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

The slaughter of unarmed Palestinian protesters carried out by Israel yesterday and its response in the past six weeks to the Great March of Return was cold blooded, deliberate, calculated murder. It was not an over-reaction or a somehow justifiable defence of a border but premeditated murder. How do I know that? Two days before the protests started six weeks ago I told the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach what was well known in both Palestine and Israel, that the Israelis were deploying 100 snipers in preparation for the unarmed demonstrations. On the first day of the protests, the massacre started. The Israelis started picking people off who were miles from the fence and represented no threat to anybody. Even if they had slingshots - the vast majority of them did not even have them - it would have been like throwing a stone into the ocean. There was no chance that they could hurt or hit anybody, but Israel was planning to massacre people. Anything less than sanctions and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador for an act of premeditated murder against unarmed protesters is an effective green light for Israel to continue. Israel is a state that is willing to slaughter in a premeditated way - 60 people yesterday and another 45 in the past six weeks. It is a state that is willing to impose an 11 year long siege on Gaza, imprisoning 2 million people, refusing to let them in or out or to let goods in or out in order to allow the Palestinians to regenerate their tiny patch of land. It is a state that is willing to continuously break international law by expanding illegal settlements into territory designated for the Palestinians. In that context, nobody can seriously suggest the Tánaiste's words of concern and call for restraint are going to make a blind bit of difference to the Israelis. They are not interested. If they had been even remotely interested in peace, they would not have breached the Oslo peace agreement within hours of signing it. They were breaching it within hours of signing it by expanding settlements. They have played the international community with the pretence that they are interested in peace, while in front of everybody they are explicitly and blatantly carrying on their illegal activities. When Palestinians try to resist in any shape or form, they are met with the most cruel, savage and murderous brutality and we sit back and continue to let it happen.

What are the Palestinians supposed to do? In 2005 they elected a group of people in a free and fair election that was observed by international observers. Israel refused to recognise that government and the European Union went along with it. Needless to say, the United States also refused to recognise the government. A siege was imposed. It is a collective punishment under international law and, therefore, illegal. The Palestinians resisted, militarily, as they were entitled to do under international law, but they were condemned for it. Then they moved to unarmed protests and the Tánaiste sneaks into his narrative a claim that there was a bit of provocation. He said this provocation did not justify the killings, but still the implication is that the Palestinians are a little bit to blame. What are they supposed to do? Every single avenue is closed off to them. The Tánaiste will not even talk to their elected representatives. I have appealed to him in recent weeks to talk to Hamas. How is it okay to talk to the murderous Netanyahu who was celebrating President Trump's provocative moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem while people were being slaughtered in Gaza and not to the elected representatives of the people of Gaza? The Government is not a neutral broker if it continues to do this or give favoured trade status to Israel when it flagrantly violates international law and murders people. If the Tánaiste's words are to mean anything, there must be consequences like there were for apartheid South Africa. Surely we have reached a point where we can say the sort of action that finally brought apartheid South Africa to heel is necessary to deal with the rogue and apartheid state of Israel.

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