Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am glad time has been afforded to discuss the Amnesty International report into Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people.I am delighted the Palestinian ambassador is here and is joined by people from the trade union movement and beyond who have been working to agitate for the rights of the Palestinian people over many years. I am very glad they are here. I am very grateful to Senator Black. It is because of her pushing of this issue that we are having this debate today.

In the past week, we have witnessed Russia invade Ukraine against the democratic will of its people and in the knowledge it will lead to the loss of thousands of its citizens' lives. It is poignant we are discussing the acts of apartheid and oppression of the Israeli Government against the Palestinian people in the knowledge that it has gone on for decades. The Amnesty International report is the latest in a litany of reports we have seen over many years describing what is apartheid by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. We know the 2017 UN report, entitled Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, came to the same conclusions as the Amnesty International report, namely, that the Palestinian people had been subject to relentless land seizures, air strikes, restrictions on movement, unlawful killing and denials of their nationality and citizenship - denials of their very identity. It is as abhorrent when it happens in Gaza as when it happens in Europe.

All people in this world have a right to self-determination and identity and this right must also belong to the Palestinian people. This right has been consistently denied to the Palestinian people by the Israeli Government. As documented in such detail in the Amnesty International report, the Israeli Government continues to treat the Palestinians as a demographic threat - even to think about that phrase in itself, a demographic threat - and that, every day, Israel imposes and enforces measures to control and decrease the Palestinian presence in and access to land in Israel and the occupied territories. The Amnesty International report goes on to illustrate how the Israeli Government has systematically treated the Palestinian people as an inferior racial group regardless of where they live and that Palestinians are being forced to live as a second-class people in a state that is built on the destruction of their national identity. It involves rendering people homeless, nationless, without an identity and access to basic democracy, and excluded from healthcare and education, all because of their nationality. That is apartheid and neither Ireland nor this Government can stand by and say we cannot use phrases like apartheid because Israel is an apartheid state.

Apartheid is not some nebulous or vague political charge or term. We know three main international treaties prohibit and explicitly criminalise apartheid - the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This report from Amnesty International goes into graphic detail about how the crimes against humanity and against the Palestinian people conform to that definition of apartheid, how the absentee property law is used as a tool of war and apartheid effectively to deprive the Palestinian people of their land, and how there is suppression of so many civil society organisations within Palestine, something we do not talk as much about. Six prominent ones were closed down in recent years while more than 400 Palestinian organisations have been banned since 1967. Palestinians are being denied that freedom of association we enjoy across most European countries because an assembly of more than ten people without a permit is forbidden.

What is the Irish State going to do? We have a seat at the UN Security Council. How are we using that? What are we doing with regard to Senator Black's Bill banning the importation of products from the occupied territories? How are we going to respond to Amnesty International's recommendations? It urges the international community to re-establish the Special Committee Against Apartheid, which was originally set up in 1962. Are we going to recognise that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid? We have heard the Minister of State's comments and believe he needs to change them. Amnesty International specifically calls for all states to enforce a ban on products from illegal Israeli settlements. How is Ireland taking leadership on the Security Council and within Europe on this issue, because we cannot stand back? We can issue all the words in the world but we need to see action and we need to see this Government taking a leadership role and calling it as it is.