by Sean Phelan
I recently finished teaching a second-year
course in International Communication. And when preparing for one of the tutorials,
I checked to see how regularly New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (and
then Deputy Prime Minister), Winston Peters, had referenced Gaza on his X/Twitter
account.
Each of the weekly tutorials with the small
distance class began with an informal news round-up where we reflected on the international
news stories that had gotten our attention over the past week. The topic of
Gaza featured a lot in our conversations this semester. And on the particular
day (May 7), I shared details with the students of a story I had just read in The
Irish Times titled “Taoiseach Micheál Martin accuses
Israel of war crime over blocking of aid entering Gaza”.
The article reported that the Taoiseach (Irish Prime
Minister) had condemned the Israeli blockade of aid to Gaza which had then
entered its eight week. It was “simply wrong, in principle, and in law, to
inflict hunger and suffering on a civilian population, whatever the
circumstances”, Martin stated. “This behaviour clearly constitutes a war
crime”.
Martin’s statement wasn’t the first time since
October 2023 that I had thought about the differences in the political and
media discourse about Gaza in Ireland and Aotearoa.
Making comparisons between one national context
and another can always be a little invidious; one is never quite sure if you are
comparing like with like.
Nonetheless, I introduced Martin’s comments to
the students with a pedagogical intent that transcended my own biography as an
Irish citizen who has been working at Massey University since 2003. I suggested
there are many good historical, political and cultural reasons why Ireland might
offer an appropriate comparison for thinking about the foreign policy discourse
of the New Zealand state.
I pointed to the similar diplomatic posture of
both countries. Both like to appeal to a flattering national mythology on the
international stage – of two small countries “punching above their weight”, determinedly
pursuing independent foreign policies that affirm the internationalism of the
United Nations (UN) while never wanting to go too far against the grain of US
and Western elite political priorities.
The Irish government has justifiably won many admirers
(alongside detractors) for its willingness to speak out about the horrors
taking place in Gaza. However, it has also been criticised at home for
prevaricating on its commitment to introduce an Occupied Territories Bill that
would “prohibi[t] the import of goods and
services produced in the unlawful Israeli settlements in the West Bank”.
Comparing ministerial tweets
I didn’t start searching Peters’ personal X account
expecting to see a repeat of Martin’s “war crime” comment. Nor did I expect to anything
similar on the X account of Martin’s New Zealand counterpart Christoper Luxon.
However, the absence of any recent reference
to the blockade on either account surprised me. So I thought it might be
helpful to see how the world looked on the X account of the Irish Minister for
Foreign Affairs and Tánaiste
(Deputy Prime Minister)
Simon Harris.
On the day of my tutorial, Harris had referenced
Gaza or Palestine in three tweets in the previous week alone, alongside another
tweet that referenced the Middle East.
Two of the tweets cited the full text of ministerial press statements on
“the situation on Gaza” that were published on May 2 and May 6.
A third cited a video clip of Harris talking about Gaza during
a primetime appearance on The Late Late Show – Ireland’s longest running
television chat show; the kind of popular, publicly-funded broadcasting space
that now seems barely imaginable in New Zealand.
My expectations when looking at Peters’ X
account were low; the assumption that Gaza would be more prominent in the Irish
Foreign Minister’s X account was hardly a long shot.
However, I surprised both myself and the
students when I saw how invisible the topics of Palestine, Gaza or Israel were on
Peters’ X account.
Israel was referenced in a single January 2025 tweet that denounced the left-wing activist John Minto.
Aside from that, we would need to go back to April 9 2024 to find any explicit reference to Gaza,
Palestine, Israel or even the Middle East on Peters’ X account. The tweet
contained a video clip of Peters addressing the United Nations General Assembly
on the same day. It was a retweet of a message first posted on a second X account
in Peters’ name – an official Minister of Foreign Affairs account that
currently has only 9,800 followers compared to the 86,900 followers of Peters’
personal account.
I hadn’t noted the existence of the ministerial
X account at the initial tutorial. So I checked it after class, to make sure I
hadn’t missed additional posts on Gaza/Palestine/Israel that did not appear in
Peters’ personal account.
The
topic was not quite as invisible on the ministerial account, yet the coverage was
still meagre. Backdated from June 3, the last tweet that explicitly referenced
Gaza/Palestine/Israel was sent on March 20 – two days after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza
had ended the ceasefire with Hamas.
Harris doesn’t seem to have a separate ministerial
account, so a comparison with his personal Twitter account is again
illustrative. For the same March 20 to June 3 period, I counted 24 Harris tweets
that explicitly referenced Gaza or Palestine. Another 20 referenced Israel, Middle
East or Lebanon (where the Irish army has had a UN peacekeeping force since 1978).
Public diplomacy New Zealand style
What bigger point might be taken from a quick
comparison of what government ministers post on a platform that is hardly an idyllic
discursive space, particularly since its transformation into a far-right media
machine by Elon Musk?
I had discussed the topics of public diplomacy
and digital diplomacy in an earlier video lecture with my students. So the
point of the Peters/Harris comparison was partly to encourage the students to
think about how the diplomatic priorities of the New Zealand and Irish governments
might be inferred from what their Minsters of Foreign Affairs talked about –
and did not talk about – on X.
The comparison suggested that publicly speaking
out against the wars crime and genocidal actions taking place in Gaza is an urgent
priority for the Irish state. In contrast, the evidence from both of Peters’ X
accounts suggests a state that does not really want to talk about the topic of
Israel/Palestine at all (we see a similar dynamic at work in the government’s
reluctance to condemn the illegal Israeli and US airstrikes on Iran).
The official ministerial account captures a
government focused on enhancing its diplomatic and trading relationships with
different countries, with a “strong focus on the Pacific and Asia” (and backgrounded by a context
where New Zealand’s every diplomatic move now seems attuned to the geopolitical
rivalries between the US and China)
The impressions from Peters’ personal X account
communicated a rather different set of political priorities.
It suggests a Minister for Foreign Affairs who spends
most of his time online fighting a self-declared “war on woke”.
In the same March to June timeframe, we find,
among other tweets, messages disparaging an RNZ journalist as an “arrogant wokester loser”, messages characterising any future
Labour/Green/Te Pāti Māori party coalition as a “radical woke show”, messages denouncing the previous
Labour government’s support for “woke DEI [Diversity, Equality and Inclusion]
ideology”, messages mocking the “Marxist and globalists” who peddle “their wacky
woke ideologies”, and messages criticising the “cancerous social engineering” of a “woke
ideology” which
undermines “sex-based” legal rights and protections.
Palestinian solidarity and the stigmatization
of wokeness
It might be thought that Peters’ anti-woke
rhetoric has little to do with the question of Palestine, since the everyday media
discourses that shape our understandings of the world are often not very good at
illuminating the connections between one issue and another.
However, the two issues are in fact intimately
connected. In the last two years, the American far-right’s obsession with “wokeness”
has been most pointedly directed towards the Palestinian solidarity movement
that emerged on university campuses in the US and elsewhere since October 2023.
And we see a tacit version of the same ideological
narrative in Peters’ rhetoric.
When Peters gave his “state of the nation” address
in Christchurch in March, the topic of wokeness (including apparently “woke
banks”) was one of the central themes of Peters’ speech.
“We need common sense brought back to our
country”, Peters told
his audience of adoring supporters:
We cannot underestimate the nature
and importance of the war on woke. It is not only the DEI in our public sector,
but also in our education system. New Zealand First set out in the election to
get rid of the relationships and sexual education guidelines in our schools - and
we have done that. We campaign on ensuring the pathway of separatism and
cultural Marxism was stopped with the likes of He Puapua and co-governance and
we are doing just that. We campaign on ensuring we have fairness in women’s
sports – that men cannot compete against women and girls – and we have done
that. But there is still so much more we need to do to continue the fight –
including fighting against the use of puberty blockers for children. We may
have won some battles, but the war is yet to be won.
Peters’ speech was interrupted on different
occasions by Palestinian solidarity activists, and at least once by a pro-Israeli
heckler.
He responded (essentially to the Palestine
supporters) with all the dignity of his ministerial office. The activists were
disparaged as “left-wing fascists”, “communist,
fascist, and anti-democratic losers” and “anti-democratic Marxist whingers”.
A few days after the speech, Peters posted a
tweet (supported by multiple photographs) describing one of the protestors as a
“ginger nut”, “deranged moron” and
“Marxist loser”. The
keffiyeh-wearing student (a University of Canterbury student and member of
Students for Justice in Palestine, Joseph Bray) was also identified as a
participant in a recent panel discussion with Green Party MP Tamatha Paul about
the New Zealand police system that was reported on rather sensationally (and amplified in part by another
Peters’ intervention).
The tweet was lauded in Peters’ replies. One
account responded with an image of what it described as a few more “nut cases”:
a photograph of a group of Green party MPs wearing keffiyehs in
Parliament.
The political consequences
Peters gives lurid expression to an anti-woke
energy that has become the spiritual engine of the current coalition government
and their media supporters. The antagonism to an amorphous “wokeness” functions
as an ideological strategy for delegitimising different institutions and
political constituencies.
The hyperbole might be dismissed as obscene
culture war spectacle. It might even be concluded
that this kind of knockabout stuff has little political impact beyond a world
of loyal New Zealand First voters.
However, that conclusion would be wrong. Because
perhaps the most significant political consequence of the normalisation of anti-woke
critique in New Zealand and elsewhere is that it can put discursive constraints
on what gutless and nominally “centre-left” politicians are willing to do in
the name of some notionally progressive politics. Consider the case of last
year’s presidential election in the US. The stereotypically woke campaign ticket
of Harris/Waltz could barely distinguish its stance on Gaza from the
Trump/Vance campaign, other than with platitudinal recognitions of Palestinian
suffering tagged on to blanket affirmations of “Israel’s right to defend itself”.
We could make the same point with respect to
the discursive policing of how Western media have covered Gaza, including under-the-cosh public media outlets like RNZ. It is
not hard to argue that the political silences in Aotearoa New Zealand have been
internalised in journalistic silences, lest too much perceived sympathy
for Palestinians generate far-right flak about the coverage being too “woke”.
The state of the nation
When Peters gave his state of the nation speech
in Christchurch, he began by mocking the protestors who had gathered outside,
depicting them as opponents of “freedom of speech” and “democracy” who want to “impose their absolute minority view
on the mass majority of New Zealanders”.
He drew a boastful contrast between himself and
the protestors by reciting his wondrous diplomatic achievements in
communicating New Zealand’s position on the “issue of Gaza” to other countries.
“Not one of them protesting outside has ever
spoken to the Palestinian Authority, or the neighbouring Egyptian government,
or the biggest Islamic country in the world, Indonesia, or dare we say the
president of Turkey”, he suggested.
“Those so-called protesters outside wouldn’t
know what geopolitics or diplomacy looks like. Yet they have the arrogance to
try and lecture you, and disrupt you, like they have a clue what they are
talking about”.
“These no hopers have come here today, with the
one certain intention, to grab the mainstream media headlines, and try to
destroy a process that we, as one of only eight other countries, have practiced
unbroken since 1854 – it’s called democracy”.
The rhetorical excess may be the essence of Peters’
political brand; his proto-Trumpian ability to combine the conspiratorial and
the comedic seems to have given “Winnie” a cultural license to say things that
others would be held accountable for.
However, if his speech was intended as a homage
to a culture of free speech and democracy, we might conclude that Aotearoa New
Zealand’s political culture is in a rather sorry place indeed.
We should not be so inured from the
authoritarian shtick of our Minister of Foreign Affairs to miss his contempt
for protestors who want to bring public and media attention to a genocide
taking place in real time.
It suggests a government that is not only
reluctant to speak out publicly about the topic.
It also suggests a government that will stigmatize
those who do, for fear of encouraging a serious public conversation about New
Zealand’s complicity with a racist Western diplomatic order that has condoned the
Israeli state’s massacre of Palestinians.
Bio note