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

I thank the Regional Group for allowing me to use their time slot and the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for allowing that, too. I also thank all the Dáil staff, service officers, ushers, everybody in the canteen and everybody in here who keep us going during the term. I thank them for all their help and their great work, and wish them the best for the next few weeks.

The Irish Government is playing a deception on the issue of Palestine that the Palestinian people and Arab people generally in the Middle East are very familiar with from certain Arab regimes. It is a game played by Egypt and Saudi Arabia and one that Lebanon has played over the years. Week in, week out, these regimes mouth sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians. They declare their support and solidarity with Palestine, condemn what Israel is doing and then quietly collude with Israel. Every Egyptian leader, most of them dictators in recent years, will say how they stand with the Palestinians but the siege of Gaza is not just enforced by Israel. It is also enforced by Egypt, which colludes with the Israeli regime. The Saudis collude with the biggest supporters of Israel, the United States, which arms them, buy arms from them and colludes with them at every level and, indeed, collude directly with the Israelis. They pretend they are acting in support of the Palestinians. That is what the Irish Government is doing by mouthing solidarity but in actuality doing nothing.

I would not have become involved in politics except that when I was 18, I went to Palestine with a few friends. I did not know anything about the political situation. I was working on an Israeli farm but I happened to be working alongside Palestinian refugees from a refugee camp in Hebron, Al-Khalil in Arabic. The families of the people I was working with had been expelled in 1948 from what is now called Israel but historically was Palestine. They had lived in refugee camps in Al-Khalil ever since. They pointed me to the hypocrisy of the Arab leadership. They also made it absolutely clear to me that the idea of a just settlement to the crime that had been done to them in any kind of two-state solution was nonsense. A two-state solution would effectively wipe out their right to restoration over the crime that had been committed against them. Before Oslo and when Oslo was declared, I always understood, because I heard it directly from the Palestinians, that a two-state solution was a deception and a con trick perpetrated by those who wished to wipe out the historic claim of the Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 to return to their homes. That is what a two-state solution means. It means eradicating the right to return of millions of Palestinians now in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and scattered across the world and of millions of those in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, all of whom have the right to return under international law. Unless the world has decided they do not have the right to return, they are deceiving and tricking people by talking about a two-state solution.

The right to return is incompatible with the existence of the Zionist state, based as it is on prioritising one ethnic religious group over another. That is the basis of the Israeli state. It is not an incidental policy. The crimes the current regime is committing in Jenin, the ethnic cleansing of east Jerusalem, the Nakba, and the ongoing crimes have been the stock and trade of the Israeli state since it was set up in 1948 with the massacres of Deir Yassin, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people, and the mass graves they are digging up as we speak in Tantura - mass killings committed by the Zionists because the agenda was to steal all of the Palestinians' land and never to allow them back. That is what we are sitting over if we talk about the two-state solution. Would anybody suggest there is a just two-state solution to the sectarian division of Ireland? Not many would, yet we think it is a just solution for Palestine. It is ridiculous.

What is the truth about the Israeli state? This is where it directly parallels Ireland's history but also gives us a particular obligation. In 1936, Sir Ronald Storrs, the British governor general of Jerusalem, when asked why they were sponsoring the Zionist movement, said their intention was to create "a little loyal Jewish Ulster" in the Middle East to guard against a potentially hostile sea of Arabism. It was to divide and rule, set the populations against each other in order to control the region. That is not just a historic fact. Some of the troops that were sent enforce the mandate and promote Zionism were sent directly from Dublin. British troops, auxiliaries, were sent from Dublin. People who were in charge of the Black and Tans went over as officers to Palestine to do exactly what they had done in Ireland to the Palestinians, the same people with the same method, very consciously so. Is that an interesting historic fact? We should ask Joe Biden, the current US President. He said that if Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent it. He went on to explain what he meant by that, namely, that the United States would have to station tens of thousands of troops in the Middle East to control the area. The current US President said this. That is the reality of the colonial apartheid regime of Israel. It is not this or that government; that is the project. To talk about a two-state solution is just a trick to pretend there is some sort of legitimate Zionist project to steal Palestinian land. It makes a mockery of all international law.

The Israeli state is based on a thing called the right to return, which is only conferred on Jews. It explicitly excludes Palestinians, people of Arab origin, from the same right to return which exists under international law. They recently passed a law called the nation state law, which says only the Jewish people have a right to self-determination. Under international law, people have the right to self-determination. It is not one group that has the right, everyone has it. The Israeli state says no, only Jewish people have the right to self-determination, and that the Palestinians do not. I could go through the list of all these laws. They are explicit apartheid. They are not the policy of this or that government; it is apartheid to its root and in its very foundations. Yet we continue with the pretence that there is something legitimate about this exercise, or that it can result in anything other than continuing persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people. All of this is now confirmed by even relatively moderate organisations like Amnesty International and the UN Special Rapporteur. They are all referring to crimes against humanity, war crimes going on, ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate killing going on week in, month out, year after year.

We still think we are dealing with some sort of normal state.

It is an incredible that the Irish Government talks about its adherence to the principles of the UN charter and United Nations. In the past few weeks, the UN committee set up to investigate the violations of human rights in Palestine informed us, among other things, that it cannot even go to Palestine. The representatives of the United Nations are not allowed into Palestine to investigate whether there are war crimes or crimes against humanity, even though they are absolutely convinced they need to do so. Members of the European Parliament are barred from going to Palestine, as are Members of this House.

How do we sit back and tolerate this? People with Irish passports who are of Palestinian origin are not allowed into Israel if Israel decides it is not going to allow them to go, for example, via Israel to Gaza where their families live. It is unbelievable and we allow this to happen.

Before it was the left and so on, and the Palestinians themselves who were talking about the contrast between the attitude of the international community to Ukraine and the attitude to Palestine but now the United Nations is saying it. The committee, which met us, pointed out that the International Criminal Court is advancing and accelerating the investigation to move to the prosecution of Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine. It has been sitting on exactly the same allegations and have done nothing about them when it has come to the murder of Palestinians and the various other crimes against humanity and war crimes Israel has been committing for years. It simply does not do it. It makes a mockery of the international order and of the claims to the adherence to international law on the part of this Government or of other governments.

I appeal to the Government because, to be honest, it knows all of this is true. The truth is that it is afraid to say boo to the Americans or to some of the leading forces in the European Union. That is the truth and everybody really knows it. It is the same reason the Government allowed 2 million troops to go through Shannon Airport to prosecute a war based on lies in Iraq. It was because we were afraid to say boo to the Americans. This is even the case when they are actively conniving with brutal authoritarian murderous barbaric regimes and even when this weekend the Americans say they are going to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. These are one of the most vile weapons human beings have ever devised. We will express concern and we might even condemn it but what are we going to do about it? Nothing, zero.

We must end this outrageous passivity because it is collusion, and we must take action ourselves to impose sanctions. Sanctions are what are necessary, which is real action against a criminal regime which has been persecuting the Palestinians for 75 years.

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