John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

For approaching two weeks now, day after day, night after night, we have been forced to bear witness to a sustained, brutal, and unforgiving assault on the Palestinian people by the apartheid Government of Israel. It has been torturous, shocking and heartbreaking. Some 230 civilians, including 64 children, have been slaughtered as of today in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. Homes, media offices, libraries, police stations, a university, nine primary healthcare centres, six hospitals, the main Covid-19 laboratory and the office of the ministry of health have been deliberately destroyed. Those are all grave breaches of the Geneva Convention or, in other words, war crimes.

Like all witnesses, we face the challenge to act under our moral obligation to attempt to put an end to this onslaught or to retreat into the role of passive observer. The Irish Government has adopted an approach that perhaps can be best described as straddling the two in its attempt to achieve consensus that has no chance of success. The deck is stacked. All attempts to achieve consensus are doomed to failure when allies of Israel cynically employ their veto at the UN and within the EU to prevent anything that could resemble a coherent approach emerging. Thus, we are morally, ethically and justifiably compelled to act unilaterally.

In the dark days of South African apartheid, Ireland, spurred by the passion of the ordinary people of Ireland as epitomised by the Dunnes Stores strikers, was proud to act in support of the victims of state oppression and discrimination in South Africa. What has changed? Human Rights Watch, an internationally respected organisation, recently laid the accusation of the crime of apartheid against the Israeli state, an allegation backed by the most irrefutable of evidence. The Government of Israel has been engaged in a systematic campaign of absolute domination over the Palestinian peoples for decades. Human Rights Watch, along with reports from other human rights groups such as Al-Haq and B'Tselem, have called this out now, which is welcome. However, the reports, in conjunction with the latest round of attacks on the Palestinian people, must be seen as a catalyst for action.

The current violence is not taking place in a vacuum. It is the product of 54 years of Israeli colonisation of Palestine. Since 1967, 250 illegal Israeli settlements have been created on Palestinian lands, now inhabited by more than 650,000 illegal Israeli settlers.

This is an Israeli strategy of remove, fragment and replace, designed to allow Israeli settlers to seize the maximum amount of Palestinian land for themselves while locking the remaining Palestinian people into a patchwork collection of Bantustans. This is apartheid in practice.

It is a fact that 83% of all demolitions of Palestinian buildings take place within a 2.5 km range of Israeli settlements. When I say buildings, I am describing homes, schools, health centres and basic critical infrastructure funded by the Irish taxpayer and other donors.

In 2020, 848 Palestinian homes were destroyed, impacting on 6,380 Palestinians, including 534 children. Up to 30 April this year, 316 buildings were destroyed. This represents an increase of 108% on figures from 2020.

The human cost of this is catastrophic. Thousands are left homeless, hopeless, and destitute. Very often, following the destruction of schools, young children are forced to travel 14 to 15 miles to schools, during which they often have to pass by the illegal Israeli settlements.

It is time for action. We can issue all the statements we want. The statements that have been issued would plaster the walls of the convention centre but it has zero impact on the illegal aggression by the Israeli state. We can and must take action. Ireland must be prepared to act alone on this when the international community has failed the Palestinian people.

We must officially recognise the Palestinian state. We must also move to bring forward the occupied territories Bill and recognise the fact that annexation is happening as we speak in East Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank territories. We must act, and if that means acting unilaterally, we must do so, otherwise, we are failing on our human rights and our obligations to the Palestinian people.

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