Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader.
Winston Peters is back on the MFA account telling Israel how to behave.
Settlements. Settler violence. Annexation. Two-state. International law.
Every press release of this sort lands the same way in Jerusalem: your enemies hear that New Zealand is not with you. Your own voters hear that Wellington’s first instinct is to manage Israel’s response, not to name the aggressor and stand clear.
That is not neutrality. It is pressure – applied to the side that was invaded.
It is well to remind ourselves of the scale of 7 October 2023.
Hamas and its allies murdered 1,195 people in a morning. They dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. They burned families in their homes. They raped. They filmed it. They gloried in it.
Israel’s population was under 10 million. New Zealand’s is half that.
Scale the slaughter to us and you are looking at something like 650 New Zealanders dead before lunch, and well over a hundred dragged across a border into tunnels run by a death cult that still calls for our elimination.
Imagine that hit the Bay of Plenty. Or Northland. Or a music festival outside Auckland.
We would not be holding seminars on “proportionate response”.
We would put security first. We would expect the world to back us. And, for a fortnight, we would get it – the free nations on our side.
So why the difference with Israel?
Because Israel is the Jew among nations. Years of propaganda have taught our politicians that Israel is a colonising power, while crowds chant for its violent elimination – “from the river to the sea”.
Proportionate is a word never applied to the aggressor who started the war with massacre, only to the democracy that refuses to lose. A foreign minister can condemn Hamas in one paragraph and still spend the next year issuing instructions that, in practice, constrain only Israel.
Peters will say he supports Israel’s right to exist. He will say Hamas has no place in a future Palestinian state. Fine. Then stop writing as if Israel’s duty is to lose more slowly.
A country that woke up to 1,195 of its own dead should not have to ask Wellington’s permission before finishing the job.
A country that has the right to exist has the right to defend itself.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
