Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Tánaiste here today. In respect of what he has said, not one word could I disagree with. I endorse everything he has said 100%.

What has been said by other speakers is equally true. Hamas is an extremist Islamist terrorist organisation. It is not the Palestinian people. It is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It is dedicated to the reversal of the 1948 expulsions of Arabs and the reintegration of a single Palestinian land. Hamas is backed by Iran in all of this.

What was done the other day was done with calculation. They knew full well when they murdered all of those innocent people at the music festival and in the kibbutz what the reaction would be. They lit a fuse determined to bring about a massive confrontation between the Israeli Government on the one hand and themselves on the other and they knew that it would be played out in the streets and in the lands of the Gaza Strip. All of that was deliberate.

None of us should for one minute think that this was understandable, this was an expression of the deep-seated frustration or this was part of a sense of disappointment that the political process was not proceeding as Hamas wants. Hamas does not want a two-state solution. Hamas has never wanted a two-state solution. Hamas has never accepted that Israel can exist as a state, and let us get that firmly on the record. Nobody in Ireland should ally with or sympathise with Hamas in any shape or form. That is the first point.

The second point is that since this situation has been brought about by Hamas deliberately, it knows what the reaction of the Israeli Government under Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Government has had the cheek to label Members of this House who voted for the Control of Economic Activities (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018 as anti-Semitic, is likely to be and what his overreaction is likely to be unless it is tempered by the international community.

I ask this House to contemplate what a land incursion into Gaza and the Gaza Strip can amount to. Where will it start? Where will it go? Will it be only in the northern part, north of the Wadi, or will the Hamas people move south with the rest of the population as the Israeli tanks, planes and soldiers move in on the northern part of Gaza?

What is the aim of it? Is it destruction of the Hamas infrastructure? Are we talking about blowing up the little workshops where rockets are made? Is that the aim of this? Is it to hunt down the people in Hamas themselves, to arrest them, possibly to execute them, to eliminate them or to bring them back to Israel and try them? What is the purpose of that part of the invasion, and when things move south and when the northern part of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza city, is a smouldering ruin, will that be the end of it?

It was interesting to see President Biden warning Israel to learn from the lessons that America did not learn in sufficient time arising out of 9/11. You can make war on terror as rhetoric but you cannot, in fact, on the ground. Afghanistan, Yemen and all such places prove that the rhetoric of saying that one is making war on terror simply does not work. If the aim of the Israeli Government is to eliminate Hamas, it is a justifiable aim if it can be done because if Hamas has done this once, why should Israel let it ever attempt it again, ever take that risk or ever expose its own citizens to ferocity of that kind? I ask it to consider how that can be done without occupation of all of the Gaza Strip, without searching through every concentration of population for the people who are Hamas and for the people who organise Hamas and sorting them out, without sorting the men and the women on one side, to use an old trope, and then setting about trying to ascertain in any pocket of captured civilians who is and who is not their enemy, and who are and who are not the terrorists. Unless some process like that took place right across the Gaza Strip, the idea that one can eliminate a terrorist cell which is driven by such hatred will not work and Gaza will be reduced to nothing in the process.It was not me who said this; it was an Israeli Government who said that at the end of this process he envisaged that the Gaza Strip would be a tent city.

The next point I will make is that it cannot be the case that one can cut off water, electricity and food from a population of 2.2 million. We have heard that a handful of trucks - 16, 18 or 20 trucks - are to be allowed in per day by the Egyptian Government. What possible effect can that have? What can a handful of trucks of that kind do for 2.2 million people? The other thing that has been said is that none of this must make its way to Hamas. How will they stop water from being given to a Hamas official and ensure it only goes to a Palestinian child whose parents have nothing to do with Hamas? How can that be done?

Realism and rhetoric must meet now. The simple fact is that a massive destructive campaign against the Gaza Strip, the destruction of the apartment blocks, the wiping out of infrastructure and the huge, imposed famine on a group of people will not have any long-term effect at all. On the contrary, it will have exactly the opposite effect of what is being proposed.

To be positive for a second, Ireland supports the two-state solution and that is a position that we have held consistently. We also support the right of Israel to exist as an independent sovereign state within the borders that existed in 1967. We have never deviated from those positions. There is one problem. We have to put our hands on our hearts and ask if we did the right thing. That was in relation to the creeping annexation of the West Bank, which is acquiescence in the right wing of Israeli politics abusing international law to advance its particular agenda.

I say that Ireland has constantly failed to beat the drum - and I use that phrase in terms of diplomacy - against the settlements.