On 15 May newbie Wellington City Councillor Nikau Wi Neera tweeted a photo of himself grinning like a schoolboy who has just been gifted a PlayStation and clutching a piece of paper. The accompanying proclamation explained that it was a notice of motion signed by 8 councillors to debate Wellington recognising the state of Palestine, becoming sister cities with Ramallah, and \u201cin celebration\u201d lighting up the Michael Fowler Centre in the colours of Palestine in one year (it being what the Palestinian people refer to as \u201cNakba Day\u201d). This was, he said, in solidarity with the Palestinian community, \u201cwhose people have struggled under occupation on their own land for decades\u201d.<\/p>\n
Twitter is not representative of the wider population, of course, but the overall tone of the replies to him were less than wholeheartedly supportive. A small sample includes \u201cjust fix the bloody pipes and get the buses to run on time<\/a>\u201d, \u201cjust what we want from our local councillors \u2013 controversial international politics. Don\u2019t worry about the obscene rates increases<\/a>\u201d, \u201c\u2026you\u2019ve got bigger issues. This isn\u2019t Uni<\/a>\u201d, \u201cthe funny\/sad thing is most of your Green Party whanau would be dead in the State of Palestine<\/a>\u201d and a few, including mine<\/a>, asking about the borders of the state.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fairly standard business for councils to establish sister cities. I have visited Ramallah, the de facto<\/em> capital of the Palestinian territories twice, which is pretty rare for a Jewish person, and prohibited for Israelis, due to it being too dangerous for them. (In 2000 two Israelis took a wrong turn there and were lynched<\/a>, the gruesome photos of which are hard to forget). It seems like a modern bustling city, with towers and pristine well-stocked supermarkets that would leave ours to shame. I am not sure what the criteria are for a sister city, but I would assume they do not include having shared values or synergies, given Ramallah is a city where LGBT are routinely persecuted, general elections have not been held since 2006, and selling land to Jews is punishable by death. Never mind.<\/p>\n As to the other parts of the motion perhaps they don\u2019t seem like a big deal \u2013 after all it\u2019s just one debate and if it passes the results will be largely symbolic \u2013 but symbols, of course, communicate an underlying meaning. It\u2019s therefore worth asking exactly what that is and what the Council is playing at by even debating this resolution (which seems set to pass, given that over half the Councillors have signed on to it).<\/p>\n The first question is what jurisdiction the Council has to recognise a state or take stances on contentious geopolitical matters, or why it feels the need to. We have a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that does that. Is there a precedent? Will the Council now be taking stances on Tibet, Taiwan, Western Sahara, Kashmir, Cyprus, Balochistan, to name just a few other territorial disputes? And if not, why not?<\/p>\n And will it now be lighting up the Michael Fowler Centre to \u201ccelebrate\u201d the days when different peoples mark their sorrows and tragedies? Will it be lit up on 24 April for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day \u2013 though perhaps first the Council could remove the Ataturk Memorial above Tarakena Bay? What about a day marking Bloody Sunday, 30 January? Or commemorating the worst refugee crisis of the modern era, from Syria. Or, to recognise current issues, how about we show solidarity with the people of Iran bravely resisting the Islamic regime or the Uyghur people incarcerated in concentration camps by China? In fact, what about we focus our attention on our home turf \u2013 5 November for the invasion of Parihaka, or acknowledging our woeful record on domestic violence by remembering its victims?<\/p>\n But it goes much further than this selectivity. Because 15 May, \u201cNakba Day\u201d, is the anniversary of the day in 1948 when five Arab states \u2013 Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, together with contingents from Saudi Arabi and Yemen, attacked Israel, with the intention of eliminating it. The day before that the state of Israel had declared independence, on termination of the British Mandate for Palestine. Mandates were a League of Nations system entrusting the temporary governance of different territories of the former Ottoman Empire at the end of World War 1 to the Allies. Along with other mandates the British were entrusted with the mandate for the area known as Palestine, of which it then carved off over 75% to create what is now known as Jordan, leaving the rump between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea as the Mandate for Palestine. The legal instrument of the Mandate recognised the \u201chistorical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country\u201d, and called for the creation of a Jewish national homeland.<\/p>\n After a bloody civil war broke out between the Jews and Arabs living in British Mandate Palestine, Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations to solve, which ultimately resulted in General Assembly resolution 181, otherwise known as the partition plan of 1947. This was the UN\u2019s attempt to solve the question of ownership of that rump of the Ottoman Empire between the river and the sea by creating two states \u2013 one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. Though it fell far short of the national aspirations off the Jewish leaders, they accepted it, believing that some form of state was better than none, especially given that this was just two years after the Holocaust finished and there were still hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews that no state wanted. The Arab leaders rejected the proposal, ultimately launching their failed war of annihilation.<\/p>\n In his 1948 book \u201cThe Meaning of the Disaster<\/a>\u201d, the Syrian intellectual Constantine Zureiq, who coined the term \u201cNakba\u201d writes. \u201cThe defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not a small downfall \u2013 naksa \u2026 It is a catastrophe \u2013 nakba \u2013 in every sense of the word.\u201d He also wrote<\/p>\n \u201cSeven countries go to war to abolish the partition and to defeat Zionism, and quickly leave the battle after losing much of the land of Palestine \u2013 and even the part that was given to the Arabs in the Partition Plan.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n