A motion condemning “the continuing genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people” and calling on the Government to impose sanctions was carried by delegates on the final day of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland conference in Wexford.
The event was addressed by Palestinian sisters Tamar and Marah Famaz Nijim who asked delegates “to keep standing for Palestine, and talking about it, because every word counts”.
Tamar, previously a teacher in Gaza, has just completed a degree in applied linguistics at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick while Marah, who was only evacuated from Gaza last Friday, is due to start studying there over the coming months.
Marah talked about the challenges of living in the region while the war, and Israeli bombardments, continue.
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“Imagine walking two hours for water,” she said. “Three or four hours to get medical attention. Being displaced from your home. Living in a tent for a year and a half. I can’t call myself a war survivor because none of us survives inside”.
“I want to thank you for listening to me. And thank Ireland for helping me to finish my studies and fulfilling my dreams,” she said.
Tamar, who is working as a senior invigilator at Mary Immaculate as well as doing translation work, thanked the delegates for passing the motion supporting the Palestinian people who, she said, had one of the highest literacy rates in the world before the war began.
“We were proud of our education system but now all the universities have been completely destroyed or are being destroyed,” she said.
Referencing the description of the conflict by Helen McEntee on Wednesday as “a war on children”, she said 15,000 of an estimated 51,000 Palestinian dead are minors.
Those numbers, she said, would proportionally equate to 37,000 and 127,000 if the Palestinian population was the same as the Irish one.
The region now has more child amputees per capita than any other area in the world, she said, and hundreds of thousands of people of all ages are traumatised by what they have lived through.
“Can you put yourselves in our position?” she asked.
She thanked the Irish for their continuing support but asked people to ask themselves: “Am I doing my best to stop this?”
People would look back, she suggested, and think “it was a shame for educated people to allow something like this to happen”.
In the meantime, she asked people to continue protesting for the people of Palestine, and she called for a boycott of Israel.
While Palestine was in constant danger of slipping down the international agenda in the face of competing crises elsewhere, she said “we need your help”.
Responding to Ms McEntee’s address on Wednesday, TUI president David Waters, who had previously emphasised the union’s condemnation of the events of October 7th, 2023, said: “the Netanyahu government has long abandoned any civility or moral compass as evidenced by the continued murderous bombing of Gaza”.
