NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
Today marked the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp and the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The day is an opportunity to reflect on anti-semitism in Aotearoa New Zealand.
In 2019, a UN independent human rights report by Ahmed Shaheed found that anti-semitism has increased globally. Shaheed defined the term anti-semitism to mean prejudice against, or hatred of Jews.
We are not immune here in New Zealand.
NZFOI: Nathan Lewin, a distinguished US Attorney, says that the Kosher Slaughter advocates neglected to include key evidence that would have strengthened their case, after an European Court ruled against them.
Neither this history [i.e. the evidence presented in the US] nor the scientifically supported proposition that shechita’s “simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument” is as effective as stunning was presented to the European court.
It is clear from the reasoning articulated in the opinion that no one gave the European court the evidence that was heard by the American congressional committees. The European court assumed that animal welfare, which it recognized as a permissible legislative goal, required stunning before slaughter.
It held that stunning only affected “one aspect of the specific ritual act of slaughter and that act of slaughter is not, by contrast, prohibited as such.” This limited restriction, it said, “is appropriate for achieving the objective of promoting animal welfare.”
What a way to bookend a year. In January, the world marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. World leaders gathered and solemnly promised, “Never again.”
Here we are in December, and while there is no new Holocaust, Europe is making Jews and Muslims feel remarkably unwelcome in their own homes.
On Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union, or CJEU, issued a ruling permitting a ban on religious slaughter in Belgium. In 2017, Flanders and Wallonia, two of Belgium’s three regions, banned animal slaughter that didn’t include preslaughter stunning. Both laws went into effect last year.
NZFOI: John Le Carre was one of the most successful spy novelists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He arguably created the genre of the spy as the anti-hero in stark contrast to the glamorous spies created by Ian Fleming. In this interview, Le Carre reveals himself to be a staunch supporter of Israel.
In a rare interview 22 years ago, the peerless thriller writer talked about Israel and Jews; Smiley could have been Jewish, he said of his most famous character. ‘Perhaps he was’
John le Carre, the master spy novelist who died Sunday aged 89, had a long fascination and sympathy for the Jewish people and a deep admiration for Israel.
Jewish characters were interwoven in his many novels, and his research into the 1983 novel “The Little Drummer Girl” gave him his first real exposure to Israel with a visit that “rocked” him, he said in a rare 1998 interview with Douglas Davis of the Jewish World Review.
“Israel,” he told Davis, “rocked me to my boots. I had arrived expecting whatever European sentimentalists expect — a re-creation of the better quarters of Hampstead [in London]. Or old Danzig, or Vienna or Berlin. The strains of Mendelssohn issuing from open windows of a summer’s evening. Happy kids in seamen’s hats clattering to school with violin cases in their hands.”
Instead, what he recalled finding was “the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future.”
“No nation on earth,” he said, “was more deserving of peace — or more condemned to fight for it.”
John Minto has wasted no time in attempting to lecture the incoming Minister of Foreign Affairs, MP Nanaia Mahuta, on what he thinks she should be doing in the Middle East and in urging his followers to bombard her with emails.
He has no compunction in spouting a distorted picture of what is a complex conflict.
Minto fails to mention that the so-called ‘Great March of Return’ consisted of a series of violent riots, organised, coordinated and directed by Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organisation that is in an armed conflict with Israel.
A case study undertaken by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights found that:
The mass violent events that took place in the area of the security barrier were “unusual in their scope and in the intensity of the threat that they posed”. Tens of thousands of people participated. Under the cover of the riots, grenade and explosive devices were hurled towards the Israel Defence Forces troops, live ammunition was fired at the soldiers and explosive devices were hurled towards Israeli territory, in addition to the flying of incendiary kites intended to harm towns and residents of Israel near the Gaza periphery.
Talk to the folks who handled the Israel file and who were close to Joe Biden between 2009 and 2017, and his boss, Barack Obama, more often than not comes up, even if not by name.
Biden was the guy Israelis looked to for support, they say, implying that Obama was … less supportive. Biden was the guy who bridged differences created by the mutual distrust between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency spoke with half a dozen people who saw the Biden-Israel relationship up close during the years that Biden served under President Obama as vice president. What emerges is a picture of a man who did little to innovate policy but who was a loyal lieutenant to Obama and remained a friend to Israel — and he was often left to use the negotiating skills he honed through decades in the Senate to bridge the divide.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Israeli superstar Gal Gadot radiates positivity. Interviewer Nancy Jo Sales describes how Gadot has the “happiest smile I think I’ve seen on anyone since the start of the pandemic. I wonder about that smile, and how Gadot manages to stay so happy. I wonder if it’s because she seems so aware of how lucky she is.”
Throughout the interview, Gadot describes herself as lucky. She’s lucky for her family, lucky for health, lucky she has the opportunity to play Wonder Woman on screen.
She is also very grateful to God for her good fortune. “In the Jewish culture there’s a prayer that you’re supposed to say every time you wake up in the morning to thank God for, you know, keeping you alive,” Gadot explains, referring to the Jewish prayer, Modeh Ani. “You say ‘modeh ani’, which means ‘I give thanks’… So every morning I wake up and step out of bed and I say ‘Thank you for everything, thank you, thank, you, thank you…Nothing is to be taken for granted.”
[NZFOI has recently acquired this book for the members’ library.]
In a story that may be apocryphal, the late Christopher Hitchens claimed that he had once seen legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban comment that the most striking aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict is how easily it can be solved: It is simply a matter of dividing the land of Israel into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The only thing standing in the way of this solution is the intense religious or nationalist attachment of both sides to the idea of an undivided nation between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, this assumption that partition alone can bring peace has been the foundation of all of the international community’s peace efforts since the 1967 Six Day War. The only difficulty, it is believed, is persuading the two sides to agree to it.
In many minds, Anti-Semitism has disguised itself as advocacy for Palestinian Arabs and opposition to Israel’s existence. Unsurprisingly therefore, NZFOI is keenly interested in NZ’s policies toward Israel in its fight against Anti-Semitism. Those following the many articles setting out the policies, the statements and the track records of the various NZ political parties in relation to Israel, will have noticed something:
Over the last few years, no matter what they have said prior to entering government all have become subordinated to the “long-standing” and “even-handed” foreign policy set out by previous administrations and closely guarded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Each administration has parroted these two catch-phrases, “long-standing” and “even-handed” policy (or their synonyms) over and over whenever the Middle East Conflict has arisen.
These two phrases or variations of them are being recited by each administration because this is the advice given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT). We know this because of the good work of the Israel Institute of New Zealand who obtained the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s advice on NZ’s UN voting between 2015-2018 through the Official Information Act. In those documents, the Ministry says:
“New Zealand has for many years endeavoured to take a balanced and even-handed approach to Middle East issues in the UN, with the primary objective of supporting a sustainable two-state solution, best achieved through direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.”
In defending Resolution 2334, Bill English said it “expressed long-standing international policy.”
Based on his 2017 pre-election statements, Winston Peters looked like an opportunity to reset NZ’s relations with Israel in the aftermath of NZ’s unwise sponsorship of Resolution 2334. Yet in 2020, he too repeated that NZ’s policy was a “consistent” one and it was “balanced” when questioned as to why his government supported anti-semitic bias at the UN.
During a casual conversation with Gerard van Bohemen, a previous NZ Representative to the UN and now High Court judge, he too re-affirmed that NZ’s stance on the Middle East was “long-standing” and “even-handed.” It’s been crafted over many decades and transcends individual administrations. He then said, we shouldn’t have a go at the Ministry as they are just a civil service, there to implement the policies of the current administration. NZFOI needed to get to the academic experts who helped shape the policy in the first place.
It’s almost as if the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has frightened each incoming administration with disastrous consequences if it dared to touch the “long-standing” and “even-handed” policy which embodies the collective wisdom of previous governments, that in their eyes, has performed so well in protecting New Zealand’s interests.
Without focusing on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the “experts” it uses to form its views on international issues, NZ’s interests, and therefore how it advises each incoming administration, NZ’s stance on the Middle East Conflict will not be diverted from its current course.
Because of this, when it comes to Israel it doesn’t matter that much which major party forms the government.
More and more Gulf Arab state officials recognize that the Palestinian people, the Arab states, and the United States (not to mention Israel) would all be better off if new, more constructive Palestinian leaders came to power. At the same time, there is less and less adherence to the conventional view that Israel must make peace with the Palestinians before it can make peace with the Arab states.
By noting that greater strategic cooperation between Israel and the Arab states against Iran would “set the stage for diplomatic breakthroughs,” the Trump peace plan anticipated the UAE-Israel and Bahrain-Israel accords. It implied that such deals could usefully increase pressure on the Palestinians to reform their politics, which is the key to a breakthrough on the issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The message to the Palestinians from yesterday’s White House signing ceremony is that they need a political upheaval—new leaders, new institutions, new ideas—or they are going to become utterly irrelevant in the eyes of the world, including the broader Arab world. As they lose attention, they will lose diplomatic support and economic aid. If they cannot make war and they will not make peace, their hopes to shape their own future will diminish to nothing.
