Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I apologise on behalf of Deputies Boyd Barrett and Gino Kenny, who, unfortunately, are double-booked. I ask the Tánaiste, Deputy Coveney, to condemn in the strongest possible terms the decision of the US Administration to no longer consider the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal. It is clear the move had no legal basis. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention is clear: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." It has been recognised as illegal by a number of UN Security Council resolutions, the most recent being in 2016, and by the International Court of Justice. More importantly than it being against international law, it is clear it is against any basic element of justice and equality in the world. The settlements are built on brutal violence by settlers and the Israeli state against Palestinians, and maintained on the basis of extreme discrimination, poverty, apartheid and segregation, including through the use of separating walls, roads and so on. The act will doubtless give a green light for more violence and settlements to be built, and it will continue, as is the purpose, to block any road to a viable Palestinian state by breaking up Palestinian territory.

This is not the first move of such a sort by Trump. It is one of a series of moves in recent years, including the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017, followed by the moving of the US embassy there in May 2018, the removal of funding from UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East on the basis of its assistance of Palestinian refugees in early 2019, followed in March 2019 by the recognition of the Syrian Golan Heights as an Israeli territory, a decision that Israel was the only state to take, and now this. Each move has been calculated both to pander to Trump's pro-Israel base domestically and to assist in propping up a deeply right-wing regime in Israel. The acknowledgment of the Golan Heights as an Israeli territory in March was immediately before the general election, and the latest move has come at a time when Netanyahu faces the possibility of losing power. In the coalition negotiations that followed the election, Netanyahu immediately took advantage. He probably knew about the move in advance, and on the final day of the campaign, he made a trip to the settlements. He has repeated the language about extending Jewish sovereignty to all the settlements, meaning the annexation of more Palestinian land.

It is not just an issue of Trump's bad intentions. Ardent support for right-wing Israeli policy has a bipartisan consensus in the US, with the corporate Democrats and the Republicans both viewing the propping up of the racist, apartheid state of Israel as part of an imperialist strategy in the Middle East. It is clear the Oslo Agreement is dead and that it was never aimed at providing justice for Palestinians but to give limited concessions to cut across a mass movement. The redevelopment of a mass movement from below, uniting Palestinian and Israeli Jewish working-class people together in a struggle against the Israeli elite, is necessary. Their international allies are not the likes of the US or, unfortunately, the EU, which will cry crocodile tears but do fundamentally nothing about it. Instead, ordinary people, such as Palestinian solidarity activists, trade unionists, socialists and anti-war activists, will support the redevelopment of a mass movement in the Middle East.

See this speech in context