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

My question concerns double standards when it comes to the way Europe deals with the situation faced by Palestinians, and the people of Gaza in particular, in the wake of the recent assault by Israel on Gaza. I would like the Taoiseach to explain how on earth the EU can continue to confer trade privileges and effective associate EU membership on Israel, contribute €840 million in recent years to Israel to develop weapons and missile systems through the EU scientific research programme and continue to allow the EU to be largest trading partner of Israel by a mile. We give them trade privileges, unprecedented access to EU funds and we contribute directly to the development of weaponry and military research that Israel uses against Palestinians in what François Hollande described as a massacre. The president of an EU state described what they did to the UN school as a massacre.

The Russell tribunal met in the past week in Brussels and found that Israel's Operation Protective Edge displayed evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of murder, extermination, persecution and incitement to genocide. It does not get much more serious than that yet the EU confers trade privileges on a state accused of these things. At what point do diplomatic niceties, realpolitik and blind submission to the diktats of the wider EU and its strategic interests give way to standing up and showing moral backbone and saying it is no longer acceptable to treat as a normal state and confer privileges and trade benefits on a state guilty of massacres and accused of genocidal action?

The same European Union can, in an instant, impose sanctions on Russia. I absolutely condemn what Russia is doing in Ukraine but nobody is accusing Russia of genocide. Israel is being accused of genocide and there is no question that it engaged in massacres yet we do nothing. When will the Taoiseach speak out and stop hiding behind EU silence and the claim that it is a decision for the EU? Will Ireland speak out about this and say it is not good enough that genocidal assaults over many years are being conducted against the people of Gaza and we continue not just to treat Israel as a normal state but to confer privilege on it? It is an extraordinary moral contradiction and I ask the Taoiseach to explain it.

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