NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
It was to be one last mother daughter adventure: penning the story of a lifetime.
They had been on a few journeys together, Inge Woolf and Deborah Hart. This last one, though, would be bittersweet.
Holocaust survivor Woolf had been part-way through writing her memoir in 2020 when she was told she was dying.
A practical woman, a realist, she told her family simply that everyone had to die sometime, recalls Hart.
Are we the baddies? One of the most bizarre moments in a new history of racism in New Zealand comes in the late 1960s when the New Zealand National Socialist Party was in conflict with the National Socialist Party of New Zealand.
New Zealand was not big enough for two Nazi parties. One accused the other of being extremist and disruptive. One accused the other of being soft on Māori.
Of the two Nazi parties, the one led by Colin King-Ansell was the more successful, although even his form of success was very marginal. He won just 35 votes as a candidate for the Eden electorate in Auckland in 1972, falling to 19 votes in 1975.
Ideological feuds between tiny, fringe parties have an air of comedy about them. The inevitable comparison is with Monty Python’s People’s Front of Judea. The anecdote, told in Histories of Hate, shows how the story of the extreme right in this country is sometimes farcical, often confusing and largely unknown to most of us.
UN Watch has put together a handy resource that lets anyone look up any country’s UN voting history with regarding to Israel.
Here’s a link to New Zealand’s voting record: New Zealand – UN Watch Database.
From there, you can look up any other country’s record too.
MEDIA RELEASE
19 JANUARY 2023 (Published in NZ Herald, 31 JANUARY 2023)
OPINION — Recently, there have been calls for resetting our foreign policy in respect of Israel.
For decades now, New Zealand has founded its policy on Israel on the idea of a two-state solution: the idea that a Palestinian Arab state could exist in peace alongside the modern state of Israel.
This idea is dependent on a number of assumptions:
We have sufficient history to see that each of these assumptions has been proven wrong.
Time and again, each Palestinian regime has shown that it has no appetite for peaceful co-existence with Israel. The Arab language rhetoric is clear: the annihilation of the State of Israel is the end goal, and that relentless and deadly violence will be pursued until this goal is achieved.
It is an all-or-nothing philosophy that is prepared to grind its own people into perpetual poverty and suffering. During the 2000 Camp David Summit the Palestinians were offered nearly all of their demands. Amongst anyone who is familiar with such negotiations between peoples, a truly remarkable offer.
Yet the Palestinians declined it, setting off the second intifada. The Gaza peace for land deal only resulted in even more violence. The Palestinians have now received more foreign aid than Europe did to rebuild after the Second World War. And what have they done with it? They have used it to fund hatred, murder and misery.
The Abrahamic Accords have shown that there is an appetite for peace in the Middle East. The normalisation of Israel’s relations with Sudan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, and Jordan show this.
Even Saudi Arabia has allowed Israeli civilian aircraft to fly through its airspace. These are monumental signs that the other Arab Middle Eastern nations are tiring of Palestinian narrow-mindedness.
The current Palestinian regime will try to turn us against Israel by accusing it of not holding to Western liberal values while pushing a totalitarian society within their own jurisdictions.
Today, Israel is a shining light in the totalitarian darkness of the Middle East. It demonstrates that Middle Eastern peoples can live together in a true democracy, where their vote counts, where there is no threat of governmental coercion as to how they can vote, where one’s civil liberties are protected by law, where its citizens have access to health care, education and state welfare assistance, where Palestinian Arabs can study law and fight for justice, where people can truly live and whatever they lawfully wish.
The Palestinian Regime needs to understand that its current goal of annihilating Israel, by fostering a grievance industry that enriches its leaders through the suffering of its people, has been discredited. New Zealand has to reset its foreign policy in regard to the Middle East.
Only by showing that this current regime has no credibility, will a new regime emerge that is free of corruption and is willing to enter into genuine peace negotiations with Israel. Only by strengthening our trade and diplomatic relations with Israel will we positively reinforce the regional behaviours we so desire.
We do need a foreign policy reset. We would be fools to continue to persist with the current policy that superficially shows even-handed support to the Palestinian Arabs, and yet has had so little success in bringing peace over so many generations.
Tony Kan
President
NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Box 37 363
Halswell
Christchurch
New Zealand
NZ Friends of Israel Association is a registered charity that fights prejudice and intolerance through raising awareness of Jewish history and culture.
Fervent anti-Israel rhetoric and propaganda have been hitting the headlines in New Zealand of late, and pro-Israel advocates are saying there is a need to step up the fight against them.
In mid-May, plans for “Nakba Day” commemorations in Wellington were dealt a blow by the city’s Mayor, Andy Foster. Originally, activists planned to light up a council-owned convention centre in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
Advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade prompted Foster to cancel the projection. This led to a “guerrilla projection” on the outside of the national museum, Te Papa, unsuccessful requests to meet Foster and a lot of sympathetic media coverage.
Then in June, the annual Doc Edge documentary film festival attracted the ire of Palestinian advocacy groups, who responded with a vocal boycott campaign by the Palestinian Solidarity Network (chaired by veteran anti-Israel activist John Minto) and the Palestinians in the Aotearoa Co-ordinating Committee.
It was not the first time the Academy Award-qualifying Doc Edge festival, which usually features several Israeli or Jewish-themed films, had been targeted. Back in 2018, the screening of a Ben-Gurion documentary resulted in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement threats and the disruption of screenings by activists armed with fake bombs.
On this occasion, it is claimed the boycott calls were due to the festival having the Israeli Embassy as one of its sponsors. But the activists focused their anger on the film that the Embassy was sponsoring, Dead Sea Guardians, about the efforts of a Palestinian, an Israeli and a Jordanian to save the Dead Sea.
Indigenous Coalition for Israel director Dr Sheree Trotter, who spearheaded a counter-campaign of support for the festival, said the film had been shown in many Arabic and European countries and it was only in New Zealand that a boycott had been called for.
“The ridiculous part about this is that the film promotes a message of co-operation and working together, accepting each other’s narratives and creating a new narrative, for the collaborative goal of saving the Dead Sea from drying out.”
Palestinian human rights groups have called for a boycott of this year’s Academy Award-qualifying Doc Edge international documentary film festival over concern it’s funded by the Embassy of Israel.
After Sukkot ends, most Orthodox Jews keep their lulavs in storage until six months later; there is a custom to use the dried-out lulav as kindling on the eve of Passover, when Jews burn all their leftover leavened products. However, in one tiny Jewish community this has never been the custom. In New Zealand, as soon as Sukkot is finished, all lulavs and etrogs are surrendered to the Ministry for Primary Industries, where they are destroyed with liquid nitrogen.
New Zealand has some of the tightest biosecurity laws in the world. There are huge signs at the airport noting that upon arrival, one must declare the presence of any organic material that is brought into the country: seeds, food, animal byproducts—even an apple you packed for the flight. Bringing any organic material into the country without declaring its presence and obtaining permission can result in serious fines, or in severe cases, even jail.
New Zealand and Cyprus are the latest countries added to the list of those that will not take part in this month’s event marking 20 years since the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, which identified Israel alone as a racist state.
The conference was studded with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments.“
New Zealand remains strongly committed to combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Wellington said on Thursday.
“Consistent with our long-standing position, New Zealand will not attend the 20th anniversary of the Durban Declaration conference in New York on 22 September 2021.”
Durban IV will be held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
We may never know the full truth about Huber’s four years in the service of the Nazi regime. But, while some secrets die hard, the truth sometimes has a way of coming to the surface.
In Autumn 1943, Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman saw mass graves in the areas of Eastern Europe where Huber served and where Nazi death squads murdered millions of Jews.
‘The earth is throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers,’’ Grossman wrote.
“It does not want to keep secrets.”
You may have heard of the controversy surrounding the comments of Juliet Moses, the spokesperson for the NZ Jewish Council, at the recent anti-terrorism hui.
Here is the transcript of her address, so you can judge for yourself as to whether her remarks conflated terrorism with Islam as members of the Islamic community have asserted. Click this link to read the full transcript.
Furthermore, here is an opportunity to meet Juliet herself and ask your own questions, via a Zoom meeting. Thanks to our friends at the Israel Institute of NZ for organizing this event. Zoom meeting details follow:
Join Dr David Cumin and Juliet Moses for a Zoom Talk on Thursday 24 June, 7pm
Ms Moses is an Auckland based lawyer and spokesperson for the Jewish Council of New Zealand. She was invited to speak at the recent Hui on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism. In one session, there was open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, whose military wings are designated by NZ as terrorist groups. There was no challenge from the officials or leaders in the room. We will discuss this and more.
Please spread the word.
Topic: The Israel Report: David Cumin talks to Juliet Moses
Time: Jun 24, 2021 07:00 PM Auckland, Wellington
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86476677914
Meeting ID: 864 7667 7914
