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

The European Union should hang its head in shame for its failure to sanction Israel in respect of the genocidal massacre it has been carrying out in Gaza for the past nine months.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil should hang their heads in shame for supporting as the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who has continued to provide Israel with impunity and allow the flow of arms and continuing trade with the regime that is guilty of this genocidal attack and massacre, which continues as we speak. The European Union and Ursula von der Leyen have no moral credibility any more. By the way, it is not just People Before Profit saying this, although we have said it for a very long time, about von der Leyen and the double standards when it came to Palestine. As early as 20 October, more than 800 EU staff wrote a letter complaining about von der Leyen. They wrote in it that they did not recognise the values of the EU any longer, given the double standards that were being displayed, with the massacre, which is what they called it, of civilians in Gaza, as against the attitude towards the horrific invasion of Ukraine.

The International Peace Institute in Geneva, along with hundreds of NGOs, has made a formal complaint to the International Criminal Court about von der Leyen's complicity with genocide, and they have evidence to that effect. She rushed to Israel and stood beside Netanyahu days into the beginning of this massacre, at which point a few thousand Palestinians had been massacred - butchered. There have been consequences of the support that she gave. The European Union is continuing to allow the weapons that Israel uses to butcher those children, like the children in four schools in the past four days. Many of the weapons that did that are European weapons. Money is being made in the genocide that Israel is committing by European arms companies and European states. They are profiting from genocide. If that is not a reason to impose sanctions, and if that is not a reason for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to say, "I am sorry, President von der Leyen, but we cannot support you, given your role in this and your failure to act against it in the face of a genocide", I honestly do not know what is. If genocide, or a failure to act against it, or possibly even complicity in it, is not a reason to withdraw support for her, what possible reason could there ever be? It absolutely beggars belief.

We need to impose sanctions. We should not support Ursula von der Leyen in the face of the European Union's shameful, disgraceful complicity in this genocide and the impunity it has given to Israel, without which none of this would have happened. Everybody knew about apartheid, everybody knew about the siege of Gaza and everybody knew about the ethnic cleansing long before October of last year. They did nothing about it. They denied it. Even now, the Irish Government does not want to use the word "apartheid" because it has legal implications. If it is an apartheid regime, it has to be dismantled. That is why it does not want to use the word - because it would have the consequence of having to do to Israel what was done to apartheid South Africa, which is exactly what should happen. At a certain point, the world decided that could not stand. Have we not reached that point with Israel? Surely we have. It cannot stand when it is capable of this horror.

The last point I will make is about the reminiscence of genocide and the fact that a fascist party with its roots in the Nazi collaborators in France, who collaborated with the Nazis in a massacre of Jewish people in the 1930s, got 33% support in the first round of the French elections. That is a very serious warning too about where Europe is going. Thank God for the left mounting a united front - the popular front, which was the name of the united front of the left in the 1930s against the fascists - and putting forward a radical alternative programme to the French people and talking about wealth taxes, taxes on excess profits, investment in housing, freezing prices to deal with the cost-of-living crisis and an arms embargo against Israel. It won the election and drove the Front National back. Surely we should also take a lesson from that when we have the terrifying prospect of the rise of fascism in Europe.

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