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

It is incomprehensible that a regime which has for four months inflicted a slaughter on the people of Gaza that has claimed the lives of close to 30,000 people, displaced almost 2 million people and brought an entire population to the brink of famine, and which is in the dock, indicted for genocide, the worst crime a state or human being can commit, is contemplating yet another massacre of people in Gaza, specifically those in Rafah, where more than 1 million are people cowering under tents and amid rubble and the bodies of the slaughtered and the maimed. The Israeli regime is planning to do it again. What kind of regime is capable of that atrocity?

What kind of regime thinks it could get away with a genocide in front of the world and, when it is indicted for genocide, wants to continue? The answer is a regime for which there are never any consequences, ever. Words of criticism, even the quite strong language used by the Minister, Deputy Coveney, and others today, mean nothing, as the Taoiseach rightly said, to Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Ministers today in the Israeli Government are saying they want destroy Gaza, adding to the litany of incitements to genocide made by that government over the past four months. Why do they continue? Why do they think they can do it again? It is because there are never any consequences. The United States continues to give them arms and weapons, as do European states like Germany and Britain. The European Union gives Israel favoured trade status and nobody imposes any sanctions.

One of the things that this country can be most proud of is what the Dunnes Stores workers did in the mid-1980s when they went on strike for two years, forcing Ireland to become the first country in the world to impose comprehensive sanctions on apartheid South Africa, which began a domino effect that led to the dismantling of the apartheid regime. Guess who held out until the bitter end to defend that obnoxious regime? The United States and Britain, the same countries that are effectively giving licence to Israel to continue with its atrocities now. Be brave and do what this country did with apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s, which helped to bring down that regime, admit that Israel is an apartheid state, an uncivilised state and a barbaric state and that it should have sanctions imposed on it to end the apartheid, end the occupation and end the possibility of the sort of genocidal slaughter we have seen for the past four months.

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