Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)

In his magisterial meditation on the Holocaust, The Drowned and the Saved, Italian survivor Primo Levi detailed in a chapter “Useless Violence” some of the cruelties and deprivations to which the Nazis subjected the Jewish community of Europe prior to their murder in concentration camps. The term “useless violence” reflected the lack of any rationale, even in the twisted logic of war, for this treatment. The point was to inflict suffering for its own sake. Levi gave the example of there being no facility for toileting on box cars that were packed with people destined for concentration camps. The severely ill, the elderly, the pregnant and children were forced to urinate and defecate in view of others on torturous journeys lasting days. Levi described this deprivation as "a trauma to which our civilization does not prepare us, a profound wound inflicted on human dignity, an obscene and ominous attack; but also the sign of a deliberate and gratuitous malignancy."

The genocide that is being perpetrated by Israel today in Gaza has been distinguished by repeated and varied patterns of useless violence, symbolised for all of us by the thousands of aid trucks lined up at border crossings indefinitely as the population starves, and as what is left of society in Gaza moves closer to a state of anarchy while people get increasingly desperate and driven to the limits of despair. There are so many examples of this: the withholding of pain medication or anaesthetics from people who are in agony due to burns or wounds or from women giving birth and undergoing caesarean sections; people with amputated limbs being denied crutches and wheelchairs; the targeted bombing of sanitation and sewage facilities to inflict maximum misery on survivors; and the countless videos posted by Israeli military personnel mocking victims of their crimes. The word "evil" should be sparingly used but if this is not evil, what is?

The scale of killing in the Nazi Holocaust was of a much higher magnitude than that of the Gaza genocide, but the contours of suffering and wanton cruelty and the clear intent to dehumanise and destroy a civilian population are increasingly similar, as all genocides share such patterns of inhumanity and destruction. The IHRA definition of antisemitism, which made its way into the programme for Government, forbids drawing such parallels and in so doing prohibits us from fully learning from history. The use of the IHRA definition to conflate criticism of Zionism with antisemitism will potentially harm our ability to fully oppose the horrific crimes being committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is not clear how this emerged in the programme for Government despite all the concerns that have been raised about it internationally. Will the Minister tell us how this came about and commit to overturning this programme for Government commitment?

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