After numerous anti-Israel letters to the editor were published in The Press during April/May 2019, co-director of The Israel Institute of New Zealand, Dr David Cumin, wrote in to provide balance and facts on some of the issues. Mr Minto took particular issue with the statement that the Middle East situation was “complex” and challenged Dr Cumin to a public debate.
The debate took place on 03 October with the title of “Perspectives on Israel”. The Israel Institute of New Zealand has published the opening speeches of both Dr Cumin and Mr Minto.
There were five major themes of Mr Minto’s speech that require a robust rebuttal. There are also a number of outright lies and distortions in his address which we have commented on below. Click on any of the struck-through text to see why it is incorrect or misleading.
The five major themes of his speech that need to be addressed in some detail upfront are:
1. Mr Minto falsely claims Jews are colonialists of the land
2. Mr Minto falsely claims Israel is an apartheid state
3. Mr Minto falsely claims Arab Palestinians have a “right of return” to Israel
4. Mr Minto falsely claims Arab terror is “resistance”
5. Mr Minto tells Jews to stand against Israel and “reclaim” the symbols of Judaism
1. Mr Minto falsely claims Jews are colonialists of the land
This is a common trope and is false because indigenous people cannot be colonisers of their own indigenous land and Jews are indigenous to Israel. It would be more appropriate to see the return of an ancient people to their indigenous lands as the undoing of colonialism, remembering that the Jewish homeland was conquered and colonised on several occasions, by the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Crusaders. The Jewish people always aspired to return and a small number never left. The building of a Jewish homeland was entirely unlike the settler colonialism of nations such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada etc; which is the parallel that Mr Minto wants to make with his emotive language.
While there were Zionists who talked of ‘colonisation schemes’, the connotation of the term in the late 19th and early 20th century was less a dictionary definition of “group of people of one nationality or race living in a foreign place” and more the idea of developing underdeveloped places – the ‘upbuilding of Palestine’ was an oft-used term. Zionism did the latter by turning desert and swamplands into productive agricultural land and a start-up nation. Because of the hard work of Jewish immigrants (the first of whom arrived before Herzl’s Zionism), more Arabs moved to the land to benefit from the higher-paying agricultural jobs that were created.
Mr Minto tries to portray Jews as European colonisers, when in fact Jews saw themselves part of the diaspora and were a distinct minority group living in European countries where they were often subject to discrimination and persecution. The antisemitism they faced in those nations served to increase their desire to return to their ancient homeland. The possibility only arose in the nineteenth century when the Ottomans, in a liberalising phase, opened the country for settlement. In this period, many European nations, driven by religious and political agenda, set up consulates and colonies in the British Mandate of Palestine.