Jerusalem on their minds: politics and religion
And how prime ministers go awry over Palestine
At Easter, Jerusalem comes to mind – as does Gaza, which has slipped from the headlines of most media outlets lately. An exception is Al Jazeera: on Easter Sunday, they reported that, since Good Friday, Israeli bombardment of Gaza had killed 92 people, and injured at least 219, with many children among the casualties.
The UN Human Rights Office said in a 15 April update:
“In light of the cumulative impact of Israeli Forces’ conduct in Gaza, the Office is seriously concerned that Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza.”
Meanwhile, RNZ reported that the prime ministers of the UK and New Zealand will meet, to talk primarily about trade and defence. The latter is high on the agenda due to the Trump administration’s disdain for allies and the Chinese navy’s recent foray into the Tasman Sea. The Middle East doesn’t seem to be on their agenda, although prime minister Luxon will visit Gallipoli to commemorate the 1915 ANZAC landing.
Despite New Zealand’s distance from the region, it’s been involved in some of the historical events there. The Allies’ assault on Gallipoli was a tragic failure, whereas Jerusalem’s surrender to General Allenby in December 1917 was heralded as a triumph. Some New Zealand and Australian troops were involved in the latter, and the phrase “new Crusaders” was often used at that time.
New Zealand’s then prime minister, William Massey, described the fall of Jerusalem as “one of the great events of the war”.
Here’s a brief bio note on William Massey: born in Ulster in 1856, he arrived in New Zealand in 1870 to take up farming, settling in Māngere, Auckland. He became an MP in 1894, joining the conservative opposition to Seddon’s Liberals. He went on to form and lead the Reform Party, and served as PM from 1912 to 1924.
To demonstrate the importance placed on the Palestine campaign back then, the names of principal armed engagements there, including Gaza and Jerusalem, are carved in stone in a special niche on the exterior of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which opened in 1929. (New Zealand held no official centennial commemoration of the fall of Jerusalem – lest we remember – although a similar niche on the opposite wall of the Museum highlights the Gallipoli campaign, which is remembered annually.)
The Palestine campaign meant more than just a fight with the Ottoman Empire.
William Massey’s strongly Protestant (and anti-Catholic) views were rooted in the Old Testament. His take on the occupation of Jerusalem (as recorded on 11 December 1917) shows why he became a patron of the British-Israel-World Federation. This fringe organisation still holds the (manifestly false) historical belief that “the descendants of the so-called ‘Lost Ten Tribes’ of the Northern House of Israel are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic and kindred peoples”. That refers to the tribes who were said (in 2 Kings 17:6) to have been been taken by Assyrian conquerors in 722 BCE: “the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria”. Where did their descendants end up? In the British Isles!
Massey declared: “May the Holy City now and for always remain under British control, and so be a part of a nation whose Sovereign is descended from David’s royal house”. He was asserting that the British royal family descended from David and Solomon – more or less implying a divine right to rule. Such fanciful ideas about connections between Britain and the Holy Land weren’t new. Take for instance William Blake’s powerful poem Jerusalem, dated 1810, and set to music by Sir Hubert Parry (“And did those feet in ancient time”).
British control over Palestine only lasted until 1948 – and not “for always”, as prime minister Massey had hoped.
Reflecting the shift in hegemonic imperial power from Britain to America, Protestant Evangelical Christians comprising roughly one in eight Americans have now taken centre-stage in the politics of (mainly white) folk who claim cultural and theological affinity with Israel. They believe that the Jews’ repossession of Israel and the Holy City is a step towards the end times, or the realisation of prophecies in the Book of Revelation. For fundamentalist Evangelicals, the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 revealed that a divine plan is unfolding. They are far more likely, then, than other Americans to view Israel’s present actions in Gaza as “justified”, and most of them voted for Trump.
As a side note, in 1941, David Ben-Gurion, who would become in 1948 Israel’s first prime minister, visited far-away New Zealand. He was given a formal reception by Auckland’s Jewish community at which he spoke about the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. That event was attended by New Zealand’s Labour prime minister, Peter Fraser, who expressed his sympathy for the Zionist cause and his concern for the injustices suffered by the Jewish people. At that time, Hitler’s “Final Solution” hadn’t commenced, but his vicious anti-Semitism was well known. As a radical socialist, Fraser had been imprisoned during WWI for sedition after speaking out against conscription; but he went on to lead the country through the subsequent war. There’s no shortage of irony in this history.
Back in the Middle East, due to strong resistance from Arabs since before World War II, the British had been trying to limit the numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving in Palestine, despite their recognition of the Zionist cause with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. In 1947, British authorities turned back a whole shipload of refugees, some of whom were survivors of death-camps.
That same year, the newly formed United Nations proposed to partition Palestine into two independent, but economically linked, Arab and Jewish states, with an extraterritorial “Special International Regime” for the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings. The Jewish historian Simon Sebag Montefiore relates how badly that plan went down:
“The Arabs did not accept that the UN had authority to carve up the country. There were 1.2 million Palestinians who still owned 94 percent of the land; there were 600,000 Jews. Both sides prepared to fight, while Jewish and Arab extremists competed in a flint-hearted tournament of mutual savagery. Jerusalem was ‘at war with itself’.” (Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography, Vintage, 2011, p. 488).
Having made (and broken) promises to Arab nationalists and to Zionists since WWI, and caught now between the warring sides, the British withdrew. Israel declared itself an independent nation and soon gained recognition from the USSR and the USA. And the neighbouring Arab countries attacked it.
How did the new State of Israel defend itself? Most of the Zionists’ arms came from Czechoslovakia, which was by then under Soviet control. There were plenty of weapons lying around after the war, and Israeli representatives were buying them from whomever would sell. If the Americans weren’t willing, then maybe the Russians were.
What happened to Palestinians at that time is known as the Nakba, the Catastrophe. The ethnic-cleansing of 1948 saw an estimated 750,000 or more Palestinians become refugees, systematically expelled by Zionist armed forces.
In 1949, the Archbishop of York spoke in the House of Lords about Palestinian refugees who’d been “driven away by terror”.
“There is no hope of permanent peace in Palestine if bitterness and the passionate desire for revenge remain among the refugee Arabs. Israel should show a conciliatory spirit towards them.”
Those words turned out to be sadly prophetic. The present mass killing, starvation and destruction in Gaza constitute one of the worst in a series of horrific episodes in an ongoing conflict.
What, then, do prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, as mere bit players, have to say about this now? When Albanese and Luxon met in Canberra in August 2024, they called (in a joint statement) for immediate ceasefire, release of hostages and an increased flow of aid into Gaza.
“[They] reiterated their commitment to working towards an irreversible path to achieving a two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians can live securely within internationally recognised borders.”
This “two-state solution” means Israel and Palestine live side by side within secure and recognized borders, consistent with international law, unifying the Gaza Strip and West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. Upholding that “solution” is a safe fallback position politically, as it has international support.
But, for Palestinians, any form of partition is a bitter compromise, even for those who may somehow accept it. And neither party to the Gaza conflict actively supports the two-state solution anyway.
Soon after October 7, prime minister Netanyahu stated that a key goal of Israel’s war is to eliminate Hamas’s civil government of Gaza, not just its military. And then Trump and Netanyahu want to evict Gazans and build a seaside resort. If all that happens, there’ll be neither a state nor a nation left to speak of.
For its part, Hamas’s 2017 policy refused to recognise “the Zionist entity”. They want instead a single “fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state”.
The gap between reality on the ground and the two-state solution gets wider by the day as the IDF’s attacks grind on. Albanese’s and Luxon’s “irreversible path to achieving a two-state solution” sounds almost as deluded as Massey’s vision of British rule “for always”. Meanwhile, the Trumpian Evangelicals see “an irreversible path” to a show-down at a place called Armageddon.
Even the Auckland War Memorial Museum lost its bearings following October 7, apparently forgetting that Gaza and Jerusalem are chiselled on its western wall under the name of a Palestine that already existed before the British Mandate.
William Massey’s British-Israelism on display in 1917:
Auckland War Memorial Museum’s western wall commemorates the Palestine campaign of 1916–18:
Labour prime minister Peter Fraser expresses sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish state:
The Archbishop of York laments the consequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians:
Thank you Grant for revealing more of the history connecting New Zealand, with the Middle East and Palestine in particular.
For over a century Palestinians have paid the price of European antisemitism including British leaders. PM Balfour introduced the Aliens Act of 1905 defining for the first time in British law the notion of the “undesirable immigrant.” It was a response to the persecution of poor Eastern European Jews and their forced migration, mainly from the Russian Empire, who were keen to settle in England. Many, barred from entering, found their way to Palestine instead. Later, in 1917 when he was Foreign Minister Balfour issued British Government’s support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people ” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region .. “ it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities” at the time over 90 % of the population was Christian and Muslim.
Until recently there was shop on Dominion Road which was mostly empty of customers, branded with British-Israelite insignia. As you point out our PM William Massey was a member so was Lord Shaftesbury who was known at th ePoor Man's Earl who campaigned for better working conditions, education and the limitation of child labour. He became convinced that the restoration of the Jews to Palestine was not only predicted in the Bible, but also coincided with the strategic interests of British foreign policy. He argued British protection of the Jews would give a colonial advantage over France for the control of the Middle East; provide better access to India via a direct land route; and open up new commercial markets for British products. Shaftesbury noted the observation of a Scottish clergyman who visited Palestine in 1839 “a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country’.
This later morphed into the much trumpeted ‘a land without people for a people without a land’ which we hear echoed down the decades and a prime example of misinformation.
Sadly, the combination of strategic imperial interests, European antisemitism, misinformation based on religious zeal (promoted on both sides of the Atlantic ) which persist today and enabled settler colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionists. Our current leaders need to understand this history and to champion humanitarian law so that Aotearoa-NZ can be counted now as standing for justice for Palestinians, even if we didn't in the past .
It also didn't help that America slammed the doors shut in 1924, after nativist pressure & the 1st Red Scare - it was common belief at the time (and still is among anti-Soros types) that Jewish migrants were Marxist agitators. On top of that, William Mackenzie King in Canada was equally unsympathetic to taking in Jews fleeing the impending Nazification of Europe.
As for Massey's British Israelist beliefs, the cult spawned an even loonier offshoot in America known as Christian Identity, which has ties to neo-Nazi groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Identity