The recent massacres by Hamas have raised tensions in the region and brought support for both sides from across the world. David Fisher reports on two very different narratives that exist in New Zealand, after the content of a university lecture became the focus of a complaint from the Jewish
Outrage over Māori lecturer who lined up New Zealand colonisation with Palestine - and what the university bosses had to say
A march on Queen St in 2020 - two flags and two different stories to tell.
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Dr David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand complained to the university after being contacted by a student who had attended the lecture by Borrell, an academic with the university’s School of Māori and Indigenous Studies.
The student had provided Cumin with a series of quotes from the lecture which allegedly included references to the recent brutal slaughter of around 1200 people by Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political and military organisation governing the Gaza Strip.
The surprise incursion into Israel has drawn comparisons in Israel to the Shoah, the Hebrew word used to describe the Holocaust.
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The student who attended Borrell’s lecture told Cumin the massacre was described as “an ongoing engagement with colonisation” and referred to those who carried it out as “a group of people who have been marginalised and oppressed for approximately 80 years fighting back” but were seen by “the majority of the world ... as terrorists”.
Cumin was also told Borrell said: “We’re going to see this in this country too if we don’t see more genuine attempts towards equity.” The Herald provided the comments to the university, which did not challenge the alleged content.
Cumin interpreted the comments as an expression of justification for the massacre - although Borrell’s alleged words don’t explicitly state this - and that the words he was sent did not describe the actions of Hamas as “terror”. He has yet to hear the full lecture but is seeking a copy.
Cumin also said it was “reckless” to align the colonisation of New Zealand with Jewish people “returning to their indigenous land”.
The complaint was lodged in an increasingly fraught atmosphere, with tensions in Israel and along the Gaza Strip and West Bank - the two Palestinian territories - at their highest for decades.
Strikes by the Israeli Defence Force against Hamas are said by the organisation to have claimed more than 3000 lives since the massacre. Israel has also halted supplies of humanitarian aid and withheld basic services.
Borrell’s comments are not out of step with those who have deplored the loss of innocent life while ascribing responsibility to both sides. Green Party co-leader James Shaw has said since the massacre: “Both Hamas and Israeli Defence are targeting civilian populations. Those are acts of terrorism, they’re crimes against humanity, and they need to stop.”
And when asked earlier about Act’s pledge to have a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi, he responded: “If that happens, you will see wide-scale social disruption - it could lead to violence.”
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Cumin said, in his opinion, Borrell appeared to have over-simplified events and did not have “a studied grasp on the conflict or respected expertise in history or the Middle East”.
He said Hamas was intent on destroying Israel. “Their charter is clear in its intent to murder Jews.”
And he said it was “chilling” that Borrell allegedly forecast violence in New Zealand as a result of Māori not achieving equity. He said it would be “offensive to Māori, who do not wish to be compared to Hamas”.
An alignment between te ao Māori’s struggle against colonisation and the conflict in Palestine has been a consistent part of the tino rangatiratanga movement since the 1970s.
A University of Canterbury 2010 Masters Thesis by Laura Kamau described Donna Awatere as a young radical using the Palestinian Liberation Front’s (PLF) model for nationhood as a framework for her Māori Sovereignty publication in 1982.
In it, Kamau said Awatere had discarded the violent aspects of PLF dogma, instead adopting its theoretical aims.
“This is done through Awatere replacing Israel with Pākehā New Zealand, Zionism with Christianity, world imperialism with Britain and Arab reaction with colonial Māori.”
Cumin, himself an academic at the University of Auckland School of medicine, said “settler colonialism” was a “dominant narrative” in New Zealand but - relying on historian Dr Sheree Trotter - said “the post-colonial theory which underpins the narrative simply does not fit historical facts”.
We are hearing reports that a @UCNZ Lecturer, as part of his class, justified the Hamas massacre and went on to say that we might see similar acts in NZ because of 'colonisation'.
— Israel Institute of NZ (@IsraelInstNZ) October 15, 2023
There is no justification for the slaughter of 1300+ civilians, murder of babies, mutilation of…
Cumin referred to an opinion piece by Trotter in the Jerusalem Post which described the narrative as comparing “the Jews, like the British ... as white European colonisers; the Palestinians as the indigenous Māori”.
In it, she said: “The British were complete strangers to the land of Aotearoa New Zealand. In contrast, for the Jewish people, Israel is the ancestral homeland. It was here that a distinctive indigenous Jewish culture, language and religion began to develop more than 3000 years ago.”
In contrast, she said: “Arabs are indigenous too - to Arabia”. “They came to Palestine (so named by the Romans as an act of cultural erasure) many centuries later.”
Trotter (Te Arawa), who is a director of the conscious-raising Indigenous Voice for Israel group, told the Herald there were “two completely different narratives, almost diametrically opposed” when considering the Māori relationship with Israel.
There was the narrative that she disputed, which developed around the tino rangatiratanga movement, while the other developed out of Māori prophetic movements in which Māori saw an affinity with the Israelites, wandering without their land, as with Jews in the Old Testament.
She said the former had been the focus of more academic work in New Zealand than the latter even though “the history just doesn’t add up”. She said the prominence of a pro-Palestinian narrative in New Zealand academia was an “outlier” in comparison to other Western nations.
Trotter said she disagreed with the thesis of comity between Māori and Palestinian causes but accepted it remained a valid area of scholarship.
Associate Professor Leonie Pihama, a senior research fellow at the University of Waikato’s Te Kōtahi Institute, also described it as a valid area of research.
“It is absolutely valid to look at all indigenous countries that have experienced colonisation. I think it is very important,” Pihama said.
“In a university context, you’re meant to be playing a critical role as the critic and conscience of society, it should be raised.”
Doing so could be difficult, she said, pointing to the backlash against former Cabinet minister Tariana Turia when she used the word “Holocaust”.
In a speech in 2000, Turia made reference to the systemic murder of Jews in Nazi Germany, then said: “What seems to not have received similar attention is the holocaust suffered by indigenous people, including Māori, as a result of colonial contact and behaviour.” She later apologised after an uproar.
Pihama said a similar uproar had occurred in other debates in recent years around historical trauma and use of the word Holocaust.
“Articulating issues around Palestine does not make you an anti-Semite (and neither does) ... using particular terminology in regards to colonisation or support for the need for violence against Palestinians to come to an end.”
Discussions with academics at other universities have found a strong body of work incorporating the Israel-Palestine struggle with matters relating to Māori. A 2023 Masters thesis by John Hobbs at the University of Otago examined New Zealand’s foreign policy approach to Palestine.
In it, Hobbs wrote that New Zealand could be more supportive of Palestine were there a te ao Māori perspective in our foreign relations.
“The commonality between New Zealand’s colonial legacy and that of the Palestinian is a common point of identity and it is a puzzle that it has not led to a more empathetic and consistent response to the conflict, particularly as New Zealand deals with its own history and the lessons from the trauma inflicted on the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand.
“Part of the answer to this puzzle might be that New Zealand has only relatively recently begun to grapple with its colonial legacy and particularly how partnership with Māori, based on the Treaty, is reflected in institutional change and settings.”
Hobbs said New Zealand’s interaction was also shaped by the narrative of Israel’s “experience of the Holocaust” and “in the biblical identification with the ‘promised land’ for the Jewish people”.
He argued: “The dominance of this narrative obscures the colonial subjugation of the Palestinian indigenous people in their land, while at the same time, it has a silencing effect on international state criticism of Israel for fear of being branded anti-Semitic.”
Professor Jack Heinemann was among those who helped set up Academic Freedom Aotearoa to help safeguard the role of academics as the “critic and conscience of society”. That was a phrase introduced to the Education Act 1989 and carried forward in the current law, the Education and Training Act 2020.
Heinemann is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Canterbury but was speaking generally on academic freedom and not on behalf of the university.
He said the concept of “academic freedom” was long-established and widespread across the world but New Zealand was among the few countries that enshrined the role of “critic and conscience” in legislation. Doing so underscored its importance to the country while placing great responsibility on academics to exercise the freedom within the framework that guided and governed scholarly research and writing.
The responsibility extended to the institution to ensure it hired people who had proven backgrounds and allowed them an environment that let them do their work and exercise their academic freedom. It also extended to students enrolled at universities.
It was a “freedom” that relied on individuals showing they were informed as an outcome of their scholarship, if not necessarily in an area of specific research. “It comes with a responsibility and that responsibility is met through a rigour in scholarship.”
Through that scholarship, Heinemann said an academic might reach a position that was difficult or uncomfortable to espouse and might draw negative responses.
“My personal view is that academic freedom is [an] enablement to do good for society even if it comes at a cost [to the academic]. For a service to society - not a service to yourself. That’s why I think it can come at a cost,” Heinemann said.
Full statement from the University of Canterbury
Deputy vice-chancellor academic, Professor Catherine Moran: “Universities are crucial places of discussion and debate and it is not unusual for controversial ideas to be aired and discussed so students can engage in critical thinking. The course you refer to looks at colonialism from an historical perspective to understand modern issues. The themes of power, property and citizenship are challenging and designed to have students think from a variety of perspectives. Sometimes teaching material of this nature can cause upset.
“The teaching and learning context is that this kōrero was preceded by a content warning from the academic the day before and again at the start of his lecture, with the caveat that it was a reading from the perspective of an indigenous academic and would include conversations about racism, apartheid, colonialism, genocide and media representation. He is aware that there are often strong opinions about these deeply sensitive subjects, and his aim is to support productive conversation in class.
“A single lecture occurs within the context of a course and as such there is content and discussion that builds from the start of the course, it is not meant as a stand-alone public talk but rather to spark thinking and discussion in the context of the wider course. Single statements, and in fact single lectures, do not provide the full context of the learning intention of an entire university course. As critic and conscience of society, universities’ ability to have deeper discussion and debate is vital to build critical thinkers.”
