I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."
I start by welcoming the many people who have come into the Gallery this evening to observe this debate. They are people who have been marching and protesting in some cases for decades or many years. Members of the Palestinian community are here to observe this and see how the Government is going to respond to it. I commend the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other groups like Sadaka, which are here and have been campaigning for many years on the issue of solidarity with Palestine against the crimes being committed against the people of Palestine by the Israeli regime.
Although this Bill was proposed by People Before Profit, I thank Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and, hopefully, others, who have already pledged support for this Bill. I give special thanks to Senator Frances Black who is also here and of course has been campaigning to get her Bill passed, looking for sanctions on trade with the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. The Government promised in the programme for Government it would be implemented but it still has not implemented it. We will probably talk about it more. However, despite the commitments given by the Government, there is a clear statement that it is now diluting that Bill. Many of us frankly have doubts that it has any intention of passing it at all despite the promise in the programme for Government that it would do so.
Our Bill is saying that under the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute against apartheid, international law generally and our commitment to international law and human rights we have an obligation to impose sanctions on the State of Israel because it is in violation of those legal commitments. We are asking, if this Bill is passed, which we hope the Government will agreed to, is that we should all break off all economic, trade and financial relations with the State of Israel because of the crimes we believe it is guilty of. They are genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment of Palestinian people and the systematic, ongoing, decades long violation of the most basic human and civil rights of the Palestinian people. We are morally and legally obliged to impose sanctions and we need to end the treatment of Israel as a normal state and recognise that it is a rogue pariah state.
If that were not clear before the events of the past three years, it is surely obvious now. The Israeli regime is not a normal regime. It has revealed itself in the past three years as a depraved murder machine hell-bent on a genocidal campaign of annihilation and mass murder against the Palestinian people. That is what it is. Such a regime in our view has no place in the community of civilised nations and in the international community and should be isolated economically and in every other way as happened with apartheid South Africa. Because of the resistance of black South Africans and the solidarity of people across the world, it was finally acknowledged that an apartheid regime like South Africa had no right to exist and be treated as a normal state, and that regime had to be dismantled.
Surely, we are beyond the point now where that is clear about the Israeli regime. We have seen in the past three years the genocidal slaughter of more than 75,000 people in Gaza, the levelling of Gaza, the destruction of all the schools, most of the housing, the infrastructure, the hospitals and the mass murder of men, women and children. That continues despite the claim that there is a ceasefire. While all of that is going on, we see the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. We see again the assaults and reoccupation of parts of Lebanon and the mass murder of Lebanese people. We see the attacks on Iran.
This is a death machine. It is obvious that is the case, and that the people presiding over it are criminals. Netanyahu, Gallant, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir are sick, sick people. When the minister of a government gets a present of a noose for his birthday to celebrate their plan to execute Palestinians, and they celebrate that for their birthday, you understand you are dealing with sick, depraved people. This is the mentality that is driving the Israeli State. Of course, all of this predates the current events. What we have seen in the past three years is the logical conclusion of the genocidal character of the Israeli State but its crimes predate the events of October 2023. I want to quote something written in 2021. I could quote many human rights organisations but I will just quote one because the impunity granted to Israel is what has led us to the genocidal horror we have seen.
This was documented by many organisations, but I will cite one, namely Human Rights Watch, and a report it produced in 2021. The report in question states that for over seven decades, the international community has stood by as Israel has been given free rein to dispossess, segregate, control, oppress and dominate Palestinians. It also states that the international community has contributed to undermining the international legal order and has emboldened Israel to continue to perpetrating crimes with impunity. Human Rights Watch accuses some states of actively supporting Israel's violations by supplying it with arms, equipment and other tools to perpetrate crimes under international law and providing diplomatic cover, including at the United Nations Security Council, to shield it from accountability. It states that by doing so, these states have completely failed the Palestinian people and only exacerbated Palestinians' lived experience as people with lesser rights and inferior status to Jewish Israelis. That was just one human rights organisation in 2021. How prophetic are its words.
Decades of impunity have been granted by the international community, by the UN Security Council and by this country. That impunity has now led to the horror we have seen over the past three years. There was the failure to pass Senator Black’s Bill, which was instigated in 2018. How many times did we stand up in this House and how many times did people take to the streets - long before 2023 - to plead with successive Governments to impose sanctions? How many times did we plead with those in government to raise the EU-Israel association agreement? This grants favoured trade status and is effectively associate membership of the European Union. Israel still enjoys this after the genocide and horror that has been imposed on the people of Gaza and there has been not a single, solitary sanction.
I will be interested to hear what the Minister is going to say about the next matter I am about to raise. I do not know if people are aware of it, but it is absolutely shocking. This week, because of a fight by The Currency, which, according to the journalist Niall Sargent took 12 months, we discovered that in 2024 the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment approved licences to the value of €20 million for exports from this country to the Israeli military. That was a surge in the value of such exports in the previous year, €12 million, when the genocidal assault on Gaza began. In the years before that, it was only €1 million, although that is too much, or €85,000 in another year. In 2023, however, when the genocidal assault on Gaza began, the figure jumped. In 2024, it went up to €20 million. This is the Government signing off on licences to allow exports of goods to the Israeli military while it was committing these crimes. In the case of 2024, this was after South Africa had already initiated the case before the ICJ in respect of the genocide, which the Government later joined, although it had to be pushed to do so. We already had a ruling from the ICJ in January 2024 to the effect there was a plausible case of genocide being committed against the Palestinian people. Following that, the Government granted licences to export dual-use technology to the Israeli military that is carrying out the genocidal massacre. That is absolutely appalling.
I will conclude by reminding the Government what our obligations are under the Genocide Convention. I want to quote the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian genocide. It states:
...a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent ... [to commit genocide] it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit.
Thus, even if there is a suspicion of genocide the signatories to the Genocide Convention are supposed to act. I will not have time to quote it but the judgment goes on to state that even if a state does not think it will have a massive impact, it should do anything in its power to try to deter, prevent or impact on the capacity of the state committing the genocide. It also states that such action should be taken. Despite that, this State has not imposed a single sanction. Not one. Spain and Slovenia have. Other European states are still sending the Israelis arms and weapons and it is just deplorable. These are signatories to the Genocide Convention, which was put together, let us remind ourselves, after the Holocaust on the basis that "Never again" meant not just that we would punish a genocide after the fact but that we would try to ensure it never happens again.
Despite this, we have allowed three and a half years of this genocide, although, as we all know, there have been decades of ethnic cleansing. The entire Israeli state has been based from the beginning on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. There have been decades of ethnic cleansing and decades of illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory. For 20 years now, there has been a siege of Gaza, which is a collective punishment of its people and which, according to the UN had, even before October 2023, reduced it to a state of permanent humanitarian crisis. And then there is what has happened since. There have been no sanctions despite our obligations. It is criminal.
I will finish with something I said earlier. I never, ever quote Éamon de Valera because I have nothing good to say about him. Now, however, I will because in 1935, Éamon de Valera instigated sanctions against Italy because it was engaged in a genocidal assault that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Ethiopians. His Government imposed sanctions because it felt it was Ireland's duty as a former colony to impose sanctions on Italy for committing genocide against people in Africa. Surely this Government can do as well as Eamon de Valera and impose sanctions on the genocidal State of Israel.
