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

In the 1980s Governments across the world stubbornly resisted the demand to impose sanctions on the apartheid South African regime for its horrible racist system. It took people power and the resistance of black people in South Africa to eventually force the world to recognise that apartheid South Africa had no place in the civilised world. When the Taoiseach is having discussions with the French Prime Minister or other European counterparts, is there any moment when he begins to wonder whether that analogy should apply to the apartheid state of Israel after what it has done over the past six weeks? For example, the deputy speaker of the Knesset said last week that "We are being too humane" in Gaza, and that they should burn it? This is the deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament. Israeli ministers have described all Palestinians as "animals". It is official policy of the Israeli Government to starve the entire population. It has displaced - ethnically cleansed - more than a million Gazans in six weeks and killed nearly 20,000 of them.

Then, Israel hauled our ambassador in for reprimand after conducting a massacre and being accused by every human rights organisation worth its salt of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity not just during the last six weeks but for decades. Is there any little part of the Taoiseach and his EU counterparts that says there is something wrong with this state, it is not a normal state, that it is guilty of the most horrendous crimes and maybe we should consider taking the attitude we took to apartheid South Africa, given its crimes are actually worse? I honestly ask the Taoiseach because it beggars belief that Israel reprimanded us and still our Government will not take sanctions against it for the criminal activities in which it is engaged.

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