Okay, so we’re not at war… yet. Israel is really trying though. Netanyahu has committed to wiping out as much of Palestine as he can get away with, and at the rate it’s going, America might let him blitz them all. And if Israel don’t wipe out the entire strip, Hamas won’t go away for them — the organisation might go to ground or become dormant for a time, but we’ll see it or a replacement spring up again in 10-20 years time unless a functional two-state solution is agreed to as the result of these atrocities.
Call me a skeptic, I guess.
While Israelis might be protesting in the streets right now for the lives of their citizens, the country contains a huge orthodox denomination that’s the reason Netanyahu has held power for so long (and he himself has in turn grown their demographic through his policy, at the same time that he was committing to actions that would further inflame tensions between Israel and Gaza, leading to the October 7th massacre).
Once the bombing stops and Netanyahu has to answer to his people, he will likely be replaced, but I do not expect that whatever government results from this will be elected by a people who want to hand Palestinians their liberation, and also, crucially, give back the land and orchards and homes they’ve been taking from them this entire time. The reality of settling your democracy on someone else’s land and then distributing their land amongst the people is that the people become quite resistant to giving it — any of it — back. There are 700,000 Israeli settlers living illegally in the West Bank alone.
In a repetition of events that shows us history is an ever-looping circle, much the same incentive was used by Hitler to cement his power and support in the 1930s. Jewish-owned businesses taken from those arrested or fled were given to non-Jewish Germans in a process referred to as Aryanisation. A value of between $220-$320 billion dollars is estimated to have been taken by the Nazi party. The difference is that in Germany, the Jews had no land to take due to prior persecution, and now in Palestine, due to prior persecution the Palestinians have only land.
How did we get here?
Both World Wars were both incredibly important for New Zealand. While our impact on the conflict can be questioned, their impact on us cannot.
World War I saw us tied by the apron-strings to Britain, troops and all. Support for the Allies was a given, but how and how much came down the decision of the Coalition War Cabinet. William Massey worked (disharmoniously) with Joseph Ward to guide us through these trying years, and with Massey in the War Cabinet, New Zealand pushed her way onto the global stage. Notably, his wartime leadership was popular enough that he regained the Prime Ministership (by himself, this time) in the post-War election.
By World War II, still smarting from the loss of life caused by having our troops fighting under British Command, New Zealand (with Australia) was ready to take a more independent stance under, briefly, Michael Joseph Savage and then Peter Fraser. There was never a question as to which side we would be on, but again the question of how much we would commit (or would need to commit) needed to be determined by Cabinet. Fraser readily recognised that this war would be different to the last, requiring more input from New Zealand and played at much higher stakes.
Not everyone shared his opinion, making it difficult for Fraser to enact measures to progress our contribution to the war, which took up all his focus. This resistance perhaps resulted in the authoritarian approach he assumed as party leader — and later as leader of the nation when he introduced conscription, much to his party’s consternation. They feared the public would not accept it; particularly, Fraser himself had opposed conscription in the previous war. But he understood the danger of the Nazis, stating that it was this time for a “worthy cause”. He must have been convincing enough, because in the end, the majority of New Zealanders accepted conscription as a necessary evil.
As our wartime Prime Minister, Fraser placed great importance in retaining control over our own military, rather than allowing the British to view and use New Zealand troops as an extension of their own forces, a position he furthered after the disastrous Battle of Crete by retaining final say over troop deployment. When Japan entered the war, he made the call to keep New Zealand’s troops in the Middle East instead of calling them home, leaving America to defend the nation, a move that went strongly against public opinion at the time.
A mutiny by battle-weary troops challenged Fraser’s reelection bid in 1943. He arranged a three-month furlough for 6,000 men to return home, hoping to bolster support, but this backfired as the relieved troops were angered by the numbers of men in reserved operations, and that the unions were diverting extra pay to munitions workers over them. They refused to return to the front. Some men managed to secure exemptions; the rest were imprisoned and then forced back to the war.
Post-war, Fraser suggested New Zealand claim its independence as Australia had, but this was unpopular with National until three years later when National changed their mind with the abolition of the legislative council. Despite wanting New Zealand to stand on its own feet, Fraser believed strongly in the Commonwealth and its promise of mutual defence — so strongly in fact that he refused to recognise when Ireland left it.
Fraser was pivotal in the formation of the United Nations, becoming the unofficial voice for smaller states and opposing permanent powers of veto. He was elected Chairman of one of them main committees of the UN Security Council, where his skills and principles earned him great respect as a statesman; this would later cement New Zealand’s own favourable international reputation.
Labour eventually lost popularity, the after-effects of the long-lasting war causing a shift in public opinion. Fraser, who had excelled at making firm and difficult decisions during wartime, found his forceful style did not work so well in times of peace, and he was punished for his slow removal of war-time restrictions. After a close win in the 1946 election, Labour lost the majority in 1949.
It’s been observed that while Savage was beloved, Peter Fraser was respected. He steered us steadfast through the first World War that we truly participated in as an independent and sovereign state. His outstanding reputation within the international community became New Zealand’s reputation, a privilege we still benefit from today. Savage established New Zealand’s social welfare system; Fraser established New Zealand as we would later become on the international stage.
Why am I writing about Peter Fraser and William Massey? We’re not at war.
Not yet. And it’d be nice to keep it like that.
Yesterday Mountain Tui posted about Luxon and Willis’s blunder over iRex that may have risked our relationship with South Korea, a country that is not just an important economic partner but one of the biggest militaries in our neck of the ocean.
In World War II, the threat New Zealand faced was from the superpower Japan, and in the end we relied on Australia and America to defend us while we continued fighting for Britain overseas. Asia was not irrelevant to us, but our relationships with many of the players did relatively little because we were still clutching to the hem of England’s skirts in a pre-globalism world.
I would like to think that after 80 years of independence and diplomatic and trade relations with Asia, in some future conflict, New Zealand could take a stronger role in our own region; one where our relationships with key players shape the decisions the UK and the US make, rather than just the other way around.
People are talking like there’s something coming, or something happening, though I’m not sure they know exactly what. There’s a change in the air, but is it political, economic, social, national, global? That’s anyone’s guess.
Most of us, I think, are hoping for economic upheaval of a positive nature, but equally as likely is the unfolding of another global conflict that sweeps us up with it and plunges Aotearoa into a decade of hardship and war.
Those times of global peril are almost out of living memory now. That, too, is down to Peter Fraser; he was instrumental in setting us up for 80 years of peace. Not just New Zealand, but the world.
The League of Nations was established after World War I to make sure there was never another one. That didn’t work out so great, and it was recognised that any international peacekeeping bodies we set up again had to be much more extensive and have greater influence — and include more countries. The United Nations is the post-WWII successor to that, and the UNSC where Fraser served is the politically peacekeeping arm of it, and it has managed to stave off a world war for a very long time.
It’s a hell of a legacy for one man to leave. The world would have been a very different place without him. A worse place, I believe.
Just as the period after a war is incredibly important for preventing a new war, so too is the period leading into one. That’s the time when conflict can be diverted, assuaged, postponed, even prevented entirely, if you do things really right.
The conflicts that are occurring now are the direct results of bad decisions made after World War II. The choice to take land off an inhabiting indigenous people and give it to someone else was a terrible colonial decision that rejected the unifying ideal of assimilation of all religions in society in favour of granting statehood and lands to a people who we saw as a bit more like ourselves than the people we were taking them away from.
And I say we because, although Peter Fraser was a excellent Prime Minister who did excellent things for New Zealand and for the globe, he was also an “exuberant Zionist” known for loudly and proudly supporting the creation and recognition of the State of Israel. So important was he to its establishment, he was granted the honour of inscribing his name in the Golden Book.
Of Palestine, he said:
There should be no antagonism or misunderstanding between the Jewish and Arab peoples, as everyone living in Palestine would naturally benefit from what the Jewish people have made out of a land which was once desert, until the desert bloomed as a rose. Palestine is very akin to the ideals of New Zealand except that the Jewish people went into Palestine with a tradition of privation…
Peter Fraser was perhaps more right (and definitely more wrong) than he could have known. His belief in the Commonwealth stemmed from not just the protection it provided us all but his genuine hope that by working together, our nations could undo the harms of colonialism. But in Fraser’s words, we can hear the voice of the coloniser echoing loud and true: “Until the desert bloomed as a rose”. He even managed to turn Jewish colonialism British. Which, well… I suppose it is.
In 2024, we have the ecological knowledge to understand that deserts already naturally bloom, and turning them into farmland is not always as good as it sounds, particularly if you’re planning to abandon traditional farming techniques for supposedly-superior Western ones that usually result in desertification. Fraser saw Palestine as akin to New Zealand in its potential to be transformed into a farming haven, and in doing so he missed what all colonisers have always missed: there was already a haven there. They just didn’t have the perspective to appreciate it.
The damage agriculture has done to New Zealand is quite literally irreparable; there are species we won’t get back, ecosystems we can never recover. The extensive farmland we now own sinks no carbon: it poisons the atmosphere with methane and allows the soil to erode and degrade. If we were to turn back time, I doubt the expert recommendation would be to transform New Zealand into farmland. again
Although the government would probably push ahead with it anyway.
Israeli settlers have destroyed over a million olive trees since 1962, a slow-growing desert native that historically and in modernity the Palestinian people have relied on for survival and income, and which they consider crucial to their culture in the same way our trees are taonga to Māori. Olive trees take 60 years to reach full maturity, so are a sign of long lasting peace because that is what is required to plant an orchard of them. Palestine was once flush with olive trees; they are the symbol of the Palestinian people. Now Israeli soldiers destroy them wherever they find them.
It is as deliberate an act of cultural genocide as the destruction and near extinction of the Plains bison, leading to the Red River War and ending forever the occupation the Southern Plains people in their native lands. The colonists, who had just recently made a peace with the natives, wished only to clear the Plains for farming, never understanding (or never caring) that they were destroying a vital food source and an entire way of life. Once, there were 60 million buffalo roaming the plains. By the time the colonists had finished, there were 512.
Now there are 45,000 Plains Buffalo, a unique subspecies, and work has begun to reintroduce the species back into its original habitat. But the Native American people, never did, rounded up as they were and confined to a reservation on “Indian Territory” outside their tribal lands, bringing a sad note of truth to this verse from the song Home On The Range:
The red man was pressed
From this part of the west,
He’s likely no more to return,
To the banks of Red River
Where seldom if ever
Their flickering campfires burn.
The present
History repeats if we do not learn from it. Sometimes it repeats even when we do.
There will be another World War. I hope not soon. And I wish desperately for us to make foreign policy decisions that support that hope, including promoting deescalation and peace — even if we have to stick our heads above the crowd to do so. Our reputation as a moral country came from a man who was not afraid to stand for his principles, and he was respected for it. But somewhere along the way, we have lost our spine, and now we would rather do things that are easy and beneficial to us than things that are difficult and good.
Recently Luxon has been touring Asia to “promote New Zealand” and to smooth out some economic and trade wrinkles so as to better facilitate relationships between us and our trading partners. It’s a role he may as well have been trained for as the CEO of Air New Zealand.
Other than the plane breaking down and Luxon throwing inappropriate shade at a previous delegation, he’s been doing alright. But when you add his other international fumbles — the lack of communication with South Korea over iRex (that he won’t be discussing on his upcoming trip, despite official advice advising careful communication), missing APEC due to underestimating Winnie during party negotiations, and sort-of insulting the Icelandic Prime Minister — as well as his much more frequent gaffs back home, and it suddenly makes me certain of something:
A CEO would make really a poor war-time PM.
You’ve been very kind Sapphi. I’m unsure Luxon even cuts it as a CEO. A fast talking sales person who doesn’t listen and endlessly repeats pre-prepared pitches, maybe. I know, harsh, right, but where is the evidence of his brilliance? I’ve never seen it.
Sapphi thanks for your perceptive overview of the state of Aoteoroa! Very thought provoking, and probably largely unknown to the majority of voters here and now. We need to spread this information, and you’re making a start. Good work!