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→ 21 February 2026
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Israel’s new strategic reality: The China-Iran alliance

Melissa Chen
Melissa Chen

For years, Israel treated China as a distant economic partner — a country that bought our tech, invested in our infrastructure, and stayed politely out of our regional wars.

Melissa Chen’s conversation with Haviv Rettig Gur makes one thing painfully clear:
China is not a bystander. It is now one of the central enablers of the forces trying to destroy Israel.

This isn’t theory. It’s happening in real time — in Iran’s oil fields, in Gaza’s tunnels, in the UN Security Council, and even in the TikTok feeds of Western teenagers.

1. China Is the Financial Lifeline of the Iranian Regime

Iran’s ability to survive sanctions, suppress dissent, and fund its terror network depends overwhelmingly on Beijing.

From the interview:

“It literally buys more than 80% of Iran’s total oil exports… and does all the work necessary to bypass American sanctions.”

China buys Iranian oil at deep discounts, but in such massive quantities that it keeps the regime solvent. That money becomes:

  • Ballistic missiles for Hezbollah
  • Drones for Russia
  • Cash for Hamas
  • Salaries for the Basij and IRGC
  • Subsidies that prevent the Iranian public from toppling the regime

China isn’t just a customer. It is Iran’s strategic depth.

2. Chinese Technology Is Embedded in the Iran–Israel Conflict

Iran’s battlefield is increasingly powered by Chinese systems:

  • Chinese radar and air‑defence platforms
  • Chinese cyber tools
  • Chinese satellite navigation (BeiDou)
  • Chinese AI‑driven surveillance
  • Chinese electronic warfare used to block communications

As Chen notes:

“Iran has essentially co‑opted the Chinese technology and repression apparatus.”

When Israeli pilots fly over Iran, they are not only facing Iranian systems — they are facing Chinese engineering.

3. China’s Pro‑Palestinian Posture Isn’t Moral — It’s Strategic

China’s behaviour after October 7 was a mask‑slipping moment. While the world condemned Hamas, Beijing:

  • Refused to call the massacre terrorism
  • Called for “restraint on all sides”
  • Blocked every US‑backed resolution condemning Hamas
  • Amplified Palestinian messaging that mirrors CCP propaganda

Why? Because the Palestinian cause is a strategic asset in China’s long game.

The 2049 Project: China’s Imperial Horizon

China has a declared goal: by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the PRC, it intends to be the unchallenged global hegemon.

To get there, China must:

  • Undermine US alliances
  • Build influence in the Arab and Muslim world
  • Present itself as the champion of “anti‑imperialist” struggles
  • Weaken Western legitimacy
  • Create a sino‑centric world order

The Palestinian issue is a perfect tool for all of these aims.

The Chessboard: How China Uses the Conflict

Chen puts it bluntly:

“In order to do that, it has to make these moves on the chessboard.”

Supporting the Palestinians allows China to:

  • Court Arab states
  • Undercut US influence
  • Frame Israel as an American proxy
  • Insert CCP narratives into Arab media
  • Keep the Middle East unstable enough to distract the US from Asia

When the USS Abraham Lincoln left the Pacific for the Persian Gulf, China got exactly what it wanted:
American attention pulled away from Taiwan.

The Great Irony: China Is Now an Imperial Power Itself

China claims to oppose imperialism. Yet it now practices:

  • Debt‑trap colonialism through the Belt and Road Initiative
  • Resource extraction in Africa and Latin America
  • Military expansion in the South China Sea
  • Cultural domination in Tibet and Xinjiang
  • Surveillance exports to dictatorships

As Chen observes:

“What it is is actually a form of neo‑colonialism… just not in a very overt way.”

China’s anti‑imperialist rhetoric is not a principle. It is a propaganda tool masking its own imperial ambitions — and the Palestinian cause is one of its most effective instruments.

4. Why China Is Actively Promoting Anti‑Semitism

This is one of the most disturbing parts of the interview — and one of the least understood.

Chen explains that the flood of anti‑Semitic content on TikTok and other platforms is not organic. It is part of a deliberate strategy drawn from the PLA doctrine of “unrestricted warfare.”

“Anti‑Semitic content is part of an informational war.”
“The battlefield is not Gaza. The battlefield is the hearts and minds of young people in the West.”

China uses:

  • TikTok’s algorithm
  • Bot farms
  • State media in Arabic and English
  • Paid activist networks
  • CCP‑aligned NGOs

Why target Jews?

Because anti‑Semitism is a high‑yield wedge:

  • It fractures Western societies
  • It weakens support for Israel
  • It delegitimises the US‑Israel alliance
  • It radicalises young people against Western institutions
  • It fuels chaos — which China sees as strategic advantage

China doesn’t need to love Hamas. It only needs the West to tear itself apart.

5. Israel’s China Bet Has Backfired

For a decade, Israel courted China — ports, tech, agriculture, infrastructure. Netanyahu even called the relationship “a marriage made in heaven.”

October 7 ended that illusion.

China has shown:

  • It will not condemn Hamas
  • It will not support Israel’s right to self‑defence
  • It will protect Iran at every turn
  • It will use the Palestinian issue to weaken the West
  • It will amplify anti‑Semitism to destabilise democracies

Israel is now facing a strategic reality it did not prepare for.

Why This Matters

Israel’s security environment is no longer defined by Iran alone. It is shaped by a China–Iran axis that:

  • Funds Iran
  • Arms Iran
  • Protects Iran diplomatically
  • Enables Iran technologically
  • Amplifies anti‑Semitism to weaken Israel’s allies

This is not a regional problem. It is a global realignment — and Israel is on the front line.

Israel must now:

  • Reduce technological exposure to China
  • Limit Chinese access to critical infrastructure
  • Coordinate closely with the US on export controls
  • Harden itself against information warfare
  • Recognise that China’s rise is not neutral — it is adversarial

The era of hedging is over. The era of strategic clarity has begun.

Key Takeaways

  • China is Iran’s economic lifeline, buying over 80% of its oil and enabling sanctions evasion.
  • Chinese technology is embedded in Iran’s military and cyber capabilities, directly affecting Israel’s battlefield.
  • China’s support for the Palestinians is strategic, tied to its 2049 goal of replacing the US‑led world order.
  • China is actively promoting anti‑Semitism as part of an information‑warfare strategy to destabilise Western societies.
  • Israel’s decade‑long bet on China has backfired, and a new strategic posture is urgently needed.

About Melissa Chen

Melissa Chen is a Singaporean‑born journalist, commentator, and human‑rights advocate known for her work on free speech, civil liberties, and the global battle of ideas. She is the Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit dedicated to translating and disseminating pro‑liberty works into Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish to expand access to censored ideas. A former New York Editor of Spectator USA, Chen frequently appears across podcasts, conferences, and media platforms, offering analysis on authoritarianism, censorship, and the cultural forces shaping open societies.

About Haviv Rettig Gur

Haviv Rettig Gur is an Israeli journalist and senior political analyst at The Times of Israel, known for his deeply researched reporting on Israeli society, Jewish identity, and the evolving relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. Born in Jerusalem and raised partly in the United States, he served as a combat medic in the IDF before studying history and Jewish thought at the Hebrew University. His earlier career included years as the Jewish world correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and later as spokesman for the Jewish Agency. Gur’s work is widely respected for its clarity, historical grounding, and ability to illuminate the forces shaping contemporary Jewish life.

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→ 19 January 2026
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The latest newsletter is out!

NZFOI Newsletter 202602
NZFOI Newsletter 202602

The latest newsletter is out and it may be downloaded from here: Download Newsletter.

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→ 7 January 2026
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What Anti-Zionism Really Is

We came across this thought provoking article and realised its importance in documenting this new evolutionary step of Antisemitism to become “Anti-Zionism.”

After October 7, friends called me ‘filthy Zionist.’ Longtime colleagues refused to work with me. This isn’t criticism of Israel. It’s about making Jews pariahs. By Adam Louis-Klein, 10.07.25 —Israel

After three months in a remote Amazonian village with no internet or phone signal, I returned to a small Colombian town on October 9, 2023—still in the rainforest, but now with internet—and checked social media for the first time. The jungle was still in my ears—squawking macaws, torrential rain, the low hum of a generator—when my screen filled with images from another world entirely: young people sprinting through dust and gunfire at the Nova music festival in Israel.

I had crossed between worlds, only to find that the world I returned to was no longer the same.

The deeper shock came in the hours that followed, as I scrolled through the reactions of friends and colleagues. Denial, justification, and open hostility toward anyone who expressed care for Israelis. I typed a simple phrase—Am Yisrael Chai, “the people of Israel live”—and learned that, in my circles of left-wing academia, that too was considered an act of aggression.

Almost immediately, I saw that a colleague had commented with a photo of people burning an Israeli flag. A former friend declared that my words revealed me as nothing but a “filthy Zionist.” Longtime intellectual collaborators informed me it was unacceptable to work with me given my support for the Jewish people. For them, even calling Jews a “people” was offensive and “right-wing.”

In the days following October 7, I was already experiencing what Marion Kaplan, in her study of Jewish life under Nazi Germany, terms “social death”—complete ostracization and the cutting of one’s previous social bonds. I was beginning to understand that to be a Jewish intellectual—to be a person who speaks in a Jewish voice, and who sees his fate as bound up in the collective fate of the Jewish people—was simply not something the academy could accept.

 

But I wasn’t about to submit. I knew that Jewishness was as legitimate a site as any identity from which to think, reason, and argue.

That was two long years ago. I have learned much in refusing to submit. Not just about the marginalization of Jews in the universities of the West, but about the enduring value of distinct peoples and voices—even in the face of a powerful ideological movement that uses the language of pluralism to conceal its demand for total conformity.

The Anti-Zionist Worldview

I had always been a good student. At my prep school, we read Antigone in Greek and the Aeneid in Latin. At Yale, I worked my way through the Western canon, from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, in the Directed Studies program.

I first became an anthropologist because I was searching for something beyond the Western philosophical tradition I had studied. I wanted to understand worlds that were not my own. What I didn’t quite understand was that the twenty-first-century academy would demand that I disavow my own.

By the time I began my PhD, I was fully immersed in the critical, anti-colonial thought that now dominates the academy—an orientation bent on interrogating and dismantling the West. But living alongside the Desana, an indigenous group in Brazil and Colombia, ultimately brought me back—back to an embrace of my own Judaism and back to my Western inheritance as one tradition among others. Instead of thinking against the West, I came to see the value of thinking across civilizations, between living peoples and the worlds they continue to sustain.

The Desana of the Vaupés region, in today’s Brazil and Colombia, are often described as marginal to the global economy. But in their own eyes, they stand at the center of the universe—a chosen people with a unique story. They call themselves the Ümücori Masa, the universe-people, descended from the universe-person, or God.

For them, chosenness simply means peoplehood. In the early twentieth century, Catholic missionaries destroyed their traditional longhouses and forced them into mission towns. The surrounding Spanish-speaking society showed little interest in their memory or survival. In response, the Desana have fought to preserve their sacred names and endure as a people.

In the same way in which antisemitism once cast the Jew as the world’s metaphysical enemy, anti-Zionism now casts Israel and its supporters in the same role.

Today, we work together to translate old texts about the Desana into their own language—restoring the name of their God, re-centering their sacred lineages, and helping turn the historical record into a living part of their future.

Their struggle to remain themselves in the face of erasure echoed 3,000 years of Jewish history and what I found on my return: a so-called liberal world where Jewish distinctiveness is no longer tolerated, where Jewish continuity is recoded as a threat, where Jewish power is seen as illegitimate.

Nowhere is that worldview more powerful than in the academy. There, educated elites are being taught that it is righteous to hate Jews.

They call that world view anti-Zionism.

While anti-Zionism introduces itself as a “political opinion,” I came to see that it was something else entirely. Anti-Zionism, like antisemitism, is an entire cosmology. In the same way in which antisemitism once cast the Jew as the world’s metaphysical enemy, anti-Zionism now casts Israel and its supporters in the same role.

I began to study anti-Zionism the way I might study any culture’s system of meaning: its myths, rituals, and taboos. It functioned as a symbolic system, its force drawn from recurring metaphors—genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid—ritually deployed not to clarify but to accuse, forming a closed circuit of moral judgment, reproduced across academia, media, and international organizations.

A major mistake would be to think that anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism as an actually existing political ideology. Instead, it constructs a fantasy “Zionism” as a cosmic symbol of global injustice itself, one in which every possible crime—including U.S. police violence, trans exclusion, 9/11, even the climate crisis—converges in the image of Israel’s evil.

The central operation of anti-Zionism is libel. Anti-Zionists bypass the charge of antisemitism by redirecting their defamation at Israel and “Zionists” rather than Jews. By repeating accusations without serious demonstration or credible sourcing, they produce the appearance of an incontestable reality: a displaced evil attributed to “Israel.”

Anti-Zionists repeatedly claim that they are simply criticizing Israel. What makes the difference between critique and libel is not what is said, but how it is proffered, whether it belongs in the space of reason—answerable to refutation—or travels merely through repetition.

People who have been targeted by anti-Zionism know the difference. They are not reacting to individual opinions but to an organized movement that marks Jews as suspect through their association with a libeled Israel. The common deflection—that Jews “assume” criticism of Israel is antisemitic because they believe in some “inherent link” between Israel and all Jews—misses the point entirely.

The central operation of anti-Zionism is libel. Anti-Zionists bypass the charge of antisemitism by redirecting their defamation at Israel and “Zionists” rather than Jews.

In truth, it is a projection by those uncomfortable with being called antisemitic, who may not understand how anti-Zionism actually works—as a closed system of accusation, designed to force Jews to disavow their identities.

What makes anti-Zionism so seductive in academia is the way it cloaks itself in the moral language of human rights. Words like decolonization, anti-racism, and solidarity circulate as moral currencies, exchanged for prestige and authority in the academy. Yet behind this pose of inclusion, anti-Zionism works as an exclusionary ritual.

For example, when I proposed hosting a single academic talk at my university, McGill, on the antisemitic genealogies of anti-Zionism, particularly on the Soviet roots of so much of today’s anti-Israel sloganeering—amid at least 10 events in my department on the so-called Gaza genocide—my request was denied without explanation.

Another colleague warned that the journal I worked on would become “untenable” if it published anything that spoke positively about Jews. The perspective rooted in Jewish peoplehood was simply not to be part of the conversation.

The Forgotten History

To understand how the anti-Zionist worldview took hold, we have to look at the history it so carefully avoids. For a movement so obsessed with historical injustice, it remains almost entirely ignorant of its own origins.

But its genealogy is not mysterious, if you care to look.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with the Nazis, met with Hitler, and broadcast antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world. Husseini worked closely with the Muslim Brotherhood, one of whose offshoots eventually became Hamas.

GettyImages-1371380021.jpg
 
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, inspecting Bosnian volunteers of the Waffen SS while giving the Nazi salute, 1941. (History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Following Israel’s victory over the Arab League in the Six-Day War of 1967, the Soviet Union took up the cause. Their strategy was clear: After the Soviet proxies lost on the physical battlefield, they turned to ideological and information warfare.

As Izabella Tabarovsky and others have documented, Soviet “Zionology” turned classical antisemitism into a global discourse of liberation. Zionism was no longer a Jewish national movement of Jewish liberation, but rather, a world conspiracy of “U.S-Israeli stooges” to undermine socialism and Third World revolution. Zionism was cast as a form of “Jewish imperialism”—a term with Nazi origins—and Israel as the world’s moral pariah.

Inside the Soviet Union, the consequences were stark. Jews were barred from emigrating to Israel, Hebrew was outlawed, and Jewish cultural associations were shuttered. Those who persisted were arrested and tried as “spies” or “traitors” to socialism. To live openly as a Jew, to insist on belonging to the Jewish people, was recast as political criminality—a climate that echoes in today’s elite institutions. These Jews became known as refuseniks: refused visas to Israel, but also refusing to submit to an anti-Zionist regime determined to crush their Jewish spirit.

Born out of the alliance between Nazism and Islamism, the rhetoric that was adopted by the Soviets ultimately found a global audience through the UN and its web of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In 2001, at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, these ideas went mainstream—thanks to a decades-long campaign by Arab nationalist regimes, Soviet propagandists, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an umbrella group for the Muslim-majority states within the United Nations. The NGO forum revived the Soviet slogan “Zionism is racism,” circulated leaflets comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, and helped cement the “apartheid” libel in progressive discourse.

GettyImages-106475313.jpg
 
The Jewish Demonstration in front of Moscow’s Lenin Library on May 29, 1988, on the first day of the Gorbachev-Reagan summit. (Vitaly Armand/AFP via Getty Images)

This is how antisemitism got repackaged in the moral idiom of human rights. The tropes migrated across different aesthetics and discourses—Nazi, Islamist, Soviet, and now the postcolonial left—each time repositioning “Zionism” as the axis of global evil. What started as Nazism became human rights, while Zionists—the modern name of Jews—were recast as “the new Nazis.”

The Genocide Libel

 

Nowhere is the logic of anti-Zionist accusation more stark than in the charge that Israel is committing genocide. This claim also dates back to Soviet propaganda in the 1970s—and within days of October 7, it was being triumphantly revived by activist professors across the West. Having reframed Jewish peoplehood as inherently oppressive, anti-Zionism seeks to criminalize it altogether—by redefining Israel’s very being as genocide: the “crime of crimes.”

This maneuver rests not just on propaganda, but on explicit efforts to rewrite international law. A small circle of academics has worked nonstop over the past two years to erase the distinction between war and genocide. Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research—which in 2024 devoted an entire issue to accusing Israel—has argued for abandoning genocide’s core requirement of intent to destroy a people. In its place, he proposes that all “settler-colonial” states are guilty by definition. Within this logic, Israel does not need to commit extermination to be genocidal; it is guilty simply for being.

While millions today are told that a “majority of genocide experts” believe Israel is committing genocide, few realize that this supposed consensus rests on a very small circle of academics whose self-avowed project is to redefine and even abolish the concept of genocide itself.

Meanwhile, another group of scholars, including leading experts on antisemitism, have rejected the genocide libel outright. Yet their voices receive virtually no coverage in the mainstream press, which prefers the spectacle of accusation to the discipline of debate—excluding Jews from the conversation unless they serve as tokens to legitimize anti-Zionism.

Legal scholar Avraham Russell Shalev, for example, has argued that October 7 itself meets the legal threshold for genocide, given Hamas’s clear intent to annihilate Israeli Jews. He also notes that genocidal actors have often made reverse accusations—a pattern seen with the Nazis, the Serbs, and the Hutus.

Anti-Zionism is not a spontaneous reaction to Israeli policy. It is a symbolic ideology with a specific history. Its moral authority depends not on truth, but on inversion—of victims and aggressors, of genocide and self-defense. It thrives not through argument, but through erasure. This is its deepest function: to delegitimize the Jewish claim to peoplehood by refashioning an old hatred in the language of justice.

What Indigenous Really Means

To truly understand anti-Zionism, we must examine what it seeks to erase: the indigenous connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

Anti-Zionism construes Jews as “colonizers”: an alien, outsider presence in the Middle East. The colonizer libel not only erases Jewish belonging, but enlists Jews as scapegoats for everything modern Western culture now seeks to disavow: racism, imperial violence, settler domination.

In the months following October 7—while still engaged in my work with the Desana people in the Amazon—I set out to peel back the ideological layers wrapped around this fashionable term and recover what indigeneity really means.

At bottom, indigeneity is simply a way of being a people, one in which land and lineage are braided together at the root of identity itself. For the Desana, peoplehood is inseparable from the Vaupés River and the sacred sites along its banks. Their ancestors are said to have arrived upriver in a snake-shaped canoe, guided by primordial beings, who established the clan houses from which souls are born and to which they return.

In today’s academy, however, indigeneity has been reduced to a claim of victimhood at the hands of European colonialism. It is fundamentally a reactive identity—defined only in opposition to “white settler” power. This narrowing of meaning flattens the richness of civilizational difference. By this logic, Jews—now cast as symbols of whiteness, empire, and Western dominance—are excluded in advance.

Indigeneity has been reduced to a claim of victimhood at the hands of European colonialism. It is fundamentally a reactive identity—defined only in opposition to “white settler” power.

Such a framework cannot account for histories of conquest and displacement carried out by non-Europeans. The Arab conquests of the seventh century reshaped the Middle East and North Africa in ways that perfectly fit the “settler-colonial” model now applied to Israel. As Egyptian Jewish historian Bat Ye’or has shown, these conquests suppressed local languages, marginalized non-Muslim peoples, and absorbed indigenous populations into an imperial order—not unlike the Catholic missions in the Amazon.

Yet none of this fits the fashionable narrative. So it is ignored.

Anti-Zionism erases the Jewish story by casting Jews as foreign oppressors. Yet that story is one of exile and return: from Ur to Canaan, from Egypt back to the land of Israel, and after centuries of dispersion, return again. Indigeneity, in this fuller sense, is not a reactive label for the colonized but a structure of peoplehood—a way of inhabiting place, memory, and time.

The Desana, too, tell of a great migration—from the mouth of the Amazon upriver to the Vaupés, where the world took form. For the Desana, to belong is to descend from a journey and to return to its source. What the Desana are to the Vaupés, the Jews are to the land of Israel: a people at the center.

The Space of Reason

I had gone to the Amazon to learn how a people could live at the center of their own world—defined not by others, but by their own destiny. I came back to the erasure of my own.

In all of the spaces I had once thought of as home—universities, cultural institutions, humanitarian NGOs—an ideology that demands the erasure of me and my people has taken hold.

Anti-Zionism’s spread through the institutions of our liberal democracy is a test case for whether equality and justice can survive once they’ve been hollowed out and turned into weapons of exclusion.

This is not only about academia, and it is certainly not only about Jews. It is about defending the right of any people to exist as themselves, to live in security, and to speak in their own voice.

If we fail to defend those basic values, the future will belong to those who erase entire peoples from the human story, twisting the language of justice into tools of violence, intimidation, and propaganda. We cannot let that happen.

The right of every people to stand in the space of reason—to speak, to be heard, and to be recognized as equals—is not a gift from the powerful. It is the birthright of humanity.

 

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→ 31 October 2025
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A critical review of Anne Irfan’s “A Short History of Gaza”

Anne Irfan’s A Short History of Gaza is a deeply partisan narrative that prioritizes Palestinian grievance over balanced historical analysis.

Anne Irfan, a lecturer at University College London specializing in race, gender, and postcolonial studies, has built her academic career around Palestinian refugee rights and modern Middle Eastern history. Her latest work, A Short History of Gaza, is positioned as a concise historical account of the region, but it reads more like a polemic than a neutral chronicle. Irfan’s sympathies are clear, and while her research is extensive, her selectivity in presenting facts undermines the book’s credibility as a historical text.

The book traces Gaza’s trajectory from 1948 to the present, emphasizing the displacement of Palestinians and the humanitarian crises that followed. However, Irfan omits critical context that complicates the narrative she promotes. She does not acknowledge that Palestinians never ruled the land they claim: it was governed by the Ottomans, then the British, and later administered under a UN mandate. The UN’s 1947 partition plan recognized the historical claims of both Jews and Arabs and offered statehood to each. The Arab leadership rejected this compromise, choosing war over coexistence—a war they lost. The Nakba, often framed as a catastrophe inflicted solely by Israel, is more accurately the result of this rejection and its consequences.

Further omissions weaken Irfan’s account. She fails to mention that approximately 40% of Palestinian refugees hold citizenship in other countries, and that all Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza already live in territories they claim as their own. Her coverage of the 2023–2025 Gaza War notably excludes the extensive tunnel network—dubbed the “Gaza Metro”—used by Hamas for military operations. Most troubling is her tendency to recount Israeli-inflicted suffering without acknowledging the provocations or strategic decisions by Arab actors that led to such responses. This lack of causality presents Palestinians as passive victims rather than agents within a complex conflict.

Irfan’s disdain for Palestinian leadership—including the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas—is evident, but this does not translate into balanced critique. Instead, it reinforces her activist stance. Like Ilan Pappe, who famously declared he was more concerned with what history should say than what it does, Irfan uses history as a vehicle for advocacy. Her book should be read with scepticism, not as a definitive account but as a reflection of a particular ideological lens. For readers seeking a comprehensive understanding of Gaza, this work offers insight—but only into one side of a multifaceted story.

 

 

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→ 24 July 2025
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Joint Statement in Response to Government Declaration on Gaza

Winston Peters, Minister of Foreign Affairs for New Zealand
Winston Peters, NZ Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs

We, the undersigned organisations, express grave concern over the recent  joint declaration by New Zealand and 24 other nations condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza and accusing it of obstructing humanitarian aid.

This statement is not only misguided, it represents a dangerous inversion of reality, in which:

  • Terrorists are excused, and defenders are condemned;
  • Hamas’s propaganda is cited as fact, and verified Israeli efforts are ignored;
  • The thief is pitied, and those delivering food under fire are vilified.
     

Blaming the Rescuers, Not the Arsonists

The joint statement accuses Israel of “inhumane” killing and “drip-feeding” aid. Yet it is Hamas (the very group that started this war with a massacre on October 7 2023) that:

  • Steals aid, sells it, and redistributes it to fighters;
  • Creates disturbances and fires on civilians at aid stations to induce panic and lay blame on Israel;
  • Places bounties on aid workers not under its control.
     

To accuse Israel of causing the humanitarian crisis while ignoring Hamas’s central role is to blame the firefighter for the fire. Israel has worked hard to coordinate necessary aid to the extent that there are currently hundreds of truckloads of food on the Gaza side of the border in need of distribution. Thus, there is no “drip-feeding” by Israel.

Treating Terrorist Casualty Reports as Gospel

The casualty numbers cited (tens of thousands of “civilians” killed) come directly from Hamas’s so-called “Gaza Health Ministry.” This is not a neutral medical authority. It is:

  • A Hamas-run information weapon, whose sole aim is to inflate civilian casualties;
  • A notoriously unreliable source. Due to inconsistencies the UN has quietly revised its own reporting;
  • Completely opaque and unverifiable, with no distinction between combatants and civilians.
     

When governments like New Zealand cite these figures without context or scrutiny, they lend credibility to terrorists and undermine genuine humanitarian reporting.

Condemning What Works, Ignoring What Fails

While condemning Israel, the joint statement says nothing about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — the one aid mechanism that actually works:

  • GHF delivers aid using vetted drivers, uses GPS tracking and bypass routes around Hamas.
  • It ensures direct civilian access to food and medicine.
  • It has faced threats and sabotage from Hamas, and—most shockingly—refusal to cooperate from UN agencies and NGOs.
     

According to a Times of Israel report (22 July 2025), these agencies have declined GHF’s repeated offers to collaborate, even as they lament “lack of access” and blame Israel. This is not humanitarianism — it is institutional dysfunction.

Calling for Ceasefire While Hostages Rot in Tunnels

The joint statement demands an “immediate, unconditional ceasefire.” But what kind of ceasefire:

  • Leaves 50 hostages in captivity?
  • Enables Hamas to rearm, reorganise, and repeat the horrors of October 7?
  • Forbids Israel from dismantling a terror regime that uses civilians as shields and hospitals as bases?
     

A ceasefire without the above conditions does not end the war. It guarantees the next one.

When Hamas Applauds You, Something Is Wrong

That Hamas has celebrated the joint statement should alarm every signatory. If your position is being used by a terrorist group as vindication, it is time to re-examine whose reality you are serving.

Why does NZ side with terrorists, when a tiny western style democratic state the size of Northland fights an existential defensive war? Israel did not start this war. She has an obligation to defend her citizens, to do everything possible to free the hostages and to protect her people from future 7 October style massacres. 

What Must Happen Now

We urge the New Zealand Government and its partners to:

  1. Withdraw or amend the joint statement, explicitly naming Hamas as the source of Gaza’s suffering;
  2. Publicly support the GHF and demand cooperation from UN and NGO agencies obstructing its work;
  3. Reject the inversion of truth, where democracies are condemned and terror groups are given a free pass;
  4. Recognise that Israel is fighting an existential war, and that peace is not possible if a genocidal terror regime is left in place;
  5. Demand the immediate release of all hostages and urge Hamas to accept the ceasefire.
     

A Final Word: Reality Must Be Respected

This is not a war between equals. It is a fight between a democracy that warns civilians and a death cult that hides behind them. Between those who seek peace and those who glorify death.

Reversing that truth is not diplomacy. It is betrayal.

We call on New Zealand to return to moral clarity — and stop legitimising the lies of Hamas.

Dr David Cumin, Greg Bouwer – Israel Institute NZ
Dr Sheree Trotter – Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem
Nigel Woodley – Coalition of Ministers, Protection of Zion Trust 
Derek McDowell – International Christian Embassy Jerusalem 
Rob Berg – Kol Israel 
Yifat Goddard, Ashley Church – Israel NZ Network 
Dennis Mcleod – Christian Friends of Israel
Bryce Turner – Christians for Israel 
Tony Kan – NZ Friends of Israel Association
Beth Mather – Bridges for Peace

 

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→ 8 May 2025
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Independence Day 2025 creates moment of reflection

Tony Kan (President, NZFOI), HE Ambassador Alon Roth-Snir and Kate MacPherson (Committee Member)

This week, our President, Tony Kan and Kate MacPherson travelled up to Wellington to attend the reception to mark the 77th Anniversary of the Independence of Israel.

To a packed house, the Ambassador spoke about our common values, and the opportunity to forge a stronger relationship between our countries through trade and fighting intolerance.

Jo McKeagan, the Principal Advisor to the Deputy Secretary (Middle East and Africa) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spoke on behalf of the NZ Government. Most notable of all, this year there was no mention of the creation of an independent Palestinian State, a commitment to a two state solution, or a call for Israel to moderate its military conduct.

In stark contrast to last year, the event was not marked by attendees being harassed by shouting over megaphones and blaring sirens from Pro-Palestinian protesters. Apparently they went to the wrong address.

The reception was also cause to reflect on how things have changed over the last 12 months:

  • Iran had seen its decades long investment in building proxy enemies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Assad regime to threaten Israel, have been made combat ineffective. Their senior leadership either dead, in hiding or in exile.
  • Decades of economic mismanagement caused by the Mullah’s fixation on imperialism has left Iranian civilians impoverished and desperate: So desperate that advertisements to sell kidneys to make ends meet are a common occurrence, infrastructure such as water supply networks have become unreliable and the Iranian currency is one of the most worthless in the world.
  • Israel has demonstrated the effectiveness of its covert forces in identifying their enemies’ leadership, their location and to devise ingenious ways to nullify them.
  • Israel now controls the Philadelphia Corridor, preventing Hamas from smuggling in further arms and munitions.
  • Israel is implementing its own aid distribution system, which will severely curtail Hamas’ ability to divert aid for its own consumption. This will hamper its ability to continue the war.
  • The election of a conservative US Government meant that there was no indecision hampering the supply of arms and munitions.
  • Various thinkers, such as Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips, Tom Holland, and Nigel Biggar are beginning to realize that what makes the West so successful are Judeo-Christian values, precepts and beliefs.

On the other hand, there is a deep sadness and grief over the loss, suffering, and hardship caused by Hamas’ evil, which has taken all around them to doom.

In the immediate, it remains for Israel to end Hamas’ rule in Gaza, place it under administration and begin the slow hard slog to de-radicalize the civilian population. Hamas has used its 20 years to create an Islamo-Fascist state and the culture, unfortunately, now runs deep.

The threat of Iran gaining nuclear weapons is serious and Iran is likely to string out any negotiations reasoning that President Trump has less than four years in power. If the possibility of an agreement that prevents them from developing a nuclear weapon is not possible within this period, then it may be forced to take unilateral action.

Yes, in 12 short months, the balance of power has shifted in the Middle East, and there is much to draw hope from. Churchill said that in war, one must be resolute. But recent events show antisemitism is strong even among some members of NZ society but Israel’s example, should inspire us to show the same robust and resolute response.

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→ 8 May 2025
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The latest newsletter is out!

Masthead of NZ Friends of Israel Assoc Inc Newsletter

The latest newsletter is out and it may be downloaded from here: February Newsletter.

We continue to have email deliverability issues to email accountholders from the following services:

  1. Gmail
  2. Hotmail
  3. Yahoo
  4. Xtra

If you know someone who should be receiving the email and uses one of these email services, feel free to forward the newsletter to them.

Otherwise they may miss out on upcoming events.  The next event is on Tuesday, May 20, see page 8.

Thanks again for your support.  

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→ 7 May 2025
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UK political bias against Israel

Natasha Haussdorff testifies before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee
Natasha Haussdorff testifies before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee

Natasha Hausdorff and Jonathan Sacerdoti valiantly explain the Middle East Conflict. Watch how the Labour Party MPs become impatient when they don’t get the answers they were hoping for. What they want them to say is that they would endorse their view that the Palestinians should be given a separate state. Instead Hausdorff and Sacerdoti said that Gazan society needs to change their belief that they must kill Jews.

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→ 24 February 2025
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The latest newsletter is out!

The latest newsletter is out and it may be downloaded from here: February Newsletter.

We continue to have email deliverability issues to email accountholders from the following services:

  1. Gmail
  2. Hotmail
  3. Yahoo
  4. Xtra

If you know someone who should be receiving the email and uses one of these email services, feel free to forward the newsletter to them.

Otherwise they may miss out on upcoming events.  The next event is on Thursday, March 6, see page 8.

Thanks again for your support.  Life and all things that make it good, depend on it.

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→ 26 November 2024
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The latest newsletter is out!

The latest newsletter is out and it may be downloaded from here: December-January Newsletter.

We continue to have email deliverability issues to email accountholders from the following services:

  1. Gmail
  2. Hotmail
  3. Yahoo
  4. Xtra

If you know someone who should be receiving the email and uses one of these email services, feel free to forward the newsletter to them.

Otherwise they may miss out on upcoming events.  There are two in December, see page 8.

This has been a tough year, so we really appreciate and thank you for your support.

May the hostages be returned in 2025!

Do have a warm and memorable Hanukkah and Christmas with your family, friends and loved ones.  If you are travelling, may you return safely.

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