Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I commend Sinn Féin Deputies on bringing forward the Bill. We in the Social Democrats will absolutely support it.

In January 2022, Deputies Connolly and Carthy asked parliamentary questions about the potential for Ireland recognising the State of Palestine. The then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, replied:

The Government has pledged to honour our commitment to recognise the State of Palestine as part of a lasting settlement of the conflict, or when we believe doing so will progress efforts to reach a two-state solution or protect the integrity of Palestinian territory.

He went on:

As I have stated previously, in the absence of progress towards a two-State solution, I would be prepared to recommend to the Government early recognition by Ireland of a State of Palestine, if and when it might be helpful, and this is a matter which I discuss regularly with EU colleagues.

Despite those admittedly strong words, 2022 proved to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the United Nations began keeping records of these atrocities. Some 171 people were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank that year.

This number included the murder of more than 30 children. That same year, 9,000 Palestinians were injured and maimed by the Israel Defense Forces, IDF. The Irish Government continued to offer words of condemnation and nothing more.

Last week marked the one year anniversary of the murder of the Al-Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Shireen was shot in the head by an IDF sniper while she was simply doing her job - reporting on a raid by the Israeli Government at a refugee camp outside the occupied city of Jenin. In any conflict, there are moments that live long in the mind's eye and there are few among us who were not sick to the pit of our stomachs when, not content with taking the life of this innocent journalist, renowned throughout the Arab world for her courage in reporting the truth of the Israeli state's oppression of the Palestinian people, the forces of the Israeli state saw fit to attack her funeral procession to the point that, momentarily, it looked like her under siege pallbearers would be forced to drop her coffin to the ground. The Irish Government continued to offer its condemnation and nothing more.

This year has been, and will continue to be, even worse for the Palestinian people. Some 120 people have been killed so far this year. Since the start of the year, a Palestinian child has been killed on average once every three days by the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF will assert that such a figure is a result of from where Hamas and Palestinian Popular Front militants choose to position and launch rockets. Even if you were to do the moral contortions it needs to view this as a justification for the wanton targeting of children by one of the most heavily armed nations in the history of the world, you would still have to come to terms with the fact that many of these murders of children are in cold blood and achieved through bullets rather than bombs. When Israeli forces entered the occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem, 14-year-old Zaid Saeed Ghuneim had just finished dinner and was on his way to his grandparents' house when he took shelter from an oncoming IDF raid by sheltering in the garage of his own home. Upon discovery, he was pulled from his place of hiding and shot once in each leg, twice in the back and once more in the neck.

There are many more examples - more victims, more acts of depravity and more words of condemnation from the Irish Government, which tempers itself from action in the disillusioned belief that we have some influence in advancing a two-state solution. We do not.

I do not for a second believe that any of us in this Chamber have a monopoly on compassion, care or revulsion when the oppression and violence wrought on the Palestinian people by the State of Israel are raised, but there is a very real divergence when it comes to how we should respond to this increasing depravity. I often get the impression that the parties of the status duobelieve that we on this side of the Chamber somehow do not get the nuances of diplomacy or statesmanship, so I will ask a question of the Minister of State about the approach that our Government and other leaders across the EU and US have deployed so far. The extremist Israeli Government minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has just been given sweeping powers over the West Bank and who, after the 26 February attack on the Palestinian town of Huwara by hundreds of settlers, leading to the deaths of Palestinians, said: "I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it, not, God forbid, private individuals." Does the Minister of State honestly believe that this person or the extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir will ever come to the negotiation table with our Government and settle into a peace of any kind with the Palestinian people? I appreciate that we are well intentioned, but we are now at the point where we are making patsies of ourselves to the war crimes of the State of Israel towards the Palestinian people.

In her contribution, the Minister of State asked us to be careful with our language, so I will ask her about a particular word and whether we should continue to use it, namely, "apartheid". "Apartheid" is a specific word that has meaning in international law, but the Irish Government refuses to use it even though such human rights organisations as Amnesty International have found that the circumstances inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the State of Israel are just that. This does not make us statesmanlike. It makes us complicit.

Israel treats Palestinians as an inferior racial group, segregating and oppressing them wherever it has control over their rights. Israeli laws and policies are designed specifically to deprive Palestinians of their rights. Does anyone in this Chamber on the Government side or elsewhere believe that illegal settlements, enforced evictions against the Palestinian people by the Israeli state, demolitions, torture, detentions and unlawful killings, which have been widely reported by reputable sources, are not taking place? I do not believe that anyone does, but we tie ourselves up in phraseology. This is not about phraseology or whether a particular word is helpful. It is a matter of law, and international law is clear that such a system of domination and oppression by one racial group over another constitutes the crime against humanity that is apartheid. If we recognise that these systems of oppression are in place, it is beyond insulting that we continue to quibble over phraseology. The Taoiseach is on record as saying that the Government would not use the term "apartheid" in describing Israel's policies against the Palestinians. Again, this is not about the terms used. The crime of apartheid is being perpetrated whether we like or use the term or not. Amnesty International, among other human rights bodies, has been clear about this. It is about law, respect for the rule of law and respect for human rights and the dignity of millions of Palestinians, whom the international community has failed to protect for decades. As we equivocate, we make ourselves complicit in that.

Ireland must impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israel's officials most implicated in the crime of apartheid and impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, working in concert with our partners across the EU. This is the very least we can do. I would go further than the Bill. lf we believe that the sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation because of its grotesque invasion and the terror it is inflicting upon the people of Ukraine are legitimate and that we had to move quickly and swiftly in that instance, what is the difference in this instance? Why have we been so slow to act? Why do we continue to see ourselves as somehow being impartial? We regularly say that we are not neutral when it comes to the politics of the war and Russia's grotesque invasion of Ukraine. Why, then, do we make ourselves politically neutral in this instance?

I appreciate that we have gone further than most, but there is still a way to go. Ireland has examples of doing this. It is regularly cited, and should never become a cliché, but consider what the Dunnes Stores workers did in standing up against apartheid in South Africa. It mattered. It made this State seem courageous in the eyes of the world. It demonstrated that those workers' refusal to handle goods coming from apartheid South Africa had meaning. When Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu visited Ireland, they referenced that act. Yet we continue to wait.

There may come a point when those extremist ministers sitting around the table of the Israeli Government tell us they are ready to sit down and negotiate, but what does the Minister of State believe will be left of Palestine by that time? How many more children will have died before that happens? They will sit there and say they are now ready to talk, and we will say we could have done more. We absolutely could do more. We regularly discuss Ireland's place in the world in terms of some crises and conflicts. This situation demonstrates perfectly what our place in the world could be. We are a country that stands for peace. We are a small country that stood against its oppressor and gave gifts like boycotts to the world. We need to extend that to this situation and stop doing business with apartheid states that oppress people. There must always be a place for negotiation, but there must also come a time when we say "No more" and we act. We can be world leaders in this regard.

I implore the Minister of State not to wait nine months. I believe that, like everyone else in the Chamber, she feels that these horrors have gone too far. We must draw a line in the sand and say we will not go beyond it, that the Irish Government and the people of Ireland will no longer be complicit in these war crimes and the apartheid inflicted on the Palestinian people. We will be world leaders when we say we will not do business with Israel. We will encourage our allies across the EU and, if necessary, the US to follow us in that.

See this speech in context