Obviously, it is incredibly disappointing that all our amendments have been ruled out of order on the grounds that they are beyond the scope of the Bill. As I said before, people are labouring under the illusion - I suspect the Government knows this and is exploiting it - that the Government is in favour of significant sanctions against the State of Israel for the crimes it is committing. I refer to the genocide of the past three years, the apartheid, the ongoing ethnic cleansing and the occupation. That is what is happening with this Bill. I suspect the Government is quite happy with a creative ambiguity in the minds of the public about what is happening, with the public thinking that the Government has ticked the box of imposing sanctions. The fact that the amendments I have put forward have been ruled out of order speaks to how minimal the objectives of this Bill are. Our amendments seek to end all imports from, exports to, all business and financial dealings with and all investment in the entire State of Israel because the State of Israel is guilty of genocide and of perpetuating an apartheid maintained on the basis of an apartheid system and an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people both before and since it came into existence. It has never stopped in its violations of the rights of Palestinians and the denial of the right of millions of Palestinians to return to their homes from which they were expelled in 1948 and who have languished in refugee camps in countries around occupied Palestine ever since. The Government is not proposing any sanctions against those and they are considered to be beyond the scope of the Bill. We cannot even discuss those amendments because the scope of the Bill is so limited that it is only dealing with the import of a small number of goods from a small area of occupied Palestine.
If we just say that the objective of the Bill is to put pressure on Israel over what are called the illegal settlements in the areas taken over in 1967, the only reason they can sustain them is because of the Israeli state allowing them to do so through providing them with troops and economic and legal support. They would not be able to maintain those settlements for a single solitary second without the orchestration of the Israeli state so the idea that we are just going to penalise the settlers and the settlements but separate that from the state that is enabling, encouraging and maintaining those settlements and, of course, is violently shooting down, murdering, beating down and oppressing Palestinian people who resist those settlements is ridiculous.
It is a ridiculous proposition, frankly. It needs to be highlighted. Ireland and the whole of the European Union are shockingly in dereliction of their obligations under international law, particularly under the Genocide Convention. I have said that repeatedly, so there is not much point in going over it too much here. As far as I am concerned, our legal obligations under the Genocide Convention trump everything. If they do not, what is the point? What was the point of the Genocide Convention if it was not to stop the sort of genocidal horrors that prompted that convention to be put in place in the first place after the Nazi Holocaust? That was the whole point. It was about never letting this happen again and states having an obligation to do everything to prevent genocide. It is not about punishing after the fact or spending years debating it, or waiting for qualified majority votes or whatever the hell it is. It is about stopping and preventing genocide. We have not done that. We have failed. It is an incredible failure.
Whenever these points were made, the Government said we cannot act unilaterally. It said that we are tied in with European treaties and, therefore, we cannot act unilaterally. Yet, strangely, even on the most pathetically minimal basis that the Government is proposing in the Bill, we find it is imposing unilateral sanctions. It seems we can impose unilateral sanctions. We are just proposing them in the most minimal way. If we can propose minimal unilateral sanctions, then why can we not propose maximum unliteral sanctions? Why can we not say to Europe that we are imposing comprehensive boycott, divestment and sanctions on the State of Israel because we are discharging what we believe to be our legal obligations under international law, as well as our obligations under the human rights requirements of the EU-Israel trade agreement? Anyone who continues to trade with this regime or give it favoured trade status is in dereliction of those human rights conditions. Therefore, it is Europe that is in dereliction.
In fact, I seriously ask – I am not saying this as a rhetorical point – why we are not taking Europe to court. Why are we not launching a case against the European Union for dereliction of its own laws and obligations under the Genocide Convention, instead of worrying that it might take us to court? We should welcome a day in court with these people. The Minister said that we would be taken to court, but I say that is good. Let Europe take us to court. Let it say that Ireland is acting completely illegally by imposing sanctions on a regime that is committing genocide and guilty of apartheid. Let us fight that out in court. Quite honestly, Europe would not have a very strong case to take us to court for imposing sanctions on Israel for genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are all self-evidently crimes and violations of international law.
I will leave it at that, but it is an awful pity. At least the public have the right to know just how minimal the efforts are to sanction a state that, as we speak, continues its genocidal horror against the Palestinian people.
