New Zealand First leader Winston Peters — a veteran of 18 general elections — has called this long and sometimes fractious campaign “the worst of my career, easily”. But whether you agree with him or not, tomorrow night still promises exciting live entertainment.

Will Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his three-party coalition be removed from office after just one term? Will they be replaced by a left-wing coalition led by Labour’s Chris Hipkins — the same man who lost to Luxon in 2023?

Will the Opportunity Party make it over the 5 percent threshold for seats in Parliament, potentially holding the balance of power?

• READ MORE: Election Policy Tracker: your guide to what the parties are promising during the 2026 election campaign
• Other NZ election reports

More technically, will the various campaigns to have voters split their two available votes (one for their electorate candidate, one for their preferred party) have a bearing on the result?

Normally in New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) system, the election numbers that really count are the party-vote percentages. This time, however, individual electorates will matter more than usual.

With polls promising a very tight race, here are some numbers and possible scenarios to track on the night.

Overhangs on the left or right
A parliamentary overhang happens when a party wins more local electorate seats than it would have been awarded in proportion with its percentage of the party vote.

The overhang seats are added (above Parliament’s normal 120) to accommodate those extra winners of single-member districts. Overhangs of one to three seats have occurred before.

But this election campaign has seen organised efforts on both the left and right to deliberately use the overhang rule to increase the number of seats their respective sides can win.

Te Pāti Māori is ignoring the party vote entirely and asking supporters to deliver wins in the Māori electorates but give their party vote to Labour or the Greens (which would increase the overall party vote on the left).

Winning three to five Māori electorates would greatly outweigh Te Pāti Māori’s party vote entitlement, which could go below 1 percent. The number of overhang seats produced on the left will be a major talking point on the night.

A counter-strategy on the right (not officially endorsed by the National Party) assumes National can win more electorates than its party vote (possibly below 30 percent) would warrant.

The campaign is asking right-wing voters to keep the left-wing parties out of office by party-voting ACT or New Zealand First, and giving electorate votes to the National candidates. By some calculations, if that works, it significantly increases the odds of a right-coalition victory.

Tactical voting and skewed results
It’s impossible to predict how many voters will heed the calls for tactical vote splitting. In the 2023 election, 35.51 percent of voters split their votes, compared to 27.33 percent in 2020. National voters were the least likely to do so.

Nonetheless, the overall impact of these opposing strategies to maximise the overhang could increase the size of the next Parliament and alter the balance of power.

On the night, watch the numbers of electorate seats won by National and Te Pāti Māori.

In 2023, National won 44 electorates and 38.1 percent of the party vote. Five MPs from the party list then made up its proportional share of seats. If National’s party vote falls to around 30% this time, we’d normally expect its number of electorate seats to fall, too — maybe below 30.

But if ACT and New Zealand First voters do split their votes, National could win more local electorate seats than the party vote would normally deliver overall.

If National wins 29 percent of the party vote, for example, that would normally entitle it to 35 seats. Predictions are hazardous, but National could conservatively win 39 or more electorates.

One peculiar outcome could be that Labour gets a higher party vote than National, but National wins more seats than Labour. That’s the kind of disproportionate outcome that brought the old first-past-the-post system into disrepute after the 1978 and 1981 elections.

Should small parties that don’t have a chance of getting over 5 percent, get government funding? That is the question I would have answered on The Platform with Michael Laws (before his repugnant statements about women candidates came to light), had Sean Plunket not banned me.

That’s right, I received a text from The Platform which stated, “Change of plan … Sean Plunkett says you are banned from The Platform”.

Not a great loss you might think from that self-proclaimed champion of free speech, but it is a question I have been asked many times over the last few months.

• READ MORE: Free Palestine party seeks electoral voice in New Zealand
• NZ First’s Laws sorry for remarks, hours after defending them
• Palestine free from the River to the Sea Party
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The broadcasting allowance is from the statutory requirement to provide a fair opportunity for all eligible parties to convey their policies to the public. It can only pay expenses for TV, radio and some internet advertising but the rules aren’t clear for this.

To qualify your party must have more than 500 current financial members. There is just over $4 million to spread across 17 registered parties. Those six parties that are in Parliament having received more votes in the last election get most of the cash.

But the real money comes from donations from the super rich and corporates. So far this election $8,254,331 has been given in donations over $20,000.

As might be expected, National, Act, Labour, NZ First, Greens, and now Opportunity have got significant donations of $20,000 or over.

Extra $8 million to spend
You might think that these parties got an extra $8 million bucks to spend. Well yes, but there is more.

The real money comes in the form of smaller donations of $5000 or under. An unnamed individual can give an unlimited amount of these donations to a party and the amount of these only comes in their annual reports.

Of the $10,383,230.39 National got in the 2023 election, $6,003,941.05 came from donations of $5000 or under.

Of the $4,769,395.26 that Labour got in the 2023 election, $2,889,810.26 came from donations of $5000 or under.

So on top of getting the biggest share of the broadcasting allowance, in the 2023 elections National, Labour, Act, Greens and NZ First got an extra $24,607,405.60. The Free Palestine Party got $82,000 in Broadcasting Allowance this election.

Last election the Opportunity Party couldn’t get halfway to the 5 percent threshold; current polling puts it at 6 percent. Some super rich now approve of them, so they allow enough funding so Kiwis know who they are.

Do you wonder why the ordinary Kiwi has been getting poorer and their share of the wealth Aotearoa produces is getting less over the last 40 years? Or why the richest 150 individuals in NZ increased their wealth by 26 percent or $27 billion dollars in the last 12 months.

While the rest of us suffer a cost of living crisis thanks to the Israeli/US war on Iran. Why do well over 60 percent of Kiwis want Israel sanctioned for 78 years of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide, but no NZ government has ever done anything about it?

Odds stacked in favour of super rich
With the odds so stacked in favour of the super rich, most of whom support the apartheid regime of Israel and Western imperialism, you think that the Zionist lobby in NZ might have just let our $82,000 in broadcasting allowance go.

But when you’ve been raised or believe in an ideology and society that tell you you’re superior, you don’t stand for criticism from people you consider less human than you.

The tactics of the Zionist lobby are the same the world over and most mainstream news organisations don’t have the courage or integrity to challenge them, no matter what crimes against humanity they commit.

To TVNZ’s credit, despite some technical issues, they had the courage to run the few ads we could afford.

NZME has no courage or integrity and were completely gutless in face of the threat of the Zionist lobby. But they went beyond just saying no, they tried to tell us what political messages they would allow us to tell Kiwis.

They wasted our time until it was too late to advertise elsewhere. Perhaps the ZB in Newstalk stands for Zionist Broadcasting?

True to the tactics the Zionist lobby has used overseas they’ve come after me through my employment. They have made complaints to the school I teach at and the Teachers Council to intimidate, silence and make an example out of me to others.

But the members of the Free Palestine Party and the Kiwis of the Palestine solidarity movement in Aotearoa and around the world can’t be intimidated.

We will hold whatever government is formed after November 7 to account. We will continue until Palestine is free from the river to the sea!

Paul Hopkinson is president of the Free Palestine Party Aotearoa.

In colloquial language, “Jesus wept” is a cry of exasperation when we encounter something either appalling or appallingly stupid.

The leaders of the 18 states and territories comprising the Pacific Island Forum — including Australia and New Zealand — have done both by inviting Israel to be a second-tier sectoral partner to their regional organisation.

The origin of “Jesus wept” lies in the Bible and Christ’s despair at the human condition — which I discuss in a separate article, Lazarus has come back from the dead.

• READ MORE: Israel approved as second-tier partner in Pacific Islands Forum — Barbara Dreaver
• Shameful move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice — David Robie
• Other Israel in Pacific reports

First and foremost the Forum’s invitation to Israel is a political statement that these countries — at the political level — are in alignment with the values and programmes being advanced by Israel.

As decisions of this body are made by consensus, it means that all 18 member states — including Australia and New Zealand — have given their blessing. At the heart of this move is the theologically-twisted world of Christian Zionism which has a powerful hold on both political elites and many ordinary folk in Pacific communities.

Fables, such as certain Polynesians or Melanesians being among the Lost Tribes of Israel, swirl around the Pacific and are deliberately nourished by cynical actors. The myth of a Pacific connection to Israel was first peddled by Christian missionaries in the early 19th century to rustle up recruits and has held sway with gullible minds ever since.

Shared Judeo-Christian framing
Elise Barandon, a visiting fellow at Australian National University, says Israel’s growing influence in the region can be better understood through the lens of a shared Judeo-Christian framing.

“These engagements — alongside targeted development cooperation, security assistance, and increased political dialogue and visits — signal the activation of existing religious affinities, now translated into more explicit diplomatic positionings, including in multilateral arenas such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA),” Barandon wrote earlier this year in an ANU paper All In for the Holy Land: Pacific Islands and Christian Zionism.

Scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007) exposed the depth of collusion and modus operandi of Israeli and US homegrown Zionists — Christian and Jewish — in massively influencing US policy. Israel has applied the same techniques with great success to the smaller fish in the Pacific.

For Israel the support of these small Pacific nations (Palau has a population of just 18,000 but one vote at the UN) is gold. For the price of a few shekels they can help build a narrative of “legitimacy” at the United Nations, despite the world’s states in large measure repudiating the racist Zionist project to extinguish Palestinian identity in Palestine.

Israel runs a sophisticated global influence campaign; state agencies include MASHAV and the “humanitarian” NGO IsraAID. Similar to US agencies like USAID these are operated as extensions of foreign policy, often focusing on “aid for votes”. What goes on under the radar in terms of purchasable politicians is opaque.

IsraAid is tasked with providing water, sanitation, mental health and emergency medical care — all the things they have systematically destroyed for millions of Palestinians. But some Christian communities of the Pacific turn deaf ears and blind eyes to this and accept the largesse.

Many — but not all — the leaders of the heavily Christian Pacific — where churches are still full on Sundays — have chosen to side with a regime that has killed tens of thousands of children and is actively attacking the Christian community of Palestine. A strange element of Christian Zionism is the fact it also ignores this persecution of Christians in the Holy Land.

Erasure of a people
As Australian John Menadue pointed out in a recent article in Pearls & Irritations:

“The ethnic cleansing of both Christians and Muslims from Palestine continues. It is not only erasure of a people but of their culture and history.

“Australian leaders in church and state are complicit in the ethnic erasure of the Palestinian people, Muslim and Christian alike, from their homeland. They appeal for our help. But they are not being heard. They are being ignored.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, like most “Christian” politicians, is probably not a true believer, otherwise he would know full well that by joining 17 other Pacific leaders last month in welcoming the state of Israel as a partner to the Pacific Islands Forum he has indelibly stained both his country’s and his own name.

To be clear: all 18 states have a great number of people who actively oppose the genocide and support the Palestinian people in this hour of need.

As David Robie, one of the veterans of Pacific journalism pointed out, the Forum has decolonisation as one of its founding principles. For good reason: our region has a long dark history of slavery, indentured labour, violent expropriation of land and European political and missionary imposed cultural erasure.

These wounds have not yet healed and now we have the ghastly sight of Israel representatives being embraced by Pacific leaders from New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other states.

‘Global rogue pariah’
Dr Robie, in a recent article in Asia Pacific Report, Shameful Israel move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice, says: “The Pacific Islands Forum has betrayed one of its founding principles in admitting Israel — already a global rogue pariah state — as a development partner in the middle of the genocide of an Indigenous people, the Palestinians.”

Their actions effectively express support for widely-held religiously-fuelled sentiments like these:

“We should take the land because God commanded us to take it. It’s our land. The Palestinians can go to any other Arab country, except Jordan, Lebanon and Syria — those are ours too. Or we will kill them,” said American settler Atara Serwatien, who recently moved to Israel from the US.

I spoke over the weekend with Rinad Tamimi, a Palestinian-New Zealand activist. She was understandably distracted by the fact that 35 members of her family had been evicted this week, along with thousands of other Palestinians, by Israeli Occupation Forces from their homes in Hebron, in the West Bank.

The United Nations has made clear the Israelis are an illegal occupation force and should not be in the West Bank at all, let alone imposing a collective punishment pogrom as part of its widening and accelerating genocide. New Zealand’s famously-racist Foreign Minister Winston Peters yawns and looks the other way when Palestinian rights are on the agenda but the rest of us should not.

Rinad Tamimi’s 95-year-old grandfather was among the family members manhandled out of his home by the Israeli stormtroopers.

“We’ve been pleading, rallying, marching for over three years now. We’re not asking for a miracle. All we’re asking for is for our government to sanction Israel, join the ICJ [International Court of Justice] case, and most importantly, speak out for what’s going on in Palestine. But we are seeing quite the opposite and I think it’s sickening,” Tamimi says.

I’ll give the last word to Dante Alighieri. I re-read Dante’s Divine Comedy recently and this line came to mind as I wrote about these Pacific Forum leaders:

“Oh, you proud Christians, wretched and small

“Who, by the dim lights of your twisted minds,

“Believe you prosper even as you fall.”

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 hosts solidarity.co.nz and contributes to Asia Pacific Report.

A leading New Zealand advocacy group for Palestine has demanded immediate reinstatement of NZ funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the face of a humanitarian crisis for food, education and healthcare in Gaza.

In a statement today, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) said it was “outraged” that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had reportedly suspended New Zealand funding for UNRWA at a time when the Gaza crisis was sharply escalating.

Peters appears in a video for the pro-Israel lobby to make the announcement but has not issued any release for the New Zealand public.

• READ MORE: UN experts sound alarm over continuing devastation in Gaza, West Bank
• ‘This is catastrophic’ – Gaza hit hard
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“Peters has apparently caved in to pressure from New Zealand’s pro-Israel lobby which has for years run an intensive, sustained disinformation campaign about UNRWA,” said PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi.

The United Nations has just held a briefing on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza last week, underscoring the grave situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, warning that “genocide continues in Gaza”, while “crimes against humanity and war crimes” are being committed in the West Bank.

The briefings examined the immediate humanitarian and human rights consequences of the ongoing crisis in Gaza, one year after the ceasefire entered into force, as well as the escalating violence linked to Israel’s unlawful occupation.

Briefers warned that the “destruction of truth” had become part of the “destruction of a people” and that Palestinians were being deprived of hope and dreams for the future.

Peters ‘betrays NZ values’
“So, while Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, Peters betrays New Zealand values in the most sick and cynical way,” Tamimi said.

“Peters wants the minority votes of the pro-Israel lobby and has gone out of his way to pander to these most racist, reactionary parts of our community.”

New Zealand faces a general election on Saturday with New Zealand’s coalition government’s policies on the Palestine genocide under scrutiny.

“Peters hopes this will pass unnoticed by New Zealanders at large but he knows it will spread widely within the pro-Israel lobby before most people cast their votes,” Tamimi said.

UNRWA is the largest humanitarian organisation for Palestinian refugees and has incomparable expertise and resources to help Palestinians in Gaza, the PSNA statement said.

It has frequently been cited by New Zealand Foreign Affairs officials as the most important and crucial aid agency for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Exploited suffering
“Israel hates it because it holds the key to UN recognition of Palestinian refugees forced out of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba. Israel will play Winston Peters with the most outrageous horror stories about UNRWA, because Peters wants to believe them,” Tamimi said.

“Peters is also happy to use the suffering of Palestinians because he believes it will bolster his electoral chances.

“We want to see the Prime Minister override Peters immediately and reinstate and triple funding to the UNRWA to meet the desperate Palestinian needs,” Tamimi said.

New Zealand had been previously making its annual payment of $1 million to UNRWA as scheduled.

On this United Nations-designated International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) stands in solidarity with journalists and media workers around the world who face intimidation, harassment, violence, imprisonment and death for doing their jobs.

We maintain that targeting journalists is an attack not only on individual journalists and their families, but also on the public’s inalienable human right to information and freedom of expression, which underpins the foundations of democratic society.

When journalists are silenced through violence and intimidation, the stories they tell, the abuses they expose, and the questions they ask are silenced with them.

• READ MORE: UN puts media giants on notice over Gaza as journalists’ death toll spirals
• Al Jazeera – its vital place in the global media landscape is more important than ever
• Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
• Other media freedom reports

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 2565 journalists and media workers have been killed since 1992. Of these, 1053 have been deliberately targeted and murdered for their work; 842 of these murders have not received justice.

The scale of such impunity remains deeply concerning, and its further erosions deeply troubling. The global UNESCO impunity rate for journalist killings has risen to a staggering 86 percent. Almost six out of seven killings remain judicially unresolved.

Journalists working in conflict zones continue to be particularly vulnerable, and the use of drones in targeting and killing journalists has added a particularly alarming dimension to conflict reporting.

In 2024-25 UNESCO reported 50 journalists had been killed in drone attacks across six war zones. Journalists in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan speak of horrendous accounts of how drones have stalked and killed their colleagues.

Gaza deadliest conflict
The war on Gaza, now widely acknowledged as the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history, continues to exert a heavy toll. The Cost of War report published by Brown University’s Watson Institute in April 2025, stated that Gaza had been turned into a “news graveyard”.

In her July 2026 Truth Under the Rubble report, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese describes the assault on Palestinian journalism as “mediacide” — the systematic destruction of the media’s public function.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Israeli military has been responsible for approximately two-thirds of all journalist and media worker deaths worldwide since October 2023, with killings documented in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.

We acknowledge that impunity is not confined to armed conflict. Journalists investigating corruption, organised crime and abuses of political and corporate power also face threats, physical attacks, legal harassment and assassination.

The UN Secretary-Generals’ August 2025 report cites UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists figures stating “44 journalists covering environmental issues were killed over the past 15 years”. The same report notes “UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists have recorded 353 physical attacks against environmental journalists between 2009 and 2023”.

We further acknowledge that female journalists are disproportionately exposed to gender-based threats, online abuse, sexualised harassment and doxxing. The International Center for Journalists’ 2020 The Chilling shows 73 percent of respondents had experienced online violence in the course of their work, with 25 percent reporting threats of physical violence and 18 percent threats of sexual violence.

The 2026 Tipping Point report found that 45 percent of women journalists and media workers surveyed had self-censored on social media, while 22 percent had self-censored in their professional work because of online violence. These findings demonstrate that the impact of such threats extends beyond the psychosocial harm experienced by individual journalists, compromising their capacity to undertake independent public-interest reporting, which ultimately restricts the public’s access to information.

Importance of education
As an association representing journalism educators and researchers, JERAA also recognises the importance of education in sustaining a culture that respects press freedom and the safety of journalists. We maintain that press freedom begins with robust journalism education that equips future journalists to understand the value of fearless reporting, to uphold professional ethics and protect sources, and to recognise the importance of solidarity and collective action when colleagues are targeted.

We call on Australian universities to invest in journalism education and acknowledge the important role journalism educators play in challenging the normalisation of violence against journalists, defending the principles of independent public-interest journalism, and building resilience in future journalists.

JERAA emphasises that protecting journalists requires more than condemning attacks after they occur. We call on governments, media organisations, civil society and the international community to ensure crimes against journalists are investigated, perpetrators are held accountable and journalists can report freely and safely, without fear of violence or retribution.

We support the International Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) call for a for a binding International Convention on the Safety and Independence of Journalists and other Media Professionals, and urge the Australian government to support such a convention in the international theatre.

Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is vice-president (networks) of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA). This article was first published by JERAA to mark International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists on 2 November 2026 and is republished with the author’s permission.

From the moment I first became conscious of my identity as an Arab, Al Jazeera was in the background.

It was as vital to my upbringing as SpaceToon, Captain Majid and Ramadan soap operas, a familiar presence on the TV sets of every family gathering, every diaspora grocery store and barbershop, almost always on silent unless something big was happening.

Being from this part of the world meant something big could happen at any moment, and we grew up mistrusting state media channels as well as Western outlets, but remaining informed felt like a responsibility. It felt like survival.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera marks 30 years of transforming news in Middle East and beyond
• Tel Aviv court extends Al Jazeera ban by 90 days
• There’s a ‘New Middle East’, but not the one Israel planned — Pinch Point
• Other Al Jazeera reports

And there was consistently one channel that felt as close to the truth as we could get. The only one challenging the narrative. Asking difficult questions. Refusing to look away.

When protests erupted in Tahir Square on January 25, 2011, a few minutes away from my grandmother’s house, there was only one network broadcasting the news. The reporters were young Egyptians, like me. Their accents sounded like mine.

The region they spoke about felt like home, not an orientalist fantasy of one. State media meanwhile showed rolling images of the Nile as if history wasn’t taking place metres away.

From that moment on, there was no doubt in my mind what I wanted to do with my career, and where I would one day hope to work.

As I mark my first year as a senior producer with the brilliant Al Jazeera English team here in Doha, the network is celebrating its biggest milestone — 30 years on air!

Its place in the global media landscape is more important than ever, and the trust it’s won with Arab and non-Arab audiences is rare in a world where people feel betrayed by the news. So here’s to another generation shaped by its coverage, and to a region getting to speak for itself and on its own terms.

Happy anniversary Al Jazeera.

Mohamed Hassan is a senior producer and presenter with Al Jazeera’s digital team. He is also an Aotearoa New Zealand author, podcaster and poet from Auckland and Cairo. This commentary was first published as a social media post.

A prominent Palestinian advocate has praised a new book launched last week investigating the history, human consequences and international failures over Israel’s three-year genocide in Gaza and beyond.

“At a time when truth, justice, and accountability matter more than ever, documenting these events and preserving the stories of those affected is essential,” said Maher Nazzal, chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Speaking at the launch of Gaza: Anatomy of a Genocide, Nazzal thanked New Zealand author Peter Macky for his research and work in producing the timely book.

• READ MORE: Iran vows ‘no limitations’ if US-Israel return to war
• UN puts media giants on notice over Gaza as journalists’ death toll spirals
• ‘Ungrounding’ – Eyal Weizman on Gaza genocide and Israel’s ‘architecture of control’
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“We remember. We bear witness. We demand justice,” Nazzal said.

Macky’s Gaza examines the destruction of Gaza and the political and historical forces behind it.

The book traces the conflict through the history of Palestinian dispossession, occupation and blockade, before examining the genocidal events following 7 October 2023.

It investigates the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the treatment of prisoners, the killing of journalists and humanitarian workers, and the role of political leaders and international institutions.

Historical conditions
Macky argues that Gaza’s devastation could not be understood as an isolated episode. His account examines the historical conditions, military decisions and international responses that shaped the catastrophe.

The book also addresses the legal and political controversy surrounding the term genocide, drawing on international law, human rights reporting and the evidence discussed throughout the work.

Macky, who has published several books, describes this as the work he is most proud of.

His engagement with Palestine and Israel extends over many years and includes his earlier book Six Days in the Holy Land published in 2009.

Gaza: Anatomy of a Genocide is published by Steele Roberts Aotearoa. It carries an endorsement from Michael Neill, emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland, who also spoke at the launch.

“I admire this book enormously — its energy, its intelligence, its meticulous research, and its careful concern for history. I know of nothing like it,” Neill wrote.

The book invites readers to confront difficult questions about the destruction of civilian society, the meaning of accountability and the responsibilities of governments and individuals when confronted with mass suffering.

Truth ‘under the rubble’
Ironically, the book has been launched in the same week as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, launched her devastating Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide report critiquing mainstream media’s role in “normalising” the genocide.

She adopted the term “mediacide” to describe the sanitising process.

Speakers at a pro-Palestine rally in Auckland’s downtown Te Komititanga Square today recalled the 1917 colonial “Balfour betrayal” and condemned it for opening “the gates of a century long tragedy”.

The protest marked the 160th consecutive week of demonstrations against the Gaza genocide in Aotearoa New Zealand in Auckland and also at dozens of other venues around the motu.

It also drew parallels with British colonial war crimes in the settling of New Zealand and the theft of Indigenous Māori land.

• READ MORE: Iran warns of unfettered retaliation if attacked as mediators try for peace
• A UN protection force must be urgently deployed to Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

This came as Australia’s unelected South-African-born Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal has sought to “muzzle criticism of Israel” in a draft blueprint for policing a nation’s democracy and the public media.

And globally, with chants of “Workers do not work for war”, dock workers at more than 100 ports across Mediterranean countries and in other nations set up picket lines and strikes against arms sales to genocidal Israel and the European drive for rearmament.

Port workers protested in Italy, France, Greece, Türkiye, Morocco and the Basque Country in Spain and the action was taken up also in Australia, India, the United States and in other countries.

At the Auckland rally, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), speakers also targeted the New Zealand elections next Saturday with protesters chanting “If you don’t sanction Israel, you don’t get our vote”.

Call for change of government
Protesters were calling for the ousting of the rightwing coalition government of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, which has failed to take a tougher line against genocidal Israel.
Opposition parties Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori have pledged to recognise the State of Palestine and impose sanctions on Israel if elected.

Speaking about British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour ahead of the anniversary of his infamous “promise” letter on 2 November 2017, activist Tim O’Shea reminded the crowd that at that time the population of Palestine consisted of 80 percent Palestinian Muslims, 10 percent Palestinian Christians and 10 percent Jewish people.

“A promise was made written in British ink and later fulfilled with Palestinian blood. A short letter, but one that changed the course of history and opened the gates of a century long tragedy,” O’Shea said.

“It was called the Balfour Declaration, a promise made by those who did not own the land, to those who had no rightful claim to it, at the expense of a people who had lived there for millennia.”

“The letter read, ‘His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.

“It went on to say ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.

“The British used their weasel words carefully — they deliberately talked about a home and not a state.”

Palestinian rights violated
O’Shea said that was the start of a process that “ignored and violated the rights” of the Palestinian people and their ownership of their homes and land.

“Those 67 words were written by British Foreign Secretary Balfour and addressed to Lord Rothschild, a leading figure in the Zionist movement in Britain. Rothschild wasn’t even an elected official — he was a baron, and a banker.

“Balfour made a promise to the Zionists that Britain had no right to make.

“It was a betrayal that would shape the destiny of a nation, and indeed the whole of the Middle East.”

O’Shea also outlined how the betrayal actually began even earlier — in 1916, with the Sykes-Picot agreement, a treaty signed in secret between Britain, France, and Russia.

“It was a colonial conspiracy to divide the Arab world up like spoils of war. The dream of Arab independence was never given a chance to be born,” he said.

“Instead, an illusion was planted in the hearts of the Arabs that they were under occupation [by the Ottoman Empire] and that self-rule was their path to liberation.”

‘Illegal and immoral’ declaration
O’Shea said a century of dispossession, occupation, and resistance had been sealed by Britain “with a promise, and by the Palestinians with their steadfastness”.

“This was not a declaration. It was a curse written in British ink and fulfilled with Palestinian land, and lives.”

The Israeli genocide in Gaza since October 2023 has killed almost 75,000 Palestinians – mostly women and children – and more than 1400 since the so-called “ceasefire” signed in October 2025.

Palestinian activist Adnan Swaid, who was born in Syria and his family had fled Palestine during the Nakba of 1948, also spoke of the Balfour Declaration and how it had impacted on his people.

“The Palestinian holocaust did not start on 7 October 2023 and did not start even in 1948, but started on 2 November 1917 when the bankrupted British government at the end of the First World War ‘sold’ Palestine — which was under their mandate — to the rich Zionist families for cash and gold,” he said.

“Then they issued the most illegal and immoral declaration in human history.

“Remember Teresa May? She was the ex-British PM, who could not, refused to apologise to the Palestinians?

“The United Kingdom, right up until now, supplies killing arms and fly-over spy flights over Gaza.”

Swaid criticised British Zionists who “collaborated with the Nazis to prepare the ground for forced Jewish migration to British-occupied Palestine.

“The British government facilitated this migration from 1917 until 1948.”

Swaid also condemned the British military for “helping form terrorist organisations like the Hagana, Stern Gang, Palmach and others – these groups were armed, trained, protected by the British army”.

‘Opened the door to genocide’
Researcher and student community advocate Kākakatara Te Pou Kohere (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua, Tūhoe, Ngāi Tahu) also spoke of Balfour and Zionist collaboration.

“The British Empire, with colonies in every ocean and occupations on every continent, opened a door to the genocide, theft, and misery of tangata whenua in Palestine,” he said.

“It was not the massacre of thousands in Gaza, it was not the displacement of a nation with the Nakba, it was not the brigandage of the Zionist terrorist militias.

“The door was opened by a declaration on 2 November 1917, made by one of the Empire’s colonial trouble shooters, Arthur Balfour. It was under “Bloody” Balfour’s watch that the British worked to ensure Ireland was kept under their rule.

Balfour enforced the strict Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act 1887 (known as the Crimes Act) to suppress agrarian unrest, ban nationalist political groups, and jail thousands of activists and protesters, Kohere said.

“Where the Irish were shot in the streets for daring to stand for their freedom and sovereignty, where the questions of nationhood were dismissed in Westminster, far to the North Sea.”

He also explained how during the Boer War of 1902, Balfour organised some of the first concentration camps “as we know them”, and moved thousands of Chinese people into functional slavery in South Africa.

“Balfour was the expression of the imperial drive for domination, of the need for markets, profits, and labourers to exploit,” Kohere said.

“Like with the Ulster Plantations in Ireland, and settling British troops across South Auckland, Waikato, the Bay of Plenty, and much of Aotearoa as a garrison against Māori struggle.”

Kohere described Balfour and “all of his brother officials across the Empire” as repeating the same practices in a “cycle of vicious and rapacious piracy”.

Comparing the struggle in Aotearoa with Palestine, Kohere outlined the peaceful resistance against land confiscations based in the Taranaki village of Parihaka and led by Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi.

“The people went out two by two. They pulled up surveyors’ pegs and ploughed the ‘sold’ land. Later they raised fences across roadways that were being built by the [colonial] government.

“Come 5 November 1881, a thriving community at Parihaka with gas street lamps and plumbed running water was invaded by 1600 men of the New Zealand Armed Constabulary.

Kohere described how a settler paramilitary force from around the country descended onto the fields and orchards of Parihaka, personally led by the Minister of Native Affairs, John Bryce.

The peaceful resistance of the people of Parihaka was brutally crushed by the Constabulary and the leaders exiled.

“The Armed Constabulary was inspired by the occupational forces in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary,” Kohere said.

“The slavery of Māori was connected to the imprisonment and forced relocations of thousands across the British Empire, the French Empire, the genocides by the Germans in the First World War, and the Nazis that followed.”

The arms industry, the chemical weapons manufacturers, the institutions of justification in schools, universities, and academies, were all tied together in the web of empire, Kohere said.

“Arthur Balfour, Governor Grey, John Bryce, George Bush, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu — the faces change, but the action and demands of power do not.”

He called for unity in the world.

“It is the people united, the students in France, the children in Palestine, the
people of Aotearoa, of Indonesia, of China, of Iran, of Bolivia, of Sudan each and every struggle by the workers of the world, by the oppressed, by the people at home and abroad, that can tear up the [colonial] Balfour declarations.”

Street theatre satire
Meanwhile, in Christchurch Ōtautahi, protesters carried out street theatre today satirising the Luxon-Peters-Seymour coalition government’s “shameful” refusal to name the Gaza genocide, recognise Palestine, and impose sanctions on Israel.

Chants of “Garbage, garbage, garbage” greeted protesters wearing masks representing the National Party’s Christopher Luxon, ACT’s David Seymour and New Zealand First’s Winston Peters.

The chair of the Pacific Elders’ Voice (PEV) says the argument that religious affinity justifies the Pacific Islands Forum’s (PIF) partnership with Israel does not stack up.

The Forum’s recent decision to make Israel a sectoral partner has drawn widespread criticism by civil society in the region, and is described as being in conflict with the Pacific’s commitments to human rights, self-determination and international law.

The Pacific Elders’ Voice — a group of former Pacific prime ministers, presidents, senior diplomats and academics — has also come out strongly against the move.

• READ MORE: Pacific Elders’ Voice calls for reversal of Forum partnership with Israel
• Open letter: Mr Gavoka, don’t present your personal theology as the ‘voice of the Pacific’
• Shameful move by Pacific Islands Forum undermines decolonisation and justice — David Robie
• Other Gaza genocide reports

According to PEV chair and former Kiribati President Anote Tong, their position has been informed by a recent report from a Middle East fact-finding mission by the global Elders Group, including former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Pakistani human rights advocate Hina Jelani.

Their report concluded that Israel’s conduct was driving systematic occupation, annexation, and forced displacement of Palestinians amidst a prolonged campaign of violence.

“The mission also cited reports of genocide, killings, and the harassment [of Palestinians],” Tong told RNZ Pacific.

“These are not speculative, these are reports coming from the people who actually went on the ground, people who have absolute credibility. These are leaders, former leaders.”

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog has categorically rejected what he called the one-sided criticism of Israel’s conduct by the Elders.

However, deep division over the Forum’s move has been reflected in the reaction to the Pacific Elders’ stance. While many took to social media to applaud the call, others were critical of it.

For some Pacific Islanders, Israel’s partnership with the Forum makes sense because many of them are influenced by Judeo-Christian, biblical narratives and Christian Zionism, and consider the Middle Eastern country as the Holy Land.

But for the Pacific Elders’ Voice, this does not justify bringing Israel into the Forum.

“To say that we have an affinity with Israel because of religion … there is nothing morally defensible by the actions that are being described, and so that kind of an argument supporting Israel against a very clear report doesn’t really stand in any way.”

Consistency
The Pacific Elders Voice said the Forum’s decision raised questions about the consistency of the region’s positions on colonialism, human rights and self-determination.

Tong said he believed the Pacific Elders represent the views, principles, and moral standards common to Pacific Islands people.

“This is also important because in our advocacy on climate change, we’ve always emphasised the moral and the ethical perspective, which we are asking the world to step forward on climate action.

“I read the arguments that we need the technology that Israel is putting forward, but that does not give them the permit to do what it is that they are doing.

“We’re arguing exactly the same thing that the countries which are benefiting by the fossil fuel industry need to make sacrifices because what they are doing is immorally destructive.”

Tong said the Pacific Islands region should put substance to its new Ocean of Peace initiative.

“I don’t think we should be saying one thing and doing very opposite the next moment. I think it’s counterproductive.

“I guess as a non-political group of elders, we are not constrained by the political or the diplomatic constraints, and I think we can speak our mind, hopefully from from a moral perspective, more freely.”

Timing
A number of Pacific countries have recently forged closer ties with Israel’s Netanyahu regime, but Anote Tong says the Pacific should not be endorsing a government like that.

“I think it’s really the wrong time, given what is happening in that part of the world. It’s really the time to be very cautious to how we get involved with that region, particularly with a country that is very much at the forefront of the conflict.”

Tong said that from his own experience, he knows of the strong lobbying that is levvied against Pacific governments.

“There is no doubt at all in my mind that this has been the case because there is no reason why we all need now to establish relations and put offices in Israel at this time.

“We should be very cautious about getting closer to a country that is now being declared a criminal administration.”

Churches
The Forum’s move has been met with strong criticism from civil society groups in the region, including the Pacific Council of Churches (PCC).

Tong said the PCC’s strong rebuke represented a different position from those arguing the Pacific’s religious connection to Israel justifies stronger ties to the Israel state.

“That kind of argument doesn’t stand in the face of what is happening, in the face of the findings that the Elders have come up with,” he said.

“I cannot imagine any moral human being saying that religious affinity is what needs to guide our decision.”

The Pacific Elders’ Voice said the PIF should review and reverse its partnership with Israel.

Palestinian-Israelis are entitled to vote — sort of.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners apparently considered this an alarming development.

So alarming, in fact, that Netanyahu’s Likud party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party announced plans to deploy approximately 2000 far-right bozos into Palestinian communities to monitor polling stations.

• READ MORE: No clear winner in Israel election with nearly 90 percent of votes counted
• Why Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote, but can’t expect any change
• UN puts media giants on notice over Gaza as journalists’ death toll spirals
• Other Palestine reports

Not ordinary election officials. Not neutral observers. Far-right activists, with no formal electoral oversight function.

Some were carrying firearms.

לא ניתן שיהיו זיופים במגזר הערבי! כ-2,000 משקיפים יוצבו בקלפיות הערביות.

בשיתוף פעולה עם ראש הממשלה נתניהו והליכוד, אנחנו נערכים למהלך חסר תקדים למניעת זיופים בהצבעה ובספירת הקולות, על רקע זיופים במערכות הבחירות הקודמות.

בנוסף, הקמנו מטה משותף להעלאת אחוזי ההצבעה בימין באמצעות מעבר מדלת לדלת, טלפניה ושיחות עם מצביעים בקלפיות.

יש לנו חשש גדול ממפלגות שלא יעברו את אחוז החסימה ויביאו לעליית שלטון השמאל. אסור שזה יקרה. פשוט אסור.

הפעם לא מהמרים. מצביעים הציונות הדתית!

— בצלאל סמוטריץ’ (@bezalelsm) October 15, 2026

On October 1, Israeli police had issued a directive permitting licensed polling-station personnel and party representatives to bring their personal weapons inside polling stations.

The Palestinian civil rights organisation Adalah and the Joint List challenged this arrangement in Israel’s Supreme Court.

They warned that armed far-right “observers” could intimidate Palestinian voters and provoke violence.

On October 25, the court rejected their petition.

Apparently, a ballot box is no place to be underprepared for armed confrontation.

And that was before polling day.

The election-day obstruction
On October 27, reports emerged from Palestinian communities of voters encountering extraordinary difficulties exercising their democratic rights:

• In Tira, a Le Monde reporter documented long queues and an observer controlling entry to a polling station. A Palestinian lawyer accused a Likud observer of deliberately slowing the voting process.
• At Segev Shalom High School in the Naqab, Israeli police and National Guard personnel reportedly restricted access while approximately 200 people waited outside.
• The Association for Civil Rights in Israel urgently appealed to election authorities over significant and unexplained delays at polling stations in Arab communities.
• Adalah recorded complaints involving missing Arabic ballot papers, police checkpoints, interrupted voting and difficulties faced by elderly, disabled and veiled women voters.

Meanwhile, Haaretz reported that Likud had spent millions of shekels recruiting teams to film Palestinian voters outside polling stations, transmitting information to party headquarters.

A remarkable amount of money, manpower and police attention devoted to the supposedly straightforward business of allowing citizens to vote.

The ‘danger’ of Palestinians voting
Netanyahu was not particularly subtle about the political message.

Reuters reported that vehicles displaying Likud flags drove through Jerusalem broadcasting the Islamic call to prayer and warning that Arabs were voting.

Netanyahu himself circulated warnings about a high Palestinian turnout.

Consider what was being presented as an emergency.

Citizens. Standing in queues. Exercising their right to vote.

Palestinians were voting.

This was not a new tactic.

In 2015, Netanyahu warned that Arab voters were heading to polling stations in droves.

In 2019, Likud deployed concealed cameras at polling stations in Palestinian communities, provoking accusations of voter intimidation.

In 2026, the operation involved thousands of proposed partisan monitors, permission to carry firearms, surveillance teams and reported obstruction of voters.

The common feature is unmistakable: Palestinian political participation repeatedly becomes the object of suspicion, alarm and extraordinary scrutiny.

The democracy test
Palestinian citizens of Israel have the legal right to vote.

That right is not a favour granted by Netanyahu. Nor is its exercise an act of aggression against Jewish citizens.

A democratic franchise means very little if a minority population must exercise it under the scrutiny of hostile partisan activists, with the possibility of firearms at the polling station and police obstructing access.

So much for “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

These sorts of antics would make a banana republic despot salivate.

• The Israeli Central Elections Committee said on Wednesday that it had counted more than five million votes as of 9pm local time (19:00 GMT). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc was on course to win 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, while the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot wass expected to secure 48 seats. Projections from Tuesday’s voting also showed that the Arab parties — the Joint List and Ra’am — could hold a record combined 19 seats.

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.

New Zealand’s oldest and largest Palestine solidarity movement today called on political parties to press for “immediate expulsion” of Israeli Ambassdor Alon Roth-Snir and to suspend ties with Israel.

The call by the Palestine Solidarity Network follows two damning new United Nations reports released yesterday and also the impact of the pariah state’s Occupied West Bank ethnic cleansing operation on the family of PSNA national spokesperson Rinad Tamimi.

“My family is directly affected by the past two days of Israel’s massive ethnic cleansing operation in Hebron in the Occupied West Bank, where my family — including my 95-year-old grandfather — have been expelled from their homes,” Tamimi said in a statement today.

• READ MORE: UN raises ‘ethnic cleansing’ concerns over Israel’s Hebron operation
• Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amid continuing genocide in Gaza, UN Commission of Inquiry finds
• Israel election 2026 live: Netanyahu faces tough test in high-stakes polls
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The call also comes as Israelis go to the polls today to elect a new government and New Zealand faces an election on November 7. Early voting began yesterday in New Zealand.

The UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk has condemned Israel’s actions in the Occupied West Bank.

More than 3000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes so far, in what Turk described as action “punitive in nature and designed to instil fear”.

“Collective punishment is a grave violation of international law. Threats to empty and erase entire neighbourhoods also raise serious concerns of ethnic cleansing,” Turk said.

Damning UN report on Israel
Meanwhile, the UN Independent Commission of Palestine and Israel has released its latest report which declares: “Israel has committed war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, intentionally targeting Palestinian civilians as it continues to commit genocide in Gaza.”

The report confirms that the source of the endless violence and oppression by Israel goes back to the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) when more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land.

“As part of a broader investigation into the root causes of recurrent tensions and protraction of conflict, the report outlines the key drivers of Israeli violence and concludes that Israel has striven to expand territorially and displace Palestinians through violence since the 1947-48 war.”

Tamimi said: “These shocking reports confirm that Israel has no intention of respecting New Zealand values or international law”.

“The argument that we need the ambassador here to keep lines of communication open is a smokescreen. There is not a scrap of evidence Israel has ever taken any notice of us. The embassy is not here to listen. It is here to propagandise, spy and infiltrate the Pacific,” she said.

“Across the country this week the Palestine solidarity movement will be highlighting these reports and demanding accountability for Israel in nationwide protests.

“The government must end its rhetoric about the Israelis in the West Bank and finally make an effective stand and cuts all ties with Israel, until the refugees can return and everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has as equal rights,” she said.

“It would be appropriate justice for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to follow the expulsion of my 95-year-old grandfather from his home.”

I cast my vote. Did it today. And I resisted the temptation to dance around the voting floor yelling the rebel yell.

I restrained myself. Just. Do we need change? Hell yeah.

I came home and played and danced. My election play list goes like this:
First up Donovan’s “It Must Be The Season of The Witch”.

• READ MORE: Do Palestinians in Gaza expect anything to change after Israel’s election on Tuesday?
• Other Gaza genocide reports
• Other NZ election reports

Because I know my own power and I want you to know your power. The power to change. To cast a spell. Voting is your rebel yell.

Then I played Zu Asche, Zu Staub:

The reason? It is the theme tune from Babylon Berlin a neo-noir series set in the latter years of the Weimar republic. The multi award-winning programme features a young woman who yearns to be a reporter (my former self), and a heroin-addicted detective during the rise to power of the fascist regime in Germany — featuring real street scenes.

The shocking aspect is that the emergence of a fascist regime was slippery and barely noticeable. Sound familiar. Sounds like now? Sounds like something to watch and watch out for? Yes.

Genocidal dictators
Oh, it is so so easy for the world to fall into the hands of genocidal dictators.

And then I turned to Psycho Killer because I resist normal.

Because as a young woman I fell, I developed reactive depression. And it was hard getting back up. And I don’t want life to be that hard for other young people who don’t fit. Who won’t fit. Why the hell should they?

My advice to them is not to run away but to demonstrate rebellion by voting against this rotten coalition.

Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer’ reminds me that I loathe “normal” because to me “normal” means conforming in a society is so abnormal it celebrates the strong and punishes the vulnerable.

It also reminds me that I want people like me to live. To be able to live. To feel accepted. To not be shunted to the margins.

And that led me to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”.

“And when you’re out there, out there, well I was out of touch. Well it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough. I just knew too much.”

I just knew too much.

Criminal Coalition
We know what this criminal Coalition has done. We know. And we can’t look back.

I’ve written these last years about the injustices, about the vile support for a horrendous genocide by our leaders who defy the United Nations by refusing to call a genocide a genocide.

I’ve been deemed the enemy of this state but at least I’m alive. If I was in Gaza I would have had a target on my press vest. For reporting the truth. I stand by those fallen colleagues. More than 260 journalists — women and men, mothers, fathers, killed for reporting the truth. Unlike most of our media.

I was only pepper sprayed and banned from my own Town Hall and ghosted on social media.

But I am the proud member of Free Palestine — a political party that was formed by Christchurch schoolteacher Paul Hopkinson to push other parties to do the right thing. To stand against a genocide.

That is what the Free Palestine Party represents — the do the right thing party. And the Green Party and Labour Party responded.

The Free Palestine Party is the only party that came out with a reel “Don’t vote for us” presented by party member and candidate, Will Alexander.

In forming the party the members met with the people of Gaza, people speaking from tents. People returned to the desert. People who have lost people.

Party faced pushback
Before its launch, the party has received pushback from those who think it is very Jewish to support a genocide. I have news for them. It is not Jewish to support a genocide. It is Zionist and fascist.

The campaign launch was threatened with disruption. The launch went ahead.

Acclaimed Ngāi Tahu poet Ariana Tikao read her poignant distressing poems about Gaza, from her pukapuka, “Pepeha Portal”.

Beads of war a rosary
turning round and round
between his finger and thumb
touching each one as
it circulates like oxygen
in blood evidence of atrocity
lay on the floor
on the whenua
in the red red rock at Ōnawe
like stains on the body bags
in Gaza gagging my throat
as they carry her away
without ceremony I see
the dead in the eyes of
the bereft:
“ka mate au i taku tangata”

The party launch was a feel good launch of people doing the right thing for Palestine. And at last other parties have responded. But not this Coalition. A coalition complicit in pushing down and out.

My final song on my playlist is Macklemore’s “The Free Palestine Song” which means, as he says, equality for all.

He has also written and performed: “Hind’s Hall” — Hind Rami Iyad Rajab is the five-year- old Palestinian girl who cowered in a car, crying — crying that she was scared.

Force of genociders
That five-year-old girl was killed by the IDF — the offensive force, the force of genociders. That mercenary military force also killed six members of Hind’s family and two paramedics coming to her rescue.

She is one of more than 22,000 children killed by the IDF. At least 77,036 people have been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, and related operations since October 7, 2023, according to data reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and Israeli Foreign Ministry up to August 2026.

At least 1208 total deaths have been recorded in the West Bank, which includes over 254 children. The Zionist state has also invaded Lebanon, killing more than 4000 people have been killed. Oh and the Zionist state is playing team tag with the US, it has its eyes on the prize of the Pacific.

More than its eyes — its hands and feet and guns.

And is it any wonder that this Coalition plays team tag with toxic leaders? It values the value of stripping the environment. Mining. Draining the sea bed.

The planet is crying. Our land is beautiful and it will bleed if this continues. It is bleeding now.

As Macklemore says in “Free Palestine”:

“The word genocide is such a point of contention for some, that it’s more hurtful than seeing dead babies being pulled out of the crumbled cement and the dust.

“Comparative suffering leads to the lie there’s a them and an us. It’s a lie. We don’t own this earth,’ he says.

“We are just guests here, my love.”

Banned, but alive
And he was banned. Canned. But he’s alive. And this government, our New Zealand government, has joined all the toxic governments of this cruel world who won’t call a genocide a genocide.

I call down this coalition of cruelty.

I’ve seen it punch down on people with disabilities.

I’ve seen it try to evaporate the Waitangi Tribunal — the means for redress for Māori who lost land and forests and mahinga kai, Māori who were pushed to the margins.

Māori incarcerated.

Colonisation is a cruel system. This coalition is oppressing some to support others. Māori deserve a real and fair chance.

Ditto Pasifika.

Ditto all people queuing for jobs. All the people being ghosted when they apply for jobs.
All the broken lives and broken hearts.

I’ve seen the coalition push people who are on the margins off the margins and over the edge.

I’ve seen our politicians blame everyone but themselves for this mess.

Does that make me crazy? Probably. But I’m glad. I’m proud.

My right to vote
And I’ve exercised my right to vote. A right I have thanks to women like my three times grandmother and two times grandmother voting for a law change on the suffrage petition.

Thank you to all the many women who stood up for the right for women to vote.

And thank you to all the people of the past who stood up for the right of all people to vote — not just the toffs but the common people but the people of the land.

I don’t like to tell people what to do.

I like people to educate themselves.

But I’ve also seen the cons, the lies, the way narratives get skewed.

This Coalition has been undemocratic, pushing people down and out, making it more — not less — difficult for voters to vote.

Change for good
So I’m calling it. Vote this cruel coalition out.

We need a change for good.

We need to heed the call of our beloved land and waters.

We need to take responsibility for ourselves and all vulnerable people.

Liberty and Responsibility.

If you heed the rebel call at all you will vote this year.

Exercise that right. Prove that they can’t pull the wool over your eyes anymore.

Prove you know too much. Vote them out.

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.

In what is probably one of its most shameful acts ever, the Pacific Islands Forum has betrayed one of its founding principles in admitting Israel — already a global rogue pariah state — as a development partner in the middle of the genocide of an Indigenous people, the Palestinians.

As decisions of this nature are made by consensus, it means that all 18 member states of the region’s main political body – including Australia and New Zealand – have given their blessing.

The move undermines the Forum’s founding commitment in 1971 to regional decolonisation.

• READ MORE: Israel becomes world’s most disliked country, global survey finds
• Gaza Strip: A beginner’s guide to an enclave under blockade
• An Ocean of Peace is not built on occupation
• Other Israel in the Pacific reports

Six Pacific countries and territories — American Samoa, French Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), Guam (Guåhan), New Caledonia (Kanaky), Pitcairn and Tokelau – are still on the UN Decolonisation list.

And there are also questions about West Papua with supporters of independence long claiming the 1969 Act of Free Choice was fraudulent process – and branded as an “Act of No Choice”.

A perception of arrogance and deceit about the Israel partnership process has also angered many in the Pacific.

Israel move condemned
Already, two regional civil society groups have condemned the move after news emerged about the controversial move – not by a Forum announcement, but by a social media post by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.

They are the Suva-based ecumenical Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), which has called for a review of the decision, and the Pacific Regional Non-Governmental Organisations (PRNGO), which has challenged the “Blue Pacific” mantra, arguing “an ocean of peace is not built on occupation – Pacific civil society questions the Pacific Forum on Israel partnership”.

Another diplomatic achievement: Israel joins the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) as a Forum Partner.

The Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum, Baron Divavesi Waqa, has informed me that Israel has been accepted as a Forum Partner, following a decision at the meeting of the Forum’s member state leaders in Palau.

This follows my visit to Fiji in June, where I met with the Secretary General and presented Israel’s request to join the Forum.

Strengthening ties with the Pacific Island nations is one of my objectives. Earlier this year, I opened Israel’s Embassy in Fiji, which also serves nine other Pacific Island nations, all friendly to Israel.
Under the current government, three of these countries, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Nauru, have opened embassies in Jerusalem.

As a Forum Partner, Israel will participate in a framework for cooperation in areas of mutual interest, based on regional priorities and Israel’s expertise in water management, desalination, agriculture, tackling climate change, innovation and sustainable development.

Israel and the Forum will also develop a joint action plan setting out practical areas of cooperation and a mechanism to monitor progress.

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) October 20, 2026

Reminding the Pacific over the failure of partnership with Indonesia regarding accountability over the Melanesian region of West Papua, “inviting another state that perpetrates occupation and denies self-determination repeats that mistake, and weakens the principle on which our decolonisation depends”, PRNGO warned the move could split the Pacific.

This controversy comes at a time when Israel has been ranked as the world’s most unpopular country because it has consistently trampled on international law, and ignored eight decades of resolutions by the United Nations, the very body that created the State of Israel in 1947 through Resolution 181 — by partitioning Palestine when the Zionists only controlled 7 percent of the land in the British mandate of Palestine with 30 percent of the population, yet granting it 55 percent as their share of land at independence.

Jerusalem and Bethlehem would become an international zone. Palestine with about 70 percent of the population of almost 1.9 million, comprising mostly Arabs, and other non-Jewish communities, would have been left with 45 percent of the land under the UN Partition plan and, unsurprisingly, rejected it.

Israel unilaterally declared independence the following year and armed Zionist militia and terrorist gangs began a campaign of ethnically cleansing and expelling some 750,000 Palestinians and razing at least 450 Arab villages known as the Nakba (the “catastrophe”).

This set in motion eight decades of illegal occupation, militarisation, wars and repression of the Indigenous Palestinian people.

In the Six Day War in 1967, Israel captured and occupied Gaza, East Jerusalem and West Bank — the occupied Palestinian Territories have been administered illegally by the Israeli military ever since.

Since October 2023, Israel has launched 100,000 attacks on five Middle East countries and territories.

Voted against decolonisation
At the UN Decolonisation Committee (C-24) meeting earlier this month, Israel and the United States were the only two countries that voted against decolonisation, and the US unsuccessfully attempted to end the committee’s mandate.

In a statement issued on Friday, the PRNGO Alliance declared: “We understand our communities’ real needs for water, food security, agriculture, development and climate adaptation. The urgent need for resources across the region is increasing, and partnerships to secure such are important.”

However, “our concern is that the Forum family will welcome, without condition, a state in continuing breach of international law. We reject antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, and mourn every civilian life lost, Israeli and Palestinian.”

Israel’s war on Gaza since the “breakout” attack on southern Israel from the “world’s largest open air prison”, by Hamas and other resistance fighters on 7 October 2023, has led to more than 75,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — being slaughtered.

Although a sham ceasefire was declared in October 2025, Israel has continued attacking the besieged enclave almost daily since then killing at least 1500 people, mostly children, and has failed to honour the terms of the first phase of the peace agreement. US President Donald Trump’s brokered Board of Peace is widely regarded to be a failure.

Last year, the Belgian-based Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar — the very person who announced the Forum partnership.

Seeking an arrest warrant
The foundation announced at the time that it was seeking an arrest warrant for Sa’ar for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel’s military assault on Gaza since October 2023.

It was alleged by the foundation that as a senior member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, Sa’ar had played “a central role in shaping and implementing policies that have led to mass displacement, collective punishment, and systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians”.

Although it is understood Sa’ar is not being formally investigated by the ICC, the court had already issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity and is believed to be investigating other officials.

The PRNGO Alliance statement cited the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court, Advisory Opinion on 19 July 2024 that found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful and that it must be ended “as rapidly as possible”.

The UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016) affirmed that the Israeli settlements had “no legal validity” and were “a flagrant violation under international law”. Also, the UNSC Resolution 478 (1980) called on States to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem.

Yet “three Forum members of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Naoero [formerly Nauru] have opened embassies there; Samoa has announced plans to follow, and Israel’s announcement cites them,” said the PRNGO statement.

Israeli forces launch a “targeted” raid in Hebron after a shooting killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded several others, as Palestinians fear “collective punishment” days ahead of Israel’s October 27 elections.

Follow our LIVE coverage: https://t.co/FL4SrZ5U5K https://t.co/DHUJNFknqd

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 24, 2026

Deprivation of Gaza’s water
Noting the mounting death toll with Israeli violations since October 2025 “ceasefire”, the statement said: “Human Rights Watch found Israel’s deliberate deprivation of Gaza’s water amounts to extermination and acts of genocide.

“FAO reports nearly 87 percent pf Gaza’s cropland damaged. The war’s emissions, an estimated 33 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, fall on islands like ours. Water, food and climate security cannot be offered with one hand and destroyed with the other.”

The PRNGO statement highlighted the fact that under international law, “a ceasefire requires a complete halt to the attacks, and allows unimpeded entry of humanitarian relief at scale.

“It would end unprecedented Israeli settlement expansion and terror, guaranteeing the right of displaced Palestinians to return home, prohibit forcible transfers and end collective punishment.

“Our Forum leaders have called on all the world to uphold the UN Charter, including the sovereign equality of all states and the rights of all peoples to exist in peace and security.”

The PRNGO statement recalled that in September 2025, “our leaders declared the Blue Pacific as an Ocean of Peace, grounded in the UN Charter and international law.”

“As we said in July, a genuine Ocean of Peace means security ‘founded on justice, sovereignty, self-determination, environmental stewardship and the wellbeing of our peoples’. It rests on a strong rejection of militarisation and great power rivalry at our expense.

“A regional partnership with Israel would further facilitate and advance security cooperation, military technologies and infrastructures, in addition to the growing military exercises and security treaties crowding our ocean.”

Pacific regionalism rested on solidarity based on shared values, not merely on shared resources, PRNGO said.

Whose voice will be silenced?
“This partnership will unravel — not strengthen, that weave. It risks dividing the Forum family, tying our voice at the United Nations to bilateral favours, and making the Pacific complicit in a conflict far from our shores. Who stands to benefit from this partnership? Whose voice will it silence?

“The Pacific remembers the cost of occupation, and our peoples continue to struggle under colonisation, nuclear testing and environmental destruction. In Kanaky New Caledonia, Ma’ohi Nui, Guahan and West Papua, the struggle for self-determination continues.

“West Papua is a long standing item on our leaders’ agenda. Since 2019, they have asked Indonesia, a Forum Dialogue Partner since 2001, to allow a visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights — a visit Jakarta offered in 2018.

“It has not eventuated, yet a similar partnership has brought delay: not accountability. Inviting another state that perpetrates occupation and denies self-determination repeats that mistake, and weakens the principle on which our decolonisation depends.”

The PRNGO Alliance demanded:

• The Forum Troika — Solomon Islands, Palau and New Zealand — reflect on its concerns over partnerships;
• Forum leaders review Israel’s partnership and suspend all engagements until Israel complies with the ICJ and UN Security Council resolutions;
• The Forum Secretariat publish the basis for the Israel decision and ensure any partnership agreement commits to international law;
• Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Naoero return their embassies to Tel Aviv, consistent with Resolution 478, and Samoa reconsider its plan; and
• All Forum members ensure no partnership, aid, or security, cyber or surveillance cooperation helps maintain the occupation.

The day before the response by PRNGO, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), an umbrella organisation representing Christian churches and national councils across 18 countries and territories in the region, called for all engagement with Israel to be suspended until it complied with international court rulings and UN resolutions.

General secretary Reverend James Bhagwan told RNZ Pacific Waves that the region needed to apply consistent standards to its international relationships.

“We cannot invoke the [International Court of Justice] for our islands and ignore the fact that the ICJ, in 2024, stated that Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian territory as soon as possible,” he said.

Reverend Bhagwan, who is also a signatory to the PRNGO statement, was speaking in response to Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Viliame Gavoka who had claimed the “entire Pacific Islands identify with Israel” and their relationship with the country was “biblical, ageless and real”.

Responses from New Zealand
In New Zealand, the coalition government of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon which is fighting desperately to be re-elected on November 7 with tight opinion polls predicting a possible hung Parliament, has been struggling to justify support for the Forum move.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters described criticism of Israel’s inclusion in PIF as an “insult” to Pacific Island countries, adding that the decision by the Pacific leaders should be respected. However, the opposition parties led by Labour demanded explanations.

John Minto, national organiser of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), the largest activist group in New Zealand, which has been organising weekly protests against Israel for the past three years, said: “Wow – a tiny country in the Middle East is now joining the Pacific Islands forum [as a second-tier partner].

“This has nothing to do with supporting the Pacific but has everything to do with using Pacific nations to provide cover and legitimacy to a racist, apartheid state currently committing genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and conducting pogroms against Palestinian Communities across the Occupied West Bank.

“Sickening complicity by Pacific leaders!”

The chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand, Maher Nazzal, has called on the government to “explain itself”, especially in view of New Zealand becoming the host for the Pacific Islands Forum next year.

“Technical cooperation must not shield any state from scrutiny under international law,” he said.

Support Palestinian self-determination
Writing in the Otago Daily Times, John Hobbs, a doctoral scholar and former career public official at the University of Otago’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, has a clear-cut message for the incoming post-election government next month:

“New Zealanders and our political parties must act and be part of the global momentum to end the brutality in Gaza, to reverse the illegal occupation of the West Bank, support Palestinian self-determination and hold Israel to account.

“To do otherwise represents a moral failure as citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand and it will severely damage our reputation among many of our traditional allies, trading partners, and the international community.”

A poignant lesson also for the Pacific.

Count the hands the footage passed through. Whakaata Māori reported the video first. RNZ said it had independently obtained the same material. Newsroom published a still photograph from the event showing people in Mongrel Mob regalia making hand signs.

The Post added that the gathering had been advertised online as a fundraiser for a Mob chapter, a claim Chris Hipkins said he had been reassured was wrong, and which by then had already done its work. The New Zealand Herald put a Labour minister on camera to answer for it.

On Wednesday, Kerrin Leoni was a candidate defending her seat in an electorate debate. By Friday morning she was finished, with her name still on the ballot because nominations had closed and there was no mechanism left to remove it.

• READ MORE: The real reason Kerrin Leoni had to go is not about the gangs
• Other NZ election reports

Forty eight hours is about how long this takes now. The machinery runs without anyone in it making a decision they would describe as political. A clip surfaces. A second outlet obtains it.

A third finds the still that works better than the clip, because a photograph of men making hand signs needs no context and cannot be argued with. A fourth adds a detail about money that turns a family gathering into a transaction. A fifth books a Labour MP and asks her to account for a colleague.

Somewhere in the middle of that chain the thing stops being a story about an event and becomes the event itself, and the party reads the coverage, calculates the damage, and acts on the coverage rather than on anything that happened in that room.

Not one outlet in that chain appears to have asked the question that any reporter who had read the last decade of this country’s own inquiries would ask first. Where did the men in the photograph come from? Who put them in the institutions that produced them? What does the Crown owe them?

A question of candidate conduct
The story was reported instead as a question of candidate conduct, which is the safest possible framing and the one that requires the least work, because it needs no history, no interviews outside Parliament, and no contact with anybody in Tāmaki Makaurau who was actually at the gathering.

The video and the photograph were taken at the same gathering and they carry opposite cargo. In the video a patched man argues that the gangs should stop fighting each other and put their attention on the government, and a candidate tells a room that people who are not enrolled hold the power to change who governs. That is footage of political organising, and any newsroom that wanted a story about democratic participation among the most excluded citizens in the country had it handed over free.

The still photograph carries none of that. It shows bodies, patches and hand signs, and it travelled furthest, because an image requires no reading and permits no reply.

The caption vocabulary gives the game away. Regalia. Hand gestures associated with the gang. Those are the words of a police file transposed into news copy, and they work by telling the reader that what they are looking at is evidence.

Parliament has already made the patch an offence to wear in public, so the photograph functions as a charge sheet while the outlet that published it makes no accusation at all and takes no responsibility for one. The men in that frame are not named, not interviewed, not asked why they were there, and not treated as people who might have a view about the government they were discussing. They appear as a visual condition attaching to the woman standing near them.

Think about what never happens. A candidate photographed at a Federated Farmers breakfast is not asked to account for the nitrate in the Manawatū. A candidate at a corporate box is not asked whether he endorses the firm’s tax structure. A minister photographed with a property developer is covered as a diary item. Proximity becomes contamination only when the bodies in the frame are Māori and poor, and the newsroom knows this without ever having to say it, which is precisely how a shared set of assumptions does its work. Nobody had to instruct anybody. The picture editor simply knew which image would run.

Oriini Kaipara is in this story, which makes it almost too neat. A few years ago she was the first person to read primetime news in this country with a moko kauae, and viewers wrote in to tell the newsroom her face was offensive. She is now Te Pāti Māori’s candidate in Tāmaki Makaurau, and the same industry that once relayed complaints about her chin has spent this week staging a contest between two Māori women over which of them stood nearer to a gang pad.

Lively moment in a tight race
Leoni attacked Kaipara over it at the debate on Wednesday. Kaipara put it straight back. The coverage carried the exchange as a lively moment in a tight race, and the structure that made two wāhine Māori prosecute each other on camera went unexamined by every outlet that profited from it.

The record here is long and consistent. A Māori MP’s tie became a national story. A Māori foreign minister’s face was discussed as a diplomatic variable. Every Māori politician in this country gets asked, sooner or later, to account for a relationship no Pākehā politician is ever asked about, and the question is always framed as a reasonable one about standards.

The reason it is always framed that way is that the people framing it have never had to explain their own cousins to a camera. Senior editorial judgment in New Zealand newsrooms sits overwhelmingly in Pākehā hands, and the judgment in question is not malice. It is the plain inability to see that a room full of Māori men might contain anything other than a threat, combined with an institutional certainty that this inability is neutrality.

Whakaata Māori reported the footage first, and that fact deserves to be stated rather than stepped around. A Māori broadcaster is still a broadcaster, working under the same commercial logic, the same political pressure and considerably more funding risk than the outlets that picked the story up.

What happened afterwards is where the whiteness lives. One report became a saturation event because the rest of the industry recognised the material instantly as the kind of thing that performs, and pushed it until a party leader had no room to move. The first report is journalism. The 48 hours that followed is a removal mechanism, and no individual inside it has to intend the outcome for the outcome to arrive on schedule.

The figure that would have reframed the entire story has been sitting in the public record for years. The Waitangi Tribunal estimates that 80 to 90 percent of Mongrel Mob and Black Power members were once wards of the state, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care carried that estimate into its own findings after sitting with gang members who described what was done to them as children in Crown institutions.

Every newsroom in the chain has covered that inquiry. Not one of them reached for it this week. The men in the photograph are the state’s own product, documented at enormous public expense, and the press that reported the inquiry found no reason to connect the two stories when a connection would have cost a political party something.

The press played its colonial role
The press in this country was built into the land taking from the beginning. The settler papers of Auckland and Taranaki spent the early 1860s telling their readers that Waikato Māori were arming, that the Kīngitanga was a standing threat to settler life, and that the government had to move.

The invasion came, the confiscations followed, and the newspapers had supplied the public reasoning that made both appear defensive. Newspapers were as much a part of that apparatus as the survey chain and the militia, and the people who ran them understood themselves throughout as reporting the facts.

The technology changed and the function held. The Dawn Raids were covered as a crime wave. Bastion Point was covered as an occupation to be cleared. In 2007 newsrooms ran police allegations about training camps in Te Urewera for months, in detail, and the case against almost everyone arrested collapsed, after which the coverage simply stopped rather than reckoning with what it had helped do to a community that is still living with it.

In each of these the press produced the Māori body as a question of public order first, which is the step that makes everything the state does next look like a measured response to a situation it did not create.

What happened to Kerrin Leoni belongs in that sequence. No outlet in the chain published anything false. The video was real, the photograph was real, the advertisement for the event existed. The violence is in the selection, the sequencing and the frame, in which still ran and which three seconds of footage did not, in the decision to make candidate conduct the story and state care no part of it, and none of that is actionable before any media standards body in this country.

Watched a woman being publicly destroyed
A complaint can test accuracy. There is no complaint available against an industry’s shared sense of what is obviously a scandal, which is the thing that actually ended her candidacy.

Set out the week’s ledger. Labour lost a candidate and kept its standard. The newsrooms had a running story through a slow stretch of the campaign and will have forgotten it by the time the votes are counted.

The men in the photograph, who were abused by the Crown as children and have since been told that the clothing they wear is itself an offence, watched a woman be publicly destroyed for standing in a room with them and telling them that their vote could change the government.

They were the only people in this whole affair with nothing to gain and they paid for it anyway. Any newsroom could have written that story this week. The material was in their own archives. They ran the hand signs instead.

Professor Mohan J. Dutta of Massey University, Aotearoa, publishes the blog The Margins Review – Culture-Centered Approach featuring critical intellectual opinions from Aotearoa to the world. The views expressed are personal. This article is republished with permission by the author.

New Zealand is failing its responsibilities towards the Palestinian people; a people who are dying from the actions of Israel.

Its responsibilities to hold Israel to account are laid out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. States are obliged to prevent and punish the commission of genocide.

This does not require that genocide actually occurs, the obligation is to act to prevent genocide. It is a prior obligation designed to ensure that genocide never exists.

• READ MORE: ‘Serious questions to answer’ – Labour slams Luxon over Israel’s Pacific Islands Forum move
• Gaza mass killing documentary a warning of global dystopian future — David Robie
• Other Gaza genocide reports

New Zealand’s lack of support for South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention and its unwillingness to mirror the sanctions imposed on Russia following it’s invasion of Ukraine, are two examples of inaction.

New Zealand’s passivity reflects other influences, particularly those of the US.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters says as much in his recent speech to the NZ Institute of International Affairs: “An independent foreign policy can never be unidirectional. The left and a large section of the media, they define us acting independently only when we are disagreeing with the Americans.’’

New Zealand, and the US, unlike the UK, Canada and Australia, have not formally recognised the independent and sovereign State of Palestine. Peters curiously argues this reflects an expression of New Zealand’s independence, asserting this doesn’t foreclose alignments with countries such as the US.

Unquestioned alignment with US
New Zealand’s unquestioned alignment with the US is occurring in spite of US agreement to provide a $2.8 billion arms package to Israel.

A movie, now showing in New Zealand, American Doctor adds another dimension to the cruelty occurring in Gaza. It focuses on the work of three American doctors — Perlmutter (Jewish); Thaer Ahmad (Muslim of Palestinian descent); and Feroze Sidhwa (son of Zoroastrian parents.)

American Doctor – a new film.          Video: Democracy Now!

It is harrowing but essential viewing and brings an immediacy to the situation.

The suffering Perlmutter and his colleagues have seen in Gaza hospitals since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas attack forms the core of the movie. The movie begins with the shredded bodies of tiny children lying on a medical bench – the result of US-made bombs employed by the IDF in Gaza.

The movie documents images of the Israeli military deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, and hospital staff.

Dr Sidhwa comments:  “People feel like they have to have a PhD in this topic to understand it, or to discuss it sensibly. The question isn’t how well you know Arab-Israeli history.

“The question is: Do you or do you not support the murder of children? Do you or do you not support the torture of physicians? Do you or do you not support the bombing of hospitals?’’

Puzzling NZ not influenced by UK
It is puzzling that New Zealand has not been influenced by one of its closest allies, the UK, when its Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband, says: “The Palestinian people’s suffering is a stain on the conscience of the world. We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank.

“We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.’’

Miliband accepts that the UK has a responsibility to do everything to end the occupation. Hence its decision to ban trade with all illegal settlements.

Such moves by the UK represent a sea change in the struggle to end Israel’s occupation and its programme of annexation of Palestinian land. New Zealand must be part of this change.

So what would a principled New Zealand foreign policy look like on Palestine?

It needs to be put on a firm foundation of the rule of law — stand with South Africa in its case against Israel at the ICJ, support the equal rights of Palestinians to self-determination with statehood recognition being a small step in this direction.

Impose sanctions against the State of Israel (not just against the illegal settler colonial settlements.) Scrutinise Israeli passport carrying arrivals into New Zealand to ensure they have not been part of the IDF acts in Gaza and the the West Bank.

Foreign policy isn’t something New Zealand voters prioritise.

Shameful NZ record on Gaza
New Zealand’s shameful record on Gaza, however, should be top of mind going into the election.

While the government has failed in its response to the horror of Gaza, undermining our standing in the international community, three political parties — Greens, Labour, and Te Pāti Māori — are articulating an approach to Palestine grounded in a morally defensible foreign policy.

All support statehood recognition of Palestine, the imposition of sanctions on Israel and joining South Africa at the ICJ. Labour will require the NZ Superfund and ACC to divest from holdings in companies on the UN list of companies operating in the Occupied Territories.

Whatever shape the next government takes it must shift its approach to one which upholds international law and supports the people of Palestine as their survival in their homeland is in peril.

New Zealanders and our political parties must act and be part of the global momentum to end the brutality in Gaza, to reverse the illegal occupation of the West Bank, support Palestinian self-determination and hold Israel to account.

To do otherwise represents a moral failure as citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand and it will severely damage our reputation among many of our traditional allies, trading partners, and the international community.

John Hobbs is a doctoral student at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

A leading Palestine advocacy group in New Zealand has given the government a “please explain” message after news reports that the Pacific islands Forum (PIF), the region’s main political body, have admitted Israel as a sectoral partner.

According to 1News, the decision was made under a new two-tier partnership model, with Israel engaging at ministerial rather than leaders’ level.

The Forum Secretariat had not publicly announced the decision when the report was published.

• READ MORE: ‘Serious questions to answer’ – Labour slams Luxon over Israel’s Pacific Islands Forum move
• Israel approved as second-tier partner in Pacific Islands Forum
• Israel joins Pacific Islands Forum as development partner
• Other Israel and the Pacific reports

New Zealand, along with Australia, is one of 18 members of the Forum and will host next year’s Leaders’ Summit.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Tel Aviv is widely condemned for its genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza with at least 75,000 people killed.

Both Netanyahu and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon face elections within the next few weeks.

Four questions
Palestine Forum chair of New Zealand Maher Nazzal has called on Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters to answer four questions:

• What position did New Zealand take on Israel’s application?;
• What advice did the Government receive on the diplomatic, legal and human rights implications?;
• Did New Zealand raise Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories during its consideration?; and
• What safeguards will ensure the partnership does not undermine the Forum’s commitments to human rights, peace and self-determination?

“These are reasonable questions, and New Zealanders are entitled to clear, public answers,” Nazzal said.

“Cooperation cannot replace accountability.”

Israel has signalled interest in cooperating with Pacific states on water, agriculture, climate adaptation and innovation.

“These matter to Pacific communities. But technical cooperation must not shield any state from scrutiny under international law,” Nazzal said.

‘Consistent principles’
“PFNZ respects the sovereign right of Pacific nations to make their own diplomatic decisions. Our concern is not with the people of Israel, or with cooperation that genuinely benefits the Pacific.

“It is with consistent principles and meaningful accountability, whichever state is involved.”

Nazzal said Pacific peoples understood what land, identity and self-determination meant. That was why the Palestinian experience of displacement and occupation resonated across the region.

“PFNZ urges the government to show that its commitment to a rules-based order applies consistently, and encourages Pacific civil society and communities across Aotearoa to engage in informed discussion,” he said.

“The question is not only who may join a regional forum. It is whether the principles that guide that forum are upheld consistently.”

Ambassador Tammy Bruce, Deputy Representative of the United States to the United Nations, has called for the UN Decolonisation Committee’s mandate to be “terminated” as having “outlived its original purpose”.

She also attacked regional visits as “yearly junkets to resorts in the Caribbean and South Pacific” in ramping up the usual US annual attack on decolonisation processes.

At last week’s UN Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonisation Committee — C-24) meeting, 160 countries voted in favour and two — US and Israel — voted against the initial resolution concerning non self-governing territories.

• READ MORE: US calls for end to UN decolonisation committee, criticises Pacific visits
• Other UN Decolonisation Committee reports

Only the United Kingdom, France and Paraguay abstained.

The United States and Israel were the only countries that voted against all 20 of the meeting’s resolutions and decisions of the committee.

Just six of the remaining 17 UN-defined colonies are in the Pacific — American Samoa, French Polynesia, Guam (American territory), New Caledonia (French), Tokelau (New Zealand) and Pitcairn (British).

West Papuan independence advocates also claim that a 1969 plebiscite enabling Indonesian rule over the Melanesian region was fraudulent and seek a fresh decolonisation process.

The US said the foundation texts of the modern UN decolonisation process — including Resolution 1514 adopted in 1960 — were non-binding and did not necessarily reflect international law.

Divided votes
Votes on other resolutions were more divided, including on whether the concept of colonialism should extend to economic coercion and other contemporary practices.

Washington argued that independence should not be treated as a “one-size-fits-all” solution, that the people of a non-self-governing territory should be able to choose among options such as independence, free association, integration with the administering state or another status freely determined by the people concerned.

But Ambassador Bruce’s speech also restated her administration’s disagreement with criticism of a US federal court decision that blocked Guam’s planned self-determination plebiscite and reasserted its “sovereign right to conduct military activities” in the Pacific territory in accordance with its national security interests.

The United Kingdom, which administers 10 of the 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories, abstained on the draft resolutions concerning its territories but voted in favour of a decision on Gibraltar.

The Fourth Committee in session on 15 October 2026.     Video: UN Media

Pacific churches reject US call on decolonisation
In Suva, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) rejected the call by the US to end
the UN Decolonisation Committee mandate and the description of the committee’s Pacific engagement as “yearly junkets.”

“Six of the world’s 17 remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories are in our region,” said the PCC in a statement. “While they remain on the list, the work of decolonisation is unfinished, and the mandate to complete it has not outlived its purpose.

“Our people are not props, and our homes are not junkets,” said PCC general secretary Reverend James Bhagwan.

He also said that although West Papua was not on the UN list, the PCC continued to advocate for the “self-determination and human rights of Papuan people, including UN access to the territory”.

The New Zealand government must turn concern for besieged Palestinians into urgent, practical action, says a Palestinian advocacy group.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the government to take “immediate diplomatic and financial action” following the UN World Food Programme’s announcement that 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza will lose their monthly food assistance because of lack of funds.

“This is not an abstract budget issue. It is a decision that will affect the daily survival of hundreds of thousands of people who have endured years of war, displacement, destruction and deprivation,” said Palestine Forum chair Maher Nazzal in a statement.

• READ MORE: Gaza malnutrition and starvation at ‘catastrophic’ levels: Health Ministry
• Other Gaza genocide reports

He said the World Food Programme had warned that its assistance was being severely reduced just as winter approached.

“Food rations are being halved, cash assistance is being cut, and the provision of hot meals is being reduced,” he said.

Meanwhile, about 1.4 million people in Gaza continue to face crisis-level food insecurity or worse.

“No family should be left wondering where their next meal will come from because the international community has failed to fund humanitarian assistance,” Nazzal said.

What the Palestine Forum seeks
The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the New Zealand government to:

• Provide urgent additional humanitarian funding for the World Food Programme and trusted humanitarian organisations delivering food, clean water, medical care and essential supplies to Palestinians in Gaza;
• Mobilise international support by working with like-minded governments to close the WFP’s funding gap and ensure that humanitarian assistance is sustained rather than progressively reduced;
• Use New Zealand’s diplomatic influence to press Israel to ensure the safe, rapid and sustained entry and distribution of sufficient humanitarian aid throughout Gaza, without arbitrary restrictions or obstruction;
• Demand full implementation of the ceasefire and protection of civilians, alongside compliance with international humanitarian law and the removal of barriers preventing Palestinians from accessing essential supplies; and
• Adopt a sustained humanitarian response, with transparent commitments and regular public reporting on New Zealand’s contributions and diplomatic efforts to address the crisis in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory.

“New Zealand cannot resolve this crisis alone, but it can make a meaningful contribution,” said Nazzal. “It can provide funding, mobilise other countries and use its diplomatic relationships to press for action.

He said the international community must not “allow a fragile improvement in food security to be reversed because humanitarian funding has fallen short”.

Humanitarian assistance needed to be based on need, “not donor fatigue or shifting political attention”.

“Palestinians in Gaza are not statistics. They are human beings, families, children and older people who deserve food, safety and dignity,” Nazzal said.

COMMENTARY: By Mary Kostakidis

Three very apt words — Truth, Trust and Tribalism. Much of what I say will focus on the last. Because of it, the first and second often become casualties.

Our Holy Grail of journalism centres on four pillars: objectivity, impartiality, balance and neutrality. Four pillars that are all too often weaponised in the service of gatekeeping the Overton window, so that establishment interests aren’t threatened by a restless citizenry.

While this has operated somewhat more subtly in the past, it has become a charade in which allies who wield enormous power on the global stage, have dropped their masks — they have shed pants as well — and it has become harder to drink this glass of milk because there are big fat flies floating on the surface.

• READ MORE:  Israel funded the legal assault on Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis
• Other media diversity and Gaza reports

The world order intended to be based on international law, and one that has often failed to deliver accountability in the case of the most powerful, has now been comprehensively debased.

In examining the media’s role and its pretence at neutrality and balance — when it actually behaves in a most tribal, partisan way — I’ll share with you some of my own experience over decades, including where I have failed.

I will argue an important weapon in our arsenal are the principles of our shared humanity that underpin universal rights, and that adherence to those principles necessitates an ability to view and analyse the world through multiple lenses, not just that of the Global North.

This is not something we need permission to do. It is part of the core business of being a journalist if we are serious about impartiality and objectivity. It is also part and parcel of diplomacy, and should also be integral to the work of leaders, otherwise we have no chance of bringing an end to forever wars, to collaboratively resolve matters in a manner that has regard to equality, freedom and dignity for all.

Injustice perpetuated
In understanding conflict and embarking on an assessment of a situation, objectivity and impartiality are vital. However, it is not necessary for an experienced journalist to remain neutral in interpreting the significance of events. Indeed, most memorable works of journalism, such as Robert Fisk’s The Great War For Civilisation, cannot be described as “neutral”.

To hold journalism in a perpetual state of neutrality and continue to provide selective “balance” (there is little to no “balance’”in the coverage of China, Russia, Iran or Israel) is to render plausible deniability, to shield crime, to deliver impunity and to compound and perpetuate injustice, as has occurred in the way Israel’s actions have been historically and predominantly reported in Western legacy media.

This era is unprecedented — there has not been such widespread repression throughout the West, and not only in our profession — it is society wide. And what strikes you of course, is that contrary to this oft weaponised Code of Ethics, what operates — with a few notable exceptions — is an unacknowledged partisanship, as tribal as geopolitical protagonists themselves.

While we have achieved diversity in the media in terms of presence and visibility, we have not yet succeeded in injecting the diversity of perspectives required. Other than in independent media, we still must all use one lens: that of the Global North.

I had certainly hoped we would have multiple lenses in our toolkit when we started up SBS in 1980. It was, however, too ambitious, and we settled for the possible. And so here we find ourselves today.

I don’t wish to diminish the significant impact of the second public broadcaster. But our task is to look critically at our industry and how it serves the Australian public, our democracy, and how it equips us to be global citizens, in addition to being Australian citizens.

In today’s world, this type of dual citizenship is mandatory if we are to have any chance at putting an end to forever wars and belligerent partisanship to move to more respectful relationships as a multipolar world community, to look out for the survival of our fellow human beings and planet, where interests can coalesce rather than collide.

After seeing its identity and purpose reflected solely in the eyes of the British Empire, and moving seamlessly into subservience to the US, and after doing away with the White Australia Policy, our country went through interminable navel gazing in the media — who are we? What is our identity as a nation?

The answer it landed on, was “Multicultural”. Yes, we came from many cultures, and wasn’t that fab.

Hoped for something more
“Multiculturalism” was a word I studiously avoided including during my almost three decades at SBS. Not because I was a closet Pauline Hanson. But because in the very early days at the broadcaster, I had hoped for something more.

One of the early on-air promotional campaigns was centred around the Overton window metaphor: “Channel O — a Window to the World’. I was banking on a Door.

It was not to be. The debate settled on whether what was being provided was “ethnic” or “multicultural” television. Cosmopolitanism, a prism conducive to the practice of journalism, was a bridge too far for Australia in 1980. We were to celebrate our particularity — our food, dance, music and movies, but the serious work demanded by our shared humanity and diverse perspectives lay dormant.

I recall Melbourne ABC radio broadcaster Jon Faine asking me when I was appointed to present SBS World News, whether it would cover stories from a different perspective. It was a question I studiously circumvented by banging on about running background stories, which were in my view one of our strengths. I knew that our lens captured a greater part of the world, but feared it’s portrayal in the end remained comfortably within the Overton window.

On Day 1 of my induction to the newsroom, the then-chief producer made a remark I considered a statement of the obvious — that “One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter”. But it proved not to be obvious at all and it was soon forgotten. And she and it went the way of those background stories we used to run. We gradually transitioned from the possibilities and potential understanding offered by the perspective epitomised in that adage, to dividing the world into our allies versus an “Axis of Evil” against which a “War on Terror” needed to be fought.

This occurred in stages and among the various contributing factors was the purging of full-time staff in favour of contractors who were less likely to raise objections due to job insecurity, as well as selecting out anti-establishment views in executive roles which is the natural state of institutions. And the broadcaster slid into the natural state of the media club in manufacturing consent.

Validation was sought in sameness, the assurance you have got it right. An at times bellicose partisanship bubbled to the surface, due to both overt support for establishment views as well as a subliminal cultural bias, all of which became more pronounced with the passage of years as the organisation went through multiple changes.

SBS could have made a difference
There were times when SBS could have made a difference but chose not to, and I see that also as a personal failure. While I did not have editorial control, I did have influence.

It is true that decision makers in the newsroom were almost exclusively Anglo-Celtic, but the Board was not and we know culture is determined by the government-appointed Board which selects the CEO who appoints those beneath him or her etc.

Ethnic diversity on the Board did not prevent the organisation heading down the path it did. Visible diversity was an achievement, but it was a mere beginning, not an end in itself. It did not deliver the next stage because its ambition was limited. Whatever I did, it was not enough to have the impact required. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

In October 2006 (I left in 2007), you may recall The Australian sent a young Arabic-speaking reporter to a Lakemba Mosque expecting he would document incitement to terrorism by the Imam. He returned empty handed, but his translation of the sermon included a reference to women who do not dress modestly as “uncovered meat”. The story was front page news in The Australian and subsequently across all media mastheads and platforms in the country, including the SBS World News bulletin I presented, despite attempts on my part to explain this sort of comment was hardly unusual, didn’t merit singling out given what is routinely said by preachers of other faiths.

The incident was nevertheless used to fan the flames of strong anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of 9/11 and in support of US-led wars.

The atmosphere in the newsroom was at fever pitch, it was part of a pack that smelt blood. It was a day of great shame for me personally. I’d had two experiences with another organised religion that were significantly more egregious, but comments around acceptable standards of modesty, whether you adhere to them, or think they are backward and damaging for women, did not warrant singling out for public humiliation as a serious, unacceptable and unique threat to Australian society, posed by Muslim rhetoric.

The speech of Greek Orthodox Sunday school teachers or rabbis was never subjected to a public microscope.

Exceptional pressure
During my almost three decades at SBS, first in management and then in the newsroom, in discussions with the heads of programming, news, and television, I was aware of the exceptional pressure brought to bear on decision-makers when it came to purchasing and broadcasting a film, or running a story, that portrayed a Palestinian point of view as opposed to the non-negotiable version of the Israel lobby.

The programme would have to be of a higher standard than usual to justify the resources that would inevitably be required to defend it.

After a staff meeting in the newsroom in 2004, at which I argued strongly that we had to run a particular story that the news director had been asked to pull, he told me he believed his days were numbered. There would be retribution for him after the election if the Coalition won, because in the end, he had defended our right to run the report.

This marked the end of an era of possibility, with more evident influence of editorial staff by the Israel lobby.

The imbalance in our coverage became even more pronounced and entrenched and it became virtually impossible to include the perspective of Palestinians. For many years, we crossed to an Israeli spokesperson, usually an IDF or former IDF member — for a long time Mark Regev — for “an update” as if it was to a neutral observer.

I well recall an occasion during my last year when I suggested to the on-duty chief producer that we have a Palestinian on for a change. I have not forgotten his short response, though 20 years have passed. “Why? They’re all mad.”

He had just returned from a junket to Israel, par for the course for senior journalists across media organisations. Some years earlier, I had been baffled by the boasting of another chief producer about the size and quality of the steak and bottle of red he had just consumed in a long lunch shouted by an Israel lobbyist, before returning to his shift.

Legacy media struggled over Gaza genocide
It’s not surprising that legacy media has struggled with reporting on the Gaza genocide — even without using the word — because for decades we overlooked Israel’s modus operandi for demographic engineering, either in ignorance or complicity — both inexcusable.

Small victories in resistance to this diminished, along with the dilution of solidarity on the floor. In my specific role, I resorted to a kind of reverse weaponisation of neutrality. Because of my role as anchor, I argued, I could not use expressions like the much-loved “War on Terror”, it had to be “George Bush’s War on Terror”, or a dead pan “the so-called War on Terror”.

Personal family history led me — since childhood — to want to understand how power was exercised because of the catastrophic consequences for ordinary people. Interrogating the nature of identity and the function of tribalism were pieces in that puzzle, as my grandparents had come from a multiracial society at a time when such societies were being transformed into ethno-states.

The heritage of pluralism remained in my DNA and a cosmopolitan outlook was to remain my prism. Ethnic particularity, however, was just one aspect of pluralism, as it was also only just one aspect of personal identity. Furthermore, the centrality of ethnic particularity was a core characteristic of ethnonationalism and often provided fertile ground for chauvinism and racism.

So I was somewhat of a Martian in the newsroom because my background provided a perspective that my contemporary environment had no time for. In 1967, when Israel took the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights — which it ethnically cleansed, wiping out 100 villages — my generation at age 13 were reading The Diary of Anne Frank, soon followed by Leon Uris’s Exodus which documented the noble struggle of Jewish pioneers forging a new life, taming “a barren” land, creating an “egalitarian” society in “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

On this cultural and formal education, British historian William Dalrymple says he was “sold a lie”. This was the prism through which the creation of Israel was seen. Arabs were an inconvenient peripheral menace. How many adults in the Western world went on from Exodus to read Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine or Ghada Karmi’s Married to Another Man, or any of the books by Ilan Pappe? How many Western journalists?

For a variety of reasons, the media’s treatment of Israel is most exceptional. In general, holding our allies to the same standards as our foes would be laughed out of any newsroom — let alone questioning why said countries are considered “allies” to begin with. An attitude unhealthy in an ethnonationalist state, but in a multicultural one, it seeded problems that can’t be swept away.

Spawned discontent can’t be controlled
Certainly not with motherhood statements by politicians who avoid accountability for their policies or their obligations under international law. And the discontent spawned can’t be controlled with repressive institutional behaviour and authoritarian legislative measures.

Just as you can’t stop an oppressed group of people from rising up against its oppressors, the rest of us can’t allow our conscience to be criminalised, and so we will not be intimidated into silence.

I have made my anti-establishment views known across a raft of matters and have been trenchant in my criticism of the US government as well as our own government, but Israel was a no-no, no matter how flagrant its conduct.

The first “public” shot across the bow in this stepped-up phase of cancellation since October 7 was the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf. I say public because there are many cases that are not known about.

I was chosen because of my public profile and reputation, because I dared step outside the narrow Overton window we must all remain within at all cost, particularly in the case of Israel. I’m aware that my sharing of articles by many Jewish journalists and a range of other reputable experts who have been either shut out of mainstream media or would never get a look in, was making Zionists apoplectic.

The newly-minted young CEO of the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) and a compliant journalist in the legacy media decided they would smear me as an antisemitic rape denier and fruit loop conspiracy theorist. And because no decent smear ends without references to Holocaust denial, one of the two “exclusives” remarkably managed to end on that note.

Radio silence from that masthead ever since. They all have egg on their face because the ZFA had to drop the case knowing they had no prospect of winning.

Israel getting some of its own medicine
The two posts they selected for the alleged breach were a clip of a speech by the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah; one post with a comment from me that the Israeli government was getting some of its own medicine and that Israel has started something it can’t finish with this genocide; and the other a mere retweet of a post by British journalist Richard Medhurst who simply reported Nasrallah’s words.

It was an interesting choice for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Medhurst was arrested three weeks after the case against me was filed.

The affront at these posts was because I had the temerity to share a clip of Nasrallah himself — a listed terrorist in Australia — and draw some sort of moral equivalence between his threat and the conduct of the Israeli government, and to indicate the consequences of that conduct would continue to escalate. How dare I compare a threat by a listed terrorist with the conduct of a terrorist state.

But Israel must be spoken of with reverence while it couches its erasure of Palestinians and theft of their land as defending itself, and those defending Palestinians must be roundly condemned as terrorists and part of that Axis of Evil, when they are seen as neither by many millions of people around the world.

That we, as journalists, must take this position as if we were mouthpieces for the US alliance or the Australian government, let alone Israel, is preposterous. It dispenses with our capacity to view our own country’s perspective and that of our allies as critically as we would any other country’s, and to have media organisations participate in this journalistic malpractice as openly as they have is astonishing.

You will be familiar with directives and guidance given to staff here, and recall The New York Times leaked memo in early 2024 directing journalists to avoid even the use of the term “Occupied Territory”, and CNN staff revealing pressure resulting in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives, with similar pressures reported at the BBC.

Over the last decade we saw distinct fragmentation of the audience — some still relying on legacy media while others accessing information and perspectives from independent media where we have seen an explosion of outlets including YouTube channels where experts and scholars publish information and commentary.

Two very different perceptions of reality
The result has been two very different perceptions of reality. However, this chasm between segments of the public is closing for large numbers of people as the situation in Gaza and in other spheres reach such extremes. Israel’s brutal colonialism in the West Bank and Lebanon, Donald Trump’s overt gangster-capitalism and proxy war on Iran, and the rise of the far-right cannot be glossed over with a comprehensive avoidance of reality in legacy media.

The consequences are too visible and too extreme.

We can take heart that on the whole the courts won’t back the suppression of political speech — with the exception of the disappointing Jayson Gillham decision where the judge did not have a problem with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra discriminating in the colour of political comment it endorsed, legitimising support for Ukraine as policy but not so for Palestinians.

NSW Supreme Court Justice Desmond Fagan’s judgement on the heels of this decision is a masterclass in calling out the lack of common sense, gaslighting and utter bullshit.

Mary Kostakidis is an Australian journalist, political commentator, and activist. She was a member of the management team that developed SBS Television in 1980. She anchored its World News bulletin for almost 2 decades before becoming an independent journalist. This address to the Media Diversity Australia Symposium was delivered on 13 October 2026 and republished from Deepcut News.

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.