At Auckland Domain in November 2023 she led the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When challenged, she did not drop it. She called the objection a “purposeful distraction… being used the world over to shut down peace activists.” On Q+A she kept the same talking point: “Palestinian freedom is necessary if we are to have longstanding freedom and justice in the region,” and treated pushback as an “intentional misunderstanding” that paints that freedom as violence. Later she spoke of Palestinians “made refugees in their own land,” and of ending “merciless violence against the Palestinian people on their own land.”
Geography is not subtle. The river is the Jordan. The sea is the Mediterranean. Between them sits Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. The chant does not say “two states.” It does not say “everyone free.” It names the whole strip Palestine. That is why Jewish New Zealanders heard erasure, and why Kadimah School told her years earlier that the phrase was, “at best, a call for the destruction of the Jewish state.” She knew that and used it anyway.
Now put the same words through her decolonisation call. Decolonisation means an indigenous people ending foreign rule and recovering self-determination in their historic homeland. Jews are not a 1948 import. Their language, law, liturgy and memory are of that land. Empires layered over them — Rome, Arab-Islamic conquest, Ottomans, Britain. Zionism was the refusal to stay a permanent minority under other people’s sovereignty. 1948 ended the Mandate and restored Jewish self-rule. Hundreds of thousands of Jews then arrived as refugees from Arab and Muslim countries. That is national liberation, not a colonial outpost.
Swarbrick’s politics treats colonisation as the original sin and indigenous standing as decisive. Okay. But consistency matters. You cannot treat Jewish return as uniquely illegitimate while treating every other people’s recovery of sovereignty as sacred. You cannot treat seventh-century conquest as permanent title and twentieth-century Jewish reconstitution as “occupation” of “their own land” as if Jews had no history there. And you cannot chant a slogan that wipes a Jewish state off the map and call it peace activism.
If “from the river to the sea” is liberation, say plainly what replaces Israel. If decolonisation is the test, Israel already passed it: a people home again, under their own flag, after empires and exile. The discomfort Swarbrick wants us to “lean into” cuts both ways. The slogan she will not drop is not the decolonisation of the Middle East. It is the demand to undo the one that already happened.
Now put the same words through her decolonisation call. Decolonisation means an indigenous people ending foreign rule and recovering self-determination in their historic homeland. Jews are not a 1948 import. Their language, law, liturgy and memory are of that land. Empires layered over them — Rome, Arab-Islamic conquest, Ottomans, Britain. Zionism was the refusal to stay a permanent minority under other people’s sovereignty. 1948 ended the Mandate and restored Jewish self-rule. Hundreds of thousands of Jews then arrived as refugees from Arab and Muslim countries. That is national liberation, not a colonial outpost.
Swarbrick’s politics treats colonisation as the original sin and indigenous standing as decisive. Okay. But consistency matters. You cannot treat Jewish return as uniquely illegitimate while treating every other people’s recovery of sovereignty as sacred. You cannot treat seventh-century conquest as permanent title and twentieth-century Jewish reconstitution as “occupation” of “their own land” as if Jews had no history there. And you cannot chant a slogan that wipes a Jewish state off the map and call it peace activism.
If “from the river to the sea” is liberation, say plainly what replaces Israel. If decolonisation is the test, Israel already passed it: a people home again, under their own flag, after empires and exile. The discomfort Swarbrick wants us to “lean into” cuts both ways. The slogan she will not drop is not the decolonisation of the Middle East. It is the demand to undo the one that already happened.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
6 comments:
Arabs and Islamic clans some of the biggest settler-colonizers (and slaveowners) in History .... True or false?
>"Zionism was the refusal to stay a permanent minority under other people’s sovereignty."
Zionism - a term coined in the late 19thC - was originally a movement for the reinstatement of a Jewish state but was infected very early on by the notion that the borders of that Jewish state should encompass the lands occupied by the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea in the early Iron Age. This became a political doctrine in 1967 which was given substance by the Settler Movement in 1974.
Writers defending Israel's actions invariably overlook the (for them) inconvenient fact that the Greater Israel project is "Zionism Plus" and involves the forcible annexation of lands outside Israel's internationally recognised borders. We don't tolerate that kind of behaviour from anyone else and there is no reason to make an exception in Israel's case.
I have total contempt for Swarbrick and her ilk (ask them which 'river' and which 'sea' they mean and most wouldn't have a clue) so don't accuse me of being anti-Israel. They have a right to their nation-state like everyone else BUT they have no right to forcibly annex lands outside their borders.
If Israel is to be condemned for “forcible annexation of lands outside its internationally recognised borders” what about the Arab objective of forcible annexation of the lands inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders ?
Presumably that doesn’t count since the Arabs claim Israel has no borders, internationally recognised or otherwise, which is what ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ implies.
As I have committed on so other blogs . this is a religious issue. Barend your contempt for Israel as an Iron age state with certain borders they believe were covenanted is getting tiresome. The ICJ , is basically a secular organisation and is never going to be to be an arbitrator of what Israel does or doesn't do .Lumping their behaviour in with Russia and China is foolishness.
>"...this is a religious issue."
It is to the ultraorthodox Jew but not to the secular Jew. There can be no 'religious solution' to the issue so the point being made, if any, fades into oblivion.
>"Barend your contempt for Israel as an Iron age state with certain borders they believe were covenanted is getting tiresome."
I am tired of writing it but article after article completely ignores the Greater Israel project that drives the illegal settlement programme and the thuggery that accompanies it. And many readers may not have come across the comment before so for them it will be new.
>"The ICJ , is basically a secular organisation"
Well of course it is, as it is the UN's top court and the UN is not a theocracy. There is a distinct naivete coming into your commentary here.
"... and is never going to be to be an arbitrator of what Israel does or doesn't do."
That all depends on how long Uncle Sam backs Israel to the hilt in defying the ICJ. Of course the US too thumbs its nose at the ICJ - for now. But can they afford to do so for ever? We'll see!
>"Lumping their behaviour in with Russia and China is foolishness."
Gosh, you forgot about the US - these 4 being the countries that regularly defy the ICJ (indeed international law in general, when it doesn't suit). Nothing like selective morality, what ho?
BTW there is no point in telling us "As I have committed on so other blogs....." when we have no idea who you are. But then if this missive is anything to go by, it might be better to keep your identity under wraps.
>"... the Arabs claim Israel has no borders, internationally recognised or otherwise"
Wrong. Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and Bahrein all formally recognise the State of Israel. Oman doesn't officially do so but conducts diplomatic relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia has said it will recognise Israel once the Palestinian issue is settled. You really haven't got a clue, have you?
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