions, New Zealand would strengthen the global response to Israel’s illegal activities, demonstrate regional leadership, and reassert support for the international rules-based order more generally.

Karen Scott is a professor of international law at the University of Canterbury and has produced more than 70 edited books/journal articles and book chapters in the fields of international environmental law, law of the sea and Polar law. She was president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

Two months out from New Zealand’s general election, and we have yet to see new policy from any of the seven main political parties on media and communication.

Only the Greens have a media policy on their website — and it is effectively a repeat of the 2023 policy that was heavy on high-minded rhetoric but very light on functional detail. No party has yet presented voters with practical initiatives that take account of the significant shifts in the media industry since the last election.

Admittedly, this is not the sort of policy that will sway voters, but manifestos are more than vote-grabbers. They represent commitments by each party to use their best endeavours during the coming Parliamentary term to give effect to what they say they will do in the interests of the public good.

• READ MORE: Other Gavin Ellis articles on media

Unless there is a sudden avalanche of media policy promises, the signal the parties are sending is that, in this area of public policy, they plan to do very little.

I do not believe our politicians are unaware of the precarious state of journalism in this country. They have been lobbied by every media organisation and left in no doubt that the cuts that have kept newsrooms in operation are not sustainable in even the medium term.

The have been warned we will see the loss of significant news publications and news broadcasts within the term of the next government unless there is a reset. The playing field needs to be levelled to overcome the pernicious effects of uncontrolled foreign digital players in our media market.

Those effects are not only financial. They include significant civic, social and cultural consequences. We have already suffered damage caused by years of political inaction and ineffectiveness, but believe me, worse will come unless significant change is forthcoming.

Comfortable with less scrutiny
One of my worries is that, irrespective of high-minded utterances about the importance of journalism to democracy, most politicians are comfortable with less scrutiny of their activities by journalists than with an enhanced ability to speak truth to power.

Too many politicians, and the functionaries who spread their messages, mistakenly believe that their responsibility to keeping the public informed is met by speaking directly to constituents through social media and email lists, and that news media are no longer needed.

They are mistaken because scrutiny is the missing element in that interpretation of their social contract. Scrutiny includes ferreting out those matters of public interest that politicians would prefer you do not see or hear.

There is also a prevailing view that commercial news media are creatures of the marketplace and should, like any other business, stand or fall on the basis of their ability to sell goods or services.

Under the model prevailing when they were created, that is a valid viewpoint. However, that model is broken and has been dysfunctional long enough for some parts of it to become almost irretrievable.

Some will say that is the nature of the marketplace — ever changing and requiring nimble business practices to keep pace. It is only to be expected that some businesses will fail because they do not (or cannot) adapt.

Again, that is a valid viewpoint. But it is one that does not recognise two things. The first is the civic and social roles that news media play in a society that requires diverse and independent sources of information to properly function. The second is the inequity of a marketplace in which foreign players can plunder content with impunity and avoid the taxes and regulations that burden domestic media.

Untouchable foreign players
Beyond the marketplace are the social harms that are undeniably caused by those apparently untouchable foreign players and the as-yet-unquantifiable effects of their use of artificial intelligence.

The present government’s introduction (not passage) of legislation to introduce an Australian model under-16 ban on social media appears to be a calculated pre-election move, rather than an earnest attempt to deal with the problem (see below).

That Bill may look as if we are catching up with other countries on media policy, but the reality is that we have been left far behind. Inaction and widespread political indifference could see an incoming government face a firestorm of compounding consequences.

There are eight areas that all political parties need to address. I would like to think they could reach consensus on most of them.

The first is to create an enforceable environment that will allow all news organisations to negotiate financial compensation from foreign digital platforms for the use of content. That use would include search and social media plus large language models and other artificial intelligence assets.

The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill that has lain dormant in Parliament throughout the term of the present government should be resurrected, updated to bring its provisions in line with those of Australia, and extended to account for developments in artificial intelligence.

The second is to enforce the provisions of the OECD profit shifting framework to impose a tax on revenue that is currently moved offshore in the form of service payments. The resulting impost, which would be in addition to the money negotiated by news organisations, should be used to finance non-profit local and iwi news initiatives.

Sustaining local newsrooms
The third is the adoption of policies to help sustain local newsrooms. Two initiatives should be considered. Firstly, the State of California’s Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act which will provide refundable tax credits to local newsrooms for each journalist they employ.

Such measures could be used to help sustain local and iwi news outlets. The Californian legislation, which passed the Senate and Assembly by overwhelming majorities and is awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature, extends eligibility to print, broadcast, digital, nonprofit, and independent family-owned news outlets. It is regarded as a blueprint for other states to follow.

Secondly, there is a British initiative that allows local authority rates relief on local news premises. The virtue of policies such as these is that they are effectively revenue neutral. Without the help, the newsrooms would not exist.

The fourth policy relates to public media. The amalgamation of Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand should be resurrected in light of TVNZ’s increasingly problematic advertising revenue base and the need to affect cost savings in both organisations.

The funding system for both organisations, together with Whakaata Māori and Iwi Radio, should be reviewed and consideration given to triennial funding.

The fifth policy should be a comprehensive review of the future of terrestrial broadcasting and the consequences of moves to digital-only delivery. Its deliberations should include possible disenfranchising of the elderly and poor; the impact on Māori broadcasting; the impact on TVNZ news services that could arise in a move to video streaming on demand; and the consequential uses of radio spectrum.

The sixth policy should be an urgent review of the harmful effects of social media that would include, but not be limited to, the effects on those under the age of 16. The proposed ban is based on that currently enacted in Australia, which has been been ineffective. Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, last month issued the results of a study that found that more than eight in 10 Australian under-16s are continuing to use social media despite the ban.

Platform operators as publishers
The review should consider deeming social media platform operators to be publishers (on the basis that their algorithms and AI tools manipulate content and determine audiences) and liable for infringements of law and regulation.

The seventh policy initiative should be a comprehensive review of media regulation and the development of an independent framework for complaint and adjudication. The review should embrace not only local media but also foreign-controlled digital platforms with New Zealand user bases over a certain size. Pending the adoption of findings from the review, existing regulatory bodies (state and industry-led) should remain in place.

Finally, any policies relating to artificial intelligence should make specific reference to news media, the integrity of news content, and intellectual property rights. It should include measures to limit the spread of disinformation, the verification and validation of legitimate news content produced by journalists, and the identification of AI-generated content.

Our political parties — and the public — need to understand the consequences of failing to deal effectively with what will become increasingly existential issues for journalism. Perhaps their starting point should be a general enquiry into the viability of New Zealand journalism and our media infrastructure, even if it tells them what some of us already know.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated in an interview with The Guardian last week that the 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion renders Israel’s presence in the occupied territories unlawful in its entirety.

She noted that  “because the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion declares the entire Israeli presence in the occupied territories as unlawful, third states’ obligations ‘not to render aid or assistance’ extends to everything that sustains that unlawful presence as a whole.”

Albanese also called on the UK government to join South Africa before the ICJ, and also support Nicaragua when the ICJ last week heard preliminary oral objections from Germany over claims filed by the Central American country that Berlin’s continued arms sales to Israel made it complicit in genocide.

• READ MORE: UN expert Francesca Albanese calls for ‘true paradigm shift’ as Miliband resets policy on Israel

She said: “Britain is not a party to that case. It can still choose which side of the argument it stands on: whether it treats participation in international accountability mechanisms as a threat to an alliance, or recognises that an alliance built on anything other than principle and the rule of law is not an alliance at all.

“It is an arrangement of convenience, honoured only until convenience changes.”

Finally she urged the UK to issue guidance to UK-based firms not to overcomply with sanctions imposed by the US on the international criminal court prosecutor, the deputy prosecutors, eight judges and an increasing number of others, including herself and Palestinian human rights groups that have cooperated with the court.

“This has frozen bank accounts, everywhere, for people doing nothing other than their judicial function or providing evidence lawfully requested by an international court,” she said.

• Malcolm Evans website

An estimated 72,500 passengers were counted on trains across the Auckland Transport network by 5pm today — 25,000 more than last Monday.

Auckland’s City Rail Link — New Zealand’s first underground metro — has had its first full weekday in operation on Monday.

Auckland Transport chief executive Stacey van der Putten said passenger numbers stayed strong all day, following the morning’s busy peak period.

• READ MORE:  CRL took a century to open – what else is Auckland still waiting on?
• Other City Rail Link reports

“This shows Aucklanders are getting out there and exploring the new routes that CRL offers, and it’s a fantastic new way for people to visit parts of the city they may not have had easy access to in the past,” she said.

“Our ambassador staff have been supporting customers at Karanga-a-Hape and Maungawhau stations throughout the day to transfer from the East-West to the South-City or Onehunga-West lines,” van der Putten said.

“These transfers will become second nature to Aucklanders in the weeks to come.”

More than 100 customer service staff and ambassadors were at stations helping with travel and transfer information, and more than 100 security staff were also present, she said.

Busiest Sunday on record
AT said the opening day on September 13 was the busiest Sunday on the rail network on record.

On Beresford Square outside the new Karanga-a-Hape Station, some were having a coffee at the nearest cafe, and others took a moment to stop and join a Waiata group singing Purea Nei and celebrating Te wiki o Te Reo Maori.

Bo Meng from the nearby bakery PieFee said in the past they didn’t open on Sundays, but they opened yesterday to coincide with the CRL opening to the public.

He said Monday was also busier than usual.

“I’ve seen heaps of people walking around, and new faces, so yea pretty good,” said Meng.

His colleague added that they’re considering opening on future Sundays as they expect to get more customers coming through.

Charlotte Ryan from the Karangahape Road Business Association said she had seen lots of new faces over the past few days, particularly on Sunday.

Many people returned
“I think I expected lots of our friends or lots of the K’rd community to come out, and they were, but it was actually majority people that I don’t think have been here in 10 or 15 years or even longer.

“People were commenting where they thought old buildings were, it was really really interesting to see that people had returned.”

Ryan said she was optimistic about the future, but added that some businesses were still waiting to see how many customers they would get before they made decisions around staffing.

“Do you bring on those extra staff, how quickly are people going to start using this as a thoroughfare, you know it’s like a social experiment,” she said.

Karanga-a-Hape Station is an interchange station, with a bus connection to Westgate, and a transit point for people hopping from the West-East line to the South City line.

Ryan said she expected people might be open to having a wander around Karangahape Road, or getting a drink in between transits.

Meanwhile, the mid-city Te Waihorotiu station was touted to become New Zealand’s busiest train station, but Shobhana Ranchhodji from Roma Blooms — which is mere metres from the Victoria St West entrance – said she had barely noticed any change in the amount of foot traffic.

“Nothing’s changed, no more people than what it was last Monday … I say give us a month, it is what it is,” she said.

Commuters cut down on travel times
Key features of the new network include the Eastern and Western lines merging into one, as well as faster trains.

On the 5.27am East West train from Swanson, Craig said he is glad he no longer needs to wait for 5-10 minutes at the Newmarket Station as he did in the past.

He estimates that he can save about 15-20 minutes on his journey into town.

Johnny Waititi used to take the train to Britomart from Ōtāhuhu, then bus to Symonds Street to the kura where he works as deputy principal.

He said he was now able to take the train directly to Karanga-a-Hape station then walk to work — saving about 20 minutes on each trip.

Waititi said overall, it was a good experience this morning, but he said the service he had originally planned to take did get cancelled – although he said he was able to quickly find out in advance through the Auckland Transport app.

Waititi said he was worried for older people who don’t have the app and will not be able to get timely updates on cancellations.

One train fault
Auckland Transport told Morning Report there was one train fault this morning which had caused a few cancellations.

Another worker who was travelling on the East-West line, trying to get to Auckland City Hospital, said she was disappointed her train got cancelled and she had to take a bus to get to Grafton.

A family living on Vincent Street in the CBD, whose two children go to school in New Lynn, are stoked to be saving time on their daily school runs.

The family does not own a car, and mum of two Arrenda Maryzona used to spend four hours on the bus each day, with each return trip to the school taking two hours.

Now, she said it’s just a three minute walk to the Karanga-a-Hape station, and she is saving about 15 minutes on each trip — adding up to an hour saved.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori has begun with an election promise from the Green Party to invest an additional $200 million in the language over four years.

Of that, $30 million annually would go towards te reo Māori education and professional development for teachers, while $20 million would be shared between Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori and Te Mātāwai.

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said sustained investment was needed for te reo Māori to flourish in homes, schools and communities.

• READ MORE: Other te reo Māori reports

“Te reo Māori is a taonga. The Green Party will proudly fund te reo Māori initiatives to thrive for generations to come,” she said.

“Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori is a time to celebrate our reo, acknowledge the generations of people who got our reo to where it is now, and advocate for the future of our reo.”

The Greens said the teacher-training funding would be used to develop programmes with schools and communities, following the end of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori.

That programme provided free te reo Māori learning to the education workforce and received $108 million between 2021 and 2024 as part of a wider $120 million package of language initiatives. Its funding was redirected by the coalition government in 2024.

16,000 participants
An independent evaluation found Te Ahu o te Reo Māori improved participants’ language capability, confidence and use of te reo in education settings. More than 16,000 people participated in the programme.

The government has since launched Te Ataarangi, a digital te reo Māori professional-development programme intended to reach 50,000 teachers. Education Minister Erica Stanford said in February that the programme would provide practical, self-paced language support from Term 2 this year.

Davidson accused the government of failing to adequately fund community language revitalisation and waging a “culture war” against the use of te reo Māori.

“Our reo must be treasured, and the Green Party will make sure that it is,” she said.

Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka dismissed the Greens’ announcement as “an election promise to spend more money”.

“Our government’s focus is on achieving results, more people speaking te reo Māori, more often and in more places,” he said.

Potaka said Te Taura Whiri, Te Mātāwai, Te Puni Kōkiri and Manatū Taonga were funded to undertake their existing roles and work programmes, but the government had no additional funding to announce.

Government ‘strategic reset’
He also confirmed the refreshed Maihi Karauna, the Crown’s Māori language revitalisation strategy, was a “strategic reset” rather than a new Budget initiative.

Potaka said the strategy retained the Crown’s long-term reo Māori goals to 2040 and would be followed by a coordinated action plan intended to make better use of existing investment.

He rejected Davidson’s allegation that the government had waged a “culture war” against te reo Māori, pointing to its investment in Māori media and kapa haka.

“We can have a legitimate debate about how public money is best invested without questioning anyone’s commitment to te reo Māori,” Potaka said.

“What matters is whether that investment produces lasting growth in the number of people learning, speaking and using the language.”

Education Minister Erica Stanford has also been asked for comment.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News

A pioneer of Palestine protest in Aotearoa New Zealand today warned against the IDF slaughter “obscenity” becoming accepted as normal in the world.

“It’s a particular obscenity watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Lebanon and for the world to get used to it — as our government does … voices, platitudes, and no action,” said Janfrie Wakim of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

“Today we also want to remember those Palestinians who died in Shabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut — a massacre that occurred in September 1982.

“How many people remember?”

• READ MORE: Labour would prioritise recognition of Palestine, sanctions on Israel
• Bruce King’s record of today’s Palestine events
• Other Palestine reports

Wakim, along with her late husband David, organised monthly Palestinian banners protests in Customs Street for 25 years and was coordinator and spokesperson for the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) and backing “freedom flotilla” missions before PSNA was formally set up.

A former chair of PSNA, she has also long supported the global BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement in opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories.

Speaking in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square and acknowledging the protests against settler-colonialism at Takaparawha-Bastion Point in 1982 — “whose chief stands with us behind us” — Wakim gave a rundown on the Shabra and Shatila massacres that killed between 1300 and 3500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shias the same year.

Three months earlier, Israel had launched a massive invasion of Lebanon “spearheaded by the notorious defence minister Ariel Sharon who wanted to destroy the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] based there at the time”.

‘Laid siege in Beirut’
“They laid siege to the part of Beirut where the PLO was headquartered near the Shabra and Shatila camps where Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba [‘the Catastrophe’] lived.

In early September 1982, a ceasefire deal had been negotiated by US President Ronald Reagan’s administration between the Lebanese Phalangist militia and the PLO, which then evacuated from Lebanon to Tunisia.

The PLO had been given written reassurance from the US that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians they were leaving behind would be safe, said Wakim.

“Known for their brutality, they murdered mostly women, children and the elderly — many were raped and mutilated.

“Israel did nothing to stop the massacre, in fact it encouraged it until the Phalangists left on September 18.

‘Truly horrifying’
“This was truly horrifying — and there was condemnation and outrage around the world. Here [in New Zealand] included. That was the time when my husband David and I became involved actively with the local PHRC.”

Wakim said that after 18 years occupying southern Lebanon, leaving 18,000 killed, Israel withdrew its military forces in 2000 but attacked again in 2006 and also in 2024.

“Today we remember that hideous event 44 years ago and the victims,” Wakim said.

“The devastating trauma that each family witnessed and has borne in subsequent decades.

“The killing continues [today] with increasing ferocity mass displacement, destruction of homes and infrastructure and war crimes as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross have proven.”

Wakim quoted from an article by the Palestinian writer and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre:

“Though Israeli massacres are meant to bring an end to Palestinian resistance, instead they unwittingly fuel it.

“While Israel continues to act with impunity, Palestinians continue to resist.

“This is not just the lesson of Sabra and Shatila, but also the bigger lesson of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

Lost opportunity for arrest
Wakim also spoke of a “crushing” opportunity lost by New Zealand in 2006 to arrest an alleged Israeli war criminal under universal jurisdiction.

“Former Israeli general and war minister Moshe Ya’alon, who faced charges of war crimes committed in Lebanon, visited New Zealand on a fundraising mission,” she said.

“Acting on a tip-off, in accordance with the principle of universal jurisdiction, and with help from a variety of legal experts, I successfully sought a private prosecution for his arrest and was delighted when a District Court judge agreed to issue a warrant for his arrest.

“Unfortunately, this reaction turned to dismay when the arrest did not proceed because the Attorney-General at the time, Michael Cullen, intervened. He quashed the warrant and allowed Ya’alon to leave the country.

“It was a crushing disappointment.”

The overall death toll of the Gaza genocide by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) since October 2023 has risen to 73,470, with at least 174,540 wounded, according to the latest available figures.

Since the “ceasefire” last October, at least 1344 people have been killed and 4464 injured while at least 815 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, according to the Health Ministry.

Critical of UK policy
Another speaker at the rally, Barry Lee, a long-time social justice activist since the Vietnam War, condemned the weaknesses of UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s dramatic “blind eye” change in British policy towards Israel last week.

The UK announced what it called “sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements”, noted Lee.

The UK sanctions would ban settlement goods but also act against companies and individuals providing services for settlement expansion.

“Sounds great but we shouldn’t get too excited about this because as Dana Paterson’s letter in yesterday’s Herald stated its ‘too little too late’,” he said.

“But when you look at the fine print you see that this only applies to banning transactions with the so-called ‘illegal settlements’.

“This is a qualification which the Zionists, being highly skilled in devious deception, will most likely circumvent by concealing or manoeuvring so that the area of origin is concealed.”

However, this did not stop Britain from being “one of the greatest arms suppliers’ to Israel.

“And it doesn’t stop UK investment and trade with Israel which helps fuel the Zionist economy.”

Lee did acknowledge a couple of points of the new policy:

• The settlements are illegal under international law, and there has been a rise in violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank by settlers in recent months.
• That “The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists”.

Illegal settlements target
However, Miliband was careful to point out that that “the sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel”.

The Foreign Secretary stated that “Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse, members of it have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians”.

“This is pathetic. The Zionist regime has done more than ‘turn a blind eye’. Israeli soldiers have protected the so called settlers.

“And leading government figures, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, have stated openly that they support the settlements. He has vowed to continue establishing the settlements — illegal under international law.

Lee criticised the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) for recently passed legislation to allow the so called area E1 settlement which will effectively cut the West Bank territory in half and undermine Palestine’s quest for statehood.

“Without this official support the settlements would not happen,” Lee said.
He described the current coalition government as being “completely politically and morally degenerate”.

“Like its Western ‘friends’, it is still waffling about the so-called ‘two-state solution’. There is no two-state solution — the Israelis ruled that out decades ago.

“And it was never a solution. Israel is occupied Palestine. The only solution is a secular one state — where all ethnicities and religions live together in equality.”

Kites for freedom in Gaza
After the downtown rally, a linked Global Sumud Aotearoa Kites for Freedom in Gaza action was staged at Mission Bay Beach.

This annual event honours the 12,000 children who flew kites on the Gaza beach to set a world record for simultaneous kite flying. More children were killed in the first five months of Gaza’s genocide than took part in the record.

On August 25, an official of the US-led so-called “Board of Peace” supervising the “ceasefire” in Gaza said: “All militant activity in Gaza must stop, including the flying of kites.”

Organisers of the Mission Bay event said the Israeli military was trying to deny one of the last fun-making events by “banning” flying kites in the ruins of Gaza.