[NOTE: To register as a political party for the 2026 election we need to have 500 paying members. It costs only $2. If you are qualified to vote in Aotearoa please visit https://palfree.nz/%5D

The purpose of this party is in the name – Palestine Free from the River to the Sea. We exist for this, but what does that mean here in Aotearoa? As one of the 5 eyes and as part of the Anglosphere this country is crucial to the US empire’s efforts to whitewash the Palestinian Genocide. We are a weak point in the imperial system and what happens here can have a disproportionate effect on the world.

So what do we do here? We go for our opponents weak point in this country. That weak point is their lack of popularity and credibility.

They fill our airwaves with lies, and they fill the internet with lies. Yet despite having excessive totalitarian-style coverage, these lies are not even strong enough to persuade most people. However, they serve another purpose. They create the impression that there are two sides to a story that is really a tale of one-sided oppression, colonisation, dispossession, and slaughter.

By making it seem like there is controversy where there is none, the New Zealand government has justified its weak ambivalent rhetoric and complete lack of serious action over decades and decades of crimes being committed against the Palestinian people. In fact, it is a participant in those crimes. Shame!

These lies can only be spread because there is no consequence for those spreading the lies. Massive omissions, completely specious reasoning, jaw-dropping hypocrisy, and absolute blatant falsehoods are treated as serious commentary by our enslaved journalists and politicians. The anti-Palestinians weakness, though, is that they are not used to being challenged on this utter nonsense. They are reliant on being shielded.

If it wasn’t so horrific, the situation would be farcical. Our government still acts as if it is a neutral party, dispassionately registering its displeasure at either side when they are in the wrong. Yet because they are an occupied people the Palestinians can never truly be held to be in the wrong. They have a right to armed resistance and if crimes are committed during that armed resistance then both legally and morally the occupying power is also culpable for those crimes.

Our government chooses to legitimate Israel’s blatantly illegal acts by recognising their statehood and according them a racially coded status as part of the Western liberal developed world. Thus our regime will claim that they have quote “the right to defend themselves” while blithely ignoring the obvious caveat that don’t have the right to defend themselves against an occupied people’s well-established right to engage in armed self-defence. Instead our government has acted to suppress the Palestinian right to self-defence and resistance by labelling 3 armed resistance forces plus the entirety of Hamas as “terrorists”. Shame!

Our government has joined a very short list of just 10 or so countries that seek to criminalise armed resistance to illegal occupation. This does nothing to stop those acts but instead it lends credence to Israel’s claims to be responding to “terrorism” when it engages in blatant acts of genocide. Every one of those countries, including us, should be taken to the ICJ and charged with violating Article III of the UN Genocide Convention by being complicit in genocide – because we are complicit! Shame!

But all this is abstract. It is when we look at the concrete realities of what is happening on the ground that it becomes as heartbreaking as it is infuriating and sickening. The horrors behind the numbers are unimaginable even to us who have seen people writhing in agony as they burn to death, and who have heard the desperate fear in the voice of Hind Rajab. Those of us who know of the torment of people like Refaat Alareer and Anas al Sharif who were told by phone that they were going to be killed and lived their last days with the knowledge that the end would come at any time.

This is torment and death by design. Palestinians are murdered both personally and impersonally. Hostages and prisoners of war taken by Israel are systematically abused and tortured. Sexual assault and rape are routine. We are learning that this long whispered reality is a decades-old tactic by Israel to destroy the pride that Palestinian resistors took in enduring imprisonment. The Israelis knew that their worst enemy was Palestinian sumud and they deliberately chose a path of sadistic humiliation.

This is typical of genocide. Genocide is not the end-product of hatred, it is a strategic process of imperialist oppression. Its architects cultivate hatred and systematically degrade their own people to be racist murderers who take sadistic pleasure in the suffering of their victims. They start by demonising and dehumanising their victims building a dangerous toxic mix of fear and contempt.

I am not just talking about Israelis here. Every one of the people who sees us with our flags and tells us we support “terrorism” feels the same. They don’t care who does the killing and who does the suffering. They are bigoted Islamophobes, but their violently racist opinions are normalised by media and political discourse of genteel liberal racism. Ordinary people still think that there is something intrinsically violent about Islam despite centuries of the liberal West invading their countries, slaughtering them if they resist, and stealing their wealth. That is the result of a civilisation-wide process of demonising and dehumanising the victims of Western imperialism.

The last Israelis killed by Gaza-based militants died in October. Since then Israel has killed nearly a thousand people in Gaza. Our media, if they ever deign to mention this unending process of murder, frame it as Israel going after Hamas leaders as if that in itself was a natural thing. As if they hadn’t agreed a ceasefire with those leaders and as if those leaders weren’t, unlike them, observing the ceasefire.

In the meantime the Israelis are pushing the survivors into an ever smaller area of shattered buildings and tents. They are confining nearly 2 million survivors to an area one third the size of urban Ōtautahi! That would be hard enough even if there was not such widespread destruction. They are being concentrated and slowly killed off in a process that screams out its genocidal nature.

Yet our media still treat this as a conflict. The framing of Israel’s 3000 ceasefire violations does not reflect this grotesquely one-sided slaughter, but still continues as if Israel had a real and plausible security concern. The subtext is that no matter who carries out the most violence, no matter who commits the most atrocities, no matter who spreads terror, it is Palestinians who are terrorists – not because of what they do but because of who they are.

The hypocrisy suffuses our society, including among those who believe that the problem with Israel is that it takes its actions a bit too far and kills a few too many children. But as I said, it cannot withstand exposure to the truth. We are never going to have an even playing field but this party can use the election campaign to put the anti-Palestinians on the spot and show people the racism and hypocrisy that underwrites their hateful ideology.

We will make them say the quiet parts out loud and this will change the way people see the issue of Palestine. We will do our best to make Palestine a key question of character, because who wants to vote for a supporter of genocidal slaughter?

Thank you.