One of New Zealand’s proudest claims to fame, just behind the pavlova dessert and the All Blacks, is being the first country to give women suffrage. Now, adding more heft to this noble tradition of groundbreaking democratic developments, comes the announcement of a new political party that hopes to contest November’s general election. Introducing the ‘Palestine Free From the River to the Sea’ party. The party has six principles, two fewer than the words in its name.

The first is ‘the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland and the dismantling of the Zionist structure of the state of Israel’.

Among the tens of millions of displaced peoples from the 1940s, only one group remains refugees. ‘Refugee’ carries a unique meaning for Palestinians, so that if your great grandparent lived in the British Mandate for Palestine for two years before Israel’s Declaration of Independence, you have never set foot in the land and have citizenship elsewhere, you can be considered a Palestinian refugee until your ‘return’. This principle contemplates that the number of Palestinians who live between the river and the sea could double.

The third principle is ‘the establishment of a single state in Palestine, bi-national, secular and democratic, with full and equal citizenship for all with ethnic and religious rights protected in a democratic constitution’.

This lofty aspiration would also be a groundbreaking democratic development, because none of the 22 Arab states have this system of government, including the ‘state of Palestine’ (recognised by Australia). The last Palestinian legislative election was in 2006, when Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats. This principle, mandating how another state governs itself, has a whiff of regime change.

The party’s president is a self-declared fund-raiser and spokesperson for the ‘PFLP solidarity campaign’. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular Marxist group, has a terrorist designation in the EU, US and Canada, though not Australia or New Zealand. It participated in the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s for its plane hijackings, including in Entebbe.

In April, the party president gave a stirring speech in which he mused about how ‘the ideology of Zionism created such a despicable people’, noting that it has had 78 years to indoctrinate ‘the vast majority of Jewish Israelis with a belief in their own superiority’, while Hitler only had 12, and referring to the ‘complicity of the mainstream media in hiding the truly horrific nature of Israeli society’.

Perhaps some naive people cleave to the delusion that Palestinians and Israelis sharing a state is a feasible solution, but someone who believes Israelis are ‘despicable’ and worse than Nazis knows it is more likely to be the final solution. This is not magical thinking. It is the malevolent thinking of someone who knows that a bi-national state would be a violent catastrophe and the best chance finally, after so many failed attempts, to get rid of half of the world’s population  of 15 million Jews. The ‘Palestine Free of Jews From the River to the Sea’ party is a more accurate appellation.

Even if the party gets 500 members and is registered so that it can contest the elections, it seems unlikely it will get into parliament, though it might take some votes off the Green party, given their platforms are barely distinguishable. But that’s not the goal.

This has been expounded by an excited humanities lecturer at the University of Canterbury, who declared that the purpose of the party is not to ‘seek power but to raise awareness’ about Palestine because it’s not getting enough attention, but that anyway it’s not just about Palestine. It is ‘the tip of the spear of a global working class struggle against a small elite, the Epstein billionaire class’.

If registered, the party will be allocated $78,000 of taxpayer funding for electoral advertising, so that it can ‘raise awareness’ and rectify the shocking dearth of media attention on Israel.

It’s tempting to laugh this off as a mere absurdity, but in this climate that’s a luxury we don’t have. There is something pernicious about a tiny irrelevant state with all its challenges having a fledgling political party dedicated to the demise of the one Jewish sovereign state 16,000 kilometres away.

The party exemplifies the latest manifestation of the mutating virus of anti-Jewish hatred, known as antizionism. Anti-Jewish hatred persecutes Jews and portrays them as a threat to humanity by referencing any given society’s prevailing orthodoxy. In the Middle Ages, that was religion, so Jews were reviled and attacked for rejecting Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammed. After the Enlightenment, it was science, so the Nazis cast Jews as race-polluters and exterminated six million of them. Now it is predominantly human rights.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, human rights became the new authority by which societies are ordered and judged. Nazi framing was no longer politically and socially acceptable and so, driven by the Soviet Union, a new anti-Jewish hate movement emerged. Through a well-financed and orchestrated mass propaganda campaign after 1967 (when the Soviet Union’s Arab allies lost another war against Israel), the Soviets weaponised and inverted human rights against Israel, accusing it of everything it was established as a sanctuary from. Fifty years ago, the USSR first charged Israel with genocide in the UN Security Council.

The Soviet Union’s propaganda outlived it and pervaded the institutions of the West – initially through academia, the UN and NGOs. Antizionism as an anti-Jewish hate movement therefore has a well-established, though not well understood, language and lineage.

This totalising, annihilationist worldview revolves around an unfalsifiable belief that Israel is a unique and irredeemable source of cosmic evil, and that the salvation of humanity requires its eradication. It demands unadulterated fealty to this premise, so that society’s mores are undermined in subservience to it. By extension, its nihilism endangers ‘Zionists’, because if they oppose Israel’s eradication, they must be evil too.

If the party gets registered, it will be using taxpayer funding to parlay this propaganda with the imprimatur of the electoral system.

The hatred that has stalked Jews throughout history, including antizionism, is often predicated on canards of dual loyalty and subversion.

In that accusation lies a confession. For it is not Jews who are subverting New Zealand’s democratic system to fund a political party whose raison d’être is the service of a foreign cause.