The Irish Government must earn its reputation as a champion of human rights in the Middle East, a Lebanese woman based in Dublin told a demonstration outside the Department of Foreign Affairs on Saturday.
“I see Arab friends and family sharing posts on social media, celebrating Ireland for being so loudly pro-Palestine,” Rasha Shraim, a PhD researcher based at Trinity College Dublin, told a crowd drawn mainly from the city’s small Lebanese community and various support groups.
“The Irish Government revels in all this praise for its lip service when real action is needed more urgently by the second, before the numbers [of injured and dead] we hear have gotten so big that they are difficult to fully comprehend anymore.”
Israeli strikes have killed more than 700 people this past week, Lebanese authorities have said.
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About 200 people attended Saturday’s protest in Dublin amid fears of a further escalation of violence.
For Ms Shraim, as for many of the others present, the threat is very real and personal. She was born in the southern city of Houla, close to the border with Israel and has, she told the gathering, a tattoo of an olive branch on her arm to remind her of the family home there and the trees her mother used to tend.
A few months back, however, her parents - both in their 70s - had to leave due to the escalating violence and now they, her two brothers and a sister are in Beirut where they have been forced to relocate once already in recent days after an Israeli declaration on what were to be considered safe areas.
Her father, she says, lost an uncle last week, and then his aunt, their daughters and grandchildren in an airstrike in the last few days. She is in constant contact with family members now as they watch endless television news there. She does the same here, anxious not to miss any indication of a shift in the “safe” zones and hoping for word of a wider de-escalation.
There has been a growing expectation, though, Israel will instead substantially increase its attacks on southern Lebanon and Beirut as part of its escalating conflict with Hizbullah and in pursuit of its recently stated aim of “returning the residents of the north securely to their homes”.
About 100,000 Lebanese and 60,000 Israelis have been displaced from the border region because of the conflict between Hizbullah and the Israeli Defence Forces.
In the meantime, Ms Shraim says, “my dad says he feels like he’s supposed to feel lucky that they have some place safe to stay, but he feels like an animal trapped in a cage. And the wheels are already spinning to try and convince the world that we somehow deserve this, as they did with the Palestinians. Guilty by birth. We are all guilty just by virtue of being Lebanese.”
She believes, she says, the Irish Government can help to prevent things getting much worse but “action is urgently needed, not just empty condemnation speeches”. The protest heard calls for Ireland to expel Israel’s diplomatic staff and impose sanctions including from Richard Boyd Barrett TD, who was one of the speakers to address the crowd.
He described the Irish Government’s position on the situation as “shameful” and accused it “speaking out of both sides of its mouth” on the situation by making statements critical of Israel’s action in recent months and by recognising Palestine while doing nothing more concrete to deter Israel’s continued military action.
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