Find someone who loves you as much as Israelis love white phosphorous and bombing tents, schools & hospitals!!

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12 months of genocide
12 months of wholesale slaughter
12 months of steadfast Palestinian resistance
12 months of media centering Israeli propaganda
12 months of New Zealand government complicity with genocide
12 months of phenomenal international solidarity with the Palestinian people
 
Thank you to everyone one of you who is taking action for Palestine. Humanity is shining through past the racism, apartheid and sheer brutality of the Israeli regime.
 
Be part of making history – join the protest in your local centre this week!
 
As Mozambican liberation leader Samora Machel used to say in the fight for liberation from Portuguese colonial rule:
 
"A luta continua; vitória é certa,"
 
("The struggle continues; victory is certain")

Remember Rachel Corrie, ad nauseum, just fuck Israel, that is all. BDS the PIG (Psycho Israeli Genocide) and all it's enablers!!

Whanganui:
 
“Flowers for Palestine - Putiputi mō Parihitini”
 
On Wednesday 16th October, the Whanganui Palestine Solidarity Network will be launching a community-driven project called "Flowers of Palestine - Putiputi mō Parihitini". The initiative warmly invites the Whanganui community to contribute to the embroidering of flowers on a large-scale tapestry - with each flower representing a life lost in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 
 
Whanganui has shown its commitment to peace by becoming the first council in Aotearoa to formally call for a ceasefire. It added its call to the collective voices of hundreds of local government bodies the world over. “We are so proud of our community. The enormous support the ceasefire motion received underscores our shared resolve as a community to respond to global crises with compassion and action. Despite these efforts and many others, the violence persists, leaving our communities in ongoing mourning. That is why we created Flowers for Palestine," says project founder, Renata Szarvas.
 
By engaging in the art of embroidery, participants of all ages will have the opportunity to learn basic stitching techniques from local artists who will offer experienced help, and contribute to a collective work that serves as both a tribute to the monumental loss of life and also a powerful call for peace. The group aims to engage and weave together the rich diversity of our riverside city and to foster constructive dialogue, allowing participants to unite in their shared pursuit of community and remembrance through creative expression.
 
“Our project seeks to create a space where people can come together to express solidarity and find comfort through creativity and community.”
 
The group envisages this project spanning months, giving many the opportunity to contribute a flower to the tapestry. The long term nature of this project will aim to provide the community with the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue and build relationships with one another. The project will culminate in an exhibition on the 25th of May 2025 - the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba. 
 
“We welcome everyone — of every religion and background, young and old, experienced and novice embroiderers — to join us in this cathartic and meaningful work. Together we want to create a powerful symbol of the compassion we want to see in the world.” 
 
The official opening and first public meeting will be on Wednesday 16th October at 5.30 pm at the Awa Room, Community Arts Centre. This initial meeting will be followed by weekly Wednesday 5.30pm meetings at the same location.

October 7th 2023: Debunking Israel’s racist propaganda and its Western media collaborators
 
By PSNA National Chair John Minto
 
As Israel extends its war against Palestine to attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, we are seeing a repeat of the same Israeli lies and propaganda which was centred in our mainstream media from October 7th last year.
 
October 7th
At 6.30am on October 7th 2023, Palestinian resistance groups launched a widespread, co-ordinated and devastating attack on Israeli military positions outside the Gaza fence. After 76 years of Israeli brutality and 17 years living under an Israeli imposed air, sea and land blockade, Palestinians in Gaza made a “prison break” involving around 1200 Palestinian resistance fighters.
 
By 8:30 am, the resistance fighters had stormed six Israeli military bases: Erez at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, Nahal Oz opposite Gaza City, two others near the Beeri kibbutz, one in Reim near central Gaza and two in the south close to the Egyptian border.
 
Dozens of Israeli soldiers were killed and many more taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war. It was an astonishing feat of military ingenuity, daring and courage in the face of Israel’s newly elected far right government with its top priority to expand illegal Israeli settlements on Occupied Palestinian land, encouragement of settler violence against Palestinians and provocative Israeli ministerial incursions into Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa compound.
 
From a guerilla war point of view, in a David Vs Goliath context, the attack was a stunning success. Armed only with light weapons the resistance fighters dealt a savage military blow to an enemy armed to the teeth with the latest US-supplied high-tech weapons, planes and armaments.
 
After some reasonable initial reporting, which included interviews with Hamas leaders, within 24 hours a massive wave of Israeli propaganda overwhelmed the western world’s mainstream media. This propaganda was not aimed to downplay the striking success of the Palestinian resistance, which was undeniable, but to deploy a surge of misinformation and disinformation to turn Israelis into the victims and Palestinian resistance fighters into bloodthirsty inhuman monsters whose only aim was to slaughter Israeli civilians, behead Israeli babies, rape Israeli women and children, pillage and destroy Israeli homes and communities.
 
If the Palestinian resistance attacks on Israel were a decisive military success, the wave of Israeli propaganda in the western media was also an overwhelming success. Conditioned for decades to promote Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications, the Western media became a one-way pipeline for the most vile, racist, dehumanising propaganda against Palestinians ever to be poured into our mainstream television, newspapers and radio outlets.
 
International law
Israel claims the “right to defend itself” against attacks from the Palestinian resistance and a chorus of Western leaders, including New Zealand, dutifully support the apartheid state when it says this. The “right to defend” means the right to wage war. However United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinians territories, Francesca Albanese, says this does not apply to Israel because it is attacking a people it occupies.
 
Palestinians on the other hand have the right to armed struggle under international law. 
 
War crimes
War crimes were committed on October 7th. The killing of civilians and taking civilians hostages are war crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention and must always be condemned.
 
All war crimes should be investigated and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court but, unlike the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ICC has been slow to hold Israel to account for its genocidal words and actions against Palestinians that followed October 7th. In Israel’s case, so far the ICC’s chief prosecutor has only sought arrest warrants for trial on war crimes against the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant.
 
Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein summed it up well shortly after October 7th when she said "Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child."
 
At the heart of the fighting
No-one wants to see innocent civilians losing their lives or having their safety and freedom of movement ripped away – Israeli or Palestinian - but the fault lies at the root cause: the oppressor-oppressed paradigm laid down by Israel's ethnic cleaning of vast swathes of Palestine in 1947 – 1949. 1.9m of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are registered with UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) as refugees from 1948. Gaza was their brief sanctuary but not their home.  For example Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar's family were driven from Ashkelon in what is now Israel in 1948.  He can see that town from Gaza but was never allowed to go there.
 
The Great March of Return in 2018-19 was an attempt to show to the world that Palestinians in Gaza have a right to return to their homes (which they do under international law) and a protest against the US moving its embassy to Jerusalem.  Israeli snipers responded by shooting dead 183 unarmed Palestinians on the Gaza side of the border fence. 
 
Despite a year passing since the October 7th attack we don’t know all the details but through Israeli media reporting and independent journalism it has become increasingly clear that:
 Most of the victims were either Israeli soldiers and police or army reservists. One analysis concluded "A total of 1,269 individuals were affected, predominantly military males aged 18-25”
Many Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli military commanders adopting the “Hannibal directive” whereby it is better to kill or risk killing Israeli war captives than having them taken hostage or prisoner. Orders to attack any vehicle heading to Gaza meant hundreds of cars were attacked, killing hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis alike
After the resistance fighters broke out from Gaza there was a “second wave” of people who came through the fence and it appears this group were responsible for most of the war crimes committed on that day rather than fighters from the highly-disciplined resistance groups
There was no widespread sexual assault committed by the Palestinian resistance fighters against Israeli women and children as claimed by Israel
There were no beheaded Israeli babies, no foetuses ripped from slaughtered mothers, no children raped – all claims made by the Israeli propaganda machine
Israel has taken more than 9,000 counter hostages (held without charge or trial) from Gaza and the Occupied West Bank since Oct 7th
6,400 Palestinians in Gaza are missing since October 7th

Demonising Hamas
The wave of Israeli propaganda has focused on demonising Hamas – so much so that New Zealand political leaders rushed to declare the Hamas political wing a terrorist organisation. It’s important for Israel to demonise Hamas because it helps them justify their wholesale slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of schools, hospitals and the entire civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
 
What has the propaganda said?Hamas hates Jews and wants to kill every Jew in the world
Hamas beheaded babies, burned babies alive in ovens etc
Hamas used systematic widespread rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women and children.
Hamas uses civilians as human shields
Hamas educates Palestinian children to hate Israelis
Hamas has hijacked humanitarian supplies which is the main reason Palestinians in Gaza are starving
Looking at these one by one.
 
Hamas hates Jews and wants to kill every Jew in the world
In the latest Hamas charter from 2017, the organisation says
 
“Hamas reiterates that its conflict is with the Zionist project and not with the Jews based on their religion.”
“Hamas is not fighting against the Jews because they are Jews, but against the Zionists who are occupying Palestine.”
“Hamas rejects the persecution of people or the undermining of their rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian ground.”
 
In fact, their new charter goes further and Hamas accepts the state of Israel based on 1967 borders – precisely the same policy as the New Zealand government along with the US, the UK and most of the world!
 
Hamas beheaded babies, burned babies alive in ovens etc
None of this has a shred of truth despite these anti-Palestinian lies gaining huge traction with even the US President Joe Biden claiming to have seen photos to prove these lies.
See the links here, here, here and here
 
Hamas used systematic widespread rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women and children.
Israeli claims of systemic sexual violence perpetrated by Palestinian resistance groups on October 7th is part of its propaganda narrative to justify the horrendous violence they have unleashed against Palestinians in Gaza – the majority of those killed being women and children.
 
Ran Yakkoby, Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand, pushes this racist lie saying on a recent TV interview ‘Are we supposed to enter homes and gang rape the same number of women…and children who were raped?’ and ‘Did children in Israel vote to be raped by Hamas?’
 
These claims of systematic sexual abuse by the Palestinian resistance were picked up readily and amplified by western media but have since been thoroughly discredited.
 
The highest profile media report was an extensive investigation reported in the New York Times on December 28, 2023 titled “'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The investigation delved into the alleged rape and sexual violence by members of the Palestinian resistance against women during the October 7 attack. That piece has now been widely discredited. The New York Times itself has backtracked on some of the allegations and now says “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” Further investigation has found allegations of systemic sexual assault by the Palestinian resistance to be untrue and award-winning journalist Jonathan Cook gives a detailed analysis here debunking the allegations.
 
A UN report suggested similarly that there may have been widespread sexual assaults although even this report raises serious misgivings. The leader of the investigation was Pramila Patten who confirmed in the report and the press conference releasing the report that:At least two of the allegations of sexual violence previously reported were determined by the mission team to be unfounded
No tangible indications of rape could be identified anywhere
She had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence
No digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found in open sources or anywhere! (The open sources included 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras on October 7th. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence)
She had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she accepted it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on October 7th was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media. 
She noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”
AP News has given coverage to at least two accounts of claims that were inaccurate about Hamas’s actions on October 7th: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-sexual-violence-zaka-ca7905bf9520b1e646f86d72cdf03244
 
The New Yorker published a extensive piece clarifying that claims of rape on October 7 were not a tool of warfare used by Hamas but were at the centre of Israeli propaganda: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/what-we-know-about-the-weaponization-of-sexual-violence-on-october-7th
 
This is not to say individual sexual assaults, which are common in war, did not occur but that allegations of widespread, systematic sexual assault were false.
 
The rape of Palestinians
Unlike the misinformation and disinformation from Israeli sources, there is a wide body of evidence showing clear patterns of sexual assaults on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and only a sliver of this material reaches western eyes and ears via mainstream media.
 
https://www.savethechildren.net/news/palestinian-children-israeli-military-detention-report-increasingly-violent-conditions
 
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un-experts-appalled-reported-human-rights-violations-against
 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/sexual-violence-against-palestinian-women-un-report/
 
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-israel-torture-executions-babies-die-sexual-abuse-crimes
 
In part because Israel has not been held to account by Western media such as TVNZ, we have reached a point where Israeli officials and the general public of Israel defend the rape and torture Israeli soldiers conduct https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
 
Israeli state-sanctioned rape of Palestinian women
However, unlike the lack of evidence that Hamas ordered rape as a weapon of war, we do have evidence, from the Israeli media, of state-sanctioned rape of Palestinian women from Israel’s Chief military rabbi, Eyal Krim, who supports Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women to “boost morale”.
 
“The rabbi gave a more shocking answer on the same site when asked if soldiers were permitted to rape women during war. Karim replied that, as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers' morale during fighting, it is permitted to "breach" the walls of modesty and "satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success."
 
Needless to say this has never seen the light of day in mainstream media here.  
 
Human Shields
While the Israeli army has always stated that human shields are “a key pillar of Hamas’s terror operations”, it has not provided credible proof for its allegations which are denied by Hamas.
Israel repeatedly pushes this lie as a way of justifying the horrific civilian death toll from its indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas such as schools, hospitals etc
The United Nations Secretary General mentioned human shields in the war on Gaza. To put this into context, the statement by the UN Secretary General said the following:All parties respecting all their obligations under international humanitarian law.  Now.
This means the unconditional release of the hostages in Gaza.  Now.
The protection of civilians, hospitals, UN facilities, shelters and schools.  Now.
More food, more water, more medicine and of course fuel – entering Gaza safely, swiftly and at the scale needed.  Now. 
Unfettered access to deliver supplies to all people in need in Gaza.  Now.
And the end of the use of civilians as human shields.  Now.
None of these appeals should be conditional on the others.
And for all of this, we need more funding – now.
The UN Secretary General didn’t identify which groups were allegedly using human shields but a 2005 Israeli Supreme Court ruled Israel must stop using Palestinians as human shields.
 
Meanwhile Israel has regularly used children as human shields in its genocide on Gaza.

Israel has always made this claim because it wants to undermine the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) which provides humanitarian aid, health and education services for Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank etc
 
It’s important to firstly look at the context. We are speaking about a group of people who have been occupied and displaced for over 76 years. These people have experienced daily racism through a State that now has had multiple UN reports calling them out on their occupation, colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, violence, and failure to adhere to international law. Israel as a racist apartheid state has been called out by Al Haq, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and every credible human rights group internationally.
 
These children, who can’t even access education anymore, don’t need to be taught hatred by anyone other than through the actions of the State of Israel.
 
What about how Israeli children are taught?
“Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But, she says, they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism. They are called Arabs. "The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don't pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don't want to develop," she says. "The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/07/israeli-school-racism-claim  and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbooks_in_Israel
 
Or check out the language used by Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Other Israeli political, military and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer”, “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated”.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being-used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal
 
Attacks on Aid convoys
Here is a UN envoy report on the lack of evidence Israel has provided to back up its claims:
 
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-envoy-says-israel-has-not-shown-evidence-that-hamas-is-diverting-un-aid-in-gaza
 
What we are seeing in fact is mounting evidence in the form of footage from on the ground of Israelis attacking aid convoys:
 
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/3/5/the-blood-was-everywhere-inside-israels-flour-massacre-in-gaza
 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/16/palestinian-lorry-drivers-israeli-settlers-attack-gaza-aid-convoy
 
Media bias
A last word on our mainstream media bias. In terms of international news agencies, New Zealand media relies almost exclusively on Western news sources such as the BBC, AP and Reuters none of which has journalists on site in Gaza unlike Al Jazeera and the various Palestinians news services which operate there despite 116 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7th according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel has closed the East Jerusalem Office and the Occupied West Bank offices of Al Jazeera and banned foreign journalist from entering Gaza. In the print media our newspapers take stories almost exclusively from The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, the Washingtion Post and the New York Times.
 
Using Western, Eurocentric news sources means we get Israeli perspectives, explanations, justifications and reasoning at the centre of news reporting with Palestinian voices, when they are ever included, as passively reported victims.
 
Our news media is unashamedly racist and biased in its reporting of the Middle East.
 
A recent computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting for example revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives despite the mass slaughter of Palestinians.
The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.
In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.
A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.
 
New Zealand government
Throughout the entire year since October 7th 2023 the New Zealand government has not uttered a single word of condemnation of Israel. The best it has done, and we welcomed this, was to vote for the UN General Assembly September motion reinforcing the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is illegal.
 
Instead of condemning the colonial aggressor the New Zealand government has condemned every act of Palestinian resistance. They have inverted reality – standing with the racist apartheid state and condemning the victims.
 
PSNA has written to the government giving a list of steps that should take to uphold their obligations under the Genocide Convention and international law to begin to hold Israel to account. At this point the government is happy to do absolutely nothing.
 
A luta continua.