Opinion

Jim Gibney: This is a time for action against Israel

A protester hurls stones at Israeli troops as another holds a Palestinian flag during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel last week. Picture by AP Photo/Khalil Hamra
A protester hurls stones at Israeli troops as another holds a Palestinian flag during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel last week. Picture by AP Photo/Khalil Hamra A protester hurls stones at Israeli troops as another holds a Palestinian flag during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel last week. Picture by AP Photo/Khalil Hamra

IN its occupation of Palestine and in its inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people, the Israeli state is a blight on the democratic institutions of the world set up to protect people from old-style fascism perfected by Hitler or off-shoots of it that we saw in places like Chile and Cambodia.

Israel has become a rogue state and should be treated as a pariah and banished from all international fora until it ends its occupation of Palestine, its slaughter of peaceful protestors, its degradation and humiliation of the Palestinians and its slow suffocation of millions of people in Gaza and the West Bank.

In my view Israel, as constituted today, has lost its moral right to exist. The massacre in Gaza should leave the international community in no doubt of that and it should impose punishing sanctions on Israel to force it to accept international standards based on human rights and decency.

The massacre last week of nearly 60 peaceful protestors - men, women and children - is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such by the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

A warrant for the arrest of Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be issued immediately and he should be put on trial for the massacre.

In that regard it is welcome news indeed that the United Nations voted to send an international war crimes team to Gaza to investigate the massacre.

It is precisely this sort of international response to Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people which upholds the moral integrity of an institution like the United Nations. 

The European Union should follow the example set by the UN and respond to this massacre in similar terms.

The international isolation of Israel, especially by the EU, is crucial to any hope of a peaceful solution based on two viable and functioning states: Palestine and Israel.

The EU should recognise the state of Palestine and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement and consideration should be given to a worldwide boycott of all Israeli goods.

The Irish government should follow the example of the South African government; it recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv.

The Irish government moved swiftly on the flimsiest of facts to expel a Russian diplomat from Dublin over the poisoning of a former Russian agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

It now has a more compelling set of facts following the massacre in Gaza to act decisively against Israel. We saw it with our own eyes.

This is a time for action against Israel. The Gaza massacre is an act of genocide.

It brought back memories of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when the white apartheid regime shot dead 50 black peaceful protestors and the massacres in Ballymurphy in 1971 when British Paras shot dead 11 people and a few months later in Derry, on Bloody Sunday, when they shot dead 14 civil rights protestors.

The obscenity of what the Israelis, supported by the US administration, have created in the historic homeland of Palestine played itself out in grotesque and stomach-churning scenes.

While the impoverished and powerless Palestinians marched for their human rights, only to be eviscerated in a hail of sniper gunfire from Israeli soldiers, a few miles away in Jerusalem the killers' political masters were celebrating the opening by the US government of its new embassy.

Netanyahu declared, without a hint of remorse, that the occasion was a "wonderful day"; while a specially-made video by the US President Donald Trump declared, to the enthusiastic crowd, Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

The decision by the US is an affront to the entire Arab world. Jerusalem is a special place for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

There are justifiable comparisons to be made between Hitler's ghettoization of the Jews and the Israeli state's treatment of the Palestinians.

The Nazis degraded, humiliated, impoverished and shot Jews as well as gassing them. The Israelis do not have gas chambers but their tactics have the same impact on the Palestinian people as Hitler's did on the Jews of Europe.