At a national meeting earlier this week Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa decided on key priorities for consumer boycotts to support the international BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. The key consumer boycott priorities .
On his appearance on breakfast television this morning Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has sided with Israeli guns over Palestinian children. (Last week Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein said “ we should side with the child over the gun every .
This is a welcome development while
Israel is continuing to flout international law with their
new government approving the building of 31
more illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied
West Bank alongside the destruction of Palestinian homes and
on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestinian families from
occupied East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish
settlers.
It appears this move may be linked to last
week’s request from the UN Special Rapporteur, Michael
Lynk, for countries to recognise Israel’s sponsoring of
Israeli settlers on Palestinian land in the Occupied West
Bank as “a war crime under the Rome Statute of the
These
protests mark Nakba Day (Arabic for “catastrophe”) which
remembers the mass ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians
from their homes and land by Israeli militias in
1948.
We will be demanding the government speak out
and condemn Israel’s racist, apartheid policies towards
Palestinians and its rampant brutality against any
Palestinian resistance.
So far Foreign Minister Nanaia
Mahuta has refused to apportion blame – preferring to
tiptoe meekly around the issue – unlike her criticism of
China or Myanmar. She is effectively excusing the racist
policies and brutality of the highly militarised state of
Israel which has the second largest army in the world per
Israel has instructed inhabitants of the
West Bank town of Zanouta to destroy many of their homes and
their medical clinic. This follows an earlier
Israel demolition of a Palestinians Covid 19
clinic.
PSNA Spokesperson John Minto says not only
is Israel denying Covid-19 vaccines to 4.5 million
Palestinians under its occupation and control but is using
the pandemic as a cover to increase its rate of destruction
of Palestinian houses and structures.
The United
Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
has listed 847 demolitions by Israel of Palestinian homes
and structures in 2020, most during the pandemic.
John
Minto says Israel is obligated to protect medical facilities