Letters: As others now follow, Ireland was correct to criticise Israel over Gaza offensive
As your editorial makes plain, what is happening is not the regrettable consequence of war, but a wilful abandonment of humanity ('Immorality of Israel knows no bounds as the world looks on', Irish Independent, May 21).
Let us be clear: the attacks of October 7 by Hamas were abhorrent. No decent person can defend such brutality. But horror cannot justify horror. Collective punishment is not justice: it is the collapse of all moral restraint.
When Ireland and Spain, along with Norway and Belgium, first condemned Israel's actions, they were criticised, even scorned.
But they were right. What once seemed a fringe position now echoes across capitals from London to Ottawa and Paris. Ireland, once again, showed moral clarity before others found their voices.
This is not about picking sides in a conflict. It is about upholding the basic principles that are meant to protect civilians everywhere. As Seamus Heaney once said: 'If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.' But Gaza has been made to winter endlessly, while the world has stood by.
Those who justify or excuse mass displacement and the deaths of children in pursuit of political or military ends have no place in any conversation about peace. Silence is not neutrality: it is complicity. And Ireland stood when others wavered.
Enda Cullen, Tullysaran Road, Co Armagh
Israeli people must stand strong and tell Netanyahu that enough is enough
Night after night, our televisions bombard us with images that paint a stark and devastating picture of the Gaza Strip. We have witnessed bombardment after bombardment by Israeli missiles launched on civilian targets – hospitals, schools and residential areas.
We have been inundated with images of young children killed or maimed, and parents left utterly distraught. It is time to call this what it is: pure and simple genocide. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert himself said the Israeli offensive is now approaching 'a war crime'.
Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it appears, is seeking control of the entire Gaza Strip while allowing only minimal aid in. The international community is finally beginning to see this for what it is.
ADVERTISEMENT
Recently, the 24-year-old Eurovision singer and victim of the October 7 attacks, Yuval Raphael, was unfairly targeted with outrage and criticism that should have been firmly laid at the door of Netanyahu.
The international community has now said 'enough is enough,' and the Israeli people themselves now need to rise up and say very clearly to their government 'enough is enough, and not in our name'.
The hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 must be returned without further delay. That attack was an act of depravity perpetrated by a terrorist organisation that has no place in a decent world. However, the response has been disproportionate, with the majority of those killed in Gaza being innocent civilians, women and children. Enough really is enough.
Killian Brennan, Clare Village, Dublin 17
A business opportunity with Qatar? Trump looks bang on the money there
I would not be surprised to learn that US president Donald Trump has a new pronunciation for Qatar and that is...Qa-ching.
John O'Brien, Clonmel, Co Tipperary
Many 'elite' in the West have a blind spot when it comes to the Middle East
How many times can the Western 'elite and educated' be wrong? Within my lifetime they got it wrong so often. Dying Western empires thought they would always be superior.
Winston Churchill couldn't understand why the Irish couldn't be more English, and Emmanuel Macron complained that African countries, formerly within their empire, didn't say thank you for his deployment of troops there to help fight terrorism. Racism in the US, apartheid in South Africa and discrimination in Ireland were all defended by versions of that so-called elite.
Now it has taken years of profound suffering, thousands killed and aid blocked to prompt them to say something about the mind-numbing situation in Gaza (never mind the West Bank). Language and standards have been brutalised until humanitarian values are all but lost.
If the dollars are still sent to Tel Aviv it can only lead to a deepening stain on humanity and yet another Western blind spot.
Billy Leonard, Kilkee, Co Clare
Tánaiste's words are all well and good, but action needed now on Palestine
It is reported that the EU will order a review of its trade agreement with Israel, in the light of the deteriorating events in Palestine. Tánaiste Simon Harris has welcomed the announcement, saying: 'Today, a clear majority of member states agreed on the need to send a strong signal to Israel to reverse course.'
Given that Ireland and Europe have failed for 20 months to do anything effective for the besieged people of Palestine, this is welcome. But we are really clutching at straws.
This 'review' is too little, too late. No meaningless words or 'strong signals' are going to stop Israel now. What is needed is complete sanctions and a boycott.
Ireland must stop military supplies travelling through Irish airspace and Shannon. These are actions Ireland can take immediately and independently.
European counties must also stop supplying arms, and the EU-Israel trade agreement should be suspended. And Mr Harris should be lobbying for these measures.
World leaders should consider assembling a multi-national force to break the siege of Gaza and bring in emergency supplies. The Tánaiste welcoming a review about strong signals is not going to achieve anything. To pretend otherwise is gross hypocrisy. Failure to take any real action amounts to collusion. Is this how Ireland wants to be remembered?
Art Ó Laoghaire, Bray, Co Wicklow
A United front or was EU's Ursula being a little Red Devil in Starmer's ear?
Looking at the photo of Ursula von der Leyen, hand over mouth, talking to Keir Starmer, one has visions of her saying, 'just what the heck is going on at Manchester United?'.
Tom Gilsenan, Beaumont, Dublin 9
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RTÉ News
38 minutes ago
- RTÉ News
At least 20 reported killed near Gaza aid distribution point
Gaza's civil defence agency has said that Israeli troops have killed at least 20 people in the south of the Palestinian territory. The Israeli military said it fired shots at individuals about half a kilometre from the aid distribution site of US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund in Gaza in the Rafah area. It said the individuals were moving towards forces in a way that "posed a threat to them".
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
In Netanyahu's grotesque world view, even Gaza's four year-olds are barbarians
There are two words that, when used together, tell at once a big lie and a terrible truth. Those words are 'barbarism' and 'civilisation'. The lie they tell is that They are not really the same species as Us. And the truth they convey is that the slaughter that is to be justified by this distinction will be both indiscriminate and unlimited. Binyamin Netanyahu has been playing this B/C two-card trick throughout his public career. As far back as 1986, in a book he edited called Terrorism: How the West Can Win, he declared 'the war on terror' (a phrase he was using long before it gained international currency after the 9/11 attacks of 2001) to be 'part of a much larger struggle, one between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism'. Right from the start of his assault on the population of Gaza , this has been Netanyahu's mantra. He has used it both to absolve himself and his regime from all moral and legal obligation and to lure the western democracies into collusion with his crimes. In Tel Aviv on October 18th, 2023, less than a fortnight after the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, Netanyahu told then-US president Joe Biden : 'You've rightly drawn a clear line between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism.' For anyone who doubted that Israel's response was going to be unchecked by any norms of decency or restraint, this utterance should have been a chilling moment of clarity. Netanyahu was intoning the dark spell that summons terror. READ MORE The binary opposition of civilisation and barbarism creates a 'clear line' that divides two moral universes. Instead of all the multiple limits so painfully put in place as responses to the horrors of the 20th century – all those laws for the conduct of war and the prevention of genocide and ethnic cleansing – there is only one line of demarcation, the great B/C boundary that rules them all. Everything – and everyone – that exists on the B side is barbarian. Precisely because the line is so 'clear', there can be no innocents there. There are barbarian four year-olds playing with their barbarian dolls, barbarian women giving birth, barbarian doctors and teachers and aid workers and ambulance drivers and reporters. They shriek barbarian screams and cry barbarian tears – cries and sobs that must never be mistaken for those of civilised people like us. But just as everyone on their side is by definition barbarian, everyone on ours is by the same definition civilised. No act committed by 'the forces of civilisation', however atrocious, can be barbaric. When you are on the C side of the great divide, slaughter is life-giving, anarchy is law, cruelty is kindness, famine is nourishment, obliteration is opportunity, collective punishment is justice. Thus, addressing a joint session of the US Congress in July 2024, Netanyahu declared that 'this is not a clash of civilisations. It's a clash between barbarism and civilisation. It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life'. The logic is as remorseless as it is absurd: even when we are engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians we are sanctifying life. The right way to deal with those who glorify death is to gloriously kill them, and their families, their neighbours, their communities, their societies, their histories and their futures. [ Netanyahu's claim that Israel is fighting 'barbarians' is a ploy to legitimise genocidal murder Opens in new window ] The annihilation of meaning implicit in this disfigurement of language prepares for and accompanies the annihilation of people. Those life-sanctifying 2000lb bombs (supplied initially by Biden) are armed, not only with explosives, but also with what George Orwell called 'language ... designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable'. Given such an obviously grotesque descent into lethal gibberish, why have the western democracies been so reluctant to call this binary what it is: a warrant for genocide? How could they have convinced themselves that Netanyahu, who has been repeating it over and over for 40 years, would not follow through on its exterminationist logic? On the face of it, it seems impossible to understand how democracies could manage to bury their knowledge that the B/C dichotomy leads only in one direction: the wiping out of the barbarians. [ Seeing Israel use hunger as a weapon of war is monstrous to me as someone with a Holocaust legacy Opens in new window ] Yet it is all too explicable. Most democracies have a lot of practice in burying this precise knowledge. Their modernity is founded on it. The exceptional aspect of Israel's current campaign of eradication is not the where but the when. It is happening now, rather than in the 18th and 19th centuries when the United States, Canada and Australia were founded on the genocides of indigenous populations or when European empires were bringing civilisation to the barbarians by murdering, exploiting and expropriating them by the million. This history is the great fault line beneath the surface of western liberalism. There is a deeply disturbing sense in which Netanyahu can claim truthfully to be merely carrying on the work of the West, for much of that work was based on the same contradiction he deploys: in the task of spreading 'our' values, we must not imagine that the barbarians deserve the benefits that they bestow on our own kind. 'To suppose,' wrote the great English liberal John Stuart Mill in 1859, 'that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilised nation and another, and between civilised nations and barbarians is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into.' Law and morality are for people like us – they cannot be applied to people like them. Writing of Britain but in terms that could apply equally to any of the imperial powers, Caroline Elkins says in Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire , that it 'constructed an alternative moral universe for populations it perceived to be off civilisation's scale of humanity, in an otherworldly order distinctly their own'. The slaughter in Gaza cannot be confronted because it reminds the West of a history it prefers to forget. It is easier for its alternative moral universe to remain otherworldly.
The Irish Sun
10 hours ago
- The Irish Sun
Irish woman facing deportation after being arrested by Israeli police in Palestine as son tells of his pride
AN IRISH woman has been detained by Israel in the West Bank, according to an activist group. Deirdre 'D' Murphy, 70, was arrested by Advertisement 2 Israeli security forces block the entrance to the village of al-Tuwani in the Masafer Yatta area in Occupied West Bank on June 2, 2025 Credit: AFP Originally from Douglas in After Israeli soldiers ordered the activists to leave, the female activists were reportedly stopped while leaving the village by Israeli settlers serving as reservists with the military. The Israeli police were called and subsequently detained Murphy and Björk for being in a closed military zone. According to the International Solidarity Movement, Björk is now due to be deported while Murphy is fighting a deportation order while detained at Ben Gurion Advertisement Read more in News Murphy is a founding member of Swansea Palestine Community Link and was previously detained in Israel in 2011 when she travelled to the Jewish state with the Welsh pro-Palestine group. The 120-person community at Khalet al-Daba'a is one of a dozen Palestinian hamlets in Masafer Yatta located inside an area which the Israeli authorities designated as a military firing zone in the 1980s. After a long legal battle, Israel's Supreme Court approved the eviction of 1,000 residents from the villages in the occupied West Bank in 2022. Amnesty International says ongoing settler attacks and demolitions place communities in Masafer Yatta at risk of forcible transfer. Advertisement Most read in Irish News International law prohibits both the expropriation of occupied land for purposes that do not benefit the people living there, and their forcible transfer. Murphy's son, Dale Ryan, said: 'As far as I can see her only Israeli military says it began extensive ground operations in northern and southern Gaza 'D has always had a strong sense of justice and I know she could not sit at home while she knew her friends in Masafer Yatta and all of Palestine were suffering unnecessarily. 'I am very proud of my mother for sticking up for the basic human rights of her friends and trying to raise awareness of the injustices the Palestinian people are experiencing.' Advertisement The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed it is aware of the case and is providing consular assistance. In 2024, the far-right Israeli security minister Itamar Ben Gvir established a special task force within Israel's West Bank police unit to target left-wing activists in the West Bank including foreign nationals and supporters of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement. According to the Israeli outlet Haaretz, at least 16 foreign activists working with Palestinians in the West Bank have been detained and deported from Israel since October 2023. Activists often accompany Palestinian shepherds and farmers who are at risk of forced displacement, as well as violence from the IDF and local settlers while they work. Advertisement In 2024, the 2 Deirdre 'D' Murphy, 70, was arrested by Israeli police on Saturday in Masafer Yatta in the occupied region
