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

Earlier, the Taoiseach said that what defined the European Union was that it is an institution based on the idea of rules-based international co-operation. He argued that the European Union is a bulwark against extremism. Let us test that proposition against the EU's relationship with Israel on the day that Israel is, once again, committing war crimes in Gaza. As we speak, it is launching missiles which have claimed the lives of 28 innocent people in Gaza in the last 24 hours, including ten children. One of the dead was due to marry the day after tomorrow. This is indiscriminate murder of civilians. As we speak, Benjamin Netanyahu is saying that he has no intention of stopping. What did the European Union do? We heard words of sympathy and condemnation but no action against war crimes by the rogue state of Israel.

What preceded the current missile strikes against Gaza? If one believes the false narrative about what goes on between Israel and the Palestinians, one is encouraged to believe this is some intractable conflict between two sides that, for some reason, cannot get on with one another. That is not the truth about Israel. What preceded this latest flare-up was the attempt to evict and ethnically cleanse – let us use the correct term – 28 families from the Sheikh Jarrah area of Jerusalem in order to replace those Palestinian families with illegal Jewish settlers. It is an attempt to evict them, take their homes and put other people in those homes. It is worth stating that those families in that area are now going to be double refugees because they came to Sheikh Jarrah after being ethnically cleansed from Haifa and Jaffa in 1948.

In the year the Israeli state was founded and in one of the most barbaric acts of ethnic cleansing seen in the 20th century, close to 1 million people were expelled by Zionist terror gangs from their homes and villages and driven to the West Bank. They were left to fend for themselves and it was only later that the United Nations helped them build refugee camps and new homes. Now, they are being evicted again contrary to law and international rules, which the EU is supposed to uphold. They are doing it again. During the holy month of Ramadan, Palestinians were blocked from going on to the Temple Mount in an orchestrated, premeditated military action by the Israel authorities in order to provoke the Palestinians while they continued the campaign of illegal settlements and ethnic cleansing. Annexation is much too nice a word for it. This is ethnic cleansing. What is happening in Gaza today is a crime against humanity. It is a crime against humanity that, on an ongoing, systematic and orchestrated basis, Israel continues to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, as it has done since the beginning of the state in 1948. People need to understand that. In Ireland, more than ever, we should know of the need to show our affinity with the Palestinians and move beyond words of concern to action.

I wonder whether people know that in 1936, the military governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, explained what the plan was for the Israeli state, which was to be set up in 1948. He was the first military governor general since Pontius Pilate, sent in as part of the Sykes–Picot carve-up of the Middle East and the Balfour Declaration, which was to support the plan for the new state that Britain would support. How did he describe the Israeli state they were planning to build? He said that “we want to build a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. Balfour, who had signed the declaration, and Herbert Samuel, another of the main figures, had been involved in Ireland in suppressing land protests in the late 19th century. Samuel interned 2,000 people after 1916 and oversaw the hanging of Roger Casement. He and Balfour went on to become senior figures in mandate Palestine, planning the establishment of the Israeli state, the partition of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in order to create a loyal little Jewish Ulster amidst a sea of potential hostile Arabism. In other words, it was for the great powers to control the Middle East at the expense of the Palestinians and causing decades of conflict, division, murder, tyranny, the denial of democracy and all the horrors the Palestinians and people of the Middle East have had to suffer.

Who is Israel’s biggest trading partner? It is the European Union. Last year, the EU and Israel did €31 billion worth of trade. All the weasel words and words of sympathy from European leaders, when they do nothing about the murderous criminal activity that Israel is engaged in, are hollow and the Taoiseach’s premise that the European Union is a rules-based international guardian is nonsense.

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