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

I am also very disappointed that the Taoiseach has left. I hope the Minister of State will pass on the points I wish to make, which largely revolve around the issue of Palestine. It is an extremely urgent matter that six Palestinian prisoners are currently on hunger strike. Two of them, Qayed Fasfus and Mukdad Qawasmeh, have been on hunger strike for almost 100 days. Their lives are very seriously in danger. All of the six are on hunger strike because they have been imprisoned without trial and in many cases repeatedly denied any kind of due process. This is a very urgent, life-threatening matter. They, as well as their supporters and families and so on, are asking that this be raised as a matter of urgency and an appeal made to Israel to give them due process so they can come off that hunger strike, or, indeed, to release them.

That raises a wider issue. The Taoiseach referred to his attendance at the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism and I would really like to ask him some questions about that. At the outset, I want to say that anti-Semitism is a vile phenomenon. The Holocaust is one of the greatest crimes that was ever committed by humanity against a particular group, that is, the Jewish people. Although it is worth saying that there were other victims of the Holocaust, such as Gypsies, communists and trade unionists, the major victims were the Jewish people in a genocidal assault by the Nazis. We must absolutely commemorate the Holocaust and insist that it never ever happens again. However, it is disturbing that at that conference, as is the wont of Israeli political leaders, President Herzog made the following statement:

... when criticism of a particular Israeli policy mutates into questioning Israel’s very right to exist - this is not diplomacy, this is demonization and anti-Semitism, because Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People.​

This is a very familiar refrain. You can question this or that policy of Israel but if you question the right of what some of us happen to believe is an apartheid state to exist, you are an anti-Semite. That is not acceptable. We should not sign up to definitions of anti-Semitism that suggest that and we should be aware that Israel's claim to be the Jewish state representing the Jewish people is not a view shared by millions of Jews across the world. For example, a recent study of the Jewish electorate in the United States found that 25% of Jewish electors believe Israel is an apartheid state, 22% believe it is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, 34% say that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is the same as racism in the United States, and 20% of young Jewish voters said Israel has no right to exist. They are hardly anti-Semites. It is appalling misuse of the terminology of anti-Semitism and is an insult to the memory of the Holocaust to try to equate those two things.

Israel is an apartheid racist state and I say that based on its own legal constitution, particularly around the law of return. The law of return prioritises the rights of Jewish people to gain entry to the historic land of Israel or Palestine - whatever you call it - and denies that right to Palestinians. That right exists under international law, UN General Assembly resolution 194, which Israel denies and has denied since its foundation, when it ethnically cleansed 1 million Palestinians. It is a racist state in its fundamental laws. It practises persecution of the Palestinian people and the denial of their rights on an ongoing and systematic basis. It is entirely legitimate to say that we should not accept the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, that Palestinians have the right to return and therefore to question the existence of the Israeli state and pose the possibility of a single state where Jews, Palestinians, Christians, Arabs and people of no religion would have equality in a single state. Not everybody agrees with that but a lot of people believe it and it is not an anti-Semitic view to hold. We absolutely have to stand against that and I commend the author Sally Rooney for publicly declaring her support for the boycott, divestment, sanctions campaign against the apartheid regime.

I did not have time to raise the issue of the people's vaccine but I ask the Minister of State to pass on to the Taoiseach the request from the people's vaccine group to meet with him to discuss the waiving of the TRIPS patent restrictions on the production of Covid-19 vaccines, medicines and so on because that is seriously inhibiting the global fight against the pandemic in the developing world.

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