Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming into the House. It is important to state we are having these statements today because Senator Black, colleagues in Sinn Féin and others in this House, along with us in the Labour Party, have been calling for this debate.It needs to be had, of course, because we are on the back of looking at atrocities that have taken place in Jenin over recent weeks where drones and ground troops were used to invade a refugee camp to, as Senator Warfield so eloquently put it, "make refugees out of refugees". Some 160 Palestinians have died since the start of this year. Yes, a number of Israelis are dead as well, but we have to look at the aggressor here. We are seeing an unprecedented escalation of violence such as we have not seen in many years against the Palestinian people.

The new far-right Government in Israel now poses a threat to the Palestinian people in a way that we have not seen for many years. Indeed, the statements in particular by the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, about how there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, speaking in front of a flag showing Israel owning all of Palestine and even the country of Jordan, shows that this Government knows no bounds, has no moral responsibility and will do anything to assert the primacy of Israel and trample over all others.

We have spoken before in this House about using the word "apartheid". There is a resistance by the Government to describing what is happening as apartheid. Of course, this is not some nebulous concept. We know that international treaties prohibit and explicitly criminalise apartheid.

We know that apartheid has been described by the 2017 UN report on the practices towards the Palestinian people by Israel, and the Amnesty International report came to the same conclusions with regard to the relentless land seizures, air strikes, restrictions of movement, unlawful killing and denials of their nationality and citizenship; denials of their very identity.

The very reason we are having these statements today is a call and plea to the Government now to step up and take on that moral responsibility it needs to and show moral leadership within the European Union. We saw a video in recent weeks, unfortunately, by the head of the European Commission, Ms Ursula von der Leyen, with regard to Israel, which confused many in terms of the EU's positioning now.

Ireland, however, as a member of the EU and as a moral influence within the UN, needs to use its position to call out the apartheid that is taking place and the attempted extermination of the Palestinian people. It needs to proceed with Senator Black's Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018 and, ultimately, recognise Palestine for the state that it is and should be.

There is a responsibility on the Irish State to act now. We have spent much time talking about what neutrality means and our role in the world over the last number of weeks. This is a very clear example of how Ireland should be using its influence and its unique place in the world, if it could be called that, to support the Palestinian people. We are not seeing any other country step up in the way it needs to at this point.