New Zealand Betrays Israel, Again

By Olivia Pierson

On October 7, 2023, the horrific massacre of Jews took place on their own ancient soil, and 251 men, women and children were carried into captivity to suffer and die in the worst conditions imaginable. The world failed to deliver a proper moral response, which should have been a unified and powerful cry from all civilised nations for the immediate return of every single hostage, or face the wrath of Israel.

Instead, before Israel even lifted a finger in any kind of retaliation, we saw the moral compass of the world crack open like a rotten egg. The very monsters who danced in the streets, gleeful and high on the slaughter of innocent Jews, were portrayed as victims.  In cities across the Western world - London, Paris, Sydney, New York - posters of the hostages, the faces of the stolen, were clawed down by hateful antisemites who couldn’t bear to see the truth staring back at them.  To call oneself “Palestinian” after that evil had taken place should’ve been nothing but a badge of shame, yet the world coddled their depravity and now coddles it even more.

The New Zealand government, alongside Canada, France, the UK and Australia, dares to want to declare “Palestine” a state. A state! For what? For evil incarnate? Rewarding barbarity with political legitimacy is a betrayal of every principle of justice we’ve ever been raised on. To grant statehood, even symbolically, to those who celebrated the violent murder of innocent people is to spit upon the graves of the real victims.

Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble, and rightly so. Gaza could have spared itself by returning the hostages - every last one, including the Bibas family, Ariel and Kfir, mere babies, who were murdered along with their mother Shiri, their little bodies mutilated by Palestinian terrorists. Gazans chose otherwise, shielding their Hamas tormentors over their own children - and this is still the status quo. The blood is on their hands, not on Israel’s.

No government that still upholds even the vestige of human rights should be making any statement other than “give the remaining hostages back - and your statehood is permanently off the table in the name of those already murdered.” Let the Islamic world absorb the Palestinians as a diaspora that they had a huge hand in creating.

To isolate Israel now is to take the side of savages who burn babies and cheerfully butcher and kidnap their families, while calling it “justice.” New Zealand, my own nation, ought to know better. Our government could and should stand with Israel, not parrot the antisemitic garbage of Hamas’s cheerleaders. Real empathy for the October 7 victims demands we see through the fog of lies and bullshit.  Hamas’s genocide against Israelis is real; Israel’s fight is just.