Richard Boyd Barrett demands sanctions over Gaza and Lebanon killings

Can I also wish Deputy Murphy and Howland the very best in the future and thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this important motion on the horror that we are witnessing being committed by Israel and its allies in Gaza and in Lebanon. Since dawn this morning, 22 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, 40 people in Lebanon were murdered by Israel and that brings, since October of last year, to the horrific total of about 48,000 people that we know of have been massacred by this regime and 17,000 of them are children, 17,000 children butchered by Israel, 1,000 or so of those are less than one year old. And all of those people have been massacred with US weapons and European weapons. That is who has given them the weapons to kill those children and to incinerate 48, but much more likely a lot more people than that and to utterly destroy Gaza and now to try and begin to repeat this genocidal massacre they have inflicted on the people of Gaza in Lebanon. Now, the point I want to make about all of this is none of this would have happened if the Western world had sanctioned Israel long before October of last year for the decades of crimes that they were committing against the Palestinian people. Because it didn't start last October. The impunity that has been given to Israel as it conducted its decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people and armed them while they ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people while they established 700,000 illegal settlers after the so-called Oslo Peace Accords. After they waged repeated savage military assaults on Gaza, imposed a siege on Gaza, killed before October of last year the most deadly year for Palestinian children in recent times. And indeed, a campaign of ethnic cleansing, of seizure of Palestinian land and the imposition of an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people, all of this was allowed by the Western powers and for the most part actively facilitated. Giving them the weapons, giving them the favoured trade status and legitimising and justifying this regime as if it was some kind of normal state. That is how we have got here. And even now, when the history books are written, it will tell a story of shame of Western governments who stood there and did nothing as a genocide took place in front of our eyes. And where your so-called allies in the United States gave them the weapons and gave them the support to carry on that genocide and indeed your allies in the European Union, in the UK and so on gave them the weapons, the means and the political support to carry on this genocidal massacre. That is the fact. But the government still won't even use the word apartheid to describe this regime. It still gags on using the word and doesn't use the word genocide in describing it. And the reason for that is because if you acknowledge that this is an apartheid regime built on ethnic cleansing, if you acknowledge this is genocide, then you would have to impose sanctions in order to deter it and that's why you don't want to do it. And some legal case that may get, you know, fully resolved or addressed in a year or two time will be too late for the massacred Palestinian people. So what you need to do now is, at the minimum, pass the Occupied Territories Bill, it's a disgrace you haven't, the Illegal Settlements Divestment Bill, but you need to expel the Israeli ambassador, you need to stop US arms going through Shannon Airport, you need to stop weapons to Israel going through Shannon Airport, you need to stop Israeli war bonds being sold through the Irish Central Bank, and you need to support, as we did against apartheid South Africa, full boycott, divestment and sanctions against a regime guilty of genocide and apartheid. Anything less will not honour our obligations to stand against this horror. Thank you.