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

I intend to move the People Before Profit amendment No. 1 to this motion. I am sharing time with Deputies Gino Kenny, Bríd Smith and Barry.

I thank Sinn Féin for introducing its motion. It makes many very important points about the annexation of territory in the West Bank and Jerusalem seized by Israel after 1967. However, our amendment, and I will mainly speak to that, seeks to go further because we believe the crimes of Israel go beyond that. They need to be called out as they are. Most importantly, we need action to hold Israel accountable for those crimes and to play our part in ending the criminal behaviour of Israel in respect of the Palestinians. To put it simply in the short time I have, we believe the Israeli ambassador should be expelled as part of a comprehensive package of economic, political and cultural sanctions against Israel for war crimes, ongoing systematic ethnic cleansing not just since 1967 but from the foundation of the state in 1948 and for being a fundamentally apartheid state in its basic laws and practices, particularly laws such as the Israeli law of return and the basic nation state law.

There is no equivalence between the two sides. Indeed, there is not two sides in this conflict. It is not a conflict. There is the apartheid state of Israel that has sought to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people since its foundation in 1948. It has continued that campaign, practises systematic apartheid and has repeated relentless war crimes against the Palestinian people. We now must treat the Israeli apartheid state in the same way as we treated apartheid South Africa. For goodness sake, today there is talk of EU sanctions against Belarus, which is quite right. However, Israel has systematic apartheid policies, commits war crimes repeatedly in Gaza and ethnically cleanses the Palestinian people on an ongoing and systematic basis, yet people do not call for sanctions or for the expulsion of the ambassador. It is not acceptable and we must call it out clearly.

The only just solution is the return of the Palestinian refugees, as guaranteed under international law, to the places from which they were expelled in 1948, and the self-determination of the Palestinian people. That has to be achieved through a complete and comprehensive boycott of the apartheid state of Israel through a campaign similar to the one conducted against apartheid South Africa. Anything less is meaningless. Sure, we must call out the annexation since 1967, but the truth is that the entire Israeli project is a criminal project of ethnic cleansing and extermination of the Palestinian people and their attempt at national self-determination. It cannot be allowed to continue. My appeal is to expel the ambassador and impose those sanctions until there is true freedom, justice and self-determination for the Palestinian people.

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