Robinson criticises Israeli raid

THE OBAMA administration was last night urged to take action over Monday’s Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.

Former president and UN high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson said the US “must take note that this has now crossed a line . . . they must take a leadership role in it”. The UN security council has to do more, she added.

A political solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict was now “absolutely urgent”, she said.

She also insisted that any inquiry into the killings be independent of Israel, a country that she said was “superb at manipulating inquiries . . . perhaps as a defence mechanism”.

The killings “happened in international waters and there must be an independent inquiry. The UN should have a role in it because it is a matter of peace and security”, she said.

Mrs Robinson was speaking in Dublin's Mansion House at the launch of the pamphlet Writer & Righter, a lecture delivered by poet Séamus Heaney at the fourth annual human rights lecture last December. The lecture and last night's launch were organised by the Irish Human Rights Commission.

Referring to Gaza, she said: “It’s actually shocking how complicit the world is in this [situation] continuing and in not holding the Israeli government to account for this illegal blockade of 1.5 million people, half of whom are children.”

They were, she said, “a population trapped in collective punishment” because they had “dared to elect Hamas”. That may not have been the choice the world had wanted but it was their choice.

The people of Gaza were “living in the aftermath of a deliberately brought about destruction of their houses, their homes, their schools. The amount of humanitarian aid they get, paid for largely by the EU, is enough to keep people from dying and causing a scandal”.

She and others attempted at a meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres last year to get equipment to Gaza to build schools and clinics under UN controls, but the answer was “No”.

She expressed admiration for Irish people in the flotilla, not least on the Rachel Corrie."We really must honour their humanitarian risk-taking. It's really on behalf of us all."

Séamus Heaney said an epigram for his poem From The Republic of Consciencecould be that "there is no such thing as an innocent bystander".

He made the remark in the context of Mrs Robinson’s use of the word “complicit” where Gaza was concerned, he said. What happened on Monday in international waters off Israel was “unjust, unfair, and at the same time the reality we are left with”, he said.