By Greg Bouwer on the Israel Institute of NZ website…
This week, Dame Jacinda Ardern published an opinion piece in The Guardian declaring that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. Her call for recognition of Palestinian statehood and an end to “military cooperation” with Israel coincided with a deeply flawed United Nations Commission of Inquiry (CoI) report that levelled the same accusation.
On the surface, Ardern’s comments appeal to compassion. She focused her article on maternal mortality in war zones, linking her advocacy with the International Rescue Committee’s Safer Births in Crises programme. Few would disagree that childbirth under bombardment is a tragedy. Yet invoking the word “genocide” is neither a matter of compassion nor of rhetoric — it is a legal charge of the gravest kind. And it must be judged against evidence, not emotion.
The CoI’s Credibility Crisis
The UN Commission of Inquiry is not a neutral arbiter. Its three members (Navi Pillay, Chris Sidoti, and Miloon Kothari) have long histories of hostility toward Israel. Kothari, for example, was condemned worldwide for antisemitic remarks about “the Jewish lobby.” Israel rightly dismissed the Commission’s latest report as a fabrication, noting that it was based on Hamas-supplied data and ignored the terror group’s role in both starting and prolonging the war.
Read the full opinion piece on the Israel Institute of NZ HERE.
[Read Stuff’s article on Dame Jacinda Ardern’s Guardian article HERE.]
