Over the past fortnight, the protest organisation Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) issued several statements asking New Zealand’s far-right foreign minister Winston Peters to urge the fascistic Trump administration to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The statements lay bare the utterly futile and bankrupt political perspective that has dominated the protest movement over the past year-and-a-half. The aim of the PSNA, like similar middle-class protest outfits internationally, is to ensure that opposition to the genocide remains confined to making appeals to parliament, and does not develop into a movement against the capitalist system, which is the root cause of this atrocity.

On March 12, ahead of Peters’ departure for Washington, the PSNA’s chair John Minto released a statement titled “Peters needs to tell Trump to stop the Israeli bullies.” Declaring that “New Zealand upholds a rules-based international system,” Minto said: “We want Mr Peters to remind the US administration that the rules apply to Gaza as well. Mr Peters should be suggesting to the US that it should stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

On March 17, the PSNA again called for Peters to “speak up for Palestine” in his meeting the following day with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In an open letter to Peters, the PSNA declared that “New Zealand has an internationally respected voice which can make a strong contribution” to peace by opposing Israel’s blockade of Gaza and “the US President’s plan for ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory.”

The group’s statements, if they are taken seriously, can only serve to foster dangerous illusions in the very imperialist powers responsible for the genocide.

The destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of its people is not the result of President Donald Trump or his predecessor Joe Biden failing to “stand up” to the “bully” Netanyahu. This completely misrepresents the real relationship between US imperialism and Israel, a garrison state which pursues its expansionist aims in the Middle East in a close alliance with the US. 

The US ruling elite has not been dragged unwillingly into supporting Israel; it is an active partner in the Gaza genocide. The US provides unlimited bombs and other weapons and gives political support to every action of the Netanyahu regime, while suppressing pro-Palestine voices within the US. 

Portraying the Trump administration as a potential force for good, Minto said on March 12, “The US helped broker a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas less than two months ago.”

In fact, the supposed January “ceasefire,” which the PSNA celebrated as a “triumph” for the Palestinian people, was only a tactical pause to give the Zionist regime and its imperialist backers time to prepare their next steps. Israel is now accelerating its genocidal bombing in close coordination with the US. The Trump administration is helping prepare the forced deportation of millions of people from the Gaza Strip.

To call on Trump to oppose these historic crimes, for which he bears direct responsibility, is as ludicrous as appealing to Netanyahu himself. It is comparable to asking Adolf Hitler, during the Nazi Holocaust, to “stand up” for the rights of the Jewish people and to respect international laws.

The notion that New Zealand’s National Party-led coalition government can be persuaded to take a principled stand against the genocide is no less delusional. The government has ignored hundreds of protests, involving tens of thousands of people across the country, demanding an end to the slaughter. 

Peters, who leads the right-wing nationalist NZ First Party, has a long record of supporting Zionism and demonising Muslims and immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. He has slandered anti-genocide protesters, including the PSNA, as “antisemitic” and “racist,” in an effort to delegitimise and criminalise them.

Peters said his visit to Washington had been “very successful” and described the US as “an indispensable partner for New Zealand.” According to a US State Department statement, Peters and Rubio discussed “avenues for strengthening defence cooperation through burden sharing, allowing our militaries to work more closely together, and ensuring security and economic strength in the Pacific region.” 

The PSNA falsely presents the Gaza genocide as an isolated issue. In fact, it is part of a developing world war, in which the imperialist powers, led by the US, are seeking to gain control over all the world’s resources and wealth. 

New Zealand, a minor imperialist ally of the US, is closely integrated into US-led wars and war planning, above all in the military build-up against China. The government is also actively supporting the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine: NZ troops in the UK are assisting in the training of Ukrainian conscripts. 

New Zealand military personnel have also been deployed to the Middle East to assist the US and Israel in the bombing of Yemen, which Trump has threatened to “completely annihilate.”

After the horrific Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza over the past week, which killed hundreds of people, Peters issued a meaningless call for “both sides to reinstate the ceasefire” and implement the hostage exchange deal. He made no specific criticism of the Netanyahu regime.

On March 20, the PSNA denounced the foreign minister’s statement as “an insult to the victims of Israel’s massacres.” It organised a protest three days later outside a “state of the nation” speech delivered by Peters, who ranted against the pro-Palestine activists, calling them “left-wing fascists” and “communists.”

The group is now calling on its supporters to write to MPs from National, ACT and NZ First, the three parties in the governing coalition, asking them “to individually speak out to condemn Israel for ditching the Gaza ceasefire agreement it signed in January.” 

According to Minto, “If the Foreign Minister can’t [criticise Israel], then there must be at least some MPs in the government coalition who have the conscience necessary to raise their voices.” He did not explain why, after years of supporting Israel’s atrocities, any members of the government will find their “consciences” now.

For more than a year the PSNA has been issuing similar appeals, while carrying out various protest stunts—including a misguided hunger strike by one of its members, and attempts to track down individual Israeli soldiers in New Zealand.

At the same time, the group has promoted illusions in the opposition Labour Party and its allies, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, who have been invited to speak at PSNA rallies. Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson David Parker issued a hypocritical statement on March 21, calling on the government to “stand up for what is right” and to support South Africa’s legal case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. Labour is supporting legislation proposed by the Green Party that would enable sanctions against Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The Labour Party-led government, which included the Greens, was in power until November 2023 and took no such action against Israel. Labour’s Prime Minister Chris Hipkins denounced protests against the genocidal onslaught against Gaza, which he justified as “self-defence.” Labour fully supports New Zealand’s alliance with US imperialism, including the war against Russia and the militarisation of the Indo-Pacific against China.

Fundamental political lessons must be drawn from the failure of the mass protests internationally to end the Gaza genocide. The problem is not a lack of opposition. Billions of people are outraged by Israel’s actions, but the protest movement has been led into a dead-end by its middle-class, pro-capitalist leadership. 

The fight against genocide, fascism and war requires a new perspective based on political reality, not the moralising and wishful thinking promoted by the PSNA and similar groups in New Zealand—such as the pro-Labour Party Daily Blog, Peace Action and the pseudo-left International Socialist Organisation—and internationally. 

The positions of all of these tendencies, including the PSNA leadership, are not the result of confusion or mistakes. The more governments have doubled down in their support for Israel, the more stridently have the official protest movements internationally insisted that nothing can be done but make futile appeals to them.

That is because these organisations speak for an affluent layer of the upper middle class, which advances its own privileges within the framework of capitalism. Politically, the function of these tendencies is to chain workers and young people to the very political forces responsible for the war crimes in Gaza and the broader eruption of imperialist militarism, of which they are a part, including Labour and the union bureaucracy.

Instead of making endless appeals to the “conscience” of imperialist warmongers, workers and young people who oppose war must take up a political struggle against the capitalist system and all its parties, including Labour and its pseudo-left backers. 

The plans of US imperialism and its allies to expand the Gaza genocide, and to plunge the entire planet into war, can only be stopped by mobilising an even more powerful force: the international working class.

Mass actions must be prepared, including political strikes, linking the struggle against imperialist war with the fight against the austerity measures that are being imposed to pay for it. Action must be taken to block the production and supply of weapons and other military equipment for Israel, the US and all their allies, including the New Zealand military.

The chief obstacle to such actions is the trade union bureaucracy, which acts as a police force on behalf of the capitalist state. In New Zealand, as in Australia and the US, the maritime unions have ensured the uninterrupted servicing of vessels belonging to the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has pledged to support the destruction of Gaza.

The fight against war is therefore inseparable from the struggle to build new organisations that workers actually control: rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracy. 

Most importantly, the anti-war movement must become consciously socialist. The wealth and resources produced by the working class, which is being hoarded by billionaires and squandered on militarism, must be expropriated from the capitalist class and redirected to meet urgent social needs, including the rebuilding of public healthcare and education, and to eliminate poverty and inequality.

This is the program fought for by the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand, and the International Committee of the Fourth International.