We must stand with Palestine

The Irish people have long supported the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. They have lobbied, marched, demonstrated, and fundraised to aid the children, the schools, the hospitals of a people trapped in an apartheid regime.

Like the case of the Dunnes Stores strikers and those who supported their struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Irish people have been ahead of their government on the issue of Gaza and Palestinian freedom.

In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people have attended marches, rallies, and vigils across Ireland in support of the human rights of Palestinian people, week after week, night after night.

We have been marching for Palestinian rights for decades. We have been demonstrating, lobbying, and protesting about the blind eye given to the plight of the Palestinian people by successive Irish governments and the EU.

Palestine has the right to a state within the promised 1948 borders. It is as simple as that. Instead, they have been continually marginalised and brutally attacked within their own communities. In Gaza, they are contained in what is acknowledged as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Their land is being stolen week in week about all the way back to the original Nakba 75 years ago in May 1948. This is the essence of the Palestinian struggle. It is a right to their own homeland, to live without fear, without daily oppression.

Speaking in Dublin on 18 November at a demonstration for Palestine, Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald said, “Now is the time for the Irish spirit of ‘Saoirse’, of freedom, of dignity, to assert itself like never ever before. Because this long walk to freedom that is Palestine is our story too.”

With over 1.5 million people displaced because of the Israeli attacks on Gaza and over 11,000 dead, including 4,500 children, we must be uncompromising in our support of the Palestinian cause.

It is this people power, like the Dunne Stores strikers in the 1980s, that has the power to move governments beginning with the Irish one. We can move the Irish Government to actively support the cause of Palestine and call Israel to account. We cannot stop now on this long walk to freedom.