Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for being here today and accommodating this Bill. I have visited the occupied territories. I have been to UN schools as part of a delegation of the foreign affairs committee. President Higgins, who was then a member of the committee, was there too. We met a class of 12 year-old girls in a UN school in Bethlehem and discussed the issues regarding Ireland and our search for peace and the parallels with Israel and Palestine. While they are not exactly the same, the search for peace is the same in both cases. The girls spoke of their daily experience, which sounded somewhat similar to the experience of people who lived in Belfast during the Troubles. As they came to school in the morning, they were stopped by Israeli soldiers, their bags were searched, their books were thrown on the ground, they might be told to stand somewhere and they could be there for an hour or two. They ended up being late for school and when they returned home in the evening, the exact same thing happened. We put it to them that they have two solutions, that is, to either beat their enemy or to negotiate with their enemy. The question was posed as to who wanted to negotiate peace and no one put their hand up. When asked whether they wanted to kill all the Israelis, all 52 of the 12 year-old girls put up their hands. That is because of the treatment they receive daily at the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces.

Recently, we had a delegation from Israel which spoke about further and more engagement with the Irish tourism board and how we could have mutually beneficial relations. They asked why we do not understand them better and why we seem to take the side of the Palestinians. I replied that there is only one army in the world which has continually put Irish troops in danger and in fear of being killed and that is the Israeli Defence Forces, as well as the South Lebanese Army, which it backed. When, over the past 40 years, with rare gaps, we have seen news reports of Irish troops being put in harm's way by the Israeli Defence Forces, it is little wonder that we are concerned about Israel and its activities.

Fianna Fáil has long been engaged in the issues of the Middle East and the search for a solution. We were the first party, and Ireland was the first country, to put forward the idea of a two-state solution with a sovereign Palestinian state and an Israeli state that could live in peace and harmony with its neighbours. It must, however, wish to do that and in order to do that, a state must be a good neighbour. Being a good neighbour does not include stopping 12 year-old girls going to and from school and punishing them for the very fact of their religion and nationality.

We condemn illegal settlements, as has the Minister. What they do in Israel and the occupied territories is a breach of international law. Israeli politicians tell us that despite all the EU or UN resolutions, it is creating the facts on the ground and what that means is that Israel is taking over the land. As the Minister observed, it is putting concrete on the negotiation process. That does not make a solution easier to achieve. It makes it far more difficult.

We are sympathetic to the idea of this legislation but what all of us are determined to do is to get formal results. The Minister has outlined a possibility and has committed to Fianna Fáil in respect of putting down questions at the next meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council. We want a long-term solution. The long-term solution is hampered daily, as the Minister will have seen when he visited Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is being bought up house by house and street by street in a systematic way by elements within Zionism. Those Palestinian people are being offered a new life away from the Middle East, their houses are being bought for enormous sums and new Israeli families are being put into that location. That means that when, if ever, there are negotiations in the future, and people examine where Palestinians are living in Jerusalem, they will find that there are very few left because they have been bought out or forced out and encouraged to leave by every way possible. Each time a new building is erected or there is another development which encircles Jerusalem, it makes the solution to the conflict more difficult.

I have said this to visiting Israeli delegations and when visiting there. We have a long and tragic history of settlements that still have consequences 800 years later. It has a detrimental effect. While the EU has a role to play, I do not believe it is being sufficiently robust. As the Minister has pointed out, it is the United States which is the ultimate player in this game. If the United States does not wish to make the Israeli Government stop the settlements and come to a negotiated solution, it will never happen. Even the American General Petraeus has said that the US policy in the Middle East, particularly in Israel, is costing the lives of American soldiers in that area and is doing untold damage to US interests globally. Notwithstanding that, the Arab world has a part to play in this. The recent announcement that the US is going to withdraw funding for Palestinian support is an opportunity for the Arab world to step up and replace that funding and to commit publicly to doing so. One cannot condemn the US for withdrawing funding and for supporting Israel when the Arab world is not playing its full role in supporting Palestinian refugees in their own countries, as well as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

We support the broad thrust of the Bill. We want to see a solution for the Palestinian people in the long run in order that those girls who attend the UN school in Bethlehem can go there unimpeded and unimpinged and to reach their full potential, which is currently not the case. So long as the current policy of Israel continues, it is unlikely to happen and we will see the situation deteriorate because of the expansion of illegal settlements, rather than checked, as should be the case.