Vincent P Martin (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Only a few short months ago, Seanad Éireann roundly condemned the outrageous, totally disproportionate and indiscriminate bombardment of Palestine by Israeli forces. Any country that engages in such flagrant breaches of international law is more than capable of operating an apartheid system. The overreaction of the Israeli Government to Amnesty's published findings was not surprising because those findings cut deep and upset many people. The report states that Israel's apartheid system against Palestinians is a "cruel system of domination" and a "crime against humanity". We have heard the usual response, that is, the disingenuous, fake information response that somehow Amnesty is antisemitic or an organisation of left-wing crazies. The usual lines were trotted out. The response was disgusting but not surprising. No doubt President Putin would call Amnesty a group of drug addicts and neo-Nazis as well. That is how these actors deal with such findings. There can be no normal conversation.

A wonderful and eminent senior counsel, Bill Shipsey, recently had published an excellent piece on Amnesty's findings. It was a very measured response. He stated that he understood that, without looking at the facts and the findings of the report, the finding of apartheid against the state of Israel would upset many people. Because there are those sensitivities and because there is a fake information war, it is always good to put on record, in case we are ever misunderstood, that we, as democrats, recognise the right to self-determination of the Jewish people. We recognise the right to existence of the state of Israel, just as I do the state of Palestine. We always condemn antisemitism, because if we do not do so, we will be misrepresented. If the Israeli Government cannot go for the ball, it goes for the man or the woman.

An analogy can be drawn with South Africa and its apartheid system. To F.W. de Klerk's eternal credit, very late in the day, before he passed away in November of last year, he retracted and apologised for what he had earlier said, that apartheid was not a crime against humanity. He found peace with himself by being true to himself. It was extremely late coming, but it is never too late.

A young man just finished his matriculation and his leaving certificate, Bill Shipsey, with a few of his fellow young pupils, went off to Israel and had a very happy summer working in a kibbutz. They worked on moving irrigation pipes in extensive cotton fields. Each morning, Mr. Shipsey passed what looked like the ruins of a village on the top of a hill above the kibbutz. It looked like one of the famine villages of the west of Ireland. No explanation was forthcoming, and it took many years later for that measured, practical man, Bill Shipsey, an eminent barrister, to realise what he had lived through that summer. He discovered that the land on which that kibbutz operated had been obtained by driving Palestinian tenants off the land in the 1930s and again in 1948. That abandoned and ruined village was one from which residents had been forcibly removed. Some of the descendents of its former residents live as refugees in Jenin, in the West Bank. Had he known what he knows now, Mr. Shipsey's attitude at the time would have been very different.

Mr. Shipsey concludes, however, with a note of hope that justice requires change, compromise and a willingness to recognise wrongs. I would add that it requires honesty, and for some that has to be raw honesty. A peace based on justice has to include a willingness to recognise wrongs. Martin Luther King said, "I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth and a willingness to ... [discuss] the truth when we discover it." That search for truth goes hand in hand with long-term peace and reconciliation. We can see that on the island of Ireland. Ours is not a perfect peace but it is a precious peace, and every day is a victory. There is a sharing of different traditions. We see how South Africa put its dark past behind it. However, there will be no resolution, no grim dark past consigned to the history of the Middle East, until people in a mature and calm way are first of all true to themselves and show honest leadership, not populism, and call things out as they are.

Amnesty has done the world a great service by backing up its findings with evidence in a very detailed report.Israel must come clean with the world and have a normal discussion. We understand the wicked past it has suffered but it has to differentiate. Its past cannot set it free of the truth of yesterday and the day before. Its past will never give a reason or excuse for the blatant apartheid, which is a blemish on this living, modern civilisation.