Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I agree with everything he said and I agree with everything Senator Joe O'Reilly said. I was listening this morning to our colleague, Senator Black, and she recited a poem that was written by a young woman in Gaza. As I listened to it, and when she got to the point of being given 56 seconds or whatever it was to get out of your home and leave everything behind, I was reminded of my wife's grandfather, Joe Brennan, a founding Senator of the reconstituted Seanad in 1937. He was given a similar notice by the commanding officer of the British forces based in Buttevant as part of martial law. His house was blown up with an hour's notice in 1921. It struck me, listening to the account today, that the poem Senator Black recited dealt with somebody who got out of their house. One must think about the parents of children who did not escape and look at the hatred that is being stored up when considering all of these things. People talk about sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. This cycle must stop.

I speak as somebody who, like Senator Black, is a member of the European Parliamentarians for Israeli-Palestinian Equality, a network of people from across European parliaments and in the European Parliament who are, effectively, trying to call a halt to the annexation of the West Bank and its de facto absorption into a greater Israel. I also speak as somebody who, as Minister for Justice, apologised on behalf of the Irish people for the first time for what happened in the late 1930s and, indeed, the 1940s in respect of Jewish refugees. I initiated the State funding of Holocaust Memorial Day and the Holocaust educational trust. I have spent a lot of time studying the Holocaust and nobody needs to impress upon me the enormity of it. This year is the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar ravine massacres. That brings back to us that the Jewish people have been the subject of terrible wrongs. However, two wrongs never make a right. I am not going to compare what is going on now with what went on then but I will say that Gaza is a living hell and that is something which must come to an end. Tolerating or inciting provocative marches through east Jerusalem at the end of Ramadan is comparable, in some respects, to what Oswald Mosley was doing in the East End of London in the 1930s. They are provocative marches designed to inflame and stir up hatred.

Those of us who believe in justice for the Palestinian people in no sense deny the right of Israel to exist or defend itself. I absolutely condemn people in Iran and elsewhere who talk about the destruction of the state of Israel. I condemn that absolutely. However, our opposition to what has happened this week and last week, and to what has been happening in Gaza for years, is based on a sense of human rights and decency. It is not, in any sense, based on an anti-Israeli point of view. I object to the efforts of some people on the right wing of Israeli politics to set a definition of anti-Semitism which somehow prevents me from articulating my opposition to what is happening on the West Bank and, effectively, puts resistance to the extreme right of Zionism into the category of implied anti-Semitism. Nobody can lecture me on anti-Semitism. I have done what any Minister in Ireland could ever possibly do to assist in bringing Irish people to a recognition of the wrongs that Irish society did to the Jews and to society's duty to uphold the rights of Jews. I reiterate Eamon de Valera's great step of bringing the recognition of the Jewish population into our Constitution. This State did that when nobody else was willing to do it.

We must protest and object to what is happening. We must defend the rights of children, be they Israeli, Israeli-Arab, Palestinian-Arab or wherever. We must also protect the rights of individual citizens. The poem Senator Black read earlier evoked in me strong feelings of revulsion and pity. This House must stand with all the other parliamentary assemblies across Europe which have stated that this must come to an end, the cycle must end, that we must stand up for what we believe in and not be afraid to do that.