New Zealand sparked outrage this week after their immigration website published a map which labeled Israel as Palestine.
The map was part of a fact sheet about Palestinian immigrants in New Zealand. It has now been removed from the government website, but it was archived on the Wayback Machine.
The Israel Institute of New Zealand immediately condemned the map, and the entire report, which they claimed “presents a one-sided, distorted and politicised narrative of the Israel/Palestine conflict and totally erases Israel from the map.”
“The geography of the map is so inaccurate that it does not even include the West Bank in what it calls ‘The State of Palestine’– it simply replaces Israel (according to pre-1967 borders) with ‘Palestine,'” the Israel Institute of NZ said in a statement.
The organization went on to say that “it is alarming and embarrassing that information provided by a New Zealand government department, can be both so wildly inaccurate and politicised.”
“A primary school student who knows how to use Wikipedia could do a better job. Which leads us to wonder whether in fact this ‘fact sheet’ is a ‘fantasy sheet’, a projection of the department’s delusional hopes for the future. If it were ever to come to pass, Immigration New Zealand would be required to have an ‘Israeli refugee quota fact sheet’ on its website,” the harsh statement concluded.
Immigration New Zealand’s ‘State of Palestine Refugee Quota Factsheet’ presents a one-sided, distorted and politicised narrative of the Israel/Palestine conflict and totally erases Israel from the map.
@MFATgovtNZ @IsraelinNZ @AlfredNgaroMP @winstonpetershttps://t.co/bo7vuv9m78— Israel Institute of NZ (@IsraelInstNZ) June 14, 2019
The organization is now calling for an investigation into the matter.
