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

I am addressing the ambassador and the supporters of the Israeli project, state or whatever it is. I am one of the people who think that state is a colonialist enterprise and that it is an apartheid state. From its very beginning, it achieved its aims through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, something well documented by Professor Illan Pappé in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which indicates that between 1947 and 1948, 700,000 to 900,000 Palestinians - innocent people - were driven from their homes in less than a year. They were driven from homes in villages and towns.

Some of those people were driven to places like Sheikh Jarrah, which is now at the centre of another attempt at ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state as it continues its advance to displace Palestinian people and take control of territory designated under the UN partition plan that has been mentioned as Palestinian territory. That territory is within the green line and designated as Palestinian territory. Israel continues to annex that territory, achieving that through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Violence is used along with a twisted version of the law as the means to achieve those aims.

If my narrative is not true, please explain the basic law of the Israeli state, which is an apartheid law and which establishes supremacy for people of Jewish origin, establishing the state as a Jewish state. Therefore, the 20% of inhabitants that are Palestinian are deemed, from a legal perspective, as second class citizens. They are not on the same level as the Jewish population or treated as such.

Furthermore, if what I say is not true, will Israel allow all of the Palestinians and their descendants displaced in 1947 and 1948 to return to their homes and villages, as international law demands? If, as Israel claims, the 600,000 to 700,000 settlers who have established themselves contrary to international law, contrary to the demands of Oslo and contrary to the appeals of the international community are really just about establishing Jewish settlements and Israel subsequently intends to hand over that territory for a Palestinian state, surely there is a quid pro quofor all the, probably now, 4 million or 5 million people and their descendants, many of whom are living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria in the most desperate conditions and completely disenfranchised. Surely, if Israel believes that Jew, Arab and Christian and indeed people of no religion, which by the way I certainly do, can and should live side by side with equal rights, then grant all those Palestinians and their descendants the right to return. Then Israel's Orwellian narrative of trying to justify the continued annexation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territory might have some credibility. Unless Israel actually confers equality in the basic laws of the state, whether one calls it Israel or Palestine, it is a fact that the ambassador's state is an apartheid state and it is a fact that it confers rights and privileges on one group because of its religion and nationality which it denies to others. If I am wrong, let the ambassador tell us now that Palestinians will have the right to return to their homes and villages and that they will have equality. Of course, the ambassador will not concede that. There is no chance the ambassador will concede that.

For us to say that is not in any sense, by the way, as Israel often charges, motivated by anti-Semitism. As I told one of the ambassador's predecessors, I lived in the Negev, in a moshav. I went there completely without prejudice. In fact, if anything, my prejudice was very much one of sympathy, as I still hold, for the historic plight of the Jews and the persecution they faced. When I lived there, I worked side by side with Palestinians who I met in the first few days who were living in refugee camps and who had been displaced. They and their families had been displaced in 1947 and 1948 and had lived in refugee camps ever since. I saw the horrific treatment of those people, the endemic racism, the anti-Arab racism that is rife - rife - in mainstream Israeli society, the systematic discrimination and the fundamental denial of the right of the Palestinian families I met living refugee camps to be able to return to the towns and villages from which they were displaced using terror by Zionist militias in 1947 and 1948, using atrocities such as Deir Yassin where 200 people were murdered in their beds and the screams of those who were killed were broadcast in order to terrorise other Palestinians into leaving their home, as nearly 1 million did over a year. If I am wrong, let Israel give the Palestinians the right to return. Then Israel can show it is serious about peace and then, maybe, have some sort of peaceful negotiation. Israel should stop trying to drive people out of places in which they live now, including Sheikh Jarrah. They we could seriously talk about peace-----