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

There will be another national demonstration this Saturday in support of the people of Gaza and Palestine. The very simple demand will be for sanctions on Israel now. The simple inescapable fact is that the genocide that Israel is inflicting on Gaza and the horrors that have been inflicted on its people could not happen if Israel did not get EU favoured trade status, weapons from Germany, the UK and the United States, and impunity for decades for crimes against the Palestinian people. This is a fact. Without this sponsorship, support and impunity, this horror would never have happened. That is the responsibility of western governments.

I want to let the Taoiseach know about a really shocking example of the lengths that some of Israel's sponsors will go to in order to suppress free discussion, as well as the complicity of western governments. This occurred during the Palestine conference that took place in Berlin at the weekend, a few weeks after the Munich Security Conference, where a conference that was organised by Jewish Voice for Peace, JVP, human rights campaigners and Palestinian rights campaigners was stormed by hundreds of German riot police. People speaking at it were to include a UN special rapporteur, a former Greek finance minister, me, as a representative of this Parliament, Dutch MPs and many Jewish people, who are opponents to what Israel is doing. In fact, one of the first people to be arrested was a Jewish activist with a banner that said: "Jews against genocide". He was arrested for carrying a banner that said: "Jews against genocide" by a German Government that claimed the conference was "antisemitic".

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