Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Winston Peters made the brave choice this weekend

Can I just come to the defence of Winston Peters for a minute?

Winston has been labelled a coward for the position that he took on Palestine on Saturday, which I do not think is fair because it appears to me that what he's done is actually the opposite of cowardice.

The easy thing would have actually been for him to just go with the crowd, just say, yep, we recognize the Palestinian state, because that's what everybody else is doing.

The hard thing for him to do is go against the crowd and go against what everybody at the UN is doing, go against the domestic media opinion, go against the commentator's consensus.

So actually, when you think about it, he's not being cowardly at all - and I agree with his analysis at the moment.

Set aside whether there should be a Palestinian state - because of course there should be a Palestinian state, and I think most of us think that, right? If it's possible, it should happen.

But that's not what this is about. It is about whether you do that right now, because doing it right now is rewarding Hamas and they themselves have made it clear that they see the recognition of a state of Palestine as a vindication of the massacre that they carried out on October 7th.

You cannot reward terrorists for taking innocent lives, but also, and probably more importantly, it's not gonna do anything to end the war.

If you really want to end the war, if Trump's current peace plan fails, then what we need to do is punish Israel for what they're doing. They should be sanctioned and they should be isolated from the international community until they stop. And we've been saying this for weeks on the show.

For every day that we talk about whether we recognize a Palestinian state, we are wasting a day that we could be talking about what we actually should be doing, the things that would actually end this war, like punishing Israel for what they're doing - which again, is another day that we've wasted talking about the wrong thing.

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