David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Black. She has made a thorough study of this matter and I salute her and her group for pursuing it. It is an issue on which I have been engaged for many years. In fact, in 2012 I raised it at the foreign affairs committee and we had a willing participant in the then Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, former Deputy Eamon Gilmore. He committed himself to this type of position.

It is important to emphasise that this concerns only goods originating from the settlements. It is not a boycott of Israel or Israeli produced goods and it is not a boycott of academic institutions. I have been a lifelong supporter of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign but I have broken its picket on meetings where academics, writers and artists from Israel were addressing the Irish public. It is very important to keep open the channels for information and exchange of ideas. In fact, although I am a strong supporter of Palestinian human rights, I was also instrumental in getting the Israeli Embassy established here.

One matter that disappoints me is the position people take and the pretence they make. For example, there is an agreement in place known as the Euromed agreement, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. Human rights protocols are attached to that agreement but they have never been assessed. I have asked repeatedly, year after year, for the Euromed agreement to be examined in light of the human rights protocols and the extraordinary and extreme violations of human rights undertaken by the Israeli Government. Nothing has happened. What is the point of having human rights protocols if they are just left to one side and completely ignored? That is worse than not having human rights protocols attached because it is a defiance and denial of human rights.

I refer to a letter in The Irish Timesthis morning, which was circulated to many of our colleagues in the Seanad. It is extremely important. Israel always says it is the only democracy in the Middle East and I have received wearying correspondence from people urging me to look at the way the Arab states treat gay people. I am aware of that. It is awful and very regrettable. I campaign against it and I have spoken out against it very strongly. However, that does not mean we deny human rights. Human rights exist not just for the people with whom we agree but, most importantly, for the people with whom we do not agree. The position of the Arab states on homosexuality is a complete irrelevance when dealing with the question of human rights for the Palestinian people.

I believe it is arguable whether Israel is a democracy. It has certain features of democracy but the Palestinian people do not think they live under a democracy. It is extremely important to recognise the courage of the people who sent the letter to The Irish Times. I will quote some of it. It is from a group that includes ambassadors for the State of Israel, half a dozen or more winners of the Israel Prize, professors, artists, members of the Knesset and the former attorney general of Israel. They have all signed this wonderful letter as Israeli citizens. They say:

We are convinced that Israel's ongoing occupation of the Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is morally and strategically unsustainable, is detrimental to peace and poses a threat to the security of Israel itself. [That is pretty strong stuff.] [...] While Ireland, along with the rest of the EU, considers the occupation illegal, it continues to economically sustain it by trading with illegal Israeli settlements established in clear and direct violation of international law.

I listened to the briefing this morning with great interest. Dr. Barghouti, who is in the Distinguished Visitors Gallery, and two other people spoke. They pointed out that the Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories beauty products, such as bath salts and so forth, and which are available in this country, come from settlements, although that is not labelled. I must acknowledge that I have used the bath salts, not the beauty products, in ignorance of that fact.

The letter continues:

The occupation has been correctly identified by successive Irish governments as a major obstacle to peace. [...] As people who care deeply for Israel's future and long for our country to live in peace with its neighbours, we urge you to support the aforementioned Bill.

That is the real voice of Israel. That is the Israel I knew more than 40 years ago when it was a left leaning, socially conscious, politically active and decent country, before the inrush of 1 million Soviet citizens who had been scalded by communism and had become extremely right wing. They fractured the political system.

With regard to the occupation, I have witnessed the demolition of houses. Last year, I was in the Jordan Valley and saw the demolition of a pathetic house. It was actually just a tent as the original house of the people, who had been living there for generations, was bulldozed to make way for settlements. The people put up a pathetic tent so the bulldozers were brought back and demolished the tent. It is rarely acknowledged but there is a type of secret war taking place in the Jordan Valley all the time. There are 600,000 Israeli settlers in occupied Palestine. If one looks at a map of Palestine with the settlements marked in red spots, it looks as if it has measles. They are everywhere. There is no such place as Palestine. The Israelis have made sure of that.

I read an interesting book some time ago by two Jewish Israeli writers. They outlined the history of the establishment of the State of Israel and, to my surprise and consternation, they showed that even the earliest leaders such as David Ben Gurion envisaged driving the Palestinians out of their land. That is at the heart of Zionism. One need not be anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist. It is a tragic irony that we in Europe resolved our consciences after the Holocaust by inflicting what the Palestinian people call the Nakba, the catastrophe or disaster, on third parties, the Palestinians, who were not involved in that situation. Two thousand applications for building permits have been made by the Palestinians in the past few years but only 30 have been granted. Is that not astonishing? The Israelis use bureaucracy to destroy the ethos of the Palestinians. I have been there and I have seen the separate roads. What is that but apartheid, when the Palestinians cannot drive or walk on the roads in their own country? The water is diverted from Palestinian land into the settlements. People have been living there for generations but, under this system, they do not have title papers to their lands. The Israelis use that argument. They ask the people where are their title deeds. They then demolish their properties in order to give the land to the Israelis.

It is a dreadful situation. It is one where Europe has shown a complete lack of courage. The Minister should not wait for a unified European situation. He will never ever get it. The Germans and the Dutch are against it. Of course the Germans are against it; they have a bad conscience because of the Holocaust. It is dreadful that the Israeli Government should use the Holocaust as a political weapon. I was at the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony on Sunday and it was extraordinarily moving. There was a photograph of children waiting in a forest in 1944 - one radiantly beautiful little girl was looking straight into the camera and there was also a terribly attractive young boy aged about five or six. How could anybody gas those children? That is a universal crime and it should not be used politically in the 21st century.