Whose Minds are Colonised?

Jerusalem Image Credit: Robert Bye

I wasn’t raised Jewish, though my mother was Jewish and her father and grandfather were rabbis. I came to faith in Jesus, the Messiah, as a foggy, English agnostic. Moving to New Zealand, it wasn’t until later in life I even visited Israel though I have family there. Every time I arrived from tranquil New Zealand, a major crisis was underway, had just happened, or was looming. You get used to it. 

But this time is different. The ground under my feet has been ruptured by multiple shockwaves from events in Israel and the international reaction. 

So far as I know at the time of writing, friends and family in Israel (two aunts emigrated from Britain) are OK. But we are all changed. I remember once reading of how in WW2 Nazi officers would hold picnics where they smashed Jewish infants against trees and thinking “How could people commit such evil?” Yet here we are again.

Distance cannot dull the horror. Whether close in heart to Israel or not, Jews everywhere discovered that our safe place, our ‘never-again’ place, the refuge of last resort, was despoiled by an insatiable evil from of old. 

The immediate celebration and hate against Israel and the Jewish people displayed by many in the Moslem world is like a claw, tearing at our shared humanity. And then the shock that many progressives in the Western world, including New Zealand, could scarcely bear to recognise or to condemn the evil visited upon Israel. Trapped by narrow ideology, they hold Israel to blame – Israel drove those poor people to it. 

In relative affluence, surrounded by vast oceans, at peace, New Zealanders can tut at wars elsewhere. Our media and leaders tend to a high minded tone of sympathy or judgement. The media casually reproduce the latest wild claims from Hamas with large headlines, and then a smaller item – “for balance” – reporting the Israeli position. 

From our cosy shelter, we call for peace and reconciliation. Much of the Western world, including Australia, Canada, and the UK did not support a UN resolution that called for a ceasefire in Gaza but lacked condemnation of Hamas. New Zealand supported the resolution. 

Hamas – the word means ‘violence’ - calls for the eradication of Israel, the killing of “all Jews, every one.” It accepts no responsibility for the people of Gaza: the UN should shelter them and Israel feed them. Their leader declares they need the blood of their women, children and elderly for the cause. According to the World Bank, Gaza has received more aid per capita than anywhere else in the world yet is amongst the poorest territories on earth. Hamas delivers on its single policy – violence – at the expense of all else.

Yet, Te Pati Māori knows Israel is to blame. After denouncing the October 7 terror, deputy leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer declares that “Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian lands, engineered by the British Empire, has led to decades of pain, suffering and bloodshed.” She ignores the original tangata whenua of Israel. She ignores the nature of Hamas. She ignores that Britain clamped down on Jewish – but not Arab – immigration from the 1930s and that Jewish militants battled the British to obtain Israel’s independence. Over 500,000 Jews were then expelled to Israel by the Arab nations – vastly exceeding the number of Jewish immigrants under British rule. None of that – nor later history - matters to Ngarewa-Packer.

The Indigenous Coalition for Israel has denounced her position. But her infantile analysis and accusations reflect a wider determination to force Israel into a fashionable narrative manufactured in elite European universities.  So, whose minds are being colonized here? My cousins in Israel must fight a demonic hatred, but its tentacles reach far – fed by complacency, arrogance and fashion.  

Dr Simon Smelt grew up in central London to a Jewish mother and English father who had served in Palestine pre 1948. Simon gained a doctorate in economics from London University and came to Wellington in 1986 with his New Zealand born first wife (deceased). He now lives rurally in Waikanae, with his second wife Jane, who previously worked for a mission agency in the Arab world.