Flashback 41 years on: One year ago marking the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, Te Aniwaniwa Paterson wrote this article. Further reading: David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (Little Island Press). The late investigative journalist John Pilger wrote: “Eyes of Fire is a beautiful book and an anger-making book, a testament to the finest activism and the need always to ‘bear witness’ and stand up to criminal state power, as you did. I was reminded how pleased I was to use the rescue of the people of Rongelap in The Coming War on China [2016 documentary]. Reading your account moved me all over again.”
Forty years ago today [10 July 1985], French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.
People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.
The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.
Greenpeace Aotearoa held a dawn ceremony on board the Rainbow Warrior III on 10 July 2025 commemorating the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior and the death of photographer Fernando Pereira. Image: Paul Hilton/Greenpeace
The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.
Photographer Fernando Pereira and a woman from Rongelap on the day the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Rongelap Atoll in May 1985. Image: David Robie/Eyes of Fire
Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.
Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.
She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.
“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.
Tui Warmenhoven and Dr Russel Norman in front of Rainbow Warrior III on 10 July 2025. Image:Te Ao Māori News
A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand “The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.
He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.
Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman speaking at the ceremony on board Rainbow Warrior III today. Image: Te Ao Māpri News
In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.
This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.
Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.
The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.
The evacuation of Rongelap Islanders to Mejatto by the Rainbow Warrior crew in May 1985. Image: Greenpeace/Fernando Pereira
The legacy of Operation Exodus Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.
For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.
Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.
“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.
He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.
Marshallese women greet the Rainbow Warrior as it arrived in the capital Majuro in March 2025. Image: Bianca Vitale/Greenpeace
Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.
What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues? “Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.
A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.
Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.
Tui Warmenhoven and the captain of the Rainbow Warrior, Ali Schmidt, placed a wreath in the water at the stern of the ship in memory of Fernando Pereira. Image: Greenpeace
Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.
“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.
This article was first published on 10 July 2025 to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.
On June 10, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya appeared on a screen before Israel’s Supreme Court via video link. He looked gaunt, visibly emaciated, and his hands and feet were bound.
It was one of the few times the public had seen the doctor since Israeli soldiers took him from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza nearly 18 months ago, where he had served as director.
He has been held without charge for more than 500 days, with little known about his condition.
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beita Lahia in northern Gaza, before being imprisoned by the Israeli forces . . . his lawyer says Dr Abu Safiya’s continued detention without any filing of formal charges demonstrates his imprisonment is unjustified. Image: Social media/Amnesty International/Mondoweiss
After the court hearing, Abu Safiya’s lawyer delivered a message from the doctor to the public: “I am a pediatrician, providing medical care to patients, the wounded, and the vulnerable in Gaza.
“I carried out my work in accordance with international law and humanitarian principles. My detention is unjust and arbitrary.”
According to the lawyer, Nasser Odeh, the court hearing followed an appeal filed by Abu Safiya’s legal team calling for his immediate release, after an earlier District Court decision had renewed his detention on 28 April 2026.
🚨Israeli authorities must immediately release the arbitrarily detained Palestinian paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya amidst reports from a lawyer who visited him that there is an imminent threat to his life as a result of torture and other…
The Supreme Court came back with a rejection of Abu Safiya’s appeal. He remains in solitary confinement in Nafha Prison, to which he had been sent earlier in June as the date of his Supreme Court appearance drew near.
No indictment filed
No formal indictment has been filed against Dr Abu Safiya to date, as he is being held under Israel’s so-called “Unlawful Combatants Law,” according to Nasser Odeh.
The law allows Israel to indefinitely detain Palestinians without having to file charges against them, subject to judicial review by the District Court every six months.
“Abu Safiya is one of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza currently being held in Israeli detention,” Odeh told Mondoweiss. “If there were actual charges against them, or evidence supporting the allegations made by the Israeli prosecution, indictments would have been filed and evidence presented, as is the case with any other detainee.”
The lawyer added that Dr Abu Safiya’s continued detention without the filing of formal charges demonstrated that his imprisonment was unjustified.
Calls grow for Israel to release Dr Abu Safiya Video: Democracy Now!
To make it more difficult to challenge his detention, Odeh said that Dr Abu Safiya not only continued to be isolated from other detainees but was also cut off from his legal team, making it difficult to obtain verified information about his health condition.
Despite the efforts to suppress information pertaining to Dr Abu Safiya, Mondoweiss has obtained testimony from recently released Palestinian detainees who said they spent time with the doctor in prison before he was moved to solitary confinement.
The ex-detainees, all of whom were released in March this year, said that Dr Abu Safiya was subjected to physical torture, beatings, humiliation, and degrading treatment. They also say that they spent their final days in prison with the doctor.
“We saw him weighing no more than 40 kilograms,” Ahmad Qaddas, 34, alleged. Qaddas had been detained from the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza in December 2025, and previously knew Dr Abu Safiya as one of north Gaza’s most prominent doctors and public figures.
🚨We are deeply alarmed by the reports that there is an imminent threat to Dr. #HussamAbuSafiya’s life as a result of torture and other ill treatment he has been suffering while in Israeli custody. Israeli authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Dr. Abu Safiya.… pic.twitter.com/sNVTL4eQTB
Unable to respond
Qaddas claimed that he had spent six days with Abu Safiya shortly before being released.
“I could not believe my eyes when I saw Dr Hussam,” Qaddas told Mondoweiss. “His weight, his thinness, his health, his face, his hands, his feet, his entire body — I could not believe what I saw.”
Qaddas also claimed that Dr Abu Safiya was minimally communicative, unable to respond to interactions.
“He became so weak that he could barely speak,” Qaddas said. “He had to repeat each word he said at least four times before managing to pronounce it. Even when he ate, he vomited it back up. He always appeared exhausted and barely talked.”
Qaddas also said that the prisoners wore the standard gray prison uniform and appeared relatively clean, but that Abu Safiya “looked filthy” by contrast.
The testimonies from the detainees were the first details to emerge concerning Dr Abu Safiya’s condition since reports of his torture first emerged in January 2025, a month after his arrest, as relayed by released prisoners who had been held at the notorious Sde Teiman torture camp with the doctor.
Each of the prisoners said they spent a limited period of time with the doctor, although the details of when and where they were held remain unclear.
Days and hours shackled
“We had no way of distinguishing one day from another inside the prison,” Rami Abu Amira, 32, who said he spent six days with Abu Safiya, told Mondoweiss. “We spent days and hours shackled and blindfolded, with no sense of how much time had passed.”
Abu Amira was a resident of Jabalia refugee camp, where he was arrested during an invasion of his area in December 2024. He said detainees often relied on other prisoners to learn where they were being held.
“When the opportunity arose, we would ask other detainees where we were. Some would say Sde Teiman. Others would say we’re in Ofer, or another prison,” he recounted.
“Those brief exchanges were the only way we could confirm that we were being held in a detention facility somewhere.”
Dr Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, corroborated the substance of the prisoners’ testimonies based on his knowledge of the doctor’s condition, affirming that their descriptions of how he was treated fit with his conditions.
All interviewed former detainees described the doctor being repeatedly subjected to beatings, torture, interrogation, shackling, and food deprivation — conditions which many Palestinian detainees report being subjected to across the board, but which in the case of Dr Abu Safiya were allegedly applied even more harshly.
They said that the doctor was clearly experiencing a deterioration in his health, and that they interacted with him as much as they were allowed to, even though any detainee who attempted to help him was allegedly beaten.
‘Soldiers placed their boots on his chest and forced him to insult himself’ Rami Abu Amira said that detainees, including Dr Abu Safiya, were kept shackled by their hands and feet for an entire week, without their restraints being removed even for eating or using the bathroom.
Their restraints would only be removed for 10 minutes every 3 days to shower, before being shackled again. “Occasionally, our restraints would also be removed so we could eat,” Abu Amira added.
Ahmad Qaddas emphasised that Abu Safiya “was constantly asking for medical treatment,” noting his advanced age. “Whenever he would ask for treatment, a doctor from the prison would come by and give him a single blood pressure pill.”
Nasser Odeh confirmed Qaddas’s testimony, asserting that Dr Abu Safiya continued to suffer from chronic health conditions that have been exacerbated by his systematic abuse and mistreatment.
The doctor’s lawyer said that Dr Abu Safiya suffered from high blood pressure, for which he required regular medication, as well as from other health issues affecting his back, eyes, and neck. One of the most serious concerns is what Odeh described as a policy of “deliberate medical neglect” by prison authorities, which had deprived Dr Abu Safiya of access to essential medications and treatment.
“We previously submitted a legal petition to the prison authorities,” Odeh said. “We were requesting that the detention facility’s physician examine Dr Abu Safiya and that his blood pressure medication be restored.”
Ahmad Qaddas also said that “soldiers would wrap him in a blanket and move him from one place to another, while soldiers placed their boots on his chest, and forced him to insult himself and call himself a donkey.”
“He would insult himself and cry as he did it,” Qaddas said, adding that the point was to humiliate him “in front of all the prisoners”.
The degrading treatment often crossed into torture and physical assault, the detainees added, alleging that they could hear Dr Abu Safiya screaming while he was being interrogated nearby.
“When we heard his screams, we first feared for ourselves,” Qaddas recounted. “Then we grieved for what Dr Hussam Abu Safiya was enduring.”
First image of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from his court hearing currently taking place before the Israeli military court in occupied Jerusalem.
The image shows Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in a state of severe exhaustion and clear physical deterioration after more than a year of detention… pic.twitter.com/0nCpp6N25O
— Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya د.حسام أبو صفية (@HussamAbuSafiya) June 10, 2026
Beatings, dog attacks, and food deprivation Rami Abu Amira alleged that he witnessed some of these moments firsthand when Israeli soldiers moved the doctor from the prison section to interrogation, or when they returned him to his cell.
“Dr Abu Safiya was tortured. They stripped his clothes, dragged him across the ground, slammed him into walls, and attacked him with dogs,” he said. At other times, he added, he would only hear the doctor’s screams, but would later see him after the interrogation session when prisoners were released from their cells for brief periods of yard time.
Abu Amira also said that he witnessed soldiers raiding Abu Safiya’s cell at night as he slept, waking him up by throwing stun grenades beneath the bunk bed before storming his cell and taking him away. He would disappear for a day before being returned at night, or the following day, Abu Amira recounted.
Ahmad Qaddas said that Israeli soldiers would regularly unleash dogs on him to attack and pin him to the ground.
“At that moment, he would cry like a child from fear and exhaustion,” Qaddas said, adding that the dogs would claw at him with their paws and nails.
He described how Dr Abu Safiya would sit for long hours in prison, unable to speak to anyone because he had neither the energy nor the ability to talk.
“When we spoke to him, he could not answer, and we ourselves would be tortured for approaching him,” Qaddas said. These ranged from beatings, having dogs set on them, being denied food, or being sent to solitary confinement, he detailed.
‘We feared being tortured’
“I wanted to help him and serve him in whatever he needed, but we could not. We feared being tortured ourselves.”
He explained that when prisoners were transferred from one place to another while shackled by their hands and feet, soldiers would beat prisoners on their legs, causing them to fall onto their knees.
But with Dr Abu Safiya, Qaddas said he saw the doctor totally collapse when hit, bumping his head on the ground from the fall. “He was that weak,” Qaddas explained. “But despite that, the soldiers kept beating him without mercy.”
He noted that although he himself was a man in his 30s, when he was beaten, he felt that he might die from the severity of the abuse, while “Dr Hussam was an older man suffering from illness.”
“Now, when I remember what happened before my eyes in prison, I feel like crying from the cruelty of the scenes I witnessed and the torture inflicted on the doctor,” Qaddas said.
Breaking a symbol The picture the ex-detainees paint is one in which every moment of Dr Abu Safiya’s life in prison is geared toward torture and degrading treatment. “They singled him out for torture and humiliation more than the other prisoners,” Qaddas noted.
According to the ex-detainees’ testimonies, doctors were the most tortured prisoners in the facility. For Qaddas, this was because the Israeli army intended to “break their convictions,” explaining how doctors in Gaza had repeatedly been a thorn in the side of Israeli ground invasions by refusing the army’s evacuation orders throughout the war.
A photo of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya that went viral on social media, showing him in his white coat walking amid the rubble towards Israeli tanks surrounding the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beita Lahia in northern Gaza. Image: Mondoweiss/via X
During the Israeli invasion of northern Gaza in late 2024, Dr Abu Safiya refused to evacuate Kamal Adwan Hospital, turning the medical compound into a last refuge of civilians and becoming a symbol of north Gaza’s defiance of the Israeli army’s invasion.
Dr Abu Safiya quickly became the face of that steadfastness, even in how he surrendered to the army, walking toward two armored tanks with nothing but his white coat amid the rubble.
During an earlier invasion of northern Gaza in late 2023, Dr Adnan al-Bursh of al-Awda Hospital played a similar role. He was arrested on 19 December 2023, alongside other doctors and displaced civilians.
Death announced
Later, his death was announced in Ofer Prison in mid-April 2024. According to testimony obtained by Sky News via the Israeli rights group HaMoked, al-Bursh died shortly after being brought into Section 23 of Ofer Prison, outside Ramallah.
The prison guards had reportedly brought al-Bursh into the section “in a deplorable state,” with “injuries around his body,” which was naked from the waist down.
“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there,” one source told Sky News, adding that one of the prisoners helped him afterward and took him to one of the rooms, where he died shortly thereafter.
To this day, Dr Al-Bursh’s body remains withheld by Israeli authorities. He stands as an example of the severe torture endured by Palestinian doctors who refused to abandon their posts and leave their patients to their fate, choosing instead to carry out their duties until they were arrested or killed.
Dr Abu Safiya’s fellow prisoners fear he is on the same trajectory.
“We heard doctors inside the prison repeatedly wishing for death because of the torture they endured,” Qaddas said. “If there isn’t an urgent intervention to save Dr Hussam, he will inevitably die inside the prison.”
Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Gaza correspondent for Mondoweiss and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter/X at @Tareqshajjaj. This article was first published by Mondoweiss.
“Kiwi journalists . . . is there a reason for so little solidarity with Palestinian colleagues,” he mused over a haunting portrait of emaciated Palestinian journalist Mujahid Abu Mufleh showing his appalling state after 14 months inside an Israel torture prison.
The image of Palestinian journalist Mujahid Abu Mufieh after 14 months in an Israeli jail that prompted the question about New Zealand media empathy. Image: ED/KJA
This is what Palestinian hostages look like after release: emaciated, exhausted, and visibly scarred by prolonged detention.
Occupied Palestine has become the deadliest place for journalists in the world. Yet merely three media people responded to Doyle’s question.
Broadcaster and singer Moana Maniapoto (Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa)
summed up the cruel image as “journacide”, citing the use of the label by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese: “Absolutely shocking.”
Journacide is a neologism used by scholars, journalists, and human rights experts to describe deliberate mass killing and hunting down of journalists and media workers in conflict zones. It is also the title of a harrowing new documentary on the topic: Journacide: The War on Truth.
Courage and fortitude
Community broadcaster and educator Victoria Quade commented: “I think few people living and working in relatively protected environments like New Zealand can imagine the courage and fortitude it takes to be a journalist under an oppressive regime where reporting on those regimes can be physically dangerous.
“And, if they can imagine it, would be able to match that courage in their own lives.”
A third comment was posted by communications adviser and journalist Susan Belt: “I think people are battle-worn after so much general genocide, kids and press included, on the part of Israel. There’s so much press targeting etc that it almost becomes ridiculous to keep posting on it. Stuff and NZME keep running Gaza, Lebanon stuff but because our govt like some others has not made much of a fuss about Israel’s illegal civilian and press killing in Gaza and its unprovoked attack on Iran and illegal forays into Lebanon, it leaves people feeling hopeless.
“I am very pro-Palestinian rights and have been since the 1970s but even my Facebook friends despair at the sad postings I seem to always be doing. They know it’s very bad behaviour but we’re in a trance at the hopelessness of it. When our ally the US is backing Israel (though cooling of late) our govt is too scared to say what’s right because it doesn’t want to offend Trump’s team.”
These comments reminded me that I have been puzzling over the generally poor and weak response from New Zealand journalists over what is currently the toughest moral and ethical challenge of our times. Yet, instead of facing up to the Gaza genocide and the accompanying journacide, most of our media colleagues have preferred to look away and remain silent.
The prevailing attitude is that it is something remote and of little relevance to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a response of denial, astonishing given that there have been protests across the motu against the Israeli genocide — and lately the unjustified US-Israeli war on Iran and fragile peace — for the past 142 weeks: by far the longest and sustained political protests ever in this country, yet largely ignored by the media.
This has led to many public protests over media coverage. These too have rarely been reported.
Palestinian protesters at TVNZ headquarters while demonstrating against the public broadcaster’s coverage of the Israeli war against Gaza on World Press Freedom Day, 3 May 2025. Image: Asia Pacific Report
And the cost in lives of hundreds of Palestinian journalists trying to bear witness on the annihilation of their own communities is deeply shocking. Yet this barely raises a shrug from New Zealand journalists.
In a report released last week by the Freedoms Committee of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a chilling new statistic was revealed — out of an estimated 1200 journalists in Gaza between 60 and 75 percent of them have lost their homes or been forcibly displaced since 7 October 2023.
The report, titled “Media Without Walls”, also said that approximately 265 journalists had been killed since the start of the conflict, by far the highest death toll recorded globally against journalists in a single conflict.
More than 80 percent of media offices and institutions had been completely or partially destroyed, leading to an “almost complete collapse” of journalistic infrastructure, it said.
The report added that journalists in Gaza no longer work from newsrooms but from tents, footpaths and shelter centres, with mobile phones as their primary production tool and intermittent internet dictating when they can publish.
“I lost my home and my office in the same week,” said one displaced journalist, Dr Ahed Farwana. “I no longer have a place to write, but I write from my phone among people, sometimes while searching for water for my family.”
‘Trying to concentrate’
Another Gaza journalist, Ola Kassab, said: “I work from inside a displacement shelter, choosing the quietest corner I can find. The hardest part is not the bombing itself, but trying to concentrate amid the overcrowding and fear.”
Photojournalist Wisam Zughair said: “The camera is no longer the heaviest thing I carry; it is the feeling that I may also be documenting what could happen to me.”
Al Jazeera photojournalist Ahmed Wishah, 25, . . . killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Just two weeks ago, an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Ahmed Wishah, 25, was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. He was the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since 2023.
His targeted murder came just weeks after his brother Mohammed Wishah, who also worked for the Doha-based global television network, was killed in a deliberate Israeli shelling of his car.
Syrian journalists protesting over the killing of reporters in Gaza. Image: AJ screenshot APR
“Let the martyrdom of Mohammed Wishah be the end to the killing of journalists. This is my message to the world . . . Stop the Israeli occupation from targeting journalists.”
Smearing journalists
The routine response of Israeli military authorities is a hamfisted attempt to smear all Gazan journalists as “Hamas terrorists”. There is never any credible evidence to back this up and it is shameful that New Zealand media simply echo these lies from a discredited regime whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a “false balance”.
Al Jazeera called on press freedom organisations and “people of conscience around the world” to take urgent action to safeguard all journalists in the Gaza Strip. Image: AJ screenshot APR
In a statement, Al Jazeera said it condemned the Israeli occupation army’s “baseless accusations”, which sought to “justify its crimes against Al Jazeera journalists and cameramen in Gaza, most recently the killing of cameraman Ahmed Wishah”.
“Since October 2023, the Israeli campaign of incitement has relentlessly spread false allegations and baseless accusations against Al Jazeera staff. The Network considers this smear campaign a transparent and futile attempt to justify the deliberate targeting of journalists and cameramen whose only ‘crime’ has been their courageous determination to document and expose the genocide being perpetrated by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip.
“These attempts deceive no one and cannot obscure the truth witnessed by the world.”
Al Jazeera called on press freedom organisations and “people of conscience around the world” to take urgent action to safeguard all journalists in the Gaza Strip and ensure their safety.
Reporters Without Borders has filed at least five complaints with the ICC over alleged war crimes against journalists, and together with other media freedom groups such as the Foreign Press Association, has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought an Israeli Supreme Court ruling overturning the IDF’s ban on global journalists being allowed into Gaza to see the reality for themselves.
Gaza bloodlust spreading
Another disturbing factor about the slaughter of journalists is the fact that the Israeli bloodlust against journalists in Gaza is spreading also to the illegally occupied West Bank and the invaded Lebanon.
Journacide: The War on Truth Video: Democracy Now!
Irish filmmaker Seán Murray has investigated Israel’s killings of journalists in his new feature documentary Journacide: The War on Truth, which was featured by Democracy Now! earlier this month. Murray says the term “journacide” applies to Israel’s military actions because of the “explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists” as a way to silence the truth.
The filmmaker describes it as “the Gaza doctrine that is now being applied in Lebanon”.
Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman highlighted the attempted killing on June 15 of Iranian journalist Hadi Hoteit, who was working for the news outlet Press TV in southern Lebanon. He was attacked by an Israeli drone while reporting live for his network at Kafr Tebnit.
Although he survived the attack, he was struck by six pieces of shrapnel.
With the latest invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the death toll of journalists has now topped 29.
Murray investigated the killings of four of those journalists for his documentary Journacide.
On March 28, journalists Ali Shoeib and brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed — all together — in an Israeli drone strike on their car.
The following month, on April 22, Amal Khalil was injured in an airstrike and died from her injuries after waiting for hours inside a bombed building as rescuers awaited clearance from Israeli forces to reach her, reports Democracy Now!
About the silence
In a trailer for the documentary, Murray says the film is not about war, it is about the silence. “As Lebanon burns, silence has now become the greatest weapon of oppression. This is a tale of those that fought different, the story of the gatekeepers of truth.”
In the Democracy Now! interview about his film, Murray explores the lengths that Israeli military authorities go to create false narratives about journalists, even to falsifying documents and creating fake images.
“I think Journacide effectively gives the explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists. I think that it fits perfectly. Not only do we see the targeting of journalists, but it’s the double-tap strikes that we see with the Gaza doctrine, that is now being applied in Lebanon.
“So, in the case of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed, the original strike killed Ali and Mohamed, and it was a double tap then that killed Fatima, Mohamed’s sister, in the second strike.
“This is a deliberate targeting of journalists. The reasons behind that is to, of course, silence what is happening in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing that’s going on, the mass war crimes that’s being committed.
“But Lebanon is a little bit different. Israel doesn’t have the geographical repressive abilities that they did in Gaza. And we see that now playing out.”
A wake up call surely for the Middle East realities for New Zealand journalists.
Dr David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch.
It is a peculiar kind of defeat — one dressed in the language of victory. Operation Epic Fury was sold to the world as a decisive strike to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat once and for all.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied Washington for precisely this moment. He got his war. What he didn’t get was the outcome he promised.
The US-Iran MOU is Israel’s strategic nightmare rendered in diplomatic text. And the consequences extend far beyond the terms of any single agreement.
Left out of the room
Let us begin with the most humiliating fact. The MOU’s second paragraph mentions Lebanon three times and declares the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts — without once mentioning Israel.
A new deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon has been announced, including the United States, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar. Israel is excluded from that too.
Think about what that means. The country that triggered this war, that flew alongside American aircraft, that provided the intelligence Netanyahu boasted had been decisive — was not in the room when peace was made.
Washington negotiated Israel’s strategic future without Israel.
Vice-President JD Vance’s message to Israeli critics of Trump and the MOU was blunt: they need to “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”. That is not the language of alliance. That is the language of managed irrelevance.
What Iran kept
The nuclear question — the ostensible casus belli for the entire war — remains unresolved.
The MOU suffices with rhetorical promises, deferring the actual mechanics of blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capacity, with no guarantee of agreement on that most critical issue.
Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal? Untouched. The MOU offers no treatment of Iran’s ballistic missile programme or its patronage of regional proxies — leaving Israel to contend with those threats as before.
Iran’s financial position? All US sanctions on Iran have been lifted, giving Tehran immediate and significant financial relief — resources that will flow into rebuilding military capabilities.
Tehran emerged from this war battered but unbowed, its theocratic system intact, its strategic leverage demonstrated to the entire world.
Foreign Policy and The Atlantic described the outcome as a defeat for the United States and Israel. The BBC’s international editor assessed that while US and Israeli air forces scored tactical victories, they were not enough to avoid strategic defeat.
The death of the Abraham Accords
Let me be categorical: the Abraham Accords are dead.
That architecture — the crown jewel of American-brokered Middle East diplomacy, the grand bargain that promised Arab “normalisation” with Israel in exchange for security guarantees and Palestinian deferral — has been buried by the post-war regional reality now taking shape.
The Saudi-Iran reconciliation summit now gathering momentum tells the whole story.
Riyadh is actively convening Gulf states and Tehran around a new regional order. And at the centre of that order sits the Palestinian question — not deferred, not managed, but central.
Saudi normalisation with Israel, once dangled as the great prize Netanyahu sought, is now explicitly conditional on Palestinian statehood in terms his government categorically rejects and always will.
The Abraham Accords were premised on one fundamental assumption: that Arab states could be peeled away from the Palestinian cause by American inducements and Israeli economic partnerships.
The Iran war has demolished that premise. Arab publics watching Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran have made their governments’ calculations for them. No Arab leader can now normalise with Israel without paying a catastrophic domestic political price.
The Abraham Accords are not merely stalled. They are finished.
Some will argue that normalisation architecture, once built, has institutional momentum that survives political setbacks. This misreads what has changed. It was not merely the political temperature that shifted — it was the foundational premise of the entire enterprise.
The Abraham Accords assumed American power could permanently reshape Arab strategic calculations. The MOU has demonstrated that American power in the Middle East is now conditional, transactional, and self-limiting.
The architecture built on that power has no foundation left to stand on.
The dual hegemony: Iran and Turkey
Most analysts have framed Turkey’s rise as a consequence of Iran’s weakening — the great power stepping into the vacuum left by a damaged adversary. This framing is fundamentally wrong, and it misreads the emerging regional order.
My thesis is this: what this war has produced is not a Turkish replacement of Iranian power, but the consolidation of a dual hegemony over the Middle East — Iran and Turkey together, each dominant in its own sphere, each with its own tools of regional influence, and collectively forming the twin poles around which the new Middle East will organise itself.
Iran has survived this war with something more valuable than military capability — it has demonstrated to every state in the region that it possesses a weapon of genuine mass economic destruction in the Strait of Hormuz, with strategic leverage over both the Gulf region and the world economy that no military strike can eliminate.
Iran will rebuild. Its reconstruction will be funded by sanctions relief. And it will re-emerge as the dominant power of the Persian Gulf and the Shia arc from Baghdad to Beirut.
Battered, yes. Eliminated as a regional hegemon? Absolutely not.
Turkey simultaneously consolidates its own distinct hegemony — Sunni, NATO-anchored, commercially formidable, and diplomatically agile in ways Iran can never be.
Turkey maintains a permanent military base in Qatar. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among its largest defence clients, with Riyadh reportedly in final-stage discussions to join Turkey’s KAAN fifth-generation stealth fighter programme — which would make it the first Gulf state with a stake in an advanced combat aircraft project outside direct American control.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has already called for the formation of a Middle East security pact to build trust and stability across the region after the war.
Crucially, these two hegemonies are not necessarily in fatal conflict with each other. The restraint that Turkey and Iran have historically shown towards one another, particularly at moments of regional and global crisis, constitutes a managed rivalry — one that involves compartmentalisation, coexistence of competing strategic depths, and mutual calculation that outright confrontation serves neither.
They will compete, yes — in Syria, Iraq, and across the Levant. But they will also tacitly coordinate where their interests converge, above all in containing Israeli power and ensuring that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can dictate the regional order.
For Israel, this dual hegemony is a strategic nightmare of the first order. It faced Iran as a declared enemy — isolated, sanctioned, and manageable within a US-led containment architecture. It now faces two hegemonic powers operating across every theatre in which Israeli interests are engaged, one of them a NATO member with a domestically built defence industry and deepening Gulf partnerships that Israeli power cannot easily reach.
Israel traded a weakened, contained adversary for two formidable and rising ones.
Netanyahu’s shattered grand design
History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic vision. Behind the stated objectives of eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme lay a grander ambition — the consolidation of Israeli regional dominance, the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood, and the realisation of a Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the sea, secured by Arab normalisation and American military backing.
That project is now in ruins.
Reports cited Israeli intelligence provided by Netanyahu as a decisive factor in Trump’s authorisation of Operation Epic Fury. He designed this war. He lobbied for it. He provided the intelligence that launched it. And the outcome — Iran surviving with its strategic leverage intact, Turkey ascending, a dual hegemony replacing the old order, the Abraham Accords collapsing, and Palestinian statehood returning irresistibly to the regional agenda — is the precise opposite of everything his grand design required.
The Greater Israel project required three things simultaneously: permanent American backing, Arab acquiescence, and the suppression of Palestinian nationhood. All three pillars have collapsed in the same season.
A recent poll shows that 92.1 percent of Israelis, including Jews and Arabs, believe Iran gained the most from the MOU, and 86 percent hold a negative view of the agreement.
Netanyahu faces elections in September or October. He went to war promising existential resolution. He faces the ballot box having delivered existential ruin.
The greatest blow: The loss of the American shield
But the deepest and most consequential damage inflicted by this war on Israel is not the MOU’s terms, not the dual hegemony, not the death of the Abraham Accords. It is something more fundamental.
Israel can no longer be assured of American support in future conflicts.
This is a tectonic shift in the foundations of Israeli security doctrine. Since 1973, Israel has operated on one unshakeable assumption: that the United States would underwrite its military adventurism, absorb its diplomatic costs, and stand between Israel and strategic consequences. That assumption is now shattered.
Trump refused to share a preliminary text of the MOU with Netanyahu, whose judgment he questioned using multiple expletives, while simultaneously describing Iranian interlocutors as “very rational people who were nice to deal with.” Washington did not merely negotiate over Israel’s head — it negotiated against Israel’s preferences, excluded it from the peace architecture, and then told it to accept the outcome.
The lesson every future Israeli government must now absorb is devastating in its simplicity: America will pursue its own interests. When those interests align with Israeli military action, Washington will partner.
When they diverge — as they did the moment the Strait of Hormuz closure threatened the global economy — Washington will deal. And Israel will not be in the room.
This is not a temporary rupture that a change of American administration will repair. It is a structural shift. The United States has demonstrated, in front of the entire world, that Israeli military adventurism carries costs that Washington will not indefinitely absorb. Every future Israeli prime minister will govern in the shadow of that demonstration.
A bleak horizon
Israel enters this new era already deeply wounded from within.
More than 150,000 people have left Israel in the past two years, and more than 200,000 since the current government took office in December 2022. This is not the normal ebb and flow of migration. A Knesset report described it as a “tsunami” — and those departing are disproportionately the young, educated, tax-paying professionals who constitute the backbone of Israel’s high-tech economy.
For the second consecutive year, more people left Israel than arrived — a negative net migration balance unprecedented in the country’s modern history. Population growth slowed in 2025 for the first time in decades, driven primarily by emigration alongside declining fertility rates and war-related mortality.
More than 25 percent of Israelis are now considering leaving. The number of official requests to terminate residency in 2024 was more than double the total requests made between 2015 and 2021.
For a state that defines itself as the ultimate sanctuary for world Jewry, this exodus carries a verdict more damning than any diplomatic agreement. Jews are leaving Israel because of Israel’s wars. The state founded to make Jews safe has become, in the eyes of growing numbers of its own citizens, a state that makes them perpetually and inescapably unsafe.
The economy mirrors the demography. The departure of high-tech workers — the engineers, physicians, and entrepreneurs who drove Israel’s “Start-Up Nation” identity — carries compounding consequences. Capital, talent, and tax revenue leave together. The sectors that remain are progressively more dependent on state subsidies and less capable of generating the growth that underwrites military spending.
A state in permanent war cannot indefinitely sustain a first-world economy, and the numbers are beginning to reflect that truth.
The only path forward: A Palestinian state
There is only one exit from this strategic catastrophe, and it requires Israel to face a truth it has spent 70 years refusing to acknowledge.
Israel’s long-term survival as a viable state — economically, demographically, diplomatically — now depends on a single political act: the acceptance of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
This is no longer a moral argument, though the moral case is overwhelming. It is a cold strategic calculation. The post-war regional order being assembled — the dual hegemony of Iran and Turkey, the Saudi-led Gulf reconciliation, the death of the Abraham Accords — has Palestinian statehood as its non-negotiable foundation.
Every regional power that matters has made this clear. The price of Israel’s reintegration into a workable Middle Eastern order, and by extension the restoration of something resembling normal economic and diplomatic life, is Palestinian statehood.
Without it, Israel faces permanent regional hostility, no prospect of Arab normalisation, a continuing haemorrhage of its most productive citizens, an economy under sustained pressure, and an American patron whose support is now conditional and transactional rather than unconditional and structural.
The Zionist founders understood something Netanyahu’s generation has forgotten: that Israel’s survival ultimately depends not merely on military power but on legitimacy — the legitimacy that comes from being a state that other states and peoples can live alongside.
That legitimacy has been catastrophically squandered. It can only begin to be rebuilt through justice for the Palestinian people.
The reckoning has arrived. And the path forward, however painful, is clear.
Accept Palestinian statehood — with East Jerusalem as its capital — or face a future of accelerating isolation, demographic decline, and strategic irrelevance in a Middle East that has irrevocably moved on.
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator on geopolitical affairs. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.
Global Voices has interviewed veteran Aotearoa New Zealand writer and educator David Robie who discussed the state of Pacific media, journalism education, and the role of the press in addressing decolonisation and the climate crisis.
Professor Robie was among the 2024 New Zealand Order of Merit awardees and on the inaugural King’s Birthday Honours list for his “services to journalism and Asia-Pacific media education”.
His career in journalism has spanned six decades. He was the founding editor of the Pacific Journalism Review journal in 1994 and in 1996 he established the Pacific Media Watch, a media rights watchdog group. He was head of the journalism department at the University of Papua New Guinea from 1993–1997 and at the University of the South Pacific from 1998–2002. While teaching at the Auckland University of Technology, he founded the Pacific Media Centre in 2007.
Global Voices interviewed him in June 2024 about the challenges faced by journalists in the Pacific and his illustrious career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mong Palatino (MP): What are the main challenges faced by the media in the region?
David Robie (DR): Corruption, viability, and credibility — the corruption among politicians and influence on journalists, the viability of weak business models and small media enterprises, and weakening credibility. After many years of developing a reasonably independent Pacific media in many countries in the region with courageous and independent journalists in leadership roles, many media groups are becoming susceptible to growing geopolitical rivalry between powerful players in the region, particularly China, which is steadily increasing its influence on the region’s media — especially in Solomon Islands — not just in development aid.
However, the United States, Australia and France are also stepping up their Pacific media and journalism training influences in the region as part of “Indo-Pacific” strategies that are really all about countering Chinese influence.
Indonesia is also becoming an influence in the media in the region, for other reasons. Jakarta is in the middle of a massive “hearts and minds” strategy in the Pacific, mainly through the media and diplomacy, in an attempt to blunt the widespread “people’s” sentiment in support of West Papuan aspirations for self-determination and eventual independence.
David Robie talks to the Fabian Society about the Rainbow Warrior, the bombing and French colonial culture in the Pacific Video: Fabian Society
MP: What should be prioritised in improving journalism education in the region?
DR: The university-based journalism schools, such as at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, are best placed to improve foundation journalism skills and education, and also to encourage life-long learning for journalists. More funding would be more beneficial channelled through the universities for more advanced courses, and not just through short-course industry training. I can say that because I have been through the mill both ways — 50 years as a journalist starting off in the “school of hard knocks” in many countries, including almost 30 years running journalism courses and pioneering several award-winning student journalist publications. However, it is important to retain media independence and not allow funding NGOs to dictate policies.
MP: How can Pacific journalists best fulfill their role in highlighting Pacific stories, especially the impact of the climate crisis?
DR: The best strategy is collaboration with international partners that have resources and expertise in climate crisis, such as the Earth Journalism Network to give a global stage for their issues and concerns. When I was still running the Pacific Media Centre, we had a high profile Pacific climate journalism Bearing Witness project where students made many successful multimedia reports and award-winning commentaries. An example is this one on YouTube: Banabans of Rabi: A Story of Survival
MP: What should the international community focus on when reporting about the Pacific?
DR: It is important for media to monitor the Indo-Pacific rivalries, but to also keep them in perspective — so-called ”security” is nowhere as important to Pacific countries as it is to its Western neighbours and China. It is important for the international community to keep an eye on the ball about what is important to the Pacific, which is “development” and “climate crisis” and why China has an edge in some countries at the moment. Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand have dropped the ball in recent years, and are tying to regain lost ground, but concentrating too much on “security”. Listen to the Pacific voices.
There should be more international reporting about the “hidden stories” of the Pacific such as the unresolved decolonisation issues — Kanaky New Caledonia, “French” Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), both from France; and West Papua from Indonesia. West Papua, in particular, is virtually ignored by Western media in spite of the ongoing serious human rights violations. This is unconscionable.
This article was first published by Global Voices on 25 June 2024. It has been republished with permission.
Being passive must come after being passionate and active.
Some know this. Some don’t.
So many people still don’t know this. I keep hoping they will learn, know, care and do something.
I recall a line about journalism many years ago, that good journalists write the truth about social issues so that the right people will read about them and do something to change those social issues, the terrible wrongs against humanity. But instead the news is read by the wrong people who continue to do the wrong things.
And I would add to this by so many who retreat into a zen state of “what I don’t see doesn’t affect me” or believing that if they pray to some great consciousness the ripple effect will go out.
I say we need both. We need to write about wrongs, read about wrongs, be active about those wrongs, then retreat and meditate so we can come out again and continue to forge a positive rather than a negative cycle.
Dr David Robie and a small number of other journalists have been doing this for decades.
Decades.
David was a journalist activist on the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.
Seven months after the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland harbour in 1985, David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire was published.
The book tells the story of the Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage and the bombing. David won the 1985 New Zealand Media Peace Prize for his coverage.
David Robie’s 2025 talk to Greenpeace activists in Matauri Bay. Video: Greenpeace
Several editions followed
Several editions of the book have followed, each providing updates to the events. To mark the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in July last year, Little Island Press released an updated edition of the book with a prologue by former NZ prime minister Helen Clark.
It is a brilliant moving account of an incident we should never forget. An incident our children should know about. A terrorist action by a country against our country.
Why? Because the French were bombing the Pacific, testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific, ruining the habitat of indigenous people. Not giving a fig about them. I love so much about France it pains me.
When I lived in France I asked French people who supported nuclear testing why they didn’t test nuclear bombs in their own harbours they shrugged. Some followed up by racist stuff about people in those islands.
Of course there were — and there are good French people — against the racism and the war on nature. But many did not know about it, many did not hear about it. Many did not think about it.
Like here, like now.
David’s book Eyes of Fire needs to be taught in schools. Read it, buy it, share it. It is our history. And one we should never forget. Lest it happens again. Because it is happening.
Chain in supply of sniper guns
Right now we have a NOIA building in Ōtautahi Christchurch. NOIA makes armaments. It supplies armies. It is a chain in the supply of sniper guns used by Zionist terrorists to kill little children in Gaza.
Here in Aotearoa. The worst leaders still cause the worst damage and they raise soldiers on nationalist propaganda. And we support those toxic leaders by supplying their armies with arms.
And the war is still being waged against nature. Because nature is not treated as a friend, a mother, a lover, by these people. She is bombed to smithereens.
Buy books by Palestinian authors and anti-Zionist authors who speak out about the genocide, how it was a long term plan to get rid of the Indigenous people of the land, how the massacres started decades ago and never stopped.
Some of us have been there and we know. Some of us have not been there and we know, just as we knew apartheid was wrong without witnessing it in action.
The one good thing about social media is we can turn away but we can never say we did not see. Those poor children. Those poor aid workers. Those poor journalists. The truth about this.
Can we do something? Yes!
We can do our bit first then retreat. Earn the retreat.
You are a representative of peace. You are a representative of humanity. You are a representative of nature.
Then when you look at the sun sinking or rising over our placid ocean you know you have done your best for the people on the other side, for the people on this side, and for nature.
Breathing in the peace you are helping to protect is far healthier than breathing in peace that you are doing nothing to protect.
Saige England is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, The Seasonwife. In her previous career as a journalist, Saige won a number of Qantas Media Awards for feature writing and the New Zealand Media Peace Award. She has worked in various conflict zones including Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East.
Something significant and revelatory just happened in the New Zealand Parliament. I was present at today’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting when things kicked off between the Foreign Minister and humanitarian aid activist Hāhona Ormsby, one of the New Zealanders who survived kidnapping and beatings by Israeli forces in May.
Despite the presence of many well-known pro-Palestinian activists, there was no security in the room when things turned spicy. By the time security raced into the room the minister had lost all composure and repeatedly shouted at Ormsby, “You’re a liar!”
Hāhona may have breached parliamentary rules when he rose to challenge Winston Peters but he felt it was a price worth paying.
Despite the presence of many well-known pro-Palestinian activists, there was no security in the Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting room when things turned spicy. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz/1News screenshot
“Is it New Zealand First, Winston? Or is it Israel First? Ormsby shot at the minister, leader of the New Zealand First Party. Turning to see the speaker, Peters appeared to recognise the tattooed face (mata ora) of Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto).
The chair tried to shut things down but Ormsby continued, “Are you going to sanction Israel? Are we going to investigate Israel for the people on the fleet that were brutally beaten and tortured?”
When Ormsby identified himself as one of the activists who had been held captive and severely beaten by the Israelis, Peters shouted, “Get out of here! You’re a liar!”
Another activist shot back: “You’re a war criminal.”
A priceless moment
This was a priceless moment because it revealed something enormously important: Peters believes what Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli ambassador are saying and denies the evidence of 430 activists who were kidnapped and taken to Israel in May.
Some were hospitalised immediately on arriving in Türkiye. Winston takes the word of indicted war criminals in preference to medical examiners and lawyers who attended the activists on arrival in Türkiye.
Denying his own lying eyes, he waves away the black eyes, broken noses, deep wounds and other clearly visible injuries. Peters said there was “no evidence of brutality”.
Gaza flotilla activist Hāhona Ormsby’s (right) message to Winston Peters . . . “Is it New Zealand First, Winston? Or is it Israel First?” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
By impugning the good name of some of our finest citizens Winston Peters betrays his duty to defend New Zealand and puts at risk Kiwis who continue their non-violent campaign to open a humanitarian corridor to the suffering people of Palestine.
“Welcome to Hell” – Inside Israeli torture prisons for Palestinians. Image: www.btselem.org
Meanwhile, even Australia has, on instruction from Winston’s counterpart Penny Wong, launched an investigation into testimonies of rape and torture by Australian members of the Global Sumud Flotilla.
Countries such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have issued stinging rebukes. Malaysia is taking Israel to the International Court of Justice over the kidnapping and violence dished out to their citizens.
What happened to the Gaza humanitarian flotillas? Video: Al Jazeera
Surprise for Global Sumud Delegation
Just the day before, to the surprise of the Global Sumud Delegation, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs (after having done absolutely nothing since Israeli forces attacked the flotilla in international waters) sent them an email offering to pass on any information about mistreatment to the Israelis.
It triggered suspicion as to motives. Today’s exchange reveals that MFAT and its minister had already made up their minds.
Rana Hamida of Global Sumud Aotearoa said: “Knowing we were coming to Wellington, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent us an email yesterday asking us to provide information on what happened to our activists. The message was that they would put this to the Israelis — in other words: they will leave it to Israel to be both the criminal and the judge. That’s not good enough.”
Ormsby’s action today in a parliamentary select committee clearly breached rules. It was, however, acting in the long tradition of those who have the courage to oppose complicity with tyranny and oppression.
As such, he stands in the company of the great Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, my friend and former CIA veteran Ray McGovern, Greta Thunberg and so many others who have raised their citizen voices in the halls of power and calmly accepted the indignity of being frog-marched out of buildings for doing so.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and he hosts solidarity.co.nz
The coastline on Futuna Island in southern Vanuatu . . . escalating rhetoric comes after diplomatic confrontations embroiling France, Vanuatu and Kanaky New Caledonia over the Matthew and Hunter islands. Image: Ben Bohane
In the great expanse of oceans, a number of small, remote islands are having their moment in the spotlight. From the Chagos islands to the South China Sea, a string of islands have been thrust suddenly onto the frontline of geopolitics. Now a long-simmering tussle over two rocky islands is creating tension in the South Pacific. Ben Bohane investigates.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Ben Bohane
South of Vanuatu, in deep ocean teeming with fish and birdlife, lie two contested islands being fought over by Vanuatu (population 350,000) and France, which has the largest EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) in the world, totalling 11 million square kilometres.
Little wonder Vanuatu is framing this as a “David versus Goliath” fight. Vanuatu calls these islands by their ancient kastom names: Umaenupne and Umaeneg.
On most maps, however, they are called by what British sea captains named them: Matthew and Hunter islands. France has controlled them since 1965.
Tanna’s Chief Peter Marcel, president of the Nikolaten Council of Chiefs . . . the disputed islands play a crucial role in the kastom and spiritual life of Vanuatu’s southern islanders. Image: Ben Bohane
France derives much prestige, wealth and a permanent UN Security Council seat thanks to its overseas territories and vast maritime domain, spread across multiple oceans. Now some politicians and security analysts in France are worried these two islands taken from Vanuatu before its independence in 1980 could prompt sovereignty claims in other jurisdictions, from Mexico to Madagascar, if Matthew and Hunter are returned to Vanuatu.
Responding to a story in Le Figaro newspaper that discussed the possibility of French President Emmanuel Macron ceding these islands as a “major symbolic turning point”, French far-right politician Marie Le Pen tweeted in December last year:
“Let’s be clear: national sovereignty is not negotiable and cannot be surrendered. The French people do not expect Macron’s government to carve up our overseas territories, which are real levers of power, influence and economic development, behind their backs, but to give itself the means to protect and defend them.”
Rising in Parliament in late May, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat issued a response of sorts. He thundered that France was “dragging its feet” on negotiations following two postponements and was withholding relevant historical documents relating to France’s claim.
A commitment, but no resolution
French President Macron agreed to formal negotiations to resolve the issue when he visited Vanuatu in 2023, saying it could be “resolved by Christmas”. He renewed this commitment in a meeting with Prime Minister Napat in July 2025.
Years later, there is still no resolution. PM Napat warned:
“We will not take a passive approach. And we will not abandon our claim. We will defend our sovereignty with determination…
“We have carefully evaluated all of the legal options that are available to us. We are trying the diplomatic pathway, but we are also ready to change strategy as soon as is necessary.”
The escalating rhetoric comes after diplomatic confrontations embroiling France, Vanuatu and Kanaky New Caledonia. A trade delegation from New Caledonia arrived in Port Vila in May to boost economic ties but was quickly overshadowed by a diplomatic spat when one of the delegation, the new president of New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) movement, Christian Téin, met with Vanuatu’s PM Napat.
The coastline on Futuna Island in southern Vanuatu . . . escalating rhetoric comes after diplomatic confrontations embroiling France, Vanuatu and Kanaky New Caledonia over the Matthew and Hunter islands. Image: Ben Bohane
Vanuatu has long supported independence for its indigenous “Kanaky” neighbours and meetings between Vanuatu and the FLNKS are quite routine. But when Téin affirmed to the local Daily Post newspaper in a front page splash that “Matthew and Hunter islands belong to Vanuatu” then France’s ambassador weighed in on social media and the New Caledonia government suspended all trade ties with Vanuatu.
Again, this is nothing new — indigenous Kanak chiefs have long recognised Vanuatu’s claims to Matthew and Hunter islands, declaring they had no kastom links to them and France should not have included them as part of New Caledonia, which France did in 1965.
Chiefs signed Keamu Accord
In 2009 Vanuatu and Kanak chiefs signed the Keamu Accord acknowledging that Matthew and Hunter belonged to Vanuatu.
France finds itself battling on three fronts in the Pacific . . . pro-independence FLNKS president Christian Téin affirmed to the Vanuatu Daily Post newspaper in a front page splash that “Matthew and Hunter islands belong to Vanuatu” . Image: Ben Bohane
France finds itself battling on three fronts in the Pacific at the moment — rising independence movements in New Caledonia, Tahiti (French Polynesia), and now an increasingly heated dispute with Vanuatu over Matthew and Hunter islands.
Vanuatu claims its southern islanders from Tanna, Aneityum and Futuna were regularly visiting these two disputed islands long before the first European got wet in the Pacific Ocean. These islands weren’t of much interest to British and French ships navigating the seas of the 18th and 19th century due to their small size and remoteness.
Both are volcanic but only Matthew remains an active volcano. Matthew (Umaenupne) was first named by British sea captain Thomas Gilbert in 1788 who named it after the owner of his ship. Gilbert would later bequeath his name to the Gilbert and Ellice islands which today form the nation of Kiribati.
Matthew and Hunter islands . . . framing the dispute as a “David versus Goliath” fight, Vanuatu calls these islands by their ancient kastom names: Umaenupne and Umaeneg.
Hunter (Umaeneg) island was named by British captain Thomas Fearn aboard his trading ship Hunter in 1798. It is thought he also named it Hunter to honour Vice-Admiral John Hunter who was then the Governor of NSW in Australia, the second after Arthur Phillip.
Hunter Street in Sydney and the Hunter Valley are similarly named after him.
The dispute over the islands primarily has its origins in the actions of another Australian named Bob Paul, who was a planter and aviation pioneer living on Tanna Island in the 1950s and 1960s, back when Vanuatu was known as the “Condominium of the New Hebrides” and jointly administered by Britain and France.
Australian planter and aviation pioneer Bob Paul living Vanuatu in the 1950s and 1960s . . . played a key role in the dispute over the islands primarily because of his actions. Image: Screenshot BB
‘He did a lot for our island’
Today Bob Paul is well remembered by chiefs on Tanna, including Peter Marcel, president of the Nikolaten Council of Chiefs. He told me that “Bob Paul was the first to show us how to run a business, how to run trade stores and bring in tourists. He did a lot for our island”.
In 1962, Paul flew over Matthew and Hunter islands and assessing from his map the two islands had not been claimed by anyone, he decided to claim them for himself and his flying friend Henri Martinet.
“It was a bit of a lark when he claimed them” says Paul’s son Brett from his home in Queensland, who remembers an idyllic childhood growing up on Tanna. “But my father always believed the islands ultimately belong to Vanuatu.”
Paul and Martinet’s claim in 1962 prompted the British and French Resident Commissioners to make inquiries about who the islands belonged to.
The British consulted their Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Admiralty. They also asked France and Australia.
The French then made internal inquiries and concluded that, based on its own internal investigation, France considered the islands to be part of New Caledonia. Britain was content with that view, and together they wrote to the Joint Court to advise that the islands belonged to New Caledonia.
Paul and Martinet’s claim was struck off.
Ni-Vanuatu never consulted
At no stage in the process were any Ni-Vanuatu consulted, so the decision was made by European colonial powers before Vanuatu’s independence. France’s claim to sovereignty over Matthew and Hunter islands has been recognised internationally ever since they were handed to them in 1965.
Vanuatu’s claim is rooted in kastom (culture) and its ancient connections to the islands, long before the first French sailor turned up on their shores. Vanuatu enshrined their own sovereignty over the islands in legislation upon the declaration of their independence.
Many would also argue that any deal done by Britain and France in the colonial period, with no consultation of the Indigenous population, is legally null and void today.
While a European mindset focuses on the strategic and resource value of such islands, what they ignore is the kastom value of these islands to Vanuatu. Matthew and Hunter islands play a crucial role in the kastom and spiritual life of Vanuatu’s southern islanders.
Indeed these islands aren’t just “rocks in the sea” but the home of their god Matjajiki. Chiefs from Vanuatu’s southern islands claim the two islands also contain ancient cemeteries where their ancestors had elected to be buried close to their god Matjajiki and were tabu for any visitors.
More importantly, chiefs say they need Matjajiki as the spirit who brings their food and fish.
“Matjajiki works to bring life to our gardens for six months every year — he is our gardening spirit. After the annual yam harvest he eats the first yam, drinks some kava and goes to rest for the rest of the year on Umaenupne and Umaeneg,” says chief Peter Marcel on Tanna. “Without the power of Matjajiki, nothing would grow.”
Veneration of ancestral spirits
While the islanders all identify as Christian, their veneration of ancestral spirits and the benevolent work of Matjajiki is at the heart of their identity. Magic stones can still be found in their gardens and rituals of thanks still performed through the cycle of yam planting and harvesting.
Matthew and Hunter are important places in the cosmology and some even say survival of southern Vanuatu.
France’s possession of these islands has cut the ability of Ni-Vanuatu from visiting and paying respect to their god. When a boat carrying chiefs in 1983 to plant the Vanuatu flag and perform kastom rituals arrived at the two islands, they were intercepted by a French navy ship and forced to turn around. No chiefs or ships from Vanuatu have been allowed since.
According to Tony Tevi, a geologist who is Vanuatu’s Director of Oceans and Marine Resources, geology and tectonic plates affirm Vanuatu’s ownership since “Matthew and Hunter sit on the Pacific plate, not the Australian plate which New Caledonia is on. Also there are no volcanoes in New Caledonia but plenty here in Vanuatu”.
For him, a further “insult” comes from France conducting military exercises on the islands every year, using a place reserved for the gods as target practice.
“The French military visit every year with their patrol boats to claim ‘effective occupation’ and do their live firing exercises on the very place — the very place! — that for us in Vanuatu is one of the most sacred and important places. That is very unacceptable”.
Vanuatu and France are expected to resume their next round of negotiations, in Paris, at the end of this month.
Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist, producer and policy analyst who has reported the Asia-Pacific region for nearly 30 years. He has contributed articles to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.
It isn’t Tehran led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington, writes Jonathan Cook.
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
Could it be that Israel’s 30-year narrative about Iran — one that persuaded US President Donald Trump to wage a criminal and disastrous war of aggression — was always a fiction, an invention cooked up in Tel Aviv?
Far from Tehran posing an existential danger to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for decades, might Israel’s real fear be that a stronger Iran would undermine its unique leverage over Washington, threatening its status as the region’s sole — and unmonitored — nuclear power?
Might large parts of the globe be facing economic meltdown simply so that Israel can remain the Middle East’s top dog — an unaccountable apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinian people and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon?
We got a definitive answer last week, care of The New York Times. It is an uncompromising yes to all of these questions.
The newspaper reported that Netanyahu not only mis-sold Trump on the idea of quick regime change in Iran following a short “shock and awe” bombing campaign. He also identified to the White House who was going to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader.
Extraordinarily, according to The Times, Netanyahu named the man for the job as former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The aim at the start of the air campaign was for Israel to kill Khamenei, then liberate Ahmadinejad from house arrest by striking the guards who were confining him.
Presumably, Ahmadinejad was then supposed to storm the citadel and seize the keys to the palace. But only Khamenei’s assassination went according to plan.
Ahmadinejad, who had reportedly been consulted on the scheme beforehand, is believed to have been injured in the Israeli strike near his home. He got cold feet, possibly suspecting he was being set up for assassination too, and went into hiding. His current whereabouts and medical condition are unknown.
Ultimate bogeyman Neither US nor Israeli officials would comment to The Times on the alleged regime-change plot, a scheme that the newspaper called “audacious”. That is the understatement of all understatements.
The idea that Ahmadinejad had the popular support, let alone the religious authority and military muscle behind him, to take on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s crack military force responsible for protecting the clerical regime, is for the birds.
That anyone in the White House took this plan seriously, let alone acted on it, is a genuinely staggering notion. But the proposition that Ahmadinejad could retake the reins of power in Iran is possibly the least preposterous part of the scheme.
Fast forward two decades, and Netanyahu reportedly now thinks Ahmadinejad is the best person to lead Iran; the person for whom it was worth killing Khamenei
While younger readers may not recognise Ahmadinejad’s name, everyone else should. He made headlines on an almost weekly basis during much of his eight-year presidency, starting in 2005. Why? Because Israel turned him into the ultimate bogeyman.
After neighbouring Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was toppled and executed in 2006, following an illegal invasion by the US and Britain, Ahmadinejad was hyped as the new implacable threat to regional peace.
Claims about Ahmadinejad first breathed an illusory substance into Israel’s now-unchallenged script that a supposedly fanatical, deranged Iran would leave no stone unturned in seeking to destroy Israel. Ahmadinejad, we were told time and again, was seeking to pursue a nuclear bomb — even after Khamenei had issued a religious edict in 2003 strictly banning its development.
In 2006, Ehud Olmert, then the Israeli prime minister, warned the world that Ahmadinejad was a “psychopath of the worst kind”, adding: “He speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation.”
Olmert was echoing a panic-inducing campaign led by Netanyahu, then Israel’s opposition leader, that Iran needed to be attacked immediately to save Israel and the world.
“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” Netanyahu told a meeting of American Jewish leaders that same year. “And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.”
Of Ahmadinejad, he said: “Believe him and stop him… He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state.”
Under Ahmadinejad, Iran was supposedly hellbent on destroying Israel, turning it into a giant Auschwitz. Also in 2006, Netanyahu told Israeli Army Radio: “Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran’s tour of destruction.”
Ahmadinejad was so unhinged, Netanyahu said, that he would not stop at Israel’s eradication: “Iran is developing ballistic missiles that would reach America, and now they prepare missiles with an adequate range to cover the whole of Europe.”
Iran has won the war. Trump and Netanyahu now face a reckoning Video: The David Hearst Podcast
‘Genocidal intent’ A short time later, Israel’s fear-mongering operation reached a crescendo in London.
Netanyahu told members of the British Parliament that Ahmadinejad had to be urgently brought before the International Criminal Court — the war crimes court in The Hague — for his “messianic apocalyptic view of the world”.
Irony of ironies, Netanyahu — who 20 years later is a fugitive from that same court, accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza — emphasised Ahmadinejad’s supposed genocidal intent towards Israel.
“In the 1930s, too, no one believed that Hitler was capable of taking action because he didn’t explicitly talk about wiping out the Jewish people,” Netanyahu told British MPs. “In contrast, the Iranian president publicly announces his intentions and no one is trying to stop him.”
Michael Gove, a former Conservative cabinet minister who chaired the meeting, enthusiastically agreed, ignoring a confounding fact: that thousands of Jews have lived peacefully in Iran for centuries.
Gove told the meeting that Ahmadinejad’s “rhetoric is more than worrying, but tantamount to an incitement of genocide”.
Gove’s concern about genocide has not subsequently extended to Gaza. He has repeatedly denounced anyone, including legal experts and Holocaust scholars, who has noted Israel’s genocide there.
In the midst of the mass slaughter in Gaza, Gove even called for the Israeli military to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is not Tehran led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington.
Smoke and mirrors Two decades ago, the message from Netanyahu was clear: Ahmadinejad was so rabidly antisemitic that he deserved to be compared to Hitler.
Ahmadinejad was so eager to pursue a nuclear weapons programme that he was prepared to defy the country’s supreme religious leader. He was so mentally unstable that he was ready to use those weapons to exterminate Israel, even though such a move would ensure a retaliatory nuclear counter-strike on his own country.
Lest we forget, Ahmadinejad had a reputation for such ruthless crackdowns on political opponents that Amnesty International noted in 2014 that his rule had “sounded the death knell for academic freedom in Iran”.
Yet, fast forward two decades, and Netanyahu reportedly now thinks Ahmadinejad is the best person to lead Iran; the person for whom it was worth killing Khamenei, Iran’s most influential opponent of nuclear weapons.
The New York Times reports that in recent years, there were strong suspicions inside Iran that Israel, Britain and the US were cultivating ties with Ahmadinejad and those around him — suspicions that now seem to be confirmed by Israel’s apparent regime-change plan.
The newspaper further reports that Ahmadinejad had recently travelled to both Guatemala and Hungary, countries with very close ties to Israel.
Does any of this make sense? And yet for Western media, the fact that Netanyahu was championing Ahmadinejad as Iran’s saviour, and that the US administration wholeheartedly bought into this idea, is little more than “surprising”.
In truth, it wrecks Israel’s entire narrative about Iran. It is a telling reminder of the yawning gap between what we have been told about Iran for decades, and what has actually been going on.
Image and reality bear almost no resemblance to each other. This has all been smoke and mirrors.
‘Wiped off the map’ In my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, I pointed out that nothing Israel was telling us about its Middle Eastern rival could be accepted at face value — least of all Israel’s assertion that Ahmadinejad was a Jew-hating “new Hitler”.
Many of the claims promoted 20 years ago by Israel about Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intent stemmed from a mistranslation of a speech in which the Iranian leader had quoted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
According to Western politicians and media, Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” — widely portrayed as an ambition to launch a nuclear strike on Israel.
The disinformation about Iran should have been all too glaring back in 2006, had any of it been reported properly – just as it should be now
In fact, Ahmadinejad had been repeating Khomeini’s observation that Israel could not survive indefinitely in the form of an illegitimate Jewish supremacist state oppressing another people. He was pointing out that Israel’s days as a racist state were numbered, just as apartheid South Africa’s had been.
The sentiment behind Khomeini’s statement should be much clearer in the present circumstances, when it is Israel, not Iran, that has been busy wiping people off the map — in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
Similarly, Israel and its Western allies made a great deal of noise in 2006 when Ahmadinejad called what was widely misrepresented as a “Holocaust denial” conference in Tehran. In fact, Ahmadinejad had organised what was intended to be a provocative — and to some, offensive — stunt to challenge Western taboos about Israel and underscore the West’s hypocrisy towards Muslims.
Ahmadinejad’s point was twofold: firstly, if Muslims are not entitled to have their beliefs and sensitivities respected by Westerners — as evidenced by the 2005 “Danish cartoon affair” and the “free speech” defence for presenting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad — why should Westerners expect their own sensitivities about Israel and the Holocaust to be exempt from challenge?
He also wanted to dissect the Western belief that someone else, the Palestinian people, should pay a heavy price, including decades of dispossession and abuse, for the West’s crimes against Europe’s Jews.
Horror show The disinformation about Iran should have been all too glaring back in 2006, had any of it been reported properly — just as it should be now, two decades later, were Western journalists doing their job rather than acting as stenographers for Israel and the White House.
The lies, now as then, serve the same end: to justify crushing Iran — then through sanctions, later through the addition of illegal bombing — so that Israel’s right to trample over the lives of people across the region without consequence can be protected.
Iran, now refusing to release its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz and the global supply of oil, is demanding that the price include an end to US backing for the Israeli-directed horror show in the Middle East.
Like a spoiled toddler, Trump is thrashing around — while cashing in on the volatility of the oil markets — trying to impose the old rules, when the terms of the confrontation are no longer under his exclusive control.
His latest tantrum — one cooked up in Tel Aviv as much as Washington — is that most Arab states, including Iran’s neighbours in the Gulf, be forced to sign the so-called Abraham Accords with Israel. This is being presented as the framework for a regional “peace deal” involving Iran.
In truth, it is the very opposite.
The accords are designed to cement Israel’s status as the Middle East’s top dog, subordinating Arab states’ interests to Israel’s, and thereby isolating Iran in the region and leaving the Palestinian people and Lebanon to a genocidal Israel’s mercy.
This is another swindle, like Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which dresses up US and Israeli criminal aggression and genocide as “peacemaking”.
What the past 20 years of lies and misdirections have sought to hide is a simple fact: it is not Tehran that is led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington.
Since the pair launched their criminal war of aggression against Iran three months ago, Tehran has shown restraint, acted with caution, and displayed a willingness to negotiate in good faith. Too bad there are no responsible adults on the other side with whom it can make a deal.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye and republished with permission.
Pink Panther and the new Karang-a-hape CRL station . . . awaiting launch date. "I am excited about the soon-to-be-opening City Rail Link and the new neighbourhood station is going to inject sparkling life (providing the modernity doesn’t eclipse the iconic K Road character)." Image: David Robie/Café Pacific
For this edition of Kāpū Tī with Antony, I sit down with journalist and academic, Dr David Robie. A professor of journalism who has worked in Aotearoa and abroad, David is a Central Aucklander and regular visitor who is highly engaged in the City Centre. We sit down for a cuppa — coffee on this occasion and what a delight it was.
Kāpū Tī with Antony conversation with David Robie at the Little Melba café. Image: The Vertical
Kia ora David, this is a column that brings the interviewer and interviewee together over tea and today we are enjoying coffee together — do you drink tea?
Antony, I have to confess that I rarely drink tea, and when I do I feel vaguely conspiratorial and subversive. Selling out on my notorious coffee habits. Although visiting some tea plantations and a tea culture museum in the mountains near Taipei a couple of years ago, it was a fascinating experience and I became tempted — for a day or two.
How do you take your tea?
When I do take it (for a break from coffee), I go for green teas, or with lemon and ginger – just tea bags, not via the lovely little teapots my wife Del has.
You’re hosting afternoon tea at your home, who are your top five guests?
You mean a wish list? Francesca Albanese, Jonathan Cook, Wendy Bacon, Mehdi Hasan and Abbas Araghchi. But then, I am sure they’re all primarily coffee drinkers.
Now you’re not a City Centre local, we in the City Centre would almost describe you [in Inner City Grey Lynn], jokingly, as “semi-rural” — tell me about your relationship to the City Centre.
Yes, I am a fringe local, about a 20 minute walk if you like (although I use the many buses at our disposal – let’s have free public transport like in Dunkirk and Montpellier in France; Tallinn, Estonia; Luxembourg and a host of other progressive cities). But I am a regular townie and love the way the city has been becoming far more pedestrian friendly with blended streets. Although I must confess I have long wanted Queen Street to be totally pedestrian like Brisbane’s Queen Street.
Pink Panther and the new Karang-a-Hape CRL station . . . awaiting launch date. “I am excited about the soon-to-be-opening City Rail Link and the new neighbourhood station is going to inject sparkling life (providing the modernity doesn’t eclipse the iconic K Road character).” Image: David Robie/Café Pacific
What are your favourites parts to the City? For instance, if you were hosting visitors, where do you like to take them?
The Viaduct, although I am not very keen on luxury motor yachts — an insult to green footprints; Silo Park is better for a walk and with the night and fish markets. Not sure whether Karangahape Road precinct counts for “City Centre”, but I love the quirky bohemian atmosphere there and I am excited about the soon-to-be-opening City Rail Link and the new neighbourhood station is going to inject sparkling life (providing the modernity doesn’t eclipse the iconic K Road character). Also, the Ellen Melville Centre and Freyberg Place have a really appealing sense of community space.
Queen Street has become more pedestrian friendly with the widening of the eastern footpath and improved seating and planting. Do you feel Queen Street has improved?
Yes, it has improved — but not enough. In fact, it is a bit schizophrenic at the moment — the eastern side is more pedestrian and cyclist friendly, but the western is still captive to a fossil fuel regime. It is confused about what it is, so lacks a genuine “heart of Tāmaki Makaurau” identity. As I mentioned earlier, I would rather see it as totally pedestrian like Brisbane’s Queen Street.
There’s strong history of citizens’ assembly and protest on Queen Street, you’ve had a long history of activism, what’s your feelings about Queen Street as a civic space of national significance?
Love it! One of the best features of Queen Street is its photogenic and audio qualities for protest photography. In many ways, I feel I have been almost living every weekend in the urban heart troika at Aotea Square, Queen Street, Te Komititanga Square — either at rallies or marches. Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau has now hosted 132 [now 138] consecutive weekly rallies for an independent Palestine and against the Gaza genocide.
That is an extraordinary track record for the city — and far exceeds the longevity over any other issue. The creativity, sounds and ingenuity of protesters is impressive. Having lived through the annual May Day and other protests while living in Paris, France, some years ago, I think we can be truly proud of Auckland.
Belated republication from The Vertical City Centre newsletter April/May edition.
City Centre fringe dweller David Robie at a Queen Street Stop Wars Aotearoa rally. “In many ways, I feel I have been almost living every weekend in the urban heart troika at Aotea Square, Queen Street, Te Komititanga Square – either at rallies or marches.” Image: David Robie/FB
