I thank the Chairman for inviting me before the committee this afternoon and take the opportunity to convey, through him, my people's and leadership's sincere appreciation to Ireland, a friendly nation with political leaders, legislators and Government, for its continued support for the cause of peace in our region.
No conflict on earth has more international attention devoted to it than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and yet no conflict remains further from resolution. The reason for this is quite simply because the rules of the game in this region, the Middle East, are completely different from the rest of the world. It is only in our region that Israel, the occupier, has been allowed to consistently ignore international law while the occupied people have been consistently called on to forgo their internationally recognised right to resist oppressive occupation.
Israel has failed to implement more than 30 Security Council resolutions which require action by it and it alone. If it had taken the action required by Security Council resolutions first, it would have removed Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, reversed its annexation of east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and opened its nuclear facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection. Israel has arrogantly refused to dismantle the wall in the West Bank, which the International Court of Justice declared on 9 July 2004 to be contrary to international law.
Ironically, and in spite of arrogantly violating international law throughout its history, 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 40 times in favour of Israel. This, coupled with the latest decision of the EU to upgrade the privileged trading and other relations that Israel enjoys with the EU, has made Israel, in addition to being the fifth most powerful country in the world, the most arrogant and intransigent nation in the world and almost a licensed outlaw country.
Israel, of course, has the right to protect its citizens like any other country but as an occupying power, it is obliged under international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention, to protect the people under its occupation and desist from harming them. The protection of human lives and the civilian infrastructure under occupation and war conditions are core principles of international law. This is underpinned by international humanitarian law of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.
Israel profits from and exploits the international community's silence and the turning of a blind eye to Israel's behaviour. This was blatantly reflected in a briefing on 30 October 2006 by the Israeli Prime Minister to the Knesset committee regarding Operation Summer Rains against Gaza. He stated:
There is an unprecedented international consensus for our actions. Three hundred terrorists were killed, and no one in the international community said a word.
The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem confirmed that the majority of those he referred to as terrorists were non-combatant civilians. Profiting from the international silence, Israel, on 27 December last year — 18 days ago — launched Operation Cast Lead, which has been the bloodiest offensive against the Gazans since the occupation of Palestine. The proportionality of this military offensive is reflected in the gruesome images of this most brutal aggression ever conducted by a democratic state — I repeat, a democratic state — which are shown daily on our TV screens. This offensive has resulted so far — until this morning — in the killing of 930 people and the injury of more than 4,280, half of them women and children. This proportionality, which has transformed Gaza from a big prison into an abattoir or slaughterhouse, should induce all those with a sense of humanity to raise their voices, calling not only for the end of this aggression, but also for the protection of all Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and the end of the occupation.
In the field, Israeli attacking forces give the Palestinians, who have nowhere to go, five minutes to evacuate their homes before they bombard them. They are more generous then others, as my colleague mentioned 15 seconds for people in their territories. According to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, last week the Israeli army ordered 100 Palestinian members of one large extended family to evacuate their homes in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza and shelter in a nearby house, and the following day shelled that very house, killing 30 and injuring the rest of the family. It was only after four days — I repeat, four days — that the Israeli army allowed paramedics to reach that house, only to find starving, horrified children next to their dead mothers.
Last Tuesday, the Israeli army shelled al-Fakhura UN school in Jabaliya despite prior information given to it by the United Nations agency that all of its schools were being used as shelters for civilians. It also furnished the army with the GPS co-ordinates of all its installations. This savage attack by the Israeli army on the aforementioned school resulted in the killing of at least 43 people. One Israeli shell killed 43 people and injured more than 100 innocent civilians, many of them women and children. This attack should remind us of Qana 1, in 1996, and Qana 2, in 2006, when the Israeli army shelled two air-raid shelters in Lebanon, resulting in the deaths of more than 150 civilian Lebanese.
During the first two hours of its ground offensive, Israel pounded Gaza with 700 shells, to lethal effect. These events proved beyond doubt that Israel is not fighting terror but, on the contrary, is itself waging a war of terror against Gaza. Ironically, Israel once again continues to elude world sentiment by launching this offensive under the pretext of security and, it is alleged, of stopping the ineffective, primitive and home-made rockets of Hamas from being thrown at them. Chairman and members of the committee, my leadership and I are totally against the use of these rockets and we are committed to ending the struggle by non-violent means. However, one cannot ignore the fact that these rockets, over the past eight years, regardless of the number — 1,000, 1 million — have killed 20 Israelis, while in retaliation for the unfortunate loss of these innocent lives — which I admit and for which I apologise — killed more than 3,500 people before Operation Cast Lead 18 days ago.
Israeli practices are a natural continuation of the Zionist strategy of ethnic cleansing of Palestine since 1948. Plan D, implemented by Mr. David Ben-Gurion, adopted a cold blooded strategy of forceful depopulation to force the indigenous people from their land and homes where they had lived for thousands of years. Consequently, the largest refugee population in the world was created. One million of those refugees are currently living on 360 sq. km of the Gaza Strip, an area less than half the size of County Louth and the most densely populated area on earth.
Mr. Ilan Pappé, the renowned Israeli historian and chair of the department of history at the University of Exeter in the UK, in his latest piece on 2 January argues that "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 massacres". Mr. Gedion Levi, an Israeli political analyst writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 3 July 2006, commented on Operation Summer Rain launched against Gaza in 2006 and said: “A state that takes such a step is no longer distinguishable from a terror organisation.”
The core of my message to the Chairman and members of the committee is, as legislators, to look beyond the immediate Israeli atrocity and establish the real, undeclared, objectives behind this offensive. The following points should be noted. The Israeli media reported that with every shell dropped on Gaza, the popularity of Mr. Barak, the current Finance Minister, and Ms Tzipi Livni, the current Foreign Minister, rises. Poll ratings in Israel show that Mr. Barak's party jumped in the first week of the aggression from nine seats to 16 and Ms Livni, who was very much behind, is now neck-and-neck with Mr. Netanyahu in the Israeli elections scheduled for next month. Israel lost its power of deterrence against neighbouring populations in Lebanon in 2006 and needs to restore it.
The corpses of the children, women, paramedics and UN Aid personnel in Gaza, the bombardment of shelters, the additional killing of six Palestinian protesters in the West Bank — there are no missiles in the West Bank — over the past ten days, coupled with the use of internationally illegal weapons, such as white phosphorous bombs, in the current offensive in Gaza give the Palestinians every reason to believe that the real target of the Israelis are not extremists, but any and every form of resistance, even that of moderate force.
Chairman, members of the committee, the shameful and unacceptable silence of world leaders is, to a certain extent, responsible for the pain the inhabitants of the Holy Land, Jews 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 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 we could have achieved through bilateral negotiations was the Oslo agreement. The Oslo agreement reflected the political decency of those who designed and signed it, yet its guarantors, the world leaders, know it has been shelved since the assassination of its Israeli instigator, the late brave Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
In August 2005 Israel redeployed its forces from the Gaza Strip. According to international law Gaza is still an occupied territory. 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 sea of Gaza. Furthermore, Israel insisted on taking this step unilaterally and without consultation with the Palestinian Authority, thereby depriving the step of any strategic value as a lasting peace initiative. Instead, Gaza has become a virtual prison completely cut off from the world, with massive economic consequences amounting to a humanitarian disaster. These conditions created a suitable environment, a recipe, for inter-Palestinian factional fighting.
The entire sequence of events in Gaza since that redeployment was anticipated by Ariel Sharon who planned the move. That unilateral step allowed him achieve significant demographic gains and evade obligations toward a bilateral peace agreement while allowing Israel to define the borders of any future Palestinian entity on Israeli 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. During this period rocket fire declined to one per month which Israel has confirmed were not fired by Hamas. There has been no Israeli death. 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. The opposite happened. Israel never respected the terms of the ceasefire by not lifting the siege, not opening the border crossings and by killing 23 Palestinians during those six months. Furthermore, profiting from the world's concentration on the American elections, Israel launched a cross-border raid on 4 November 2008 deliberately killing six Palestinians.
On the other front, while it was calm on the Gaza border, the Israelis conducted daily incursions into the West Bank, killing, arresting and injuring Palestinian activists. These illegal actions by the Israeli occupying forces were accompanied by Israel's expansion of its illegal settlements and the construction of its apartheid wall despite this again having been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in July 2004.
These provocative Israeli actions were the reason behind the non-renewal of the Egyptian brokered ceasefire. This sabotage of the ceasefire has 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 and the Arab initiative of 2002. Sharon called the Oslo agreement a national suicide and said the Arab initiative was not worth the ink in which it was written. That shows how serious the political leaders in Israel are about peace. Consequently, since the Oslo agreement the 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 the rest of the region because most of the Israeli political leaders believe that our occupied territories are liberated Jewish lands or at best disputed lands. Chairman, members of the committee, I emphasise that the rules of the game need to be changed. I very much doubt that the current bilateral negotiations alone will be able to provide us with what both Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land badly need, peace and security. Among Palestinians there is a terrible fear that this latest round of atrocities is simply the latest step in the attempted ethnic cleansing of Palestine of all Palestinians. There are now more than 300,000 illegal Israeli settlers on the West Bank and a further 200,000 in East Jerusalem. All of these have been settled illegally since 1967. Israel came into being as an answer to the Jewish question, not by divine decree but by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181. Palestine, the viable contiguous independent state side by side with the state of Israel, is not only the answer to the Palestinian question but will be the real answer to the Hamas rockets as well. This goal is a moral, historic and constitutional duty of the United Nations. The creation of a viable Palestinian state would be much needed proof that the United Nations has a vital function in the modern world. For now, I beg of everybody here to do everything in their power to make sure that the latest Security Council resolution is implemented immediately in order to stop the carnage in Gaza.
