Irish Collaboration With Israel Must End!
Last week it was revealed that IDA Ireland is seeking to benefit from, and collaborate with, the Israeli-apartheid state by establishing a presence in that country. This, despite Israel’s total disregard for the human rights of the Palestinian people.
The remit for this new business development consultant, which will involve the establishment of an IDA office in Israel, is allegedly to win new Foreign Direct Investment for Ireland from Israeli companies.
The IDA currently has offices in just sixteen countries across the globe, including Britain, EU member states and major trading partners such as the US. The establishment of an IDA office in any new territory is thus a major statement of future intent by the IDA and the government. On this occasion the intent is to build ever deeper economic links with the Israeli apartheid state.
This move - which must at the very least have the tacit approval of the Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party coalition - is yet another betrayal of the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom and national self-determination.
In recent months, it also emerged that An Garda Síochána and the PSNI are both working together in collaboration with Israel’s notorious Ministry of Public Security in an EU-funded research project known as ‘ROXANNE’.
The Ministry of Public Security controls the Israeli police, border forces and prisons, forces which have rivers of Palestinian blood on their hands.
Israeli police in action against Palestinian girl in Khan al-Ahmar near Jerusalem
In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s a broad spectrum of Irish political and civic society worked together to oppose the brutal and unjust apartheid regime in South Africa. As part of the international anti-apartheid movement they helped to bring about an end to that hateful regime.
Today, the Israeli state is implementing a comparable system of apartheid against the Palestinian people. Thousands of Palestinian men, women and children have been murdered by Israel without meaningful sanction from the international community. Millions more Palestinians suffer poverty, insecurity and despair in the occupied territories and beyond.
Safe in the knowledge that it will not be sanctioned by the UN, the EU or other global powers, Israel continues with its policies of expansion, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations. It acts with total impunity in clear contravention of countless UN resolutions.
The vast majority of Irish people support the Palestinian people in their fight for self-determination - seeing in their struggle an echo of our own long fight for self-determination.
The development of ever closer security and economic links between Ireland and the Israeli apartheid state runs contrary to the wishes of the Irish people and indeed to our own history of colonialism and oppression.
Instead of deepening links with the Israeli apartheid state, the administrations in both Leinster House and Stormont should be cutting links and joining the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against that rogue state.