Former minister for justice Alan Shatter has claimed that the proposed ban on trade with the occupied Palestinian territories is a “boycott Jews Bill” reminiscent of policies from 1930s Germany.
There were appeals for respect at the Oireachtas foreign affairs committee on Tuesday amid terse exchanges between politicians and Mr Shatter, who compared the Bill to something from Father Ted.
The proposed legislation, which has become known as the Occupied Territories Bill, would prohibit trade in goods with Israeli companies operating in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. Mr Shatter told TDs and Senators that the Irish Government was producing legislation that was “anti-Semitic”.
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“It is the first boycott Jews Bill published by any European government since 1945. And it replicates the type of legislation that was initiated in 1930s Germany,” said Mr Shatter, who was appearing before the committee in his capacity as a board member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations.
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Foreign affairs committee chairman John Lahart said it was “hurtful”, “offensive and slanderous” for it to be suggested that the motivation behind the Bill was anti-Semitism.
Mr Shatter also claimed that the legislation, which focused on limited imports of “olives and avocados”, resembled the “Father Ted-like provisions” of a 1980 family planning law that sought to license the importation of condoms.
Mr Shatter was challenged by Fine Gael TD Brian Brennan, who told the committee that he had travelled to Cairo in a personal capacity last weekend and met injured and orphaned Palestinian children.
“I held the hand of a two-year-old child who had bullet holes because of what’s happening in Gaza. So when you say to me, and you say to this committee, that is a ‘token gesture, this is fantasy politics, this is performance politics’, I totally reject [that],” said Mr Brennan.
“How dare you come in here and make such statements? A ‘Father Ted Bill’! You speak to the people on the ground that matter, listen to what they’ve got to say about this Bill ... I just think the humanity coming from yourself, with all due respect, is just simply lax.”
In terse exchanges, Mr Shatter said: “I don’t think a single visit, deputy, to Egypt is the be-all and end-all to resolving the conflict. And this Bill certainly won’t resolve the conflict.”
In response to Mr Brennan’s remarks, Natasha Hausdorff of the Ireland Israel Alliance said that he had spoken “very powerfully” about Palestinian suffering.
“But it is important that the cause of that suffering is correctly identified, and that is not as a result of Israel’s policy here, that is squarely on the shoulders of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups who continue to abuse and subjugate and terrorise their own civilians,” she said.
All of the Israeli and Jewish witnesses appearing before the committee declined to agree that the occupied territories in the West Bank were illegally occupied land. Mr Shatter said he “does not accept” that the Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank are illegally occupied land. Ms Hausdorff said that “one cannot occupy what is one’s own sovereign territory”.
Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, said that anti-Semitism would be the result of the Bill. “I’m not necessarily certain that that is the motivation behind it,” he said.
In a separate session shortly afterwards, the same committee heard from the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Sadaka - the Ireland Palestine Alliance, who support the Bill.
Sadaka chairman Éamonn Meehan said the same arguments against the Bill had been made against the anti-apartheid campaign in the 1980s and 1990s, but that legislation had been “highly effective”.
