People comfort each other inside Kamal Adwan Hospital, following Israeli strikes in the area which killed dozens in November 2024. (Photo: RNZ AFP)

What’s happened in Gaza is a “plausible genocide” says the International Court of Justice. So where does that leave New Zealand’s foreign policy on Palestine?

John Hobbs reviews our governments’ previous approaches and argues for a more active role now.

While there is a ceasefire in Gaza, provocations from Israel, both in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, are designed to undermine its fragile status.

It’s clear that Israel intends to revert to its genocide in Gaza by seizing the opportunity created by President Trump’s overt support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This also opens up the real possibility of the Israeli annexation of the illegally occupied West Bank.

This, together with ambivalence from Europe and countries such as New Zealand and Australia to pressure Israel to desist from its actions, provides a green light to Israel to go all of the way in its settler colonial project to eliminate and expel Palestinians from their historical homeland.

To understand the government’s current approach, it’s useful to consider New Zealand’s long-standing and chequered history on the question of Palestine. What becomes clear is that the current lack of action is deeply rooted in its problematic approach to this issue in the past — a past which straddles an involvement by New Zealand in Palestine since the First World War, through to today.

New Zealand provided military support  (via the ANZACs) to the British Empire to shore up its imperial endeavours during the First World War, supporting the invasion and occupation of Ottoman-held Palestine in 1917–18. New Zealand was invited to join the British Imperial War Cabinet in 1917 (along with a number of other British colonies), to discuss war strategy and foreign policy. Over this period, consideration was given to the Balfour Declaration (“the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”). At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, New Zealand gave full support to the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, driven by its support for British imperial interests in Palestine.

Britain, as a victor, gained mandatory control over Palestine in 1922 under the direction of the newly established League of Nations. The Balfour Declaration was built into the League’s Charter.

During its mandatory control, Britain gave support to the sentiments expressed in the Balfour Declaration by supporting the Zionist institutions in Palestine, through the Jewish Agency, to oversee the development of Jewish structures for public works, schools, health and international diplomacy, privileges not accorded to the Indigenous Palestinian people.

Britain had laid the groundwork for a future Israeli state by the end of the Second World War.

Following the Second World War, and the establishment of the UN (New Zealand being a founding member), New Zealand supported the partition of Palestine into two states: a Palestinian and an Israeli state. This was against the will of the Indigenous Palestinian people, who owned 95 percent of the land and comprised 70 percent of the population.

Britain announced in 1947 that it would hand over its mandatory oversight to the UN and that its forces would withdraw by August 1, 1948. New Zealand expressed  concern over the need to enforce the Partition Resolution given the risk of conflict once the British left (“fears of bloodshed and chaos would be realised”). Despite these concerns, New Zealand supported Partition in November 1947.

New Zealand fears were realised, as Jewish paramilitary groups took control of most of Palestine in 1948 and ethnically cleansed its people from their land. More than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed, and more than 700,000 people were forced out of their country. Despite the devastation inflicted on the Indigenous people, New Zealand supported Israel’s Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948, and offered statehood recognition in coordination with the British Government on January 29, 1949. New Zealand then supported Israel’s membership of the UN on May 11, 1949.

Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, where Palestine and Israel agreed to a “road map” leading to two states living side by side, New Zealand has positioned itself as supporting the “peace process” and the “two-state solution.”

New Zealand, 32 years later, still holds the two-state solution as its defining foreign policy position, although few commentators believe that this is a real possibility now, given the huge number of Israeli settlers embedded in what would be a future Palestine.

Palestinian children run as they flee from Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 6 November 2023. (Photo: RNZ, Mohammed Abed for AFP)

New Zealand also holds by this rhetoric despite the devastation inflicted on the people of Gaza. A recent article by The Lancet estimates that a staggering 62,000 Palestinian people were killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024 with possibly 17,500 of them being children (January 2025). New Zealand is a signatory to the Genocide Convention and is obliged to take action where genocide is deemed to be happening, but has failed to do so.

New Zealand, unlike its courageous rugby-playing friend, South Africa, simply refuses to call out Israel and its genocide of the people of Gaza. South Africa is another country with a history of settler colonialism, like New Zealand and Israel, reaching its most extreme form during the South African apartheid regime.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, however, South Africa has engaged in a more principled approach to foreign policy. This has been most evident in South Africa instituting proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging breaches by Israel of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This initiative led to the ICJ concluding that a “plausible genocide” was being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. New Zealand could have taken a principled stance and joined South Africa in its case against Israel, in the ICJ. It still can.

Furthermore, New Zealand has failed to condemn the recent sanctions placed against the International Criminal Court (ICC) by the US. The ICC has issued warrants of arrest against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his then defence minister Yoav Gallant. They are both deemed criminals under international law. In response, the US has issued sanctions against the members of the ICC for its decision to issue the warrants of arrest.

Foreign affairs minister Winston Peters and the prime minister, Chris Luxon, have refused to directly challenge President Trump’s statement that the US will seize control of and “own” Gaza, expelling the Palestinians from their land, “with no right of return”. This is part and parcel of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza — forcing them into neighbouring Arab states, such as Egypt and Jordan, with no ability to ever return.

But this is only part of a clear mission to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians from historic Palestine. Israel is looking to ethnically cleanse occupied East Jerusalem and annex the occupied West Bank. It has already illegally annexed East Jerusalem.

Days after Trump’s election, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, to whom Netanyahu has given broad authority over the Occupied West Bank, said that Trump’s appointment to the White House meant that “the year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the territory that makes up the Occupied West Bank.

Since October 7, 2023, 905 people, including at least 181 children, have been killed in the Occupied West Bank, with over 40,000 Palestinian civilians displaced in the Israeli-controlled bantustans, which comprise the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. Daily military incursions into Jenin, Nablus, Tubas and other areas have generated terror across the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

New Zealand, in 2016-17, co-sponsored a UN resolution that condemned Israel for its illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, underscoring its illegality in international law. Israel, however, has ramped up its illegal settlements with 750,000 illegal Israel settlers occupying what would be a future Palestinian state.

And still, Winston Peters stands behind the “two-state solution”, being his diplomatic and public response to the dire situation confronting the Indigenous people of Palestine.

Mahmoud Muna, one of the owners of East Jerusalem’s historical Educational Bookshop seen inside a branch of the store, which was recently raided by Israeli police. (Photo by Sally Hayden/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Most recently, Israel has raided the much loved Educational Bookshop in Occupied East Jerusalem, where I spent countless hours drinking coffee and cake, soaking up its gentle ambience.

A recent article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on this assault noted:

“We speak as (Jewish) readers, writers, translators, editors, teachers, book-shoppers, publishers, browsers, frequent bringers-of-foreign guests, regular audience members at bookstore events, sometimes participants in bookstore events, now and then sitters and sippers of tea and coffee on the warmly welcoming second floor of the newer of the twin shops. We speak in admiration (for the Munas), we speak in anger (at the judge, at the police), we speak in sadness (for us all): This is what the People of the Book have come to? This is what the people whose books have so often been burned are now doing to other people, to other books? Well, yes.”

It is time for the New Zealand government to do the right thing and denounce Trump’s and Netanyahu’s most recent pronouncements, which state to the world that the Palestinian people will be ethnically cleansed from all of Palestine.

New Zealand should drop its embarrassing and insincere rhetoric that the two-state solution is the answer to the question of Palestine — and replace it by forcefully joining South Africa at the ICJ, giving concrete support to the beleaguered Palestinian people and conferring statehood recognition.

John Hobbs has been a career public servant, working in a number of government departments, including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. He also worked for a number of ministers on secondment from government agencies. He has a Master of Commerce (Hons) in Economics from the University of Auckland and a Master of Arts (Thesis) with Distinction in Peace and Conflict Studies, from the University of Otago. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies, Otago University.