Mr. Alan Shatter:

I want to bring a message to this meeting because I have been watching the various, repetitive sessions saying same things repetitively about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The message is that words matter. Truth matters. We learned that through 30 years of conflict on this island. Words can contribute to bridge building, reconciliation and peace and understanding. They can also distort history and today's reality, exacerbate division, ferment hatred and incite and trigger violence, murder and terrorism.

The Amnesty International report that we are discussing falls into the latter category. At a time of reconciliation and growing co-operation between Israel and Arab states across the Middle East, all of whom aspire to a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Amnesty’s poisoned, unbalanced report can do nothing other than fuel public hostility within Arab states and elsewhere to constructive engagement, the deepening of new relationships and conflict resolution.

The report purports to present itself as a detailed analysis of Israeli Government conduct since Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and condemns it as engaged since then in the application of a system of apartheid. That is the headline-catching big lie currently fashionable within some campaigning and ideological circles.

It is designed to undermine the pivotal foundational role of United Nations Resolution 181 of November 1947, which expressly prescribed the creation of two states, an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state, and an international regime to govern Jerusalem. Amnesty's report says nothing about the aggressive illegal war launched by Israel's surrounding Arab states to eliminate it at birth, which also sabotaged the Jerusalem governance mechanism. Amnesty is critical of Israel being the one and only Jewish state in the world and is on record asserting, contrary to the 1947 UN resolution, that it should not exist as a Jewish state. To maintain its despicable depiction of Israel, one of the most culturally diverse and blended states on the planet, as systemically racist, it studiously ignores the legal fact it is internationally designated to be a Jewish state and so created and recognised by the United Nations. It ignores the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from neighbouring Arab states who obtained refuge in Israel rendering those states judenrein. It also ignores the fact that Israel, unlike some other states and entities in the Middle East, is not only a democracy but, as Yoseph Haddad states, also fully facilitates and protects freedom of religion.

Amnesty's report entirely ignores the region's true history, including the rejection by all Arab states and the local Arab population from day one of the two-state solution structured by the 1947 UN resolution, the continued state of belligerence to which Israel was subjected in the decades that followed; that again in 1967 and 1973 it had to fight for its continued existence; that between 1948 and 1967 when Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank, and East Jerusalem by Jordan, nothing was done to establish the new Arab state the UN prescribed in 1947 or any Palestinian state. Amnesty also substantially ignores the substantive provisions of the 1993-95 Oslo Accords, which facilitated the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the specific detailed arrangements agreed to govern areas A, B and C on the West Bank, it ignores Arab and Palestinian rejectionism and the backdrop to and impact of both the first and second intifada and the terrorist atrocities perpetrated, which resulted in the murder and maiming of thousands of Israeli men, women and children of all backgrounds. Amnesty ignores the ongoing defensive and security measures required by Israel to this day to protect all Israelis from attack and atrocities, the wars as initiated by Hamas from Gaza, toxic internal Palestinian division and governance dysfunction, the multiple attempts made by the Israeli state and successive prime ministers in talks with Palestinian leaders to effect conflict resolution and implement a two-state solution.

The report grossly misrepresents the reality of daily life in Israel. As Mr. Haddad says, Israeli law applies equally to all Israeli citizens, including the 20% of Israelis who are not Jewish, that a variety of Israeli Supreme Court judgments have asserted the equality of all Israeli citizens under Israeli basic law; that interventions of that Court, much like our own Supreme Court, have prevented government and state overreach. It ignores that all Israeli citizens have access to every type of employment, to first, second and third level education, participate together in every type of sport, that non-Jewish Israeli citizens are represented and have leadership roles across Israeli society, throughout all professions, are members of the Knesset and the Israeli Government, the Israeli judiciary all the way to its supreme court, professors and lecturers in Israeli universities, doctors and nurses throughout the Israeli healthcare system, and play for, captain and coach Israeli international teams. The report totally misrepresents and distorts the Israeli political process and totally ignores the fact that the current Israeli Government is entirely dependent on a Muslim Brotherhood Arab party led by the already mentioned, Mansour Abbas, with whom the authors of the Amnesty report did not even engage. It also ignores the cross-community involvement throughout Israel of approximately 25,000 Magen David Adom professionals and trained volunteers who act as emergency medical responders.

Fundamentally, the Amnesty report misrepresents what is a territorial and political conflict relating to Israeli and Palestinian nationhood and identity as a racial conflict. It does not contain an objective, factual and legal analysis but a smorgasbord of distorted history, ideological philandering masquerading as fact and is fundamentally legally flawed. Amnesty, in its report, admits that it set out to examine the conduct of the Israeli Government through the framework of apartheid. Having acknowledged the heinous form of apartheid notoriously applied in South Africa to be inapplicable, Amnesty then proceeds to apply a new variant, ideologically spun and created to smear the Israeli state, knowing apartheid in the public mind to be synonymous with the evil inflicted by South Africa's white supremacy governments. In doing so, Amnesty misappropriates South Africa's bitter and cruel history and exploits for its own purposes the grievous wrong of many decades inflicted on South Africa's non-white community.

The report does not properly distinguish between Israel and the West Bank, between Israel and Gaza, nor between the West Bank and Gaza and presents as largely ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the widely known history of Jerusalem. Crucially, it does not properly address the distinction between international humanitarian law and international human rights law and fails to distinguish between international law provisions applicable to disputed or occupied territory and those applicable to the territory of internationally recognised states, such as Israel. It is a pity that its ideological and distorted depiction of the conflict, which reflects Soviet ideology going back to the 1950s and the infamous rescinded UN motion labelling Zionism as racism, has to date been so uncritically accepted by most members of this committee and Parliament and its language replicated.

Israel of course, like Ireland, is far from perfect. Much can be validly criticised and should change or be reformed, but Israel's flaws cannot be correctly depicted as derived from a system of apartheid any more than Ireland's. Is it the view of this committee that our country is applying a system of apartheid because of our failure to address the issue of Traveller accommodation, the shortage of affordable accommodation for young people, the plight of those in direct provision, delays in accessing healthcare experienced by those who lack private health insurance, the lack of adequate timely services for children with disabilities, the inadequacy of psychiatric services, the almost total absence of non-white presenters in State media such as RTÉ, the existence of superior facilities in some private schools compared with public schools and the delays and difficulty experienced by non-EU foreign residents in Ireland effecting family reunification? Does that justify Ireland being internationally labelled and demonised as applying an apartheid system or being an apartheid state or does it simply illustrate we are not perfect and much remains to be done?

Some members of this committee and other Oireachtas Members have frequently depicted the Israeli security wall or fence, which is referenced by Amnesty in its report, as an apartheid wall. The necessity for the wall derives from the fact that more than 1,000 Israelis died during the second intifada between 2000 and 2005 and the Israeli Government was compelled to protect its citizens from Palestinian terrorism. In Northern Ireland, peace walls still exist to this day to protect local communities from sectarian violence. None of those who reference an apartheid wall in Israel similarly label the peace walls nor label Northern Ireland, whatever its governance failures, as an apartheid state. Incidentally the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, is in reality a great deal more diverse than is this Parliament or Stormont.

The ideological intellectual gyrations through which the Amnesty report travels to substantiate the false charge of a new form of apartheid would be laughable if not designed to demonise and delegitimise the only Jewish state in the world, the state to which the Jewish people are indigenous, the state recreated and arisen from the ashes of history to always be a safe haven for the Jewish people who have not, in a single century over 2,000 years, been free of persecution. It is the safe haven this State refused to offer persecuted Jews attempting to escape Nazi Germany and emaciated survivors of German concentration camps.

This committee in its deliberations, as I have watched them, is on the wrong side of history. As far as I know, to date, it has had nothing positive to say about the Abraham accords, historical meetings taking place and agreements between Israeli leaders and leaders of Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Morocco and Bahrain or the real advances in peace, reconciliation, economic co-operation and environment protection taking place throughout the Middle East.

It has had nothing, ever, to say about Palestinian rejectionism of every advance achieved and Iran’s malign role in the Middle East. Nor is anything ever said about Palestinian political parties, terrorist and civil groups celebrating in Gaza, Jerusalem and in the West Bank murderous terrorist atrocities, when committed, such as those of the past three weeks that resulted in the death of 11 people and the maiming of many others. Those murdered include two Ukrainian men, a 19-year-old Druze police officer, a Christian Arab police officer, four Jewish women and a rabbi wheeling a child in a pram. It is equal-opportunity terrorism with cross-community tragic impact.

Too many members of this committee advocate boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS, and are supportive of Irish NGOs opposed to normalisation of relations between Israelis and Palestinians when from everything we have learned on this island they should encourage dialogue and engagement. Of course, if it chose, this committee could positively contribute to conflict resolution by encouraging the Government to apply the lessons of our own peace process to the conflict and exploring what positive steps it could take to encourage and foster dialogue, trust and confidence building, cross-community engagement, reconciliation and to increase Palestinian economic development.

The unquestioning acceptance in previous hearings, by most members of this committee, of the deeply-flawed, ideologically-inspired report leads to three simple questions I will put to this committee. I regret the absence of some members who have been vociferously critical of Israel in the past. What is the objective of this committee in holding these hearings? It is not clear to anybody. Is it the objective of some to recreate in Israel the terrorist violence and atrocities perpetrated over a period of 30 years on this island by the Provisional IRA and loyalist paramilitaries and in Israel, the terrorist atrocities of the second intifada? How many members of this committee seek the de-legitimisation and destruction of the world’s only Jewish state? These are serious questions that only each member of this committee can answer.

I have final questions about Amnesty and its report. Why did Amnesty spend so much time on creating this toxic, selected edifice of half-truths and lies? Why not use that time positively? Why not spend that time encouraging dialogue, engagement, conflict resolution and reconciliation?