I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for inviting me to brief the committee on the most immoral offensive on the Palestinians in Gaza since the occupation of Palestine or the Palestinian territories and to take the opportunity to convey through the committee the sincere appreciation of my people and leadership of Ireland, the friendly nation and its political leaders, legislators and Government for their continued support for the cause of peace in our region.
For 22 days prior to the Israeli declaration of a unilateral ceasefire on 18 January 2009, Israel, the occupying power, continued with impunity to unleash its military wrath on the defenceless population in the Gaza Strip. The immediate result of this offensive is over 1,300 dead and more than 5,450 injured, half of them women and children. The victims were not only trapped, traumatised and terrorised along with the 1.5 million inhabitants there, but they were deprived of the protection accorded to civilian persons under international law.
In the hope of avoiding this offensive and others before and after it, we, the Palestinians, have always appealed for the UN Security Council's engagement and called upon it to shoulder its responsibility. However, the lack of any favourable response from the council has encouraged Israel to ignore more than 30 of the UNSCR resolutions that require action by Israel alone. If Israel had taken the action required by the UN Security Council resolutions, then Israel would have removed Jewish settlements in the occupied territories; would have reversed its annexation of east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; would have opened its nuclear facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection; and, most important, would have lived by now in peace and harmony side by side with the Palestinian state. On the other hand, Israel has arrogantly refused to dismantle the wall in the West Bank which was deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in July 2004.
Ironically, and in spite of those violations of the international law, Israel, the occupying power, has continued to receive unconditional support and extraordinary immunity from Western leaders, in particular the Americans, who have exercised their veto power more than 41 times in favour of Israel. This, coupled with the latest decision of the EU to upgrade trading and political relations with Israel, has made Israel, in addition to being the fifth most powerful country in the world, the most arrogant, the most intransigent. Indeed, it is almost a licensed outlaw country. Israel has the right to protect its citizens like any other country but, as an occupying power, it is obliged under international law and the fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, to protect the civilian persons under its occupation and to desist from harming them.
Profiting from the international silence, Israel on 27 December 2008 launched operation Cast Lead, until now the bloodiest offensive by Israel against the Gazans since the occupation of Palestine. The proportionality of this offensive on Gaza is reflected not merely in the death toll, but also in the gruesome images of this most brutal aggression ever conducted by a democratic state, which are shown daily on our television screens. This proportionality, which transformed Gaza from a big prison into an abattoir, should induce all those with a sense of humanity to raise their voices, calling for the protection of all Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and the end of this occupation.
In the field, the Israeli attacking forces gave the Palestinians, who have nowhere to go in this militarily sealed off strip, five minutes to evacuate their homes before they bombarded them. According to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOCHA, in the week before last, the Israeli army ordered 100 Palestinian members of one large extended family to evacuate their homes in the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza city and to go and shelter in a nearby house. The following day the army shelled that very house, killing 30 and injuring the rest of the family. It was only after four days that the Israeli army allowed paramedics to reach that house, only to find starving, horrified children next to their dead mothers.
Last week, the Israeli army shelled the UN headquarters and completely destroyed its warehouse. This was referred to by the Minister for Foreign Affairs in his concluding remarks. The Tuesday before last, the Israeli army shelled al-Fakhura UN school in Jabaliya to become the 17th UN school to be shelled by the Israeli army, in spite of prior information given to the Israeli army by the UN agency that all its schools were being used as shelters for civilians. It had also furnished the army with the GPS co-ordinates of all its installations. The shelling by the Israeli army of the aforementioned school resulted in the killing of 45 people and the injuring of more than 100 innocent civilians, many of them women and children. These attacks can only remind us of Qana 1 in 1996 and Qana 2 in 2006 in Lebanon, when the Israeli army shelled those two air raid shelters which resulted in the deaths of more than 150 Lebanese civilians. Furthermore, the humanitarian agencies and foreign doctors in Gaza confirmed the Israeli use of internationally illegal weapons, depleted uranium and white phosphorus.
The belief that the Israeli occupying power has in fact committed war crimes is also being reported by several human rights organisations which are now working on the ground in Gaza. In this regard, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Council in its resolution of 12 January 2009 called for an independent investigation of crimes committed by Israel, the occupying power, in Gaza.
On the other hand, in Gaza, the civilian population continues to suffer from unlawful collective punishment measures being imposed by the occupying power. The situation before the Israeli offensive on Gaza was already dire due to Israel's 19-month inhumane siege, by which it deliberately obstructed humanitarian access, the movement of persons, including sick persons needing treatment, and the movement of all goods, including the most essential goods such as food, medical and fuel supplies. All aspects of life were severely impacted with poverty, hunger, disease and instability rising to alarming levels, particularly among the refugee population and especially among children who constitute almost 56% of the population. This exacerbated the humanitarian crisis to catastrophic proportions. In spite of all these facts, Israel once again continues to elude world sentiment by launching this offensive under the pretext of security and allegedly to stop the ineffective and primitive Hamas home-made rockets being thrown at them.
My leadership and I are totally against the use of the so-called Hamas rockets and still are committed to non-violent means to ending this struggle, yet one cannot ignore the fact that these rockets over the past eight years have killed 20 Israelis, while in retaliation for unfortunate loss of innocent Israeli lives, Israel has killed more than 3,500 people. I believe that these Israeli practices are not at all a reflection of the Jewish values but of the Zionist strategy of ethnic cleansing of Palestine since 1948. Ulan Pappe, the renowned Israeli historian and chair in the department of history at the University of Exeter in the UK, argues in his latest piece: "We have to try and explain not only to the world but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres". Gedion Levy, an Israeli political analyst, writing in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, commented on earlier Israeli offensives in Gaza as follows: “A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization”.
The core of my message to members of the committee, as legislators, is to look beyond the immediate Israeli atrocity and establish the real, undeclared objectives behind this Israeli offensive. Members should bear in mind the following. The Israeli media reported that with every shell dropped on Gaza the popularity of the Israeli Minister of Defence, Mr. Barak, and the Foreign Affairs Minister, Ms Livni, rises. Poll ratings in Israel show that Mr. Barak's party jumped from nine seats to 17 and Ms Livni who was very much behind is now neck and neck with Mr. Netanyahu in the campaign for next month's scheduled Israeli election. Israel lost its power of deterrence against the neighbouring population in Lebanon in 2006 and needs to restore it, in order to impose unilateral humiliating agreements on its neighbours including the Palestinians. The indiscriminate nature of the Israeli offensive on Gaza and the great losses prove that the real targets of the Israelis are not extremists or their weapons, but the will and resolve of the Palestinians to achieve the aforementioned goals.
The shameful and unacceptable silence of world leaders is, to a certain extent, responsible for the pain the inhabitants of the Holy Land, Israelis and Palestinians alike, have endured for decades. This silence blatantly reflects the leaders' impotence and failure to face the intransigence and irresponsibility of the Israeli political leadership. Since the early 1990s, world leaders have distanced themselves from attempting to resolve the crisis and have called on both sides to settle their differences on their own, as if this were a fight between equal contenders rather than a struggle between a powerful and ruthless occupying power and the people whose territory is occupied. This is in spite of the fact that these leaders know very well that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle constitutes a real threat to world peace and stability.
Since the Madrid conference of 1991, the best the Israelis and Palestinians could have achieved through bilateral negotiations was the Oslo agreement. However, I believe that agreement reflected the political decency of those who designed and signed it, yet its guarantors — the world leaders — know that it has been shelved since the assassination of its Israeli instigator, the late brave Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
In August 2005 Israel redeployed its forces from the Gaza Strip and declared it a "non-occupied Palestinian territory", while in fact retaining its grip on all the border crossings, the sky and the sea of Gaza. Furthermore Israel insisted on conducting this step unilaterally and without consultation with the Palestinian Authority, thus depriving it of any strategic value as a lasting peace initiative. Instead Gaza has become a virtual prison, cut off completely from the world, with massive economic consequences amounting to a humanitarian disaster. These conditions created a suitable environment for inter-Palestinian factional fighting. I, for one, believe that the entire sequence of events in Gaza since that redeployment was anticipated by the planner of that move, Ariel Sharon. In reality, that unilateral step allowed Mr. Sharon to achieve a significant demographic gain and evade obligations towards a bilateral peace agreement, while allowing Israel to define the borders of any future Palestinian entity on Israel's terms.
Six months before 19 December 2008, Egypt brokered a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. The first four months marked the most peaceful period for years between Gaza and Israel. Had Israel been serious regarding its peaceful intentions, one would have expected it to benefit from that lull by intensifying its peace negotiations with its moderate Palestinian interlocutor, President Abbas, and could have transformed President Bush's vision of a two-state solution into a reality. What happened is the direct opposite. Israel never respected the terms of the ceasefire by not lifting the siege and not opening the border crossings. On the contrary, profiting from the world's concentration on the American elections, Israel launched a cross-border raid on 4 November 2008 — the same day as the American elections — deliberately killing six Palestinians. In addition there is the other disastrous story of the Israeli daily incursions into the West Bank, killing, arresting and injuring Palestinian activists, and the Israeli expansion of its illegal settlements and the construction of the wall.
These provocative Israeli practices were the actual reasons behind the non-renewal of the Egyptian brokered ceasefire and the launch of this offensive after two years of military training. These Israeli practices have turned the Annapolis process of 27 November 2007 from an historic opportunity to end the occupation into yet another missed opportunity. The same fate met the Oslo process of 1993 and the Arab initiative of 2002. Mr. Sharon referred to the Oslo process as "national suicide" and responded to the Arab initiative by saying that "It is not worth the ink it was written with". Consequently, since the Oslo process, bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have achieved little tangible progress because of Israel's bullying tactics and its determination to impose its terms unilaterally on us and on the rest of the region. I do not know whether this is a secret. The majority of the Israeli political leaders believe that the Occupied Territories are liberated Jewish lands and at best disputed territory.
I conclude by emphasising that the rules of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle need to be changed. Unless pressure is exerted on Israel I very much doubt that the current bilateral negotiations will be able to provide us with what we — both Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land — badly need, which is peace and security.
We should be guided by the aforementioned narrative and the European vision on national interests and foreign policy, as expressed by the EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Mr. Solana, who stated "foreign policy which is not informed by our values is neither possible nor acceptable". I call on the EU member states through members of the committee, as European legislators, to reconsider the EU decision to upgrade its relations with Israel until such time as Israel abides by international and human rights law and allows the Palestinian people to enjoy the same neighbourly relations with the EU as other nations in the region; and support the resurrection of the viable contiguous sovereign Palestinian state based on United Nations resolutions as a legitimate answer to the Palestinian question, exactly as Europe did 61 years ago when it supported the resurrection of Israel as an answer to the Jewish question.
I thank the Chairman for giving me this great chance to brief the committee on the current circumstances in our region. I would be more than happy to answer any questions should members have any.
