Sarah Harte: The Government cannot continue to pay lip service to atrocities in Gaza

Irish Examiner

a day ago

There are many other conflicts in the world, such as the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan. Yet, we find commonalities in our shared history with the Palestinians. This can be linked to what Fintan Drury, in his new book, Catastrophe Nakba II, terms us being 'indelibly marked by the experience of being colonised by Britain'.
The folk memory of the famine that transformed Ireland lives on, when entire communities were wiped out, which perhaps heightens our reaction to the current famine in Gaza, including the nightly images of emaciated children and starving babies.
As TCD academic Brendan Ciarán Browne has written, blockaded humanitarian aid trucks waiting to get into Gaza should remind us of British colonial ships laden with crops and livestock departing our shores while our ancestors at home starved.
So, we, the Irish people, empathise with the Palestinians. Still, as international agencies operating in Gaza have run out of superlatives to describe the hell there, hard questions are being asked of many European governments, including our own.
The Germans are struggling with reconciling the genocidal ideology that paved the way for the mass genocide of European Jews, and their response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Many German Jewish writers have objected to the conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel (as have scores of intellectual Jewish thinkers), and they have suffered as a result, including being defunded and not awarded literary prizes. Small potatoes, you say, but not if it's your livelihood. In that situation, the moral luxury of commenting becomes costly.
Spare a thought for the many Jewish people, who abhor the genocide in Palestine. To ever escape a cycle of violence necessitates acknowledging suffering on 'the other side'.
What must that be like, go to bed, turn off the light, and be left trying to square the outsized tragedy of your past, the visceral fear the Hamas attack on October 7 provoked, with knowledge of the massacre and famine in Gaza supposedly carried out in your name?
Tide may be turning in Germany
The tide may finally be turning in Germany. Last week, its foreign minister Johann Wadephul warned that the fight 'against antisemitism…and full support for….the state of Israel must not be instrumentalised for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip'. He said they are thinking carefully about what 'further steps to take'.
They need to hurry up.
Of course, many Western countries persist in seeing only what they want to see about the current phase of the Zionist mission. A question that must be posed to the Irish Government is what concrete steps they are going to take to object to the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people?
Omar Shaban is the founder of Palthink for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst and development expert with extensive experience in Palestine. Mr Shaban has led humanitarian and emergency programmes for Catholic Relief Services in Gaza for 10 years and worked with UNRWA for another 10. He was born and lives in Gaza.
Mr Shaban suggests that the Irish Government request that EU states stop supplying arms to the Israeli military. The Social Democrats in Germany have just called for the German arms exports to Israel to be halted to avoid German complicity in war crimes. Germany is the second-largest weapons supplier to Israel after the US.
He asks that the Irish Government work to pressure Israel to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt to allow patients, injured children and their families to be evacuated. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.
He advocates that Ireland works closely with other EU states that share the same position to declare a clear joint statement asking Israel to stop the war immediately and to allow the flow of aid through international organisations such as UNRWA and WFP. This statement should include an ultimatum that if Israel doesn't do this, then the EU will impose trade sanctions.
The EU can suspend sections of the EU-Israel Trade Agreement under Article 2. According to European Commission statistics, the EU is Israel's biggest trading partner. Some 34.2% of Israel's imports came from the EU, while 28.8% of the country's exports went to the EU.
Of course, practically, that leaves our government with a problem.
As reported in The Irish Examiner last week, Ireland is Israel's second-largest trading partner. Israel's exports to Ireland have exploded since 2021.
As Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie exposed, for all our performative statements, meaningful sanctions on the Israeli economy would jeopardise our economic position.
As reported, the vast majority of what we are buying are 'electronic integrated circuits and microassemblies,' mainly used in tech and pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Ambassador Adel Atieh, who lives in Ramallah, is the director of the European Affairs Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Palestine. He suggests that if the EU Council fails to take responsibility for reviewing the EU-Israel association agreement, and if the European Commission continues to neglect its legal obligations regarding agreements with Israel, Ireland should consider asking the European Court of Justice to investigate and provide a legal opinion.
Furthermore, Ireland should issue a public warning to settlers holding Irish citizenship, urging them to withdraw immediately from settlements due to their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Mr Atieh says that this stance could encourage other EU member states to adopt similar positions, potentially leading to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank.
This month, the UN General Assembly will vote on granting Palestine full membership status. Even if a US veto blocks Palestinian statehood at the Security Council, the General Assembly retains a critical pathway through the 'Uniting for Peace' resolution. This mechanism allows the Assembly to convene an emergency session when the Council fails to act due to a veto, and to recommend collective measures.
Our Government must exert public pressure on other countries to accede to this.
Silence of Irish professional bodies
Back home on Irish soil, the questions for our government extend to professional medical bodies, including the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) and the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA). The management of their relationships with Israeli counterparts and their deafening silence in calling out the genocide, as I've written before, raises serious questions about them.
Dr Angela Skuse, a GP working in Inclusion Health in Dublin with homeless people, says none of the Irish medical organisations have issued a statement that includes the words 'genocide' or 'Israel'.
Any statements issued have been careful not to 'take sides', and as Dr Skuse said, could equally refer to a natural disaster.
'Why is the medical profession so silent? Doctors are one of the most trusted professions.
If we won't speak out and say that it's wrong, that it's a genocide and Israel is committing it — who will?'
She adds that hundreds of healthcare workers have been murdered.
Trinity College has just ended academic co-operation with Israeli institutions. The medical organisations should follow its lead and expel Israel from the World Health Organization and the World Medical Association.
Ultimately, it will never be enough for the Irish Government (or professional bodies) to mouth support for international law from the sidelines. If we do nothing concrete, we engage in a problematic form of empathy or virtue signalling.
Just as many Jewish people have the hardest of choices about whether to speak up, we and other Europeans are presented with choices too. The question is, what choices will our Government make in our name?