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

The Minister is still doing it. He is still talking about Israel's self-defence. Apartheid, which is what the Israeli system is based on, has no more right to defend itself than apartheid in South Africa did. Illegal occupation does not have the right to defend itself, nor does ethnic cleansing or a state built on ethnic cleansing. The people who have a right to defend themselves are the people who are victims of those things. Who are the victims and the oppressed here? The Palestinians are. They are the ones being ethnically cleansed. They are the people at the wrong end of apartheid, the ones under illegal occupation and the ones who have been killed with impunity for years and years. They are being killed in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas. Why does the Government continue to peddle the notion that Israel is interested in peace when everything it is doing makes it clear that it is involved in a massive programme of terrorist ethnic cleansing to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and out of the West Bank in order to expand the borders of Israel, as it has been doing every single year since 1948? When is the world going to wake up to this? The Minister did not answer me. Setting aside the issue of the ambassador, why are there sanctions on Putin for his war crimes when no sanction whatsoever has ever been imposed on Israel, even now as it is slaughtering thousands of children?

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