Rhetoric is meaningless when there is zero action
20 April 2024
UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian
Human Rights Francesca Albanese.
Text of leaflet distributed at Palestine solidarity rally in Dublin (20/04/24)
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories has signalled out Ireland as one of the countries where there is a huge chasm between rhetoric and action over the genocide that is being carried out against the people of Gaza. Her comments, delivered during a recent lecture at the University of Galway, were scathing. She identified Ireland as one of the “countries that have been most outspoken." However, she went on to say:
"There’s this tendency to be very supportive with rhetoric, as Ireland has, but when it comes to taking concrete actions, there is zero. Not a little. Zero... what have they done in practice? Nothing. And this is shameful. It is disgraceful."The Irish people are foremost amongst Western nations in terms of popular sympathy with the Palestinians. Yet this is not reflected in the official polices of the Irish government. The record of the Irish government on the genocide in Gaza has been abysmal. There have been no moves on the level of diplomacy, trade or international law. The expulsion of the Israeli ambassador; the imposition of trade sanctions and support for the genocide case against Israel in the ICJ are the bare minimum we should have expected. Yet there’s been nothing even approaching this.
The duplicity of the Irish political class was on full display during the St Patrick’s Day reception in the White House where the leaders of the major parties were present to toast Joe Biden. The ongoing US sponsored genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza barely got a mention. This should have drawn a sharp rebuke from the IPSC yet there was silence. The criticism of the Irish government's empty rhetoric also fits a solidarity movement which has limited itself to A to B marches and the promotion of consumer boycotts. Sinn Féin, the largest party associated with the solidarity movement, is given a free pass to ignore the call for a of boycott of the White House.
The IPSC has abandoned its own limited platform and accepted the Sinn Féin and Fatah dominated Palestinian Community position that Gaza is a purely humanitarian issue. Anything beyond this, such as the collaboration of the Arab regimes or the viability of a two-state solution, is dismissed as political and divisive.
The courage and resilience of the Palestinian people is changing the world yet in Ireland they are being treated as a charity case. This does a great disservice to the cause of Palestine and seriously weakens the solidarity campaign.
Our strategy must be to break the collaboration of the Irish state. To do that we must challenge those who remain silent. The trade union movement could magnify the boycott movement by a thousand-fold.
The sympathy of the Irish people for Palestine rests on a shared history of imperialist oppression. The problem is that current Irish politics is firmly founded on a political consensus that agrees, despite all the evidence, that imperialism plays a progressive role in overseeing the peace process.
True solidarity isn't anti-imperialist abroad and pro-imperialist at home. We have to fight imperialism everywhere. Opposition to the Irish government’s position on Palestine is one element of this. But we also need to recognise that its stance is part of a much broader alignment with imperialism which has seen successive governments unashamedly support aggression by the US and its allies. The use of Shannon airport by the US miliary; the increasingly strident rhetoric towards China: and the involvement of Irish military personnel in NATO’s proxy war against Russia are all evidence that Ireland is being drawn in ever more closely into a US led political and military structure that is driving the world towards WWIII.