JD
The Palestine situation raises four key questions. Why did Hamas attack Israel on October 7, 2023? Why is this particular conflict such a magnet for protest in NZ? Who exactly is colonising who in Israel/Palestine? What evidence is there of genocidal intent in this war?
In reverse order following is a layman’s answer to these questions.
Genocide.
This claim “genocide against the Palestinian people” is regularly levelled as Israel pursues victory over Hamas. But the numbers don’t stack up.
In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 260 (A) (III), also known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide or the “Genocide Convention”. This defines genocide as any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
To analyse how this may or may not apply in the Gaza war we must first establish the number of Palestinian deaths during this conflict to date, even though, cloaked in propaganda as it is, the answer is difficult to determine.
For example, Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab-funded media network has variously said, “The updated death toll from Israel’s war on the besieged enclave reaches 61,709” (October 2023) and “at least 46,707 people in Gaza have been killed” (January 2025). Even the most pro-Palestinian sources can’t decide on the real number.
That said, the consensus seems to be the toll in Gaza is most likely to be the lower number of 47,000 dead. Of this number, we should also recognise that some 17,000 of these were Hamas militants, as the Associated Press reported in October 2024, so the civilian dead numbers around 30,000 people.
Breaking the figures down further, of these civilians,18,000 are claimed by Hamas sources to be children, suggesting that the balance, the adult death toll of 29,000, comprises 12,000 non-combatants and 17,000 Hamas fighters.
By extension these figures prove, if Israeli forces are indiscriminately killing both Hamas and non-Hamas Gazans, as is claimed, then approximately three fifths of the adult population of Gaza are Hamas combatants of one kind or another.
Not quite the powerless, harmless civilians being pursued by the murderous Israelis as the image painted in the world’s press suggests.
And so to the “genocide” accusations themselves. Running the numbers we see total Palestinian deaths at 47,000 is less than one percent of the total Palestinian population currently spread between Gaza and the West Bank.
Even if we compare total deaths to the two million population of Gaza, itself, the civilian dead, at 1.4 per cent of the population, hardly merits a claim of genocide which the dictionary describes as “the deliberate killing of large numbers of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group”.
There is no intent by Israel to destroy a nation or ethnic group, only to root out the terrorist cancer of Hamas. The civilian dead are collateral damage in this war, and would still be alive if Hamas hadn’t a) started it in the first place and b) deliberately chosen to embed themselves with their soldiers and weaponry amid the civilian infrastructure as the war progressed. The latter was done with the deliberate intent of maximising civilian deaths.
In comparison, when the Western Alliance fought to eradicate the scourge of Nazism in WW II, the toll inflicted on Germany by the Allies amounted to over seven million German dead, more than 10 per cent of the population and is orders of magnitude above the price Palestinians are paying for allowing Hamas to fester in their midst.
It seems a strange dichotomy to believe that the Allied actions in WW II, of which NZ was proud to be a part, were honourable and entirely justified but the Israeli actions on a far lesser scale in the war against Hamas are not.
From another viewpoint it might even be argued that by restricting collateral deaths to such a small number compared to virtually every other war ever fought, Israel deserves some kind of humanitarian recognition, perhaps even the Nobel Peace Prize. But I leave that to others to decide.
Colonisation
Much is made by the supporters of Palestine in the West that the Israeli Jews are ‘colonisers’ of Palestine. That the Palestinians were forced out of their ancestral homelands in 1947 when the United Nations, by the necessary two-thirds majority, voted to adopt the Partition Plan that divided a region that had existed for 400 years prior as part of “Ottoman Syria” under Turkish rule.
So the basic question is, who are the indigenous people of Israel/Palestine? And the answer must be that it is the Tribes of Judah, the Jews, who have been in this land since the Iron Age, for three to four thousand years according to historical and archaeological records.
Additionally we should note that both Arabs and Jews are Semitic people. Semites have a common ancestry in the Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, so they are all basically the same indigenes, with the key differentiator being the religion practiced.
On that basis it is impossible to claim that the Jews are colonisers where Palestine is concerned, given that they have lived in the region as a distinct national/religious group for 3,000 years, and for as much as a thousand years before that as their identifying and unifying religion developed.
Cause Célèbre
Next we might ask ourselves why the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas sentiments are currently so prevalent on university campuses in the USA and, by extension, among certain politicians and young people in New Zealand.
Firstly let us recognise it is a basic law of nature that youth must rail against their elders and protest against the mistakes that they believe them to be making, and this is as true for the current generation as it is for any other.
It is also true that most of the great causes of the late 20th century, equality in human rights, rights of women, anti-apartheid, anti-Vietnam war etc, that so convulsed the post-war, baby boomer generation have already been protested, to greater or lesser degrees of success, so the youth of today are driven to find new outlets for their genetically programmed rebelliousness.
But why is the Palestinian conflict the current cause célèbre of our youth? Why not the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, the Nuer and Darfuris in Sudan, or the Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria to name but a few? And the answer can be sheeted back to universities in the USA where the pro-Palestine demonstrations first erupted.
According to various sources, American universities, most notably those of the Ivy League, such as Harvard, Berkeley and Cornell, together with many others have, over the past 20 to 30 years, received somewhere between eight and 15 billion dollars in Arab funding.
Much of this is directed to the establishment and maintenance of “centres of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies”, and, incidentally, much of it has been channelled through Qatar where, to quote CBC news, “Hamas leaders live in air-conditioned comfort while ordinary Palestinians suffer and die in Gaza”. So you can form your own opinion as to where this money actually originates (Did someone say Iran? We’ll check that out later.)
As the famous movie tagline has it, “If you build it, they will come” and so it is with these university faculties. When the jobs and tenures of staff depend on the holding of opinions that favour the Arab perspective on the Palestine question, you must by definition hear these sentiments expressed. Most specifically that Israel are the aggressors who are, to quote the supposedly “Independent Commission” of the United Nations, “committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination”.
Following on from these investments, is it any wonder that the students of these institutions are indoctrinated with the similar, simplistic idea, “Palestinians/Hamas good. Israel bad,” giving them the perfect focus for their youthful desire to protest about something, anything, before they get too old and need to focus on making a living instead.
Eventually, these same ideas have filtered down to NZ, to be slavishly embraced by our own quasi-intellectuals. And then further to be conflated with claims that Māori in particular should embrace the Palestinian cause because the people of Gaza are ‘brown’ and oppressed by the ‘white’ Israelis, in the same way that Māori are ‘oppressed’ by the Pākehā in NZ.
The fact that Israelis and Arabs are of the same Semitic stock (or indeed the fact that the great majority of Māori have Pākeha genes) isn’t allowed to get in the way of youthful cries of oppression and genocide as they follow the American, anti-Israeli lead.
These opinions offer a prime example of groupthink, embraced as a money-making exercise by the likes of John Minto with his Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa; as an opportunistic, virtue-signalling, vote catcher by the Green Party and others on the left; or simply as an attempt by the youthful protesters themselves to prove their worth as insiders in the same clique as their equally deluded fellow travellers.
In short, the rationale behind protest in NZ is because it’s what we do, it gives us a feeling of self-righteousness and belonging, adds some purpose to our lives and it’s fun.
And we protest in favour of Palestine and Hamas simply because Arab money has purchased student opinion in the US and we blindly follow that lead.
Reason for Hamas attacks on October 7.
Finally, we come to the question of why Hamas did what they did with the massacre of Jews on October 7, 2023, an atrocity which, despite their claims, had very little to do with protesting against prior Israeli aggressions.
Instead, it had everything to do with Iran’s desire to keep the Middle East destabilised in the continued struggle for domination between the Sunni and Shia factions of the Muslim world which has been going on since the death of the Prophet Muhammed in 632 AD.
The Shia minority, centered on Iran and representing as they do only around 13 per cent of Islam, throughout this history have believed themselves threatened by the Sunni majority states of the Middle East and most particularly by Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Even now, with the Iraqi threat much diminished after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the ever-growing modernisation of Saudi Arabia and the power it exerts in the region still gives the Iranian Mullahs grave concerns.
Add to that the increasing dissatisfaction with their own political status among the people of Iran and you have another reason why the leadership must keep the region in ferment to distract their population and why they must urge them to look outward against manufactured external threat, rather than inward, where they might be tempted to focus on revolution against the backward looking, theocratic rule that has been stifling the country since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.
And so to the specific trigger for the October 7 massacre.
Following on from the Abraham Accords brokered in 2020 by the USA, which normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, Saudi Arabia, in 2023, was negotiating with Israel and the USA for a similar agreement, albeit with some additional guarantees.
These guarantees included reduced restrictions on US arms sales to Saudi Arabia and US assistance in developing a civilian nuclear programme in the country, both of which, in the eyes of the Mullahs, could only increase the Saudi/Sunni threat to Shi’ite Islam, and so must be stopped at any cost. A cost which, unfortunately for the civilians of Gaza, they were forced to pay in blood.
Enter Hamas who, as proxy for Iran and following Iran’s orders, invaded Israel on October 7, an act which had nothing to do with protest against or revenge for prior Israeli acts of oppression, but purely and simply done to derail the Saudi-Israeli détente.
It was also done with total disregard for the people of Gaza. Indeed it could be said that the deliberate intention of Hamas in starting this war was to maximise the number of civilian casualties.
Why? Because Iran/Hamas knew when they launched the October 7 attack, that Israel would have no choice but to retaliate on a massive scale and that thousands of Gazan deaths would result.
They also gambled that public opinion across the West would turn against Israel, a secondary bonus almost as important as derailing the Saudi initiative, which is exactly what happened.
Two birds with one stone, achieved by sacrificing the lives of their fellow citizens in the greatest possible numbers. An intent further proven by the Hamas tactic of establishing their operational bases and stores of arms under hospitals, schools and other civilian locations across Gaza.
In Summary
The Hamas attack of October 7 succeeded in its deliberate intent of maximising civilian deaths in Gaza.
The responsibility for that attack and the resulting deaths lies squarely with Hamas as a puppet proxy for Iran, and the desire of Iran’s Mullahs to maximise instability in the Middle East for reasons of self-preservation.
Israel has done more than any other combatant force in history to minimise collateral civilian deaths.
Protests against Israel are founded on a misunderstanding of these facts and are funded by Arab money pouring into American universities to buy faculty and, by extension, student opinion; opinion which in turn has spread worldwide to those who slavishly follow all that is American and in vogue.
Finally, in NZ, these protests have become further confused by their conflation with the currently fashionable, ‘colonialist oppressor’ narrative in an attempt to identify ‘brown’ Gazans being oppressed by ‘white’ Israelis with ‘brown’ Māori being similarly oppressed by ‘white Pākehā.
It’s a concept eagerly seized upon by various political players in NZ to win votes and make money, or simply by those who believe ‘protest is good’, irrespective of how right, or wrong, the cause being protested is.
