September 27, 2025. Thousands of miles away from her refuge in Cuba, Aotearoa first wakes up to the news of the great freedom fighter Assata Shakur’s transition into the world of her ancestors.

Moe mai rā e te māreikura. Rest in eternal power, esteemed woman.

Assata’s words have offered a penetrating force of moral and political clarity in these maddening times. She recognized the inseparability of global struggles for freedom, igniting the hearts of oppressed peoples throughout the world, to see beyond the smoke and mirrors of a white supremacist order and into the deep truths of love for humanity.

Throughout that morning, these clarifying words repeated themselves in a sea of tributes: “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

Here in Aotearoa, the past two years of a viciously racist government towards Māori, have been a reminder to us all of how easily settler-colonial governments snap and reveal their true colors of disdain towards Indigenous people. Amidst all the attacks on our treaty rights and roll out of extra-carceral laws, this government has revealed its flirtations with fascism most explicitly through complicity in the Palestinian genocide. While New Zealand has long held a relatively ‘progressive’ image in the liberal Western world, we are constantly reminded of the realities of oppression, and the moral senselessness of our oppressors. Sometimes, the rest of the world is reminded of that too.

Later that day, September 27, 2025 will go down in our history books as one of the most embarrassing revelations of the New Zealand government’s moral senselessness to date. A shameful rupturing of our country’s supposedly “independent” foreign policy positioning before the United Nations, in support of genocide.

Two weeks ago, on September 13, 2025, tens of thousands marched across the streets of Tamaki Makaurau (despite weather cancellations diverting the original bridge crossing plans) in the biggest demonstration for Palestinian rights on Aotearoa soils. The public demand has been loud and clear; our Government must impose diplomatic, economic and military sanctions on Israel to prevent further complicity in genocide. Since then, the Government has responded to those demands with smoke and mirrors, refusing to engage transparently with the public on what the Government’s position on Palestine might be.

We were told to patiently wait – all while the carnage continued and more bombs were dropped on Gaza. The Government’s stance would officially be revealed by Foreign Minister Winston Peters in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2025. For context, Winston Peters is a Māori politician from the northern iwi (Indigenous nations) of Aotearoa. However, he has long sided with colonial interests over his own whakapapa (ancestry), including this Government’s recent attacks on Māori and the environment.

Winston Peters, in response to unprecedented protests on home soils and the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned reporting confirming that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, then steps before the General Assembly to deliver a shambolic speech.

No sanctions. No recognition of Palestinian statehood – in part because of the “enormous propaganda value” for Hamas, offering “little more than an existential act of defiance against an unalterable state of affairs.” Just complicity and support for a genocide, in breach of every international legal obligation to act, in an international forum created to address the aftermath of a global war against fascism and genocide.

An Indigenous representative mouthing the deflections of a colonizer state. An Indigenous face brown-washing imperialism, recognizing only the colonizers before him.

In a press conference following the speech, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, further justified that decision as being necessary to preserve our friendship with both the genocider and the genocided, although Palestinian statehood could not be recognized so long as Hamas remained the de facto government of Gaza.

Where in the past we may have sheepishly followed behind the positions of other Western colonizing “allies” such as Australia and the United Kingdom, New Zealand has refused even this tokenistic and conditional stance on Palestinian statehood recognition. New Zealand now finds itself in the company of the world’s most morally senseless, violent, and rogue nation states – the United States and Israel, Italy and Germany. But again, as Assata Shakur reminds us, none of this is all that surprising.

New Zealand similarly shamed itself internationally when it allowed the South African Springboks to tour in 1981, sparking protests around the country against our government’s support for an apartheid regime. New Zealand has been quick to support the United States in their devastating imperialist wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. New Zealand is nothing more than a colonial outpost of US imperialism, built upon the murderous theft of Indigenous lands, simping for relevancy among nation states that are intent on ruling over bones and ashes while the world burns.

But New Zealand is not Aotearoa, and this government is not the people. In these moments when the oppressor’s mask of morality slips revealing only violent self interest, Fanonian psychoanalyst Lara Sheehi reminds us to hold fast to militant clarity, to cede no psychic territory, and maintain liberation as the precondition from which we struggle.

We turn to the clarity of our ancestors, of countries that know the violence of apartheid like South Africa who are leading the push for prosecution and sanctions, and the revolutionary voices of the Global South who maintain the greatest threat to global imperialism. Voices such as Colombian President Gustavo Petro who, a few days prior to New Zealand’s shambolic speech, described this moment before the United Nations as a global reckoning between freedom or death. “Real death from missiles, but also real freedom in the heart of human beings – in their capacity to rebel and to resist.”

Here in Aotearoa, we will continue to fight for Palestinian freedoms, appealing only to the hearts of our fellow human beings, and not to the moral senselessness of our oppressors.

Gabriella Brayne is the Māori spokespeople for the Aotearoa for Palestine – March for Humanity.

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