THE SELECTIVE OUTRAGE OF WINSTON PETERS

 

This week the Israeli military tore down the headquarters of the UN's Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, in occupied East Jerusalem. The New Zealand Government said nothing. While the Minister of Foreign Affairs was quick to condemn the violent crackdown of protests in Iran, he has remained silent about Israel's continuing barbarism. Winston Peters, loyal to the Trump administration, thinks observing international law is an optional extra and Palestinian suffering an inconvenience. He wants your vote in November.

WHEN THE Israeli military demolished a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Jerusalem this week—a direct strike on the very infrastructure meant to help keep Palestinians alive—the New Zealand Government said nothing. Not a word of concern, not a gesture of diplomatic pressure, not even the usual platitudes about 'deep unease' that the coalition Government has usually deployed when it wants to appear principled without actually taking a stand. Instead, the Government’s response was a vacuum, and into that vacuum stepped the Minister of Foreign Affairs and 'Mr Anti-Woke' Winston Peters, whose selective outrage has become a defining feature of this administration’s foreign policy.

Peters was quick to condemn the violent crackdown on protests in Iran. Fair enough. But the speed and clarity of that condemnation has only served to further highlight his refusal to protest about the ongoing devastation in Gaza. The same minister who can summon moral certainty when criticising adversaries of the West suddenly becomes a man of great restraint when the perpetrator is a close ally of New Zealand’s traditional partners, particularly the United States. 

What makes this silence even more jarring is that Peters has not merely avoided comment—he has actively mocked those who demand accountability. His dismissal of concern for Gaza as mere 'wokerism' is not just cynical; it is a deliberate attempt to delegitimise empathy. It reframes humanitarian outrage as a cultural affectation, a fashion trend of the left, rather than a response to mass death. In doing so, Peters is trying to position himself as the custodian of 'realism', the adult in the room who refuses to be swayed by what he portrays as the emotional irrationality of middle class liberals, divorced from real 'working class concerns'. But this posture collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. If condemning state violence is 'woke, then why was his condemnation of Iran not also an act of wokeness? The answer is obvious: the label is not an argument, but an excuse to say nothing.

The Government’s silence on Gaza is not passive. It is an active political choice. It signals alignment with a geopolitical order in which Palestinian lives are treated as expendable, and in which Western-aligned states are granted impunity for actions that would provoke outrage if committed by others. New Zealand, once proud of its independent foreign policy, now appears content to drift into the slipstream of this double standard. The demolition of a UNRWA building—an attack on a humanitarian agency already strangled by funding cuts and political pressure—should have been a red line. Instead, it barely registered.

This is not simply a matter of diplomatic inconsistency. It is a moral failure. Gaza is not an abstraction. It is a place where entire neighbourhoods have been erased, where families have been buried under rubble, where children are dying not only from bombs but from hunger and disease. To call this anything other than genocide is to engage in wilful blindness. To refuse to speak about it at all is to become complicit in the erasure of its victims. It should also be noted that Peters has embraced the Zionist lobby in this country.

The Government’s defenders will argue that New Zealand must be cautious, that foreign policy requires nuance, that public statements can jeopardise delicate relationships. But this argument collapses when placed alongside Peters’ willingness to speak forcefully on Iran. The caution is selective. The nuance is one-directional. The silence is strategic. 

What is emerging is a foreign policy defined not by principle but by alignment. When the target of criticism is a state outside the Western sphere, moral clarity is abundant. When the target is a state within that sphere, moral clarity evaporates. This is not diplomacy; it is obedience. To put it in the most colloquial of terms — Peters wants to keep on kissing Donald Trump's arse.

The tragedy is that New Zealand once prided itself on a different path. The anti-nuclear movement, the refusal to join the invasion of Iraq, the willingness to challenge great powers—these were not accidents of history. They were expressions of a political culture that believed small states could act with integrity. That culture is now being hollowed out. In its place stands a government that treats international law as optional, humanitarian concern as ideological, and Palestinian suffering as an inconvenience.

The demolition of the UNRWA building should have been a moment of reckoning for the Government. Instead, it has become another entry in a growing ledger of silence. New Zealand does not need to sever relationships or abandon diplomacy to speak clearly about human rights. It simply needs to rediscover the courage to name injustice when it occurs, regardless of who commits it.

Silence is not neutrality. It is a choice. And right now, the choice being made in Wellington is to look away. And the man doing most of the looking away is Winston Peters. And he wants another three years in office.