Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Israeli ambassador has been expelled from Colombia; the Israeli ambassador should be expelled from Ireland too. Some 15,000 people across this island marched in protest last weekend. Let us see 150,000 this weekend. The Dunnes Stores workers boycotted apartheid goods from South Africa in the 1980s. Any Irish worker who boycotts goods from apartheid Israel during this invasion must receive the backing of the entire trade union movement.

Here are the words of Israel's war minister, Yoav Gallant:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

This is not just the language invasion, war and collective punishment; this is the language of ethnic cleansing, genocide and war crimes. All the leaders of the capitalist world – von der Leyen, Sunak, Scholz, and Joe Biden, who arrived today – are beating a path to the doorway of the war criminal Netanyahu. At the same time that the Israeli war cabinet orders 1 million people to evacuate and targets civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, world leaders all signal their support for war, but the response from working people and the poor masses across the world is very different. In Italy, the trade union SI Cobas has announced it will oppose the shipping of weapons to Israel. I applaud it. Millions marched and demonstrated globally last Saturday. I applaud in particular those Palestinian workers in the West Bank who took general strike action today and have defied the corrupt Palestinian Authority and its security forces.

I am opposed to the killing of innocent civilians in Israel by Hamas. I oppose the killing in its own right and because it does not advance the Palestinian cause. However, I fully support the right of the people of Gaza to oppose invasion and resist, and resist arms in hand. Mass resistance from below, democratically organised, is the key to defeating the Israeli terror machine. I applaud the words and actions of socialists in Israel who oppose occupation and the planned invasion and I hope the number of dissenting voices in Israel increases in the weeks to come. There will be Palestinian freedom. The Israeli state cannot stop it. Capitalism and imperialism cannot stop it. It will be won by overthrowing the rotten political, economic and social system in the Middle East and by revolutionary socialist change, uniting the working people, the poor and the oppressed peoples throughout the region against a common enemy.

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