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

Thousands of people will gather outside the Dáil at 5.30 this evening to express their absolute outrage and fury at the genocidal massacre Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza as we speak, blowing children, mothers and innocent civilians to bits, blowing up residential buildings, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques, starving the people of water, food and electricity, and systematically destroying the infrastructure necessary for the sustenance of human existence. This is a genocide. Much of the fury of those who are protesting is directed at the Government and the European Union for its shameful failure to act to stop a genocide as we are required to do under the Genocide Convention.

All of the European states are signatories to the Genocide Convention, put together in 1948 after the horrors of the Holocaust precisely to prevent the commission of future genocides. When I hear the Taoiseach say no order of the International Court of Justice under the convention will stop this genocide, it begs the question as to the point of the Genocide Convention. What is the point of the International Court of Justice? It is a shameful statement. The entire point of the convention that was signed by more than 150 countries and the entire point of the International Court of Justice was to prevent the commission of genocides like that which was committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis in the Second World War.

Now we find the Israeli State committing a genocide and stating publically its intention to do so, as the South African legal team explained in detail, calling the Palestinians animals, saying they want to deprive them of food, water and electricity, and referring to Amalek, which is a biblical reference to the murdering of all men, women and children. They are saying they are going to bring nothing but destruction to the people of Gaza, making it clear they intend to drive them out. They are stating explicitly that they are going to commit a genocide and then committing it in front of our eyes.

Another thing about the genocide convention is that any state that fails to act under the convention is itself in breach and potentially complicit with that genocide. That is the truth about the European Union and, indeed, why I suspect the Irish Government will not take action under the genocide convention, namely, that it does not want to fall out with its friends in the European Union and the United States who are up to their necks in supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza, with billions in arms trade from the United States and the European Union which has increased during the course of this genocide. European governments are arming the Israelis to blow men, women and children in Gaza to pieces, and have given Israel impunity.

One of the really disgraceful aspects to the complicity of the European Union is the perpetuation of a false and dishonest narrative that somehow this is a conflict between a supposedly democratic Israel and Palestinian terrorists. That is an absolute lie. Israel was born in an act of terrorism in 1948, the Nakba. That event was characterised by massacres in Deir Yassin and Tantura, and the use of terrorist methods to expel 750,000 Palestinians from hundreds of villages and towns in an act of terrorism. Within days of the agreement of the UN partition plan at that time, Israel set out to move way beyond and breach the terms of the partition plan, seize Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. For decades since, there has been wave after wave of ethnic cleansing, decades of illegal occupation, a 16-year long siege of Gaza and the systematic killing of Palestinians who resist and have the right to resist. Under international law, an occupied people or people who are victims of apartheid have the right to resist. The regime that occupies them, imposes apartheid or attempts to kill them through genocide does not have a right to defend that. It simply has an obligation to dismantle those structures of occupation and oppression. Why will the Irish Government not stand with the oppressed Palestinian people?

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