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
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