As a Pākehā Scotsman who spent most of his festive seasons in the northern hemisphere, I associate Christmas (and Pākehā New Year) with a time of darkness and renewal, with a pivotal pause and reflection point before making resolutions for the year ahead. In Aotearoa, that pivotal point in our annual journey is better reflected with the Māori New Year in June/July. I thank Tangata Whenua for sharing the gift of Matariki. Having said that, old habits are hard to shake off, and – as my comrade and friend Ian Hyslop has said – the slow days between Christmas and New Year are a time for reflection.
Ian made that point in his piece about the current coalition government’s ongoing assault on public services, attacks on Te Tiriti, and promotion of the worst kind of libertarian deregulation.
He also revealed that the University of Auckland had made him surplus to requirements, news that I know will send a shockwave through social work networks at home and overseas. The neoliberal logic of the capitalist academy takes no prisoners in its technocratic drive for efficiency. Of course, ruthless cuts have the added advantage of dampening dissent. After all, you might be next. Still, dissent is a critical aspect of the spirit of social work, and in that spirit, I offer my dissenting reflections on 2024.
“The night is darkest before dawn” is a statement of hope, hope that the darkness will end, and hope is a source of collective strength. Still, we need to recognise the darkness, to be aware of it, to feel its presence. Ian has outlined the considerable challenges we face in Aotearoa, New Zealand. But, at the present time, darkness is experienced by people across the world. No more intensely than by the hundreds of thousands of families sheltering from the freezing wind and rain in flimsy tents on the Gaza Strip. Families who feel abandoned. Families who fear for their lives. Families who do not know what tomorrow will bring, but know it will not be safety, security or warmth.
During 2024 thousands upon thousands of people in hundreds of countries across the world marched, protested, stood in silence, camped out on campuses, banged pots and drums and wrote to their political representatives to demand a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli genocide. Still, the violence continues. Unabated. Forty-five thousand deaths and climbing every day. A genocide streaming in real time on your smartphone and television set.
Over the last year, we have become far too accustomed to the bombing of women and children in schools, refugee camps and hospitals. Habituated to the slaughter of journalists, the assassination of poets and the incarceration of teachers and social workers in the West Bank. Inured to the deliberate obliteration of health, education and humanitarian services necessary to sustain life on the strip.
The United Nations, an international organisation born from the post-war desire to end genocide, has been rendered powerless by Western Security Council members more interested in protecting Israel and projecting American power than in the lawful right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.
The moral failure of the Western powers is absolute and shared by the duplicitous stance of our own government. Slater (2014), writing over a decade ago, stated that:
Today, the west’s abject failure to act against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land constitutes a core component of Euro-Americanist duplicity in relation to justice and human rights. It is the struggle against the Israeli state’s vicious colonial power that makes Palestine more than a specific geographical location; it has become – as Madrid, Managua and Soweto have been in the past – the name of a frontier through which our own political identities are constituted.
The predicament of the Palestinian people resonates deeply here in the settler colonial state of Aotearoa. Why? As Patrick Wolfe argued, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life – or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be – indeed, often are – contests for life”. The struggle of the Palestinian people for land, human rights, and self-determination is recognised here in Aotearoa. Palestine is “the name of a frontier through which our own political identities are constituted”.
The deep connection between the Palestinian struggle and the struggle for tino rangatiratanga was recognised at te Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti when organisers invited Nadia Abu-Shanab of Justice for Palestine to address the crowd assembled outside parliament. Nadia said:
We are here to live forever and ever and ever. We’re not just here to fight, we’re here to live. That resonates, because we and Māori are really good at this. We’re not just fighting against something, we are actually fighting for something. We’re fighting for life, for dignity and for better ways of living in relationship with the lands where we live.
Nadia Abu-Shanab addressing te Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti. November 2024
In Aotearoa, and Palestine, and across our common world, the fight for life, and dignity, and better ways of living in harmony with the land continues today. As the darkness deepens, and it will, we strengthen our resolve to work for the dawn. For our whānau, for the whenua for our mokopuna.
He ahiahi pokopoko, he ata hī tore.
(Like the dying embers of a fire,
new beginnings await with the dawn’s first light).
References
Slater, D. (2014). Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014): An appreciation. Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 58(1), 136–148.
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240