As the first steps appear to be underway to end the war in Gaza, those in Dunedin supporting a just peace are clear what needs to happen. Tom McKinlay reports.
There were new faces at a recent Dunedin fundraiser for Palestine.
‘‘A lot of young people, all ages, all different types of families,’’ says Rinad Tamimi, one of the organisers.
Just 24 hours after Foreign Minister Winston Peters, speaking at the United Nations, said he could not see a Palestine to recognise, the Dunedin community had apparently come to a different conclusion.
It’s heartening, Tamimi says. But it’s hard work too, she says of the near two-year marathon she’s faced to support the Palestinian cause through what a UN commission, alongside a growing list of organisations and scholars, has declared a genocide.
‘‘It's really hard getting up every day in the morning and trying to put a face on, going to work, pretending,’’ she says.
The fate of family back in Palestine is a constant worry.
Tamimi is one of the principal organisers of the remarkable series of protests, rallies and fundraisers in Dunedin that have continued through Palestine’s most recent torment, the war in Gaza.
After two years, they are going strong, consistently attracting hundreds to downtown Dunedin.
There’s another this Saturday, a vigil.
It is work those involved, including many from the local Palestinian community, feel called to.
‘‘It's really the least we could be doing compared to what people are enduring back home, both in Gaza and also the West Bank.’’
Tamimi speaks for Palestine also on her regular Otago Access Radio show, The Watermelon Report, on which she details the very worst of which humanity is capable. She names the dead, shares a little of their lives.
Through it all she takes strength from expressions of support here in Ōtepoti, support that looks past the division promoted by some to see a shared humanity .
‘‘I guess Israel wanted to wipe out Palestinians and ethnically cleanse Palestinians but suddenly the world has become Palestinian, which is again something that also keeps us going.’’
On the flip side, Tamimi sees the gap between this community-level support for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the actions, or lack of them, by governments — ours included.
‘‘The government is doing the absolute opposite to what the people are wanting,’’ she says.
It seems stuck in a narrative that paints Arabs as terrorists, is picking and choosing who to care about along racial lines, she says. There have been visas for Ukrainians fleeing war but nothing comparable provided for Palestinians.
‘‘It's just really shocking that when it comes to human lives, we get to pick and choose if we're in power.’’
It was shameful for Peters to say there was nothing to recognise, in terms of a Palestinian state, she says. He was doing Israel’s work of erasure.
‘‘Literally, what Israel is trying to do is to erase our culture, erase our history, erase everything.’’
If Peters wants a two-state solution, as he claims, then recognise both, she says.
Gaza remains Tamimi’s immediate focus, the need for a ceasefire, but she sees a bigger picture too.
‘‘If people don't have enough conscience and humanity to think about the slaughtered children and the journalists, doctors, mothers, fathers in Gaza and the West Bank at the moment, then what else are we waiting for the world to do, you know? It could happen to any of us, it could happen to any country.’’
Emir Hodzic is among those who have joined Tamimi on the marches. He could not have done otherwise, having survived a genocidal war himself, in Bosnia as a boy.
He says Peters’ failure to recognise Palestine at the UN was shameful, aligning our country with those abandoning international law, abandoning the 1998 Rome Statute that, in establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), identified four international crimes — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.
This, despite the fact Peters recognised the same danger himself during his address, saying ‘‘The shift in the international order from rules to power continues its malignant path while the Security Council is effectively paralysed on many of the acute geopolitical challenges it faces’’.
Unfortunately, the principal actor in all this is the most powerful country in the world, Hodzic says, what might once have been regarded as beacon of democracy is now a regime, arresting its own citizens at home and complicit in genocide abroad.
A world governed by international law is to be replaced by one in which the most powerful, the US globally and Israel in the Middle East, do what they like.
‘‘What [President Donald] Trump is doing, it's not normal. We are being conditioned and shocked into believing that authoritarian right-wing regimes are the defenders, somehow, of Western Christian cultures.’’
In that context, recognising Palestine would have been an important act to isolate those abandoning international norms, he says.
Slovenia’s President made the point at the UN General Assembly, just days before Peters rose to speak, Hodzic points out.
Its president, Natasa Pirc Musar, said if leaders can offer nothing but terror, conflict, pollution, fear, inequalities, and war, then ‘‘we are complicit in crimes against our civilisation and our planet’’, she said.
‘‘We did not stop the Holocaust, we did not stop the genocide in Rwanda, we did not stop the genocide in Srebrenica. We must stop the genocide in Gaza. There are no excuses anymore. None.’’
Hodzic says the dehumanisation of Palestinians has been internationalised these past two years.
‘‘The racism is blatant because not all lives are equal. And that's a scary world to live in,’’ he says.
He’s familiar with the taunts that calling for Israel to end its operations in Gaza means you are pro-Hamas.
‘‘To me, it's a horrible statement to make.’’
It is arguing that the death of more than 20,000 children is justifiable. That can’t be allowed to stand, he says.
‘‘Genocide can't be justified.’’
He also offers hope drawn from Bosnia’s experience.
‘‘So, some people have gone back to my hometown despite everything. And there were literally stories of people standing in line at shops with accused war criminals, who were concentration camp guards,’’ he says.
It’s not to suggest Bosnia as a model, he says, but to say that a path can be found to some kind of coexistence — once the guns are silent.
May Pik has also marched, and addressed those assembled.
There’s a profound weariness now in the way she talks about Gaza, the weight of it pressing on every word.
A recent social media post explains some of this. Pik described how even in sleep she can not now escape the genocide.
‘‘I have been having terrible dreams of walking among skeletons while going about normal everyday things. And it kind of sums up my feeling in the last two years,’’ she wrote.
Asked about those dreams, she says they sometimes mix images of Gaza’s genocide with the Holocaust.
‘‘Because you have images in your head of both. And the perpetrator flips between Germans and Israelis.’’
These images have arrived unbidden from the subconscious, as if in sleep she’s trying to resolve a puzzle that has no solution.
Pik was born and grew up in Israel, which she now regards as an oppressive Apartheid state, the world’s last colonial project, exhibiting all colonisation’s violence and racism — this time, inescapably livestreamed around the world.
She left Israel with her husband for Aotearoa eight years ago, worn down by the everyday racism of her fellow Israelis, the society’s injustice, its meanness.
‘‘The society is quite aggressive and unfriendly. I think it spills out from the occupation [of the Palestinian territories]. People can't be nice to each other if they have this occupation state of mind.’’
Pik says it is built on her country’s process of indoctrination.
‘‘We all go through this chain of kindy, school, army, and that chain is really important to produce, at the end of it, someone who's OK with that kind of state.’’
It is, as Pik describes it, thoroughly Orwellian. Israeli citizens will be prolific consumers of news, newspapers, radio, television, without any of their assumptions ever being challenged. And all the while, the quiet marginalisation and erasure of the indigenous population continues.
Palestinians must travel on lesser, rougher, longer roads, identified by the different number plates their cars must carry. If a soldier says you can not pass, you do not pass. The Arabic quietly disappears from the streets signs, leaving only the Hebrew.
Now, from the distance of half a world, Pik grieves for the tens of thousands slaughtered in Gaza while sharing Tamimi and Hodzic’s concern about what it means for all of us, elsewhere in the world.
‘‘It's people being arrested in the UK for supporting Palestine Action, it's special police in the US making people disappear into interrogation, it's brutally beating people in protests. All this kind of movement, I do not think, would have been accelerated like that if we weren't seeing what we see in Palestine and in Gaza,’’ she says.
Its chilling effect stretches to citizens questioning whether they are safe to speak out — without being branded as supporting terrorism or spreading anti-Semitism.
"Democracy kind of feels like it's an empty shell right now, I don't know what's left of it.’’
It’s the Israel of historian Ilan Pappe’s new book, Israel on the Brink, in which he describes a state teetering, irrevocably riven by its own contradictions. He argues change is inevitable, a process now well under way. But he doesn’t promise it will be pretty.
Prof Richard Jackson is clear about what needs to be done to hasten change. And says we in New Zealand can claim some clarity on the subject.
Once, New Zealand was on the front line when the international community rallied to end South African Apartheid, implementing a global boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign, the power of global opinion translating into economic pressure.
Public opinion has arrived at a similar point, in relation to Israel, buttressed by a slew of reports and decisions by a variety of national and international bodies, that Israel is both an apartheid state and perpetrating a genocide, the peace and conflict studies researcher says.
Almost without exception, public opinion, including in the United States, now supports a Palestinian state, the end of the genocide and the end of apartheid.
The difference to date, from the example of South Africa, has been the reluctance of political elites in some countries to respond, including for fear of the coercive power of Donald Trump’s tariffs.
All the while, Palestinians pay the price. Based on his knowledge of other conflicts, Jackson estimates the death toll is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands.
All this indicates a worrying democratic deficit, he says.
‘‘I think what we're seeing in this particular case is that democracy is not as strong as we thought it was. It's not as resilient and robust and responsive because public opinion really is very strong on this issue.’’
Depending on how you read it, there are signs democracy is not done for yet. Hundreds of thousands in Italy recently took action, strikes and protests, to pressure their government to act — and did indeed manage to shift Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni towards a conditional recognition of a Palestinian state.
Still, Jackson despairs of the current crop of world leaders.
‘‘They're much more afraid of Trump than they are of being seen to be complicit in a genocide.’’
It leaves him pessimistic about the future, as the so-called liberal world order shows itself to be not very liberal at all.
‘‘I have a feeling that we're on the verge of the end of this world order, that we've had since World War 2, and we don't know what will emerge.’’
The hope that Prof Jackson holds on to is the response from civil society, around the world, to say ‘‘not in my name’’.
That needs to translate into the cold shoulder South Africa experienced through the 1970s and 1980s, he says.
‘‘I think, really, the only hope we have is if global society cuts Israel off economically and cuts them off culturally as well.’’
It is the only pathway on offer towards a just settlement.
Here in New Zealand we need to do everything in our power to play our part, he says, suggesting a place to start.
‘‘We've got to expel the Israeli ambassador and stop treating [Israel] like a normal state.’’
At the point at which the people of Gaza stop dying, stop starving, and the prospect of peace returns, Rinad Tamimi hopes the stories she shares on her radio programme can change too.
‘‘I would love to be able to showcase our culture — recipes, food, culture, dances, music — which I will integrate in the radio show in the future,’’ she says.
‘‘That's the biggest part that really breaks my heart, is that I'm not talking about something joyful or fun. I’m talking about the devastation of my people.’’
