A growing number of voices around the world, including senior UN officials and genocide scholars, have warned that Israel’s assault on Gaza bears all the hallmarks of previous genocidal episodes seen in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar and Darfur.
Legal experts argue that at the very least, there is prima facie evidence of crimes against humanity being committed.
There have been two large marches to Wellington’s parliamentary grounds demanding a ceasefire. Politicians from Te Pati Māori, the Greens and Labour have been present, but no coalition partners.
There has been a flurry of statements from New Zealand politicians which shed some light on political party positions on the situation in Gaza. Chris Hipkins is calling for an immediate ceasefire, making his statement as a member of the Labour Party, not as the caretaker prime minister.
In response, National spokesman Gerry Brownlee said the party was not in favour of calling for an "absolute ceasefire" at this stage. He supported a ceasefire with conditions, such as the release of the Israeli hostages, and a five-day humanitarian ceasefire.
Te Pati Māori and the Greens have been consistently clear, urging that New Zealand demands an unconditional and immediate ceasefire and an end to the massacre of civilians in Gaza. All political parties demand that international law be upheld by both parties to the conflict.
A pressing concern is that the New Zealand coalition partners collectively remain silent and reticent to act when a potential genocide is occurring in plain sight.
New Zealand’s Five Eyes partners, alongside many EU countries, are ignoring massive weekly public protests. Politicians from all sides of the political spectrum can only muster a timid call for a "humanitarian pause". There is little that is humanitarian about the call for a temporary pause in the bombing, which allows food and water to a people who will then be bombed again at the end of the pause.
Meanwhile, over 12,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, a rate of killing far in excess of those killed in Ukraine. More than half of all deaths and injuries involve children. A million people in northern Gaza have been forcibly displaced to southern Gaza.
Those who have fled have been bombed as they move south. As Israel’s ground invasion intensifies, the conditions of life for ordinary Gazans has deteriorated precipitously, with severe shortages of food, water, electricity, essential medicines and medical care.
Craig Mokhiber, human rights lawyer and senior official in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned two weeks ago in protest at the failure of Western nations and the UN to address the crisis in Gaza.
He argued that the UN’s current response to the situation in Gaza was similar to its previous failures in Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria and Myanmar, where the organisation spectacularly failed to prevent crimes against humanity, protect the vulnerable or hold the perpetrators to account.
He has now been joined by the largest body of independent experts in the UN human rights system (The Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council), who point to a genocide in the making and have called on Israel and Hamas to implement an immediate ceasefire.
The term genocide has a specific meaning in international law which can be challenging to prove and even more challenging to hold states or armed groups accountable for its perpetration. This is largely because of the difficulty in proving intention to commit genocide. Mokhiber argues that the threshold of genocide has been clearly met in the case of Gaza.
The combination of devastating attacks against a civilian population, combined with public dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, signals the genocidal intent of the attack. The mechanism for considering matters of genocide is the International Criminal Court. New Zealand is a party to the UN Convention on Genocide and has responsibilities under this convention. Specifically: "The contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish."
New Zealand, including its Five Eyes partners, is failing its responsibility under this convention. It is effectively undermining the convention’s authority by not speaking out or acting forcefully, and likely squandering its reputation as a "good international citizen".
Indeed, the credibility of the rules-based system is threatened by the inaction of the international community. While two-thirds of UN General Assembly members voted in favour of an "immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce" (including New Zealand), the UN Security Council, the real power-making body of the UN, remains unable to pass a resolution demanding a permanent ceasefire.
The UNSC has just passed Resolution 2712, which falls short of this requirement by only calling for "urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors through the Gaza Strip to facilitate the provision of essential goods and services".
A permanent ceasefire resolution would signal that the most powerful states still support the rules-based system and international law applies to every state without exception.
What should New Zealand do? In support of international law, the rules-based international order and maintenance of New Zealand’s purported independence and values-based foreign policy, it should go further than its principled voting in the UNGA and immediately demand of Israel cessation of all military activity and allow unrestricted humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.
If this request fails, New Zealand should follow the example of South Africa by closing the Israeli embassy in New Zealand and suspend all diplomatic relations until Israel agrees to a ceasefire. This would be the morally correct thing to do and would ensure that in any future accounting of the world’s failure to prevent another genocide, New Zealand is not counted among those who are shamefully complicit.
New Zealand, as a country which supports the international rules-based order, should actively promote a UN-supervised mechanism to both protect civilians and work with Palestine and Israel on an honest and ethical peace process, which is based on international law and is fair to both parties.
■ Richard Jackson is a professor of peace studies at the University of Otago; John Hobbs completed his master’s degree at Otago.
