Prophecy Alert “Modern Nations in the Bible”

A writer in a US Jewish publication says this country is blaming Israel for its own failings, after New Zealand’s prominent role in a United Nations resolution on Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.

“New Zealanders are no strangers to settlements – or to the cavalier denial of the rights of an indigenous people in their historic homeland,” Liel Leibovitz wrote in Tablet.

He suggested indigenous peoples of the world, including Maori, could benefit from the technology, organizational capacity and experience of the Jewish state. Israelis were the “ultimate indigenous survivors”, he said.

“Given the brute ugliness of its colonial past, New Zealand seems like an excellent place for the diplomats in Israel’s Foreign Ministry to try out a new model that puts solidarity with other indigenous peoples on an equal footing with traditional government-to-government relations.”

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Approached for his thoughts on the article, Auckland University of Technology history professor Dr Paul Moon said it seemed to be a work of satire.

The case being made was so extreme and deliberately paralleled, he thought, the points of the UN Security Council resolution.

“It’s not a serious piece in the sense it’s historically accurate, but it’s certainly serious in the point it makes,” Moon said.

That point was to turn the issue around to see how New Zealanders would feel if foreign governments voted on New Zealand’s internal affairs in the way they had voted on Israeli issues.

“More than anything, there’s a mixture of anger and disappointment with what New Zealand has done, with good reason in a sense,” Moon said. Israel was the only country in the region that supported such concepts as gender equality and gay rights, while the regime supported by the resolution “is against everything we stand for”.

There could be economic reasons behind New Zealand’s decision, given this country has comparatively little trade with Israel, compared to other countries in the Middle East, Moon said.

“What is concerning is the forcefulness with which New Zealand has gone into this.”

The UN said that in the resolution last Saturday (NZT), the Security Council reaffirmed that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity.

It also constituted a flagrant violation under international law and was a major obstacle to the vision of two states living side-by-side in peace and security, with internationally recognised borders.

The proposal was originally prepared by Egypt, but that country dropped it after US President-elect Donald Trump called on Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to do so.

The resolution was picked up and sponsored by New Zealand and three other non-permanent members of the Security Council – Malaysia, Senegal and Venezuela.

It was supported by 14 of the 15 members of the council. The US abstained rather than veto the resolution, which would have been in line with its longstanding practice when Israel has been targeted over the settlements.

Israeli publication Haaretz has reported that before the vote Israeli  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a “harsh” phone call with New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully. “If you continue to promote this resolution from our point of view it will be a declaration of war,” Netanyahu has reported to have said.

After the vote the Israeli government withdrew its ambassador from this country and barred New Zealand’s ambassador from Israel.

In his Tablet article, Leibovitz said that if the principle of two states for two peoples was good enough for most Israelis to willingly accept, it was surely good enough for New Zealanders “who have already agreed to a division of their own land with the Maori – and then wantonly violated their own legally-binding agreements”.