Now Do Palestine

Greg Bouwer IINZ

By now, New Zealanders are familiar with the pattern.

When Israel acts – or when an Israeli politician says something inflammatory – Wellington responds with urgency, condemnation, and moral certainty. Statements are issued. Ambassadors are summoned. Public rebukes follow.

Recently, Foreign Minister Winston Peters once again publicly condemned Israel, this time over comments and conduct linked to Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Gaza flotilla incident.

Some of Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric regarding the flotilla incident was genuinely inflammatory, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rebuked it. Democracies should scrutinise reckless rhetoric from their own ministers.

But that is precisely the point: Israel’s internal democratic culture already contains mechanisms of public accountability, criticism, and self-correction. The asymmetry emerges in how frequently Wellington directs public moral scrutiny toward Israel while applying far less comparable pressure to Palestinian political institutions that lack those same corrective structures.

Peters declared that New Zealand had already imposed a travel ban on Ben-Gvir for “severely and deliberately undermining peace and security”, before adding that his latest conduct further vindicated that position. MFAT, he announced, had summoned the Israeli ambassador to express New Zealand’s “grave concerns”.

The language was strong. The condemnation was direct. The diplomatic machinery moved quickly.

Which raises an obvious question: where has this moral clarity been when it comes to Palestinian leadership?

For years, the Palestinian Authority has maintained a system widely known as “pay-for-slay” – a structure under which imprisoned terrorists and the families of deceased attackers receive financial payments linked to the severity of the attack and length of imprisonment. The policy has been condemned internationally, including by the United States Congress through the Taylor Force Act.

Recent reports indicate that despite repeated international scrutiny and cosmetic restructuring claims, the payment architecture continues in altered administrative forms rather than being genuinely dismantled. In practice, the message remains unmistakable: those who engage in violence against Israelis, or their surviving families, continue to receive institutional recognition and financial reward.

Yet New Zealanders would struggle to identify a moment in which Wellington publicly summoned Palestinian representatives, imposed sanctions, or issued direct moral condemnation over a system that many democracies regard as the incentivisation of terrorism.

Hamas is rightly condemned internationally as a terrorist organisation. Its October 7 massacre – involving torture, rape, kidnapping, and the systematic slaughter of civilians – shattered any remaining illusion about its governing ideology.

But the more uncomfortable issue for Western diplomacy is not Hamas. It is the conduct of the Palestinian Authority itself – the very body routinely treated as the legitimate and moderate Palestinian interlocutor.

Palestinian Authority officials have repeatedly glorified terrorists as “martyrs”. Corruption allegations are longstanding and extensive. And despite years of international criticism, the PA’s system of financial payments linked to terrorism offences continues in modified administrative forms.

But the issue extends beyond militant organisations alone.

Multiple reports over many years – including analyses by organisations such as IMPACT-se – have documented patterns of incitement, antisemitic imagery, historical erasure, and the glorification of “martyrdom” within segments of Palestinian educational material.

This matters not merely because such material exists, but because international donors, including Western governments, continue helping sustain parts of the broader educational infrastructure in which these narratives circulate. The issue is therefore not abstract extremism. It is the international subsidisation of a political culture insufficiently oriented toward coexistence.

A serious peace process cannot survive if one generation is taught that compromise is betrayal and that terrorism constitutes heroism. Yet this dimension of the conflict rarely appears in the moral vocabulary of New Zealand diplomacy.

Has New Zealand ever imposed travel bans on Palestinian officials for incentivising terrorism?

Has MFAT ever summoned Palestinian representatives over incitement?

Has Wellington ever publicly declared that Palestinian political culture itself may be undermining prospects for peace?

Indeed, New Zealand governments have continued supporting parts of the broader UNRWA-linked educational infrastructure despite repeated concerns raised internationally about antisemitic content, historical erasure, and the glorification of violence within some Palestinian educational materials.

That makes the silence more striking: not merely an absence of condemnation, but continued material support alongside diplomatic reticence. That asymmetry matters.

Because diplomacy is not merely about what governments condemn. It is also about what they normalise through silence.

New Zealand presents itself internationally as a principled defender of international law, human rights, and democratic norms. But principles lose credibility when they are applied selectively. A democracy facing constant terrorism scrutiny receives continual public rebuke, while authoritarian or violent actors often receive euphemism, abstraction, or contextual mitigation.

This is not an argument that Israeli ministers should be immune from criticism. Democracies should be criticised when warranted – and Israeli politics, like all democratic politics, contains figures and rhetoric open to legitimate scrutiny.

But consistency matters.

A foreign policy that publicly disciplines only one side of a conflict while avoiding equivalent scrutiny of the other ceases to look purely principled. It begins to reflect a post-colonial moral framework in which moral agency, blame, and responsibility are distributed primarily according to perceived power rather than consistent standards of conduct — leaving stronger democratic actors uniquely accountable while weaker or radical actors are increasingly treated less as fully responsible political actors than as reactive products of history and circumstance.

And New Zealand’s posture increasingly carries that appearance.

The issue, ultimately, is not Ben-Gvir himself. Democracies are entitled – indeed obligated – to scrutinise inflammatory rhetoric from their own ministers.

The real issue is the framework through which Wellington appears to interpret the conflict.

Israeli actions are often treated as the central obstacle to peace. Palestinian political failures, rejectionism, corruption, incitement, and extremist culture are too often treated as secondary, unfortunate, or largely invisible. The result is a distorted moral equation in which meaningful agency is assigned largely to only one side.

But peace was not destroyed by Israeli rhetoric alone.

Peace collapsed because Palestinian leadership repeatedly rejected negotiated settlements, tolerated or encouraged violence, fragmented politically, and failed to prepare its population for coexistence. Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum. Nor did the political culture that made October 7 possible.

To speak endlessly about Israeli democratic ministers while remaining comparatively muted about Palestinian authoritarianism, the rewarding of terrorism, and incitement is not balance. It is imbalance institutionalised.

The irony is especially striking given that Israel remains the region’s only liberal democracy – complete with a free press, independent judiciary, opposition parties, LGBT protections, and vigorous internal dissent. Even the flotilla comments cited by Peters triggered public criticism within Israel itself, including from Netanyahu.

That is what democracies do: they argue publicly, expose internal disagreement, and subject their own leaders to scrutiny.

Hamas does not.

Nor does the Palestinian Authority meaningfully tolerate democratic dissent.

Yet Wellington’s diplomatic outrage appears overwhelmingly concentrated on the state that actually possesses democratic accountability mechanisms.

That does not strengthen New Zealand’s moral standing internationally. It weakens it.

Because when condemnation becomes predictable, selective, and politically asymmetric, it no longer appears guided by universal principles. It begins to resemble performative diplomacy – moral language deployed through ideological frameworks that distribute accountability unevenly according to power rather than conduct.

New Zealand can – and should – criticise Israeli ministers when warranted.

But a foreign policy that reserves its harshest public scrutiny almost exclusively for the region’s only democracy while treating Palestinian political dysfunction, incitement, and the rewarding of terror as peripheral concerns is not demonstrating balance.

It is demonstrating a particular moral framework – one in which democratic states are treated as uniquely morally accountable, while authoritarian or radical actors are granted partial exemption because they are perceived primarily through the lens of grievance and powerlessness.

Frameworks that systematically reduce one side’s moral agency do not produce justice.

They produce paternalism.

By treating Palestinians primarily as passive products of grievance, occupation, or historical circumstance rather than as moral and political actors capable of meaningful responsibility, such approaches risk infantilising the very people they claim to defend.

The result is a soft bigotry of permanently lowered expectations: violence becomes contextualised, corruption excused, incitement minimised, and accountability perpetually deferred.

That approach does not strengthen the prospects for peace. It distorts the conflict itself.

Because peace requires confronting not only the failures of Israel, but also the political culture that has normalised violence, martyrdom, rejectionism, and perpetual conflict within Palestinian society itself.

Otherwise, New Zealand’s “grave concerns” risk looking less like principled diplomacy and more like a performance of selective morality.

Moral theatre.

This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.