By Juliet Moses on Shalom.Kiwi…
For whatever reason, whenever the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians escalates, passions are ignited in our country on the other side of the world, like for no other foreign issue, and indeed for few domestic issues. Anti-Israel protests are typically mobilised on our streets.
Last weekend, we saw protests in various places in New Zealand. Green MPs proudly shared photos of themselves on social media accompanied by various slogans, but one in particular stood out. It was Ricardo Menendez March’s, with the caption “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. He put this on Facebook and Twitter, and then his co-leader Marama Davidson retweeted it.
Now, perhaps Mr Menendez March doesn’t have a grasp of Israel’s geography, and to be fair it is pretty hard to find on a map, a sliver one half the size of Canterbury, squeezed in between Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. But if you look carefully you will find it in between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, along with the Gaza Strip, a coastal enclave controlled by the Islamist group Hamas, whose military wing is classed as a terrorist organisation by New Zealand, and an area known as the West Bank, which is controlled in part by the Palestinian Authority and in part by Israel.
A two state solution is the official policy position of every main political party in New Zealand, including apparently the Greens, as well as the Jewish Council’s. Gaza and at least part of the West Bank would form the new state of Palestine, in which the Palestinian people would have self-determination, alongside the state of Israel, in which the Jewish people would continue to have self-determination, while guaranteeing the equal rights of all its citizens.
Read NZ Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses’ full article on Shalom.Kiwi here.
And read the NZ Jewish Council’s media release on Green Party MPs using the Hamas slogan here.
