Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)

In 2009, I was in Gaza after Israel went in, following the changeover of the US President. It went in on 27 December 2008 and kept bombing until 18 January 2009. On 20 January, the new US President was sworn in. I was there in February 2009 and saw the devastation of less than 28 days of bombing, where 1,400 people were killed, of whom 400 were children. I was reporting to a subcommittee of the European Parliament on the atrocity that had occurred. Now, that has been multiplied by 100, with over 45,000 people dead, although the figure is probably far higher than that.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the acts of genocide as including “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Article III states that complicity in genocide is also a punishable crime. As we speak, genocide is being committed in Gaza. On Monday of this week, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said, "We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed ... We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction with no precedent globally”. In February, Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament, referred to Palestinians as "scum" and "subhuman". He called for the killing of all adult men in Gaza. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaks of total victory, which echoes the Nazi Second World War slogan of the final victory. Israel is now doing to the Gaza ghetto what the Nazis did in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. If anyone doubts what kind of person Benjamin Netanyahu is, Alon Pinkas, former senior Israeli Government adviser, described him last September as a “vile messiah leading a cult of lies and death”. Another former head of the Israel Defense Forces and former Israeli minister for defence referred to Israel becoming a “messianic dictatorship that is racist, fascist, homophobic, misogynist”. There is no doubt the Prime Minister and his criminal crew have embraced what Sigmund Freud called the death drive. They are now motivated by the manic forces of death and destruction. Their final solution for the Gaza ghetto is the total destruction of the ghetto and the killing and ethnic cleansing of its people. Speaking this week, Yair Golan, a former senior Israeli general and now leader of the Democrats political party, said:

This government is full of people who have no connection whatsoever to Judaism. Vengeful types who are bereft of any intelligence, morality or ability to run a country in a time of emergency. Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state ... [like] the South Africa of yore, unless it reverts to acting like a sane country.

All the while, settler terror gangs are marauding across the West Bank, fully supported by Israeli security forces. Israel also embarked on a major bombing campaign in Lebanon and Syria and used the opportunity during the collapse of the Assad regime to grab more Syrian territory in the Mount Hebron region. Extremist politicians in Israel are advocating for a greater Israel stretching from the Nile to Euphrates. While the genocide unfolds in Gaza, the world stands idly by and issues calls for restraint. The time for talk has passed. The need for action is urgent. The time for action is now.

What is happening in Gaza has been described as a medieval starvation siege. Israel must be forced to stop. Europe is Israel’s most important trading partner. It has a privileged association agreement with the EU. Israel is in gross violation of international law and therefore in breach of article 2 of the association agreement. Reviewing the agreement is welcome but genocide is already under way. The association agreement should be immediately suspended. There should be no trade with Israel while the blockade continues. More forceful action must be taken against Israel. The time has also come for a complete boycott of Israel - military, economic, social and cultural. Any person or country giving support to Israel as it pursues a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing is complicit in these crimes. This is especially so for countries supplying military aid to Israel. The United States and Germany have the capacity to stop this genocide if they wish. To their shame, they refuse to do so. The bombs being dropped in Gaza are made in America.

The powerful Arab states in the Middle East appear to have abandoned their fellow Arabs and Muslims in Palestine. Shame on them.

The EU published its 2025 values document earlier this year. The section on human rights violations states that the EU will continue its work to end and prevent human rights violations globally, including those related to Russia's war in Ukraine and the situation in the Middle East, particularly Gaza. The challenge for EU leaders is to live up to their stated values when confronted by the situation in Gaza. Gaza is a political emergency and a moral crisis. The world is watching. The time for talk is over. Decisive action is now required.

InThe Irish Times last Saturday, Berlin correspondent, Derek Scally, wrote a beautiful article about the life of a German Holocaust survivor who died at the age of 103. Her parents and brother were murdered in Auschwitz. She survived the war and emigrated to the US in 1946. She returned to Berlin in 2010 and spent much of the last years of her life informing and educating young Germans about the Holocaust. She kept repeating a powerful message:

There is no Christian, Jewish or Muslim blood, just human blood. People killed millions of people because they didn’t see their victims as people. It is your task to make sure, in future, that nothing ever happens like what we experienced. My message is simple: be human.

The future she talked about is now. The Palestinian people of Gaza are human too. We have a moral obligation to come to their assistance to stop the killing, starvation and genocide.

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