Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

First, I am horrified by every single death but, you see, the world is responsible for failing to call out the reality of the Israeli regime. It is an apartheid regime. It was set up on the basis of the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians. It has sustained itself through the ethnic cleansing - ongoing - of Palestinians day in, day out, in East Jerusalem, across the West Bank, everywhere, every where there is Hamas and where there is no Hamas. I lived there at the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 and there was no Hamas. Young people rose up because their entire future had been stolen from them. They were suffering ferocious oppression at the hands of the Israeli regime and military and they rose up. There was no Hamas. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, PLO, was not even in the country; it was in Tunis. Israel met them with brutality, murder, administrative tension and ethnic cleansing. It has continued that day in, day out, and yet the Taoiseach's Government refuses even to call it an apartheid regime. It refuses to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and war crimes for which human rights organisation after human rights organisation has begged and appealed to the Government and other European governments to hold Israel to account and to end its impunity. The world has given it the licence to conduct the savagery it is doing now and it is responsible for the crimes we are witnessing. If we want to end the murder, we have to hold Israel accountable for its crimes.

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