Subscriber OnlyLetters

Sanctions against Israel

The case for sanctions is stronger than ever

Letters to the Editor. Illustration: Paul Scott
The Irish Times - Letters to the Editor.
Fri Aug 02 2024 - 00:07

Sir, – Kenneth Harper is correct; “now” is not the ideal time for sanctions against the Israeli state (“Sanctions would be a gift to Hamas”, Letters, August 1st).

Sanctions should have been imposed long before the current carnage began.

Our nation, with our indelible historical experience of overcoming colonial oppression and ethnic subjugation – and our more recent experience as a leading light in a global solidarity movement against the apartheid regime in South Africa – should have led the way years ago.

In July 2021, an Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence report called for concrete diplomatic and economic measures to be applied where the Israeli state violates international law, and declared that Ireland should not render aid or assistance to Israel which would facilitate the maintenance of annexation. Of course, the Coalition Government took no concrete action, contenting themselves with empty platitudes.

READ MORE

At a minimum, Dáil Éireann should swiftly enact the Occupied Territories Bill, the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill, and the Arms Embargo Bill.

These Bills, it must be understood, do not amount to sanctions; each Bill is a specific and long-overdue measure to end Ireland’s complicity in war crimes. But proactive sanctions should follow swiftly on their heels.

With nearly 40,000 Palestinians slaughtered by a nuclear-armed expansionist state, over 10,000 people missing, famine all but officially declared in the Gaza Strip, polio resurgent due to the Israeli military’s devastation of civil infrastructure, and widespread reports of torture, including sexual abuse, emerging from the Israeli military’s internment camps, the case for sanctions is stronger than ever. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN Ó ÉIGEARTAIGH,

Donnybrook,

Dublin 4.

A chara, – Kenneth Harper describes Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

However, in 2019 Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted that Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people”. Such a concept of statehood is incompatible with democracy.

Mr Harper tells us that “the stated aim of Hamas is the eradication of Israel and the displacement or worse of its seven million Jews”.

However, Hamas had already dropped this “stated aim” in its 2006 election manifesto, and in its 2017 charter (article 16) it asserts that “its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews”.

Mr Harper tells us that this “stated aim” is “endorsed by the population of Gaza and the West Bank ... according to the latest survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy Survey and Research ... two-thirds believe the October 7th massacre was justified ... and only a third want a two-state solution.”

However, since the “stated aim” is non-existent, it cannot have been “endorsed”. Further, the implication that the results of the survey are identical for Gaza and West Bank Palestinians is wrong – they often differ considerably. For example, according to the survey “the decline in support for a two-state solution came almost completely from the Gaza Strip”. In Gaza, there is “a decrease of 14 percentage points” in support for the Hamas attack (the word “massacre” is Mr Harper’s contribution) since a previous poll three months earlier; the compilers of the survey comment that “support for this attack ... does not necessarily mean support for Hamas and does not mean support for any killings or atrocities committed against civilians.”

The International Court of Justice’s recent ruling that Israel’s occupation and annexation of Palestinian territories is illegal seems to have escaped the attention of some. Clearly, for Israel’s unconditional defenders, such trivialities are irrelevant. – Yours, etc,

RAYMOND DEANE,

Broadstone,

Dublin 7.