Ireland should insist EU acts against ‘rogue state’

A FEW months ago the deputy Israeli defence minister warned that Gaza would be subjected to a Shoah — the Hebrew term for Holocaust — and we are now witnessing this barbarous threat being realised.

That Palestinians continue to resist the whittling away of their country on a daily basis is hardly surprising.

Under the Geneva conventions, such resistance is in fact a legitimate right against criminal occupation policies such as those being implemented by Israel. On March 11, 2008 our then Foreign Minister, Dermot Ahern, speaking in the Dáil, correctly denounced the Israeli blockade of Gaza as “collective punishment… illegal under international humanitarian law”.

Nevertheless, for six months Hamas — the democratically elected authority in Gaza — held to a ceasefire despite Israel’s criminal refusal to lift its economic and political strangulation of what has become for 1.5m people a densely populated concentration camp. That ceasefire was broken by the Israeli murder of six people in Gaza on November 4. Israel simply shrugs off the condemnations of Irish and EU leaders of its barbarous slaughter in Gaza, comfortably assured that the west will never dare raise a finger against it.

Indeed just two months after Dermot Ahern condemned Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians, the EU announced its intention to “upgrade” the privileged trading status Israel enjoys with it.

Yet the association agreement with the EU categorically states that it is subject to Israeli adherence to international humanitarian law.

Israel, in contemptuously ignoring international outrage at its barbarous actions, has shown itself to be a rogue state. The Irish Government must now insist that the EU Council of Ministers suspend its association agreement with Israel as long as the Zionist slaughter in Gaza continues.

Philip O’Connor

Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Dame Street

Dublin 2