Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is very important we discuss this matter, even if the debate is very limited. There are very few issues that unite most if not all in this House, but this is one of them. I do not doubt the bona fides of the Minister, Deputy Coveney, on this issue but I wish in the few minutes I have to deal with three specific issues.

First, I add my voice to the issue that is now current and immediate, that is, Israel's designation of six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organisations. That is a clear and absolute assault on democratic norms of accountability and human rights monitoring. No democratic nation, no nation that presents itself to be fully democratic, can be allowed simply to extinguish human rights bodies from existing within its territory. The impact of this is immediate. There is an immediate concern for all the people who have worked, sometimes for decades, in advocating human rights and monitoring what is going on on the ground in Israel and in the occupied territories that they will be subject to arrest if they enter their own premises or access their own funding. The whole idea is to stop them functioning as human rights organisations. Even totalitarian regimes have not resorted to this.

The idea is that if you extinguish the eyes of the people of the world, somehow, what is going on in Israel and the occupied territories will not be noticed. It really is a brazen act that we need to respond to.

The second point I wish to make relates to the ongoing occupation and annexation of Palestinian land. We must make it clear to the state of Israel that it has abandoned the two-state solution. I listened to the Minister's words very carefully. It has abandoned the two-state solution. There can be no two-state solution if the viability of the state of Palestine is eroded through occupation and eviction. It seems to be the settled policy of successive governments of Israel to simply extinguish the possibility of what we have all hoped for, namely, the creation of two separate states, one for the people of Israel and one for the people of Palestine, both viable, with issues like control of the city of Jerusalem to be determined as the capital of both. The Minister's statement is most welcome, but it charts, still, a course that is being demonstrably undermined as we speak, day in, day out, by the official actions of the Government of Israel.

The final point I wish to make concerns what we must do now. We need to stop coming in here and having endless statements. We have to do something. I am taken by the actions of the Belgian Government, which has set out a formula for dealing with bilateral agreements with Israel. Further treaties between Belgium and Israel will contain a territorial clause stipulating that they must not apply to territories brought under Israeli control since 1967. On customs, trade and databases, we must apply in very strict terms our policy in relation to the illegality of the occupation of Palestinian territories not only in recent days, but over recent decades. I hope that the Minister might come to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence with a strategy setting out what specifically Ireland is going to do. Hopefully, Ireland will lead both in its position as a member of the UN Security Council and also as an influential and important member of the EU Council.

There are obviously dissenting voices in the EU Council in relation to Israel; we know that. However, the moral case to be presented is persuasive. It falls to countries like Ireland to make that moral case before the court of European public opinion and before the international public opinion of the UN, so that we can, before it is too late, stop the disintegration of the possibility of a long-term peaceful two-state solution.

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