Seanad Eireann 10th October 2023 – Order of Business
In relation to what is happening in Gaza I want to make some remarks. What happened last Saturday must be classified as utterly unforgivable, utterly wrong and completely inexcusable. To invade across an internationally recognised boundary, round up people and slaughter them and bring some of them back across the boundary for the purpose of making them hostages is a crime against humanity, in my view, and cannot be excused. I was extremely worried, then, when I heard Prime Minister Netanyahu say that the Israeli response would echo across history. I was equally worried by the failure of UN member states much more powerful than ours to acknowledge the point that the Irish UN delegation was making.
This was that the use of force in these circumstances, of a kind that deploys massive force against civilians, is itself also likely to be a crime, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Reducing Gaza, which is a location where unparalleled international neglect and cruelty are being visited upon a people, to rubble and bringing it back to the Stone Age, removing water, electricity, sewerage, health facilities and all energy from a people, and then bombing them and their buildings with such ferocity that it will reduce their urban areas to a state of being uninhabitable, is inexcusable. Nothing should be said in these Houses which in any way encourages the Israeli Government to use disproportionate, unlawful and vindictive retribution against innocent people who had nothing to do with what happened last Saturday.
Seanad Eireann 18th October 2023 – Order of Business
I have one point to make regarding the conversations that have been happening in the wings of this House and in respect of the business before us. The previous Seanad passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018, which was measured legislation that was designed to fly a flag against the creeping annexation of the West Bank by settlers encouraged by the Netanyahu Government. We were frustrated at every angle in progressing it. We were told the Bill would breach EU law. At a later stage, when it got to Dáil Éireann, the Members of that House were told it was a measure that required a money message from the Government, which was an entirely spurious foot trip of the legislation. I have one point to make in this regard. Those of us who supported the Bill, and there was support for it right across this House at the time, were making a stance against the circumstances that were leading to the hatred that is destroying the Middle East. We were standing up for the rule of international law. We were not helped by the Government because it was afraid of being seen as an outlier on the issue at EU level. Much more offensive than that was that an official of the Netanyahu Government called those of us who supported the measure in this House anti-Semites. The ambassador was called in for a dressing down. We do not know what excuses were offered or whether the Israelis were given an assurance the Bill would be allowed to die, which it has been. People should look back to what happened. The Government should look back to what it did not do. The European Union, by its failure to act and take proper stances, has contributed to the hatred and despair that have brought us to the abyss we now see in the Middle East.
Seanad Eireann 19th October 2023
STATEMENTS ON THE SITUATION IN ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
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.
The Tánaiste
Senator Michael McDowell
I will finish on this. I see the Tánaiste shaking his head. I remember when this House passed the—–
An Cathaoirleach
Senator Michael McDowell
—–settlements Bill, we were foot-tripped in the Dáil and we were foot-tripped here. We were told it was against European law. That was untrue then and it was shameful.
An Cathaoirleach
I thank the Senator. An chéad—–
The Tánaiste
Saying it is creeping annexation is shameful.
An Cathaoirleach
The Tánaiste will have a right to reply at the end.
The Tánaiste
Absolutely shameful.
The Irish Times 11th October 2023
Michael McDowell: Ireland must now shout out loud against total war in Gaza
The premeditated, evil barbarity unleashed on hundreds of innocent human beings by Hamas, a terrorist organisation, can never be justified or excused. Nor can the belief systems that conceived of the massacres and put them into effect. By any standard, they are heinous crimes against humanity and can only be viewed as such.
The question that arises now is one of response. What can and should be done in response? At the absolute minimum, it is not only legitimate but obligatory to firstly prevent any recurrence and then to seek out and bring to justice all the perpetrators – gunmen, weapons providers and political planners. Rescuing all the poor hostages from their captors is also an imperative.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu – mortified by intelligence lapses – has promised a response that will “echo across the generations”. We should remember that anything that is done or not done now will have lasting historical reverberations. If any aspect of the history of Israel and Palestine is clear and beyond dispute, it is that the use of violence begets further violence and that killing Israelis and Palestinians drives peace further away and only endangers the lives of the great mass of innocent people.
More than two million human beings live in the Gaza Strip. Their awful circumstances are the legacy of war and oppression. Gaza is not a concentration camp and it is not a ghetto of old. Many Israelis would describe any such descriptions of Gaza as anti-Semitic and as belittling the Holocaust.
But Gaza remains what it undeniably is – a terrible place and an inhuman pressure cooker. And Israel jointly shares responsibility and blame for what it is – and what it has become – with neighbouring Arab states that unleashed wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Gaza is a sump of hopelessness, deprivation and political subjection to the extremists who control it.
It is contended by many that the rise of Hamas to ascendancy in Gaza was initially encouraged by Israel as occupier, in the short-sighted view that encouraging a local variant of the Muslim Brotherhood would diminish the power, standing and effectiveness of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the secularist, left-wing politicians who dominated the Palestine Authority. Splitting the Palestinian political entity in two was seen by some as an opportunity to divide and conquer.
If so, that strategy has dramatically backfired. It has dealt heavy blows on any two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine political conflict. That may suit the hard right in Israel in their strategy of creeping annexation of the West Bank and kettling two million Palestinians under Hamas in Gaza.
There is a risk that Netanyahu will now unleash such terrible destruction by air and land on Gaza that tens of thousands of innocent humans will die, hundreds of thousands will be made homeless, and millions left with no social infrastructure, water, electricity, sewage, gas or access to food or health facilities. Reduction of millions to a living hell of disease and despair.
If that is the response that Netanyahu thinks will “echo across the generations”, all of Israel’s western supporters will share the blame if they allow it to happen.
US president Joe Biden should wake up to what he is watching. Netanyahu’s vengeance has the capacity to critically damage the West in a relatively short time frame. Biden has the lives of tens of thousands of people in his hands and he must take the responsibility if he transfers them into the cupped hands of Netanyahu.
Terrorism depends on horror in the minds of others. It thrives on outrage. It has been said that last weekend was Israel’s 9/11. The 2001 terror attacks in the US begat worldwide outrage, sympathy and calls for a “war on terror” by the Bush administration. Who won that war? Is it still ongoing? Can it ever end?
If Hamas deserves to be toppled – and it does – how will reduction of Gaza to stone-age rubble address the long-term security needs of Israel? How will that play across the Islamic world? Who knows how the Saudis and the Gulf states will view the Hamas massacres, or how they will play out if Gaza is razed and many thousands of Palestinians die? Could Israeli-Arab rapprochement survive a war in Gaza that will “echo across generations”?
Europe sat on its hands on the annexation of the West Bank. Those of us in the Seanad who passed the Settlement Goods Bill as a small but important symbolic rejection of the creeping illegal annexation of the West Bank were described by the Israeli government as anti-Semitic.
Ireland must now shout out loud against total war in Gaza. The only response that will avoid further long-term catastrophe is restraint and adherence to international law. Israel’s right of self-defence must be proportionate, lawful and humane. That response might echo across the generations.