International community must strive to bring ‘lasting’ peace to Middle East, Higgins says

President Michael D Higgins has called on the international community to broker an immediate ceasefire and the release of all Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Speaking at a ceremony in Dublin to mark annual National Holocaust Memorial Day, the President said too many innocent people had been killed since the “appalling atrocities which took place on October 7th perpetrated by Hamas”.

If the international community believes all human life is paramount and that all lives matter, it should strive to achieve a “lasting and meaningful peace” that brings security to the Israeli people and at the same time realises the rights of the Palestinian people, he added.

He warned against seeing the conflict between Israel and Palestine as “seemingly unending – war is not the natural condition of humanity, co-operation is. We must recover and assert this principle at every level – nationally, regionally and internationally.”

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Some 500 people attended the annual event at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre, which was hosted by Holocaust Education Ireland.

Mr Higgins said the murder by the Nazis of six million Jewish people along with Roma, homosexuals, political prisoners and physically and mentally disabled people was preceded by a campaign of gradual acceptance by German society which removed the rights of these people.

The Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich, said Israel was supposed to be a “save haven” for Jewish people after the Holocaust. She quoted the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, who said, “the massacres of October 7th have brought back some of the darkest moments in history into our present.

“The scope of the atrocities is painfully familiar to our people but the speed which denial began to spread and Jewish suffering was dismissed exposed another painful truth. Anti-Semitism does not belong to another time and place – it is right here.”

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Holocaust Education Ireland chairman Prof Thomas O’Dowd said the small number of survivors of the Holocaust who came to Ireland had played a “full part” in all aspects of Irish society.

“Through Holocaust education, we refute Holocaust distortion and denial by providing accurate information about the Holocaust and its consequences.”

He warned that memories of the Holocaust were becoming “dangerously dim”, especially among the younger generation. “We urge young people to speak out against the scourge of disinformation, prejudice and hatred,” he said.

Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe said a rise in anti-Semitism had been driven by “right-wing, white-supremacist movements” around the world

Social media, he added, had been a “perfect accelerant allowing the dissemination of hate speech and cruelty where extremist rhetoric can develop unchecked”.

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Now 88 and one of Ireland’s few remaining Holocaust survivors, Tomi Reichental recounted how he had been taken to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of nine.

“What I witnessed as a nine-year-old boy is impossible to describe – the starvation, the cruelty of the camp guards, the cold and the disease. People who were just skin and bone and looked like living skeletons,” he said.

“They were walking around very slowly, dropping to the ground never to get up again.”

Schoolchildren read the name of Holocaust victims from a roll and the ceremony ended with the lighting of candles to remember those who perished in the Nazi concentration camps.

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