Information released by the New Zealand–based movements All Out For Gaza and United 4 Palestine on the outcome of a joint lobbying campaign has highlighted the refusal of governing coalition MPs to support legislation imposing sanctions on Israel.
The bill, introduced by MP Chloe Swarbrick in December 2024, won the backing of all 55 opposition MPs but still requires the support of at least six MPs from the ruling coalition to pass.
New Zealand’s parliament has 123 members, with 68 drawn from the governing majority. Despite sustained campaigning, organisers said no coalition MP agreed to support the proposal.
On Sunday, the two movements published a statement alongside photographs and the names of 11 MPs whom they said either refused to support the bill or failed to respond to constituents’ appeals. The material was released under the headline: “These are the ones who made genocide possible”.
In a campaign poster attached to the statement, the groups said the named MPs had declined to back sanctions legislation against Israel “despite the availability of evidence and the many demands of their constituents in open letters”.
“The decisions of these MPs made genocide possible, while death was the price of their silence,” the poster added.
The movements said they had organised a wide-ranging grassroots campaign that included collecting signatures and formally submitting open letters from constituents across multiple electorates urging MPs to support the bill proposed by Swarbrick.
According to the statement, the outcome was “clear and unambiguous”, with some MPs openly rejecting the legislation and others ignoring constituents altogether.
“People do not forget those who ignore them,” it said, warning that decisions made at such moments would carry political consequences.
The image is a campaign poster by United 4 Palestine and All Out for Gaza
The groups said the publication marked the end of this phase of the campaign, but stressed that it did not signal an end to efforts to secure accountability.
Yasser Abdel Aal, head of the All of Us Gaza movement, told The New Arab that pro-Palestinian organisations in New Zealand have organised multiple nationwide protests since 7 October 2023.
“At the second national protest, we presented seven demands to the government in writing,” he said. “At the forefront were boycotting Israel and recognising the State of Palestine.”
Abdel Aal said that following a negative response from the government, activists escalated their efforts by organising a third national protest in coordination with the Green Party, the Labour Party and Te Pāti Māori.
He added that ahead of the December 2024 protest, Swarbrick shared with organisers her proposal for a sanctions bill, which was closely modelled on New Zealand’s legislation sanctioning Russia.
He said that, in his capacity as head of All of Us Gaza, he was the first to propose approaching right-wing coalition MPs directly in their electorates to pressure them to support the bill, an initiative later joined by United 4 Palestine.
The campaign focused on mobilising constituents to address their MPs directly.
“We appointed coordinators in each electorate, drafted a letter, and uploaded it to a website so people could select their electorate, sign the letter and send it to their MP,” Abdel Aal said.
The aim, he added, was to demonstrate the scale of public support for sanctioning Israel over crimes against humanity committed in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories.
According to Abdel Aal, the campaign succeeded in collecting a large number of signatures, many of which were sent directly to MPs alongside warnings that failure to act could cost them votes in future elections.
In several electorates, particularly in Auckland and Christchurch, he said the number of signatories exceeded the margin by which MPs had won their seats in the previous election.
He said campaigners also met with several MPs to present their demands, but encountered what he described as instructions from the government not to engage with the issue.
All MPs were contacted as part of the campaign, Abdel Aal said, but those whose photos were published were singled out because they represented electorates with particularly high levels of engagement and still refused to respond.
Some declined to meet constituents altogether, while others refused to accept letters containing signatures calling for support of the bill.
Abdel Aal added that a public opinion poll conducted in New Zealand had showed majority support for boycotting Israel in response to the Gaza genocide and war crimes.
He said plans were underway to launch a new campaign later this year, linked to the general election expected in December, aimed at assessing how the government and coalition MPs had responded to the issue of Palestine and Israel’s onslaught of Gaza.