Tomorrow, on Saturday the 31^st of January 2026, there is a global day of solidarity that is part of the red ribbons campaign to bring home Palestinian hostages. Over 9,100 Palestinians are held captive by Israel and they must all be released.

I want to begin my remarks by stating something that we should always remember when we think about the Gaza Holocaust: that is that it was perfectly legal for Palestinian resistance fighters to enter Israel on October 7^th 2023 and carry out acts of armed resistance. That does not mean that no crimes were committed by Palestinians on that day, and it does not mean that anyone has to agree morally or strategically with the actions taken on that day.

Regardless of our personal feelings on whether the attack was right or wrong we must insist that the operation itself was legitimate and legal. To do otherwise is to treat Palestinians as having less rights than other human beings simply because they have been denied sovereign statehood. In contrast, when Ukraine carries out an attack on Russian soil none would dare call it terrorism.

I start with this point because the world is topsy-turvy. By being bullied into collectively condemning Hamas, we have legitimated Israel’s completely illegal response. Israelis cannot exercise any right to self-defence while they practice an illegal occupation. Once the resistance forces had ended operations and were returning to Gaza the legal grounds for using armed force on them ended.

We live in a time when lies are not stated, but are universally accepted without needing to be spoken aloud. It just seems natural that when accused of crimes Israeli personnel are given all of the civilised benefits of due process, while a mere accusation against a Palestinian justifies not only the use of deadly force against the suspect but conveys a collective guilt that can be used to enact deadly violence against an entire group. Simply holding or having held an official post with Hamas has been treated as grounds for summary execution. When captured anyone accused of being part any resistance group is treated with the utmost brutality, whether themselves accused of crimes or not.

In Cambodia one can visit the notorious Tuol Sleng prison where enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime were held in inhuman conditions. Forbidden from moving or speaking, their lives were made into a form of living death in which everything of life was abolished except for pain, fear and loneliness. We rightly feel the horror as we imagine this existence, but it seems that most people don’t feel such empathy unless they are given official permission to feel, unless the place in question is designated as a canonical site of atrocity. Israel’s Channel 14 broadcast footage of detained suspected militants forced to endure cruel conditions very similar to the conditions at Tuol Sleng. Officials bragged about the suffering they were inflicting on their prisoners. Far from awakening empathy the spectacle only served to further demonise the victims. Like the prisoners sent by the US to the CECOT torture camp in El Salvador, the victims suffering itself is exploited to make them seem less than fully human.

Empires and colonialists always seek to delegitimise resistors, the history here in Aotearoa has shown on several occasions. International Humanitarian Law requires that prisoners of war be treated humanely and be accorded certain rights. IRA prisoners were treated by the Brits as common criminals. They engaged in extreme acts of protest to establish their legal combatant status. This included the hunger strike in which 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, gave their lives. Palestinians accused of armed militant action are not even treated as criminals.

The treatment of prisoners from Gaza has clearly been modelled on the US designation of prisoners as “unlawful combatants”. Do not be fooled by the fact that some of these prisoners, a tiny minority, eventually had legal procedures. This only occurred when the captors allowed it to. From the moment of capture to the moment of death or release most of these prisners had no rights.

“Unlawful combatant” status was and is the denial of legal personhood. Such prisoners h suffer inhumane conditions and are tortured as a matter of routine. If prisoners die under torture or are murdered in other ways, there are no consequences.

The US held its “unlawful combatants” in military bases such as Bagram and Guantanamo, in prisons like Abu Ghraib, and in black sites. These were areas where no law applied. These places operated on the model established by the Germans at Dachau. Dachau was not a death camp. It was a place of torture and brutality designed to show that the raw force of the state could be applied brutally, arbitrarily and without limits. It was open for nearly a decade before the first gas chambers were used, yet the dehumanisation of Dachau was crucial to the evolution the apparatus of mass death. It is clear that the worst of the Israeli prisons are equally horrifying. One is literally subterranean, an underground prison whose inmates may only experience 5 minutes of sunlight every two days.

Doctor Adnan al-Bursh, who had been head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa hospital, died in Sde Teman prison in April of 2024. To the best of our knowledge he had been tortured by being raped with an object or objects inserted into his anus. He died a slow, lonely, and painful death from internal injuries due to the torture. This was a man of considerable status. Medical personnel have specific protections under international law. Doctors, if they are not Palestinian, are treated almost universally in Western culture as heroes until proven otherwise. I say this because we all know that if they can do this to Adnan al-Bursh with no consequence they can do it to anyone. Like Dachau or Abu Ghraib, a prisoner can be tortured or killed arbitrarily. They have lost legal personhood. They are unpeople.

The same twisted logic that uses the violence of October 7 to assert that resistance is criminal terrorism has been weaponised against those who are clearly not armed militants. In the months following October 7 thousands of people from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were abducted because of social media posts allegedly expressing support for the operation.

We are getting an increasingly horrific picture of the treatment of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody, but perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects has been the growing wave of testimony pointing to systematic and widespread rape.

Israel is trying to criminalise all forms of resistance. It uses atrocity propaganda, almost all based fictitious claims, to create a hyperbolic emotional reaction against October 7^th and other acts of armed resistance.

Resisting the criminal occupation and resisting the criminal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories is terrorism. Being a journalist is terrorism. Distributing food is terrorism. Being a doctor or nurse is terrorism. Crossing an invisible line is terrorism. When two young boys, Fadi and Jumaa Abu Asi, crossed an invisible line Israelis murdered them. Instead of claiming they made a mistake Israel said the boys activities as they looked for firewood seemed threatening and thus “The air force eliminated the suspects to remove the threat.”

It is something beyond hypocrisy that Israel and the US will not treat armed resisters as combatants but will readily assign combatant status to unarmed civilians in order to further genocidal ends. They have long worked to erase the difference between combatants and non-combatants and this is not new. Every genocide in the modern era is a war according to its perpetrators. Every perpetrator of genocide claims that they are fighting a war.

In Iraq US personnel would create unmarked “traffic control points”. If people crossed an invisible line they would be killed. Technically there was supposed to be an escalation of force, but if someone starts shooting at your car engine the normal reaction is not to pull over and ask them politely why they are trying to kill you. If the driver’s instinct was to stop and reverse they might live, if their instinct was to accelerate they and their passengers would die. The reaction from soldiers, who in some instances had murdered children, was always to blame the victims. Psychologically they protected themselves by getting angry at their own murder-victims for putting them in the situation of becoming murderers.

In the wake of a massacre of journalists and other civilians in Baghdad documented in footage released by wikileaks (under the title “collateral murder”) one of the helicopter crew says “Well its their fault for bringing kids into a battle.” This is a process of reifying a fantasy. There was no battle. They had deliberately been pretending that they thought a journalists camera was an RPG. Even if it had been an RPG, it was never brandished nor could it possibly have been a threat to the distant armoured helicopter gunship. Like the Israelis in Gaza, the US military had declared journalists to be a form of combatant. The videos spread online by insurgents of IED attacks gave the pretext that people with cameras or even cellphones could be considered terror suspects by US personnel. They killed more journalists in Iraq than the number killed in Gaza, and they were much more successful at hiding what was happening as a result.

The idea that a driver who happened upon a massacre in a suburb of Baghdad had entered a zone of “battle” is reminiscent of the free-fire zones in Viet Nam where leaflet drops often preceded mass-murder. The victims are made out to be the agents of their own destruction. It is their own fault. They choose this fate.

In Gaza at the height of the Holocaust, the Israelis had various systems of designating safe zones, often in very complex detail. The zones would change whenever they wanted and they would send SMS and recorded phone messages that may have been even less useful than the notoriously ambiguous leaflets used in Viet Nam. The result seems to have been more akin to a horror movie than any form of legitimate warfare, but rabid Zionists will claim that it proves that there can be no genocidal intent. Netanyahu has often cited leafleting and phone warnings to prove the morality and legality of Israel’s supposed war on Hamas.

These exercises are all about controlling meaning. They seek to make a reality out of a twisted fantasy where the forces of death are the bringers of cleansing light. They project their own aggressive brutality onto their real and imagined enemies. This is the psychosis of fascism. It is the same psychosis that calls Alex Pretti an assassin who died on the cusp of massacring helpless law-enforcement officers. Fascists do not keep their mental illness to themselves, they seek to inscribe it on the world, to create a history from their own mad delusions.

There is a novel about this process of fascist historiography. It is called After Dachau and was written by Daniel Quinn. The book is set in a world where the Nazis won and over time rewrote history so that Dachau was not a concentration camp but a battle, just like the site of the Collateral Murder massacre in Baghdad. In the book the Battle of Dachau was a great victory over an enemy army. Every perpetrator of genocide claims that they are fighting a war.

Most people accept the notion that Palestinians take hostages while the Israelis hold prisoners. Is this really any different from calling Dachau a battle? We treat the victims of genocide as guilty until proven innocent, and accept genocidal violence as legitimate military action, if perhaps excessive in some details.

The fascist imaginary creates a world in which the criminal is the policeman and the judge punishes those found guilty of being the victim. The whole system is one in which the concepts of legality and the legitimate exercise of sovereign power are turned into a form of pantomime used to create a system of criminality far beyond the wildest dreams of Al Capone or El Chapo. They don uniforms to cosplay as agents of order while seeking to unleash brute lawless force. If this sounds uncomfortably like it applies equally to the streets of Minneapolis, that is because it is the same thing unleashed by the same people. This is also true of the UK’s repressive actions against Palestine Action and thousands of their supporters. If our news media continuously make it seem that Palestinians are the aggressors and Israelis are acting in response, then it is really no great leap to the point where we all face charges of antisemitic hate speech.

What happens to Palestinians affects us all. We need to let people know that the Palestinians held be Israel genuinely are hostages. Few will ever have a day in court, and very few have ever committed an actual criminal act. Just because Israel has uniforms and handcuffs and cells and prisons and chains of custody and paperwork, it does not mean that they have legitimacy. It is a giant fraud.

As you read the novel After Dachau a slow horrifying realisation creeps over you. The story is not actually set in the future of an alternate Earth where the Germans won World War II, it is set in this world’s possible future: a future in which the Nazis do eventually win. As everyone here should know by now, we have not defeated the Nazis yet. We fight for Palestinian freedom, but we also fight to live in reality. We fight to live in a world where opposing genocide is not terrorism nor antisemitism, it is common humanity. We fight for a world where we can call the people abducted by a criminal genocidal state what they are. They are hostages.

Thank you.