Chris Andrews (Dublin Bay South, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Ward.

I welcome the opportunity for Members to speak on this groundbreaking report by Amnesty International. I commend the team at Amnesty on the years of research that went into it. I understand it took four years to complete and it is a solid piece of research. Ireland has a long and proud tradition of support for and solidarity with the people of Palestine. While many of the crimes of Israel's apartheid have long been raised in the Dáil, the EU's central involvement in the arms trade to Israel has seldom been raised. EU members have profited well from Israeli apartheid over the years. Since 2012, EU member states have sold arms to Israel to the tune of nearly €700 million per year. Between 2014 and 2018, Germany and Italy alone supplied 35% of Israel's arms imports. EU states make large profits selling deadly arms to states like Israel that frequently abuse international law and suppress and murder peaceful protestors.

Ireland currently sits on the UN Security Council and is in a prime position to bring forward proposals highlighted in the Amnesty report, such as an arms embargo. The report, along with other recent reports, clearly shows that Israel fails the standards of the EU Council's common position on the arms trade. Criterion two clearly states that there must be "[r]espect for human rights in the country of final destination as well as respect by that country of international humanitarian law".

Israel clearly does not comply with criterion two.

Last week I spoke in the Chamber of how Israel’s occupation forces shot a 13-year-old child, stripped him naked and let him bleed out on the pavement. There is a long list of these murders and crimes. In June 2018 an Israeli sniper shot Rouzan al-Najjar, a 21-year-old paramedic. She was shot through the chest and through her white coat which clearly marked her as a paramedic. She was tending to two injured protestors when she was murdered. Amnesty International believes that Rouzan was wilfully killed, making her murder a grave breach of the Geneva Convention and a war crime. Let it be clear in the Dáil that EU states are empowering Israel to carry out these war crimes and its apartheid policies. We are facilitating it and we are part of the problem. The Oireachtas needs to officially recognise Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians and there can be embargoes. The UK imposed a 12-year embargo on Israel a number of years ago under Margaret Thatcher. That was one of the few things Margaret Thatcher did well but we are not even willing to step up to the plate and do that. We have to be outspoken and we have to lead but at the moment we are not doing so. We also have to recognise that Israel is an apartheid state.

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