David Norris (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and that this motion has become an all-party motion and will pass unanimously without a vote through this House, with the support of all elements. It originated in the foreign affairs committee, proposed by myself and seconded by Deputy Michael D. Higgins. It took some negotiation to get it through and elements were added with which I do not entirely agree.

Sadly, I do not believe in a two-state solution. That idea is finished and we must wake up to that fact. It is not going to happen, partly for the reasons outlined by Senator Eugene Regan's magisterial contribution, which mentioned the words of a distinguished Israeli academic, Professor Seigman, who acknowledged that the idea of a Palestinian state has been made inoperable by the actions of the Israeli Government since. It knows that and is prepared for the consequences. It will not happen. The only possibility is a federated situation where the Palestinians continue with their religious and ethnic identity and the Israelis with theirs.

It wearies me to have, once again, to put my credentials before the House, as I had to do when I opposed the war in Iraq and had to say I am not anti-American. I am not anti-Semitic. Nobody should dare to suggest I am and I will tell the House why. I was of assistance to the Israeli Government in securing the conviction of Ivan Demjanjuk, the Nazi concentration camp war criminal. I was instrumental in helping to establish an Israeli Embassy here when the official Irish attitude was rather against it. I campaigned for the human rights of the Jewish minority in the former Soviet Union and, in particular, for the release of people such as Anatoly Shcharansky. In that case, I bitterly regret what I did. I wish he was still stuck in the Soviet Union, or in the ruins of it, because that is where he thoroughly deserves to be. I cannot imagine a more nasty, narrow, xenophobic and racist person, who has contributed disastrously to the texture of Israeli public life.

I know the area very well and for many years I spent four months of the year there. I lived with an Israeli citizen, whom I honour, because he has put his life in danger. He has been shot at, stabbed and jailed for reaching out across the preconceptions of his own cultural identity to assist the downtrodden Palestinian people. That is the real test of human rights, not just rewarding the people who look like oneself and share the same interests.

As a result of the stand I have taken on the principle of human rights regarding the Palestinians, I have received a torrent of mail, some of which is very abusive and personal. Even in the columns of newspapers correspondents have sought to rub my nose in my own sexual orientation and have asked how someone such as myself supports human rights for Hamas and the Palestinians and how long I, as a gay man, would last there. That is a total irrelevancy. In all these countries, from Iran to Iraq to Gaza, I have raised the persecution of gay people, which occurs. However, I also listened with great interest when I raised the situation with the late Benazir Bhutto. She said that this will come but that it is an unfolding story and it is not on the agenda at the moment. If one understands cultural difference and the different rate at which societies progress in their understanding of the complexity of human nature, one must accept that, bitter pill though it may be.

I will still stand up for the human rights of gay people in Iran, Iraq, Gaza or wherever, but that will not inhibit me from saying there is no justification for slaughtering people. However backward they are in their understanding of society and its realities, they still have a right to be protected by international human rights covenants. These have been consistently violated.

It may be a pity that the two-state solution is now so problematic as not to be worth bothering with. It will have to be a federated solution which will take a great deal of working out.

There is balance in this and there was much negotiation to get it through. The balance is not entirely fair. At the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, we listened to another distinguished Israeli Jewish academic, Professor Ilan Pappé, who warned specifically against this attempt to produce what is seen in the West as even-handed treatment because there is no even-handedness about the situation. The Palestinians, who are totally guiltless in the situation, are paying the price for European crimes. In particular, if one looks at the response of the German Government, the Palestinians are being forced to pay the price of the Germans' guilty conscience about the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a very sensitive subject. This was such an enormous human catastrophe that it has become the inheritance not only of the Jewish people, who were the principal targets, but of humanity as a whole. There were other targets, including gay people, gypsies, the Roma, intellectuals, left wing people and so on, but it was overwhelmingly anti-Semitic.

Each year I go to the Holocaust memorial, now held in the Mansion House, and it is immensely moving. It is the most dignified commemoration which pays tribute to the human spirit and expresses the horror of humanity about what was done in Europe. At the last memorial I attended some weeks ago in the Mansion House, there was reference to the unique character of the Holocaust, the bureaucratic approach, the single-mindedness and the way in which people were depersonalised by the bureaucratic machine. I am sorry to say that is what is happening in Israel as we speak.

I speak as a friend of Israel in solidarity with people like Ezra Yitzhak Nawi, Professor Siegman and the wonderfully courageous eight or ten Jewish Irish citizens who spoke out in the columns of The Irish Times against this because what is happening is a blasphemy against the ethos of Judaism, including the toast one makes to health and to life, L'Chaim, and to the idea that whoever saves one human life saves the universe and whoever kills one person kills the universe. This ethos regarding life has been vitiated by the present Government.

It was horrifying for me to listen to the spokesperson from Olmert, from whom I expected nothing else because I know the man and his brother. Tzipi Livni is a disgrace not just to the human race but to womanhood. She said we will crush them with an iron fist. Did she realise the resonances there?

There are war crimes and there is no equity. After much thought, I have come to the point where I say "No" to certain propositions which are easy for liberal people to agree to, for example, that there is an equal right to live in peace for the people in the settlements and in Palestine. There is not. I do not wish them any harm but there is not an equal moral right. If one invades, colonises, tramples on and strangles people, how dare one claim a right to peace. Are they never to assert themselves, to struggle and to survive? Are they to just die? That is what is being asked of them. There are 1.5 million people in an area the size of greater Dublin, 50% of whom are under 15 years of age.

These people have had massive amounts of American supplied munitions dumped on them, including white phosphorus. The Israelis never admitted they used it but they equivocated and said that whatever weapons were used were used under the rules of international law, but they were not. There is a total proscription on the use of white phosphorus in populated areas where there will, inevitably, be civilian casualties. The evidence is there, the fragments have been collected and they have been chemically analysed. They used it in circumstances where there was an inevitable causation of massive civilian casualties.

We know that dense inert metal explosive, DIME, munitions were used. They are horrendous, fiendish things. The Americans and the Israelis deliberately and provocatively used Gaza as a laboratory to test new and fiendish weaponry. That explains the autopsies which are coming out of the hospitals in Gaza. People have almost no external injuries but when they are opened for a full autopsy, their entire internal organ structures are fried, cooked to a blackened crisp. Nothing like this has been seen before. This is what I call a war crime.

I would like something stronger from the Minister, for example, for the two demands of Amnesty International to be met, namely, that there should be the immediate establishment of an independent investigation under the UN Security Council into allegations of war crimes by all sides and that those found responsible should be brought to justice, perhaps to the International Court of Justice, and that there should be an arms embargo on both sides by the world, in particular the United States which has been supplying most of these arms.

It is very important that we speak out strongly, and I say this from my intimate knowledge of Israeli society, my love of that land and of its people. The Israeli people, by and large, are in total and complete denial. I understand that; it is an understandable human response. My father was English and he died when I was six years of age. I only saw him three times so he was not in a position to do too much damage. I was brought up by my Irish family, an old Gaelic Irish family, but they were very pro-British. I had it inculcated in me that the British Empire was the greatest thing that ever happened, that it was responsible for world civilisation and so on. Then I went to school and discovered the Famine, evictions and the penal laws. It was appalling, deeply distressing and painful, but I had to live with it. It prepared me for Bloody Sunday when people were murdered by the British Army. At the beginning, I did not believe it, nor did the RTE reports which said the IRA had fired first, but we then discovered it did not. Then there was that dreadful cover-up by Lord Widgery and then Denning said that we could not accept the authorities would lie because that was an appalling vista. Appalling vistas must be faced by us and by the Israeli people as well, but they are not being faced.

We should look at the situation of that wonderful Palestinian doctor who treated Israeli people. Three of his children were killed and he was hysterical. The next day at a press conference in Israel he spoke Hebrew and discussed the event but he was set upon by the Israelis who said it was not true, that he was responsible and that his family had fired. It is total denial and we owe it to them to ensure this denial ends.

The use of white phosphorus and DIME munitions are clear war crimes. Dr. Clonan also stated: "While military analysts have come to accept breaches of the Geneva conventions on the part of militant groups such as Hamas, the sheer scale, premeditation and prosecution of war crimes by the Israeli general staff in Gaza beggars belief." For that reason, we need to establish an investigation. That is all I ask for.

It is astonishing we are talking of upgrading the external association agreement. What must the Israelis do before somebody raises the issue of human rights? I am not talking about an embargo, but that barbarous and brutal war could have been switched off in five seconds if we had inhibited the 75% of Israeli produce imported into the European Union. Instead, what do we do but upgrade the agreement.

We were talking this morning about the financial situation, where we rewarded failure. We are now in the business of rewarding the systematic and deliberate abuse of human rights by the Israelis. They should stop lying. I call on the Israeli Ambassador to stop lying. He comes out with guff such as the Palestinians do nothing with the greenhouses the Israelis left to them. The Israelis strangled any question of exports. I have seen those greenhouses and have seen the mounds of rotting vegetables because the Israelis will not let even one tomato out.

I will not praise the Egyptians either. They were using poison gas to kill people in the tunnels. They were stopping children from coming to Europe for medical treatment. Why praise these kinds of people for the dastardly way in which they behave? Nobody recognised Hamas although they were elected. What about democracy? They were elected and then we illegally kept money from them. We allowed the people to be strangled and starved.

In one of O'Casey's great plays depicting the situation during the revolutionary period in Ireland, one of the characters, a British Pommy, complained that Irish irregulars coming out without uniforms and sniping was not cricket. The response was to ask whether he wanted us to come out in our pelts and throw stones. That, apparently, is all we have left to the Palestinians. I regret anybody who is hit by a stone, but I understand it.