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

I am one of the people who thinks the ambassador should be expelled from the country. This has nothing to do with him personally, rather it concern the policies of his state. Like Desmond Tutu, I think the time for treating Israel as a normal state is over because it is not behaving as a normal state. I want to ask the ambassador questions about that contention. For the record, it is certainly not motivated by anti-Semitism in my case. For example, when disgraceful attempts were made to downplay the horrors of the Holocaust by people like David Irving, I brought a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz to this city to organise meetings and get her on national television to remind the Irish people of the horrors of the Holocaust. I would do so again if anybody tried to downplay the horrors of what was done to the Jewish people, but it is precisely because I am opposed to racism that I oppose what the ambassador's state is doing and what it stands for. I want to ask him a few questions about this.

I lived for one year in the moshav called Ne'ot HaKikar on the Dead Sea before the first intifada broke out in 1987. That leads me to my first question.

The ambassador has tried to cover over what Israel has done - the killings of innocent people in Gaza on three separate occasions in recent years, the seizure of Palestinian land and so on - by attacking Hamas. Why does the ambassador not admit that Hamas did not exist when the first intifada took place? It did not establish an armed wing until the early 1990s. There was a reason; the PLO was exiled in Tunis at the time - effectively not present. However, the ordinary Palestinians rose up because Israel denied them basic rights. I lived there. It was apartheid. Racism was endemic; it was rotten. I was shocked within weeks of living there to see how Israel treated Palestinian people.

Is it not a fact that the law of return, which is the basic law of the Israeli state, is a racist apartheid law because it confers rights on Jews that it denies to Palestinians? For example, if I was Jewish and had never set foot in Israel, I could claim citizenship there tomorrow, but 6 million people whose origins are in what the ambassador now calls Israel who were forced out in 1947 or 1948 do not have that right. Is that not part of the reason that the Palestinians are in dispute with Israelis? It is because Israel denies them the right to return to their homes, their land and their villages. They have a legitimate claim, even under international law, to return but Israel denies them that right. Why does Israel deny them that right? Why does it give that right to other people who have no connection whatsoever with the land, whether one calls it Israel or Palestine?

If Israel is serious about the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution why does it continue to seize land which under that agreement is designated to be Palestinian land? This has affected 500,000 people mostly since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Why does Israel allow that to happen if it is serious about giving this land to the Palestinians? It is absolutely extraordinary. Is the ambassador not just taking us for idiots if he can say with a straight face "We're serious about peace, but while we're serious about peace we're going to seize Palestinian land"? He expects the Palestinians to sit back and do nothing about that and he expects the world to regard that as an acceptable way to behave.

The ambassador asked earlier if we could have some constructive solutions. He knows what the Palestinian people have been requesting, which is far less even than some people would request because I believe the whole apartheid system should be dismantled. What they have requested is the lifting of the siege of Gaza. Let them have an airport. Let them have ports. Let them not be dictated to by a Government, for which they do not vote, as to what can go in and out of their territories, and whether they will have power, clean water and medicine. What makes the ambassador think that Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons and the fourth biggest army in the world, and visit destruction on the people Gaza when they have no rights to defend themselves? They have no territorial sovereignty over that land.