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

I thank the Social Democrats for tabling this important motion on the horror we are witnessing being committed by Israel and its allies in Gaza and Lebanon. Since dawn this morning, 22 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel and 40 people in Lebanon have been murdered by Israel. Since October last year, that brings it to a horrific total of about 48,000 people we know of who have been massacred by this regime. Seventeen thousand of them are children, who have been butchered by Israel. One thousand or so of those are less than one year old. All of those people have been massacred with US weapons and European weapons. They have given Israel the weapons to kill those children and to incinerate 48,000, and more likely many more people than that, to utterly destroy Gaza, and now to try to repeat the genocidal massacre that they have inflicted on the people of Gaza in Lebanon.

None of this would have happened if the western world had sanctioned Israel long before October last year for the decades of crimes that it was committing against the Palestinian people, because it did not start last October. Impunity has been given to Israel as it conducted its decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. The western world armed Israel while it ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people, while it established 700,000 illegal settlers after the so-called Oslo Accords, after it waged repeated savage military assaults on Gaza, imposed a siege of Gaza and, before October last year, killed so many that it was the deadliest year for Palestinian children in recent times. It conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing, seizure of Palestinian land and the imposition of an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people. All of this was allowed by the western powers and, for the most part, actively facilitated. It gave Israel the weapons, the favoured trade status and legitimised and justified this regime as if it was some kind of normal state. That is how we have got here.

When the history books are written, they will tell a story of shame of western governments, which stood there and did nothing as a genocide took place in front of our eyes, and where the Government's so-called allies in the United States gave Israel the weapons and support to carry on that genocide. Indeed, its allies in the European Union, the UK and so on gave Israel the weapons, means and political support to carry on this genocidal massacre. That is a fact. The Government still will not even use the word "apartheid" to describe this regime. It still gags on using the word and does not use the word "genocide" to describe that. The reason for that is if you acknowledge that this is an apartheid regime built on ethnic cleansing and if you acknowledge that this is genocide, then you would have to impose sanctions to deter it, which is why the Government does not want to do it. Some legal case that may be fully resolved or addressed in a year or two will be too late for the massacred Palestinian people.

What the Government needs to do now is, at the minimum, pass the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018. It is a disgrace that it has not. The Government needs to expel the Israeli ambassador. It needs to stop US arms and weapons for Israel going through Shannon Airport. It needs to stop Israeli war bonds being sold through the Irish Central Bank. It needs to support, as we did against apartheid South Africa, full boycott, divestment and sanctions against a regime guilty of genocide and apartheid. Anything else would not honour our obligations to stand against this horror.

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