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

It is and was a welcome step, belatedly, to recognise the Palestinian state. If it is not going to be more than hollow symbolism something has to follow that assists the Palestinian people in liberating themselves from a regime that is capable of committing what the International Court of Justice believes is a plausible genocide and which most reasonable people think is a genocide.

Any reasonable assessment of Israel's behaviour over its entire history is that it seeks to normalise the utterly indefensible. It seeks to normalise ethnic cleansing, the annexation of territory and the brutal military action in territories that it occupies and that it has besieged for 17 years. Now what it is doing is normalising the massacre in Gaza. There is chatter about peace but Israel just says it is not doing peace or a ceasefire and that it will keep going.

It is the impunity that Israel has enjoyed for normalising horror, massacre, ethnic cleansing and apartheid that allows it to continue to think it can ratchet this up. At what point does the world say that the state capable of this is not a normal state, is not the sort of state we should be trading with and is not the sort of state in which our universities should be doing business or engaging in partnerships with arms manufacturers providing Israel with the means to do what it is doing? Is there any level of atrocity that Israel has to commit before we say it has gone beyond the realm of normal political practice and maybe we must reconsider our relationship with the state in the way we eventually did with apartheid South Africa? I am just asking whether there is a point because at this moment it is all words. There are no sanctions or actions. There is nothing to deter this regime from continuing to massacre Palestinians.

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