Israel-Palestine: Motion.
4th February 2004

An Leas-Chathaoirleach: I welcome the
Minister of State at the Department of Foreign
Affairs, Deputy Tom Kitt, to the House. He
informs me that the Minister will be here shortly.
Mr. Norris: I move:
That Seanad E´ ireann:
—commends the Government for its
balanced policy towards Israel/Palestine and
in the light of recent tragic events affecting
both communities and of Ireland’s
Presidency of the EU requests that the
Government use its position to ensure that
this problem remains a priority area for the
EU;
—notes with satisfaction the presentation
of the common EU submission on the
construction of the wall separating and
encircling the Palestinian population of the
West Bank to the International Court of
Justice;
—welcomes the presentation of a national
submission outlining Ireland’s views on the
matter; and requests that the Government
(1) ensure that Ministers Cowen and
Kitt continue to monitor the situation in
depth and in particular to continue the
practice of visiting both Israel and the
West Bank/Gaza,
(2) continue to raise human rights issues
with both sides, and
(3) maximise opportunities to support
the beleaguered inhabitants of the West
Bank and Gaza in their current distress
through humanitarian projects.
I have deliberately framed this motion in a way
that, with the help of the Leader of House, it will
not be challenged but will go through unopposed.
It is such a sensitive issue that it is important we
have consensus on it.
I have travelled backwards and forwards to
Israel and Palestine for the past 30 years. I have
a long-term relationship and we live very close to
where the recent tragic suicide bombing took
place. I would like particularly to draw the
Minister’s attention to something quite
important, namely an exchange of letters that
took place between myself and President Arafat,
whom I visited recently. There has been much
criticism stating that he has not properly
condemned suicide bombing. I wrote to him
thanking him for his hospitality and stated:
One matter however remains to which I feel
it is necessary to return — and that is the
question of suicide bombing which has
tragically resumed. While I appreciate the
suffering and distress to which the Palestinian
people have been subjected I feel that such acts
present a very serious barrier to progress. I am
convinced as are all the senior representatives
of the Palestinian Authority that I met that
such action is not only grossly morally wrong
but also politically counterproductive. Such
events merely provide an alibi for further
Israeli mistreatment. They also seriously
undermine the work that a number of us within
the democratic parliaments of Europe are
attempting on behalf of the Palestinian people.
With the help of Dr. Ali Halimeh who
transmitted this message directly to President
Arafat I received this morning the following
communication from Ramallah in which Dr.
Halimeh says:
I have been instructed directly by President
Arafat to state the following:
The President and the Palestinian National
Authority strongly condemn all attacks
against civilian targets.
Suicide bombings do not serve the
national interest of the Palestinian people.
We consider all attacks directed at
innocent civilians as terrorist attacks.
The Palestinian National Authority,
despite the total destruction of its security
infrastructure, especially in the West Bank,
has managed to intercept sixteen suicide
bombers in three months. We have alerted
the Israeli security forces to those who we
have failed to stop.
President Arafat assures you and the
people of Ireland of his commitment to do
everything possible to put a halt to these
attacks.
That finally nails the statement, frequently heard
on RTE, among other places, that President
Arafat encourages them. It is a very important
development and I draw the attention of the
House to it.
I am naturally closer to the Israelis than to the
Palestinians in the sense that this has been my
lived experience. I admire the Israelis for their
courage, their ingenuity, their technical skills, for
making the desert blossom and so on. However,
being close to them also means that I have
become more aware of the betrayal of the
humanitarian ideals of the Jewish people by the
present Government and its descent into moral
chaos. I do not believe that the use of murder by
a Government as an instrument of policy should
be tolerated in any society. However, I make the
point that the soul of Israel is not dead for the
ideals of Judaism are nobly incarnated by people
like Esru, a Jerusalem plumber, an ordinary man
who goes every Saturday to Hebron to try to help
the distressed people, taking the elderly to
hospital, collecting their medicine, trying to
rebuild their shattered homes and documenting
abuse like that of the Physicians for Human
Rights that I witnessed at Tulkarum,
distinguished consultant surgeons humiliated and
abused by their fellow Israelis guarding the
ghetto and kept waiting in the rain before they
are allowed into the camps where they perform
473 Israel-Palestine: 4 February 2004. Motion 474
operations and bring in medical supplies. One of
these men told me that he has been coming every
Saturday for 15 years. I must also mention the
Israeli soldiers and airmen who have refused to
obey orders which they consider a violation of
human rights laws, protocols and international
laws. I quote from an open letter written to
Sharon by members of the commando unit
Sayeret Matkal and published in The Irish Times
of Monday, 2 February, in which they stated: “We
shall no longer take part in the deprivation of
basic human rights from millions of Palestinians,
we shall no longer serve as a shield in the crusade
of the settlements, we shall no longer corrupt our
moral character in missions of oppression.”
That there are decent people of conscience and
of courage in Israel who plainly detest the road
towards full-scale ethnic cleansing, towards which
Sharon is speeding a frightened and confused
nation, can be confirmed also by the position
taken by one of the so-called refuseniks, Itai
Swirski, who said:
We are there [in the territories] to protect
5,000 Israelis in Gaza living amongst 1.2 million
Palestinians. How do we discriminate? We
treat the person by the colour of his skin, by
the colour of his ID card, by the colour of the
licence plate on his car, by whether he wears
the Kippa or not. If the person is not a settler
you will see him immediately as an enemy as
you will stop him at the check point and make
him wait for hours losing a large part of his
school time, not being able to reach a hospital,
his daughter’s school, his work place. If a
settler, he is gone in a minute.
These idealistic young people have been
denounced in the Israeli Parliament but have had
the moral courage to continue their protest
issuing public statements such as the following
which some have seen as treasonable but which I
see as the highest form of morality:
They say we did an antidemocratic act, they
say we damaged Israeli democracy. This
democracy has a backyard. This democracy has
a basement and in this basement 3.5 million
people are imprisoned, they do not take part in
this wonderful democratic show that is being
played on stage.
This democracy sends out soldiers to make
sure that those people stay behind the scenes
and do not interrupt the show. We will not take
part in this show anymore. International
protest must show solidarity with these brave
figures.
These are Israeli voices. It is also noticeable that
the four previous heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli
secret service, issued a joint statement describing
Sharon’s policy as catastrophic, as did a former
Israeli Army chief. Even more remarkable are
the activities of the Association of the Bereaved
in which Arab and Jewish people who have lost
family members to violence meet together to help
the process of personal healing and to advance
the cause of peace.
Israel was established in 1948 as a result of a
United Nations resolution. However, there was
another part to this resolution. This sought to
provide a state also for the original Palestinian
inhabitants from the remains of the divided land.
We are still waiting for that second shoe to drop.
It is astonishing that 60 years after Europe solved
its problem of conscience at the expense of the
Palestinian Arabs there is still no Palestinian
state. Of course, the surrounding Arab countries
did little to help, and their record is shameful.
In many instances they treated their Palestinian
brothers as badly or worse than the Israelis. Then
they fought a series of incompetent and wasteful
aggressive wars against Israel — an already
traumatised people. Although it was subject to
attack, Israel has also consistently abused its
position both in terms of morality and
international law in what has come to be known
as the Occupied Territories. I could quote from
any number of legal sources to show that
international protocols have been exceeded.
I have just returned from a visit with two
Oireachtas colleagues, Deputy Liz O’Donnell
and Deputy Simon Coveney, at the invitation of
Christian Aid. The experience of witnessing on
the ground the lived reality of the Palestinian
people even for a moment was instructive. We
were the victims of the capricious arrogance of
some of the soldiers and security guards at the
crossings although others among them were
decent, humane and friendly.
One of the points I would make is that forcing
young people into these situations and
encouraging them to treat without respect their
fellow humans is a violation of their moral spirit
and a degradation of everything for which the
state of Israel stood in the past and should
continue to stand for. How easy is the slide into
moral chaos. At the Erez checkpoint on the way
into Gaza, one of the young Israeli soldiers,
otherwise a pleasant lad, remarked: “I don’t
know why you are going in there. It is full of
Arabs.” It was just a casual remark and the true
and awful significance only dawned on me later
upon reflection. I doubt it would ever dawn on
that soldier.
The Gaza Strip is a pathetic little rasher of land
surrounded on three sides by Israel. It is further
subdivided into three by Israeli military
installations at crossing points. These can be used
to isolate each separate area at the discretion of
the occupying forces. There are also 16 Israeli
settlements controlling 14% of the land mass.
Most of the coastal fishermen are so severely
restricted by the Israeli marine authorities that
they cannot fish. There is 62% unemployment,
the average industrial wage is less than 10% of
that of Israel, 80% of the people live beneath the
poverty level while 40% of the children are
undernourished and anaemic. Water resources
for the area are depleted by artesian wells bored
475 Israel-Palestine: 4 February 2004. Motion 476
[Mr. Norris.]
within illegal settlements which export water to
the irrigation projects in the Negev Desert.
In Gaza we witnessed the wholesale
destruction of houses for strategic purposes, the
laying waste of farm lands, bulldozing of
greenhouses and farmers corralled behind electric
fences watching impotently as their crops rotted
on the trees. We managed to get caught in one of
the arbitrary Israeli closures that take place even
within the Palestinian territory while a gun battle
was fought out over our heads. Although
frightening I was glad that we had the
opportunity to experience some of the lived daily
reality of the civilians within the Gaza area.
When we visited a local school, on the
headmistress’s desk there was an array of shell
casings and ash trays full of spent bullets. These
are the everyday playthings of the children in the
school yard The drawings of young children from
six to 18 show the same horrifying vividly caught
images of dismembered bodies, rockets appearing
from the sky blowing the roofs off buildings,
injuring and maiming women and children. Nor
can this be discounted as propaganda. As the
Bible tells us, “Out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings shall come forth truth”, and this is what
these children live with. Where will they be in ten
years time if not in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-
Qaeda or something even worse?
On the coastal strip we met a fisherman and
his wife with eight children living in tiny Sowetolike
cramped conditions, the smell of sewage
heavy even in the primitive kitchen. This is how
people live there. Yet in these awful
circumstances they retain their dignity,
cleanliness and courteous hospitality. One must
be careful not to blame the Israelis entirely for
this because in many cases poor conditions
existed before the Israeli occupation. However, it
was partly as a result of Israeli action that work
on the sewage ponds was halted so that now on
the outskirts of Gaza city people live literally in
their own excrement. Children are affected by
bronchial asthma and upper respiratory tract
infections and this is something for which Israel,
the European Union — which started the project
but lacked the guts to finish it — and the
Palestinian Authority, whose corrupt practices
helped to syphon money away from the project,
all have a responsibility. To all of them it is a
moral reproach. I would like in particular to ask if
the Government during its Presidency of Europe
could not at least do something about the
situation by providing decent sanitary
arrangements or at least stopping the overflow of
raw sewerage.
At Qualqilya, the wall bites deep into the heart
of Palestinian territory to throw a cement noose
complete with hostile machine gun posts and one
functioning exit to surround tens of thousands of
Palestinians. This used to be a positive interface
between Israel and Palestine and there were
many joint enterprise businesses. They are all in
the process of collapse, co-operation being
replaced by antagonism. The go-ahead young
mayor of this important urban region is being
undermined by constant harassment from the
Israeli side, while the extreme elements find the
discontent so caused to be fertile ground for
recruitment.
On this occasion we also visited a small
mountain village called Jayyus. While there we
met a group of farmers. One of the officials told
me that one of these old men of the soil who had
not wept at his son’s funeral had to turn away
as he was describing to an interviewer what was
happening to his farmland — as his eyes filled up
with tears and he was ashamed. Love of the land
is something with which we in Ireland can
empathise.
I promised these people at the least that I
would tell their story through the Irish Parliament
to its people and let it stand upon the record. The
first man, through an interpreter, told me how on
30 November last his nine year old daughter
became seriously ill. He brought her to the gate
so that she could visit a doctor to get treatment.
He talked to the soldiers. They said that orders
were not to open the gate even at the advertised
opening times on that particular day — bear in
mind this is not a border, it is people imprisoned
deep within their own territory. He was told that
the keys were with a roving military vehicle. He
ran over to the car which swerved to avoid him
but which would not stop. He waited for the
authorities. A military car arrived, stopped 20
metres from him and now the girl had a very high
fever. They telephoned the doctors and one
came, but when he wanted to give the girl an
injection through the fence he was prevented, so
he threw over a box of tablets instead. Luckily
she survived.
A second man similarly had a son, four years
old, who was very sick. There were many people
waiting at the gate. Soldiers pushed them back.
He waited 15 minutes, but again was refused
permission to let the car through. Soldiers told
him to carry the child but it was too far. He said,
“The boy will die”. To this the soldiers replied
that they did not care. He then laid the child on
the ground in front of the vehicle and said: “This
is my son. It is your fault if he dies. If he does die
I will kill you.” After an hour and a half they
eventually allowed him to take the child through.
The child luckily survived.
A third farmer told of 43 students going to
school the previous day. It started raining at
about 12 o’clock. The children were kept waiting
in the rain for one and a half hours. The children
even touched the electric fence to try and draw
attention to their plight, but nobody came.
Eventually a guard arrived and after another 20
minutes they were allowed through. This happens
virtually every day when there are instances of
police chasing and firing at Palestinians.
One well established farmer we met in the
previous village took us to the fence so that we
could see his incubators. Some 4,000 chicks died
in one day and 7,000 on another day because they
477 Israel-Palestine: 4 February 2004. Motion 478
are not allowed to visit the plant to see to
essentials such as food, water and heat. Now his
brother lives in a shed on the premises at risk of
his life.
During our brief visit we had a meeting with
some Irish Jewish families who have chosen to
make their life in Israel. The response to our visit
was quite mixed, some being actively hostile. One
of the most interesting guests was not Irish, but
married to a Cork man. She was from Bratislava
originally and carried the terrible tell-tale mark
of a tattoo number from Auschwitz on her wrist.
She told us that when she was sent to Auschwitz
she was selected by the infamous Dr. Mengele
who tapped her with his riding crop, brought her
forward and said to her: “But you are not Jewish.
You are too beautiful with your blond hair and
blue eyes.” She, however, confirmed that she was
Jewish. He then asked her age and she replied,
“13”. With a subdued but powerful emphasis he
said into her ear: “You are not 13, you are 16,
repeat this after me, ‘I am 16 years old’ and if
anybody asks you your age, you say you are 16,”
and she did. This was how she escaped when all
the children under 16 were gassed.
She told me that every time there is a bomb in
Jerusalem she has nightmares. She sees again the
camps, the dogs and the brutal Gestapo officers.
She also said she sympathised with the plight of
the Arabs but, she said, “What are we to do? We
only want to live.”
It is very difficult to respond in the light of such
testimony. As a Christian one can only be
humbled and shamed by what was inflicted upon
such innocent decent people. However, I would
also have to ask: would her nightmares not have
been worse if she had come with us and seen the
wall and the ghetto, for such it is, that has been
created by Jewish people into which they have
put their Semitic cousins, the Palestinians? If she
had seen the concrete watch towers and
automatic machine gun emplacements, the
guards, the uniforms and the dogs, could she have
borne it? I believe this is one of the problems in
Israel, that many decent people cannot confront
what is being done in their name by the Sharon
Government and some of its predecessors
because if they did, their whole moral universe
would collapse.
The Israeli Government collaborates with them
in their blindness. I gave an example the other
day of the wall at Tulkarm which is four storeys
high and of grey concrete from the Israeli side. It
looks like and is felt by most Israeli civilians to
be a noise barrier. With regard to the infamous
wall, few people who have the experience of
driving along its course could accept this primary
function of security. If it was it would be along
the green line, the 1967 border. It reaches
insidiously into Palestinian territory which is
already sprinkled with spots and looks, on the
map, like it had an attack of measles.
Presently under construction, apparently with
the collaboration of firms with connections to
Irish companies such as Cement Roadstone
Holdings, the wall when finished will have a
devastating impact on about 60 towns, villages
and refugee camps. I regard any such
collaboration by Irish companies as infamous,
shameful and indefensible and I call upon
Cement Roadstone to investigate the situation
and take immediate steps to disinfect itself from
such a reprehensible undertaking. I thank the
Leas-Chathaoirleach for his indulgence. I will
complete my contribution at the end of the
debate.



Mr. Norris: I would like to thank the Minister
and the Minister of State and all my colleagues
who took part in what was a very important
debate. I have not changed my position. I
continue to state where I stand, fully in support
of the human rights of ordinary people on both
sides. When the state of Israel violates those
human rights I will speak out and hope I will be
heard. With regard to the business of settlements
and Mr. Sharon, we must be very careful. I
travelled down there with a very reputable Jewish
scholar who has written extensively on this
subject and he predicted Sharon’s actions two
weeks ago saying: “This is exactly what Sharon
will do. It is a bargaining ploy. Be careful.”
7 o’clock
Every settlement is illegal under the United
Nations. Why should one, two, three or four be
allowed? The position is unsustainable and half
the time in these so-called
settlements there is nobody, just
empty buildings. The other matter is
the point raised by Senator Henry — the
demographics. Sharon knows perfectly well there
are elements within the Palestinian side, for
example, who will now say: “Let us give up.
Surrender is the best form of attack. Let us say
we cannot have a state; it does not work. We will
all go in with Israel.” Then Israel is overwhelmed
because it is faced with the problem of whether
it becomes totally dictatorial or whether Israelis
recognise the Palestinians and become a minority
in their own Jewish state. That is the problem
Sharon faces, so we must be careful with him
because of the cosmetic arrangements he makes.




[Mr. Norris.]
We have a powerful weapon in the European
Union, the association agreement with Israel,
which is a trade consensus. That is where it bites
and that is where it will hurt. There are human
rights protocols attached and I believe there is a
strong case for activating them. With regard to
the suicide bombings I am not going to go over
that. I have said what I had to say apart from
this: I know when that woman, a beautiful young
lawyer, killed herself, awful as that deed was it is
not enough just to condemn it. One has to ask
why these abnormal events happen. How is it that
a young woman with a law degree and her life in
front of her commits such an act? We must ask
why, not to excuse it, but to delve into the
reasons. When one asks this question, one
discovers that her brother and her cousin were
shot in front of her and her father, when dying of
cancer, was refused palliative treatment. He was
stopped all the time at the gate. She watched him
die in agony. I am not excusing her act, but
putting it into context.
As a former academic, I believe there should
be a comparative review of sentencing policy in
the jurisdiction of Israel as between Jewish and
Arab citizens. There is a discrepancy and it is a
reproach to the Israeli bar council that it has done
nothing about. I would like to return to the
business of the wall. Some 220,000 people are
affected directly, representing a third of the
population of Palestine. On visiting this region,
both sides have a tendency to ask what lessons we
can show them from our experience in Northern
Ireland. The parallel is salutary — four hundred
years after the plantation of Ulster, we are still
dealing with its malignant consequences. At least
now we have learned and there is progress. One
reason for this is the doctrine of parity of esteem,
which has not been accepted by the contending
parties, especially the Israelis, whose government
appears to have declared war, not on a state, but
on its people and whose proud boast of having
made the desert bloom has now been replaced in
the territories by the horrible reality of turning
orchards and olive groves back into desert.
If one takes the parallel with the North
seriously and tries to imagine the Israeli-
Palestinian situation and its conditions being reenacted
north of the Border, this would involve
the bombing of the Divis Flats by F-16 aircraft
every time a machine gun poked out of a window,
the surrounding of Dundalk by a concrete noose
and its isolation from the rest of the Republic,
with all the attendant restrictions on its
population and the demolition of half of west
Belfast because of supposed IRA contact. It
would be much better if, instead of attempting
to degrade the Palestinian population further, the
Israeli Government made every attempt to bring
them up to the level of infrastructure, income and
employment that used to be enjoyed before the
intifada in the state of Israel.
Mr. Sharon frequently says the problem with
the process is there is no partner. This tends to
refer to Mr. Arafat. However, the absence of
partnership could equally be laid at his door. On
any occasion when there was a possibility of
peace breaking out, Mr. Sharon was careful to
sabotage it by a target assassination which
frequently went wrong and caused multiple
civilian casualties. After the recent suicide
bombing, which was widely and rightly
condemned, an Israeli Government spokesman,
Mr. Gissin said: “The rest of the world should
now sit back and let us do as we need to do to
defend ourselves.”
I sincerely hope this advice is not heeded and
is smartly rejected. There could be no better
recipe for disaster. Let us recall what happened
when Mr. Sharon infamously stood back and let
the Christian militia in to butcher the unfortunate
Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila. It is wise, also,
to be careful of repeated and quite dishonest calls
made by Mr. Sharon on the Palestinian Authority
to disarm Hamas. Let us recall that Hamas was
established with the assistance of covert Israeli
funding as an early means of destabilising the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation. In so doing,
they sowed dragons teeth. Is it reasonable to
expect a police force whose police stations have
been repeatedly bombed and whose personnel
are forbidden by the Israeli occupiers to carry
weapons or even wear uniforms in directing
traffic to confront armed radical elements? As I
said on RTE recently, it is like expecting them to
go out in their underpants and peg snowballs at
heavily armed fanatics.
If there is to be a resolution of this terrible
conflict in the medium term, positive steps,
however small, as the Minister of State said, need
to be initiated now. During the week, I attended
a talk by the Cypriot Foreign Minister in the
Institute of European Affairs. Speaking on the
Cyprus problem, he said that in order to make
progress both sides must cut their losses, turn the
page and develop a new vocabulary. This is the
best advice I could give to both sides in the
continuing tragic dispute in Palestine-Israel.
Finally, I thank Christian Aid for making this
trip possible and to say that if I learned anything
it is the necessity for people of conscience, be
they Israeli, Palestinian, Arab or Irish to travel
through these hot spots and bear witness to what
is happening so that the worst excesses may be
stopped. I also ask in particular that the Minister
for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Cowen, and the
Minister of State at the Department of Foreign
Affairs, Deputy Kitt, keep this matter close to the
top of the agenda during the Irish Presidency and
make a point of visiting not just Jerusalem but
also Ramallah, the terrible trajectory of the wall
509 Public 4 February 2004. Transport 510
and the squalid militarised conditions that now
exist in the West Bank and Gaza.
Question put and agreed to.
An Cathaoirleach: When is it proposed to sit
again?
Ms O’Rourke: At 10.30 a.m. tomorrow.