IRELAND: Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern has refused a request from a Catholic Church delegation, including two bishops, for a review of the EU-Israel association agreement.
"The Government has taken the view that it is essential to maintain engagement with Israel," Mr Ahern said after a meeting with the delegation. "Let's be clear that any proposal for suspension would require unanimity in the [ European] Council, which will not happen."
The meeting was attended by the Bishop of Clonfert and chairman of Trócaire, Dr John Kirby; Bishop Ray Field, chairman of the Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs (ICJSA) and an auxiliary bishop of Dublin; and Fr Eoin Cassidy, chair of the ICJSA's international subcommittee. All three had recently been members of an international Catholic Church delegation to the Holy Land.
At a press conference in Dublin beforehand they launched a position paper, Palestine/Israel, Principles for a Just Peace.
Bishop Field said that "at the very least the Irish Government has a duty to work at EU level to ensure that the existing close commercial and cultural relations with Israel are carried out in a manner that gives priority to promoting the legitimate rights of the Palestinians".
He said restriction of movement in the Occupied Territories was "in clear breach of Article 12 of the international covenant on civil and political rights" and described Gaza as "little more than a large prison". Fr Cassidy agreed with former US president Jimmy Carter's description of the situation of the Palestinians as "more oppressive than what black people lived under in South Africa during apartheid".
He said Israel's separation wall ensured "10 per cent of the West Bank, encompassing the most fertile land, will remain in Israeli hands" and reduced Palestine "to a patchwork of municipal cantons or a collection of bantustans and thus destroying any hopes for a viable state".
Sanctions imposed by Israel "threaten to unleash what can only be described as a humanitarian disaster", he said.
There was an "understandable reluctance to be seen to be criticising the Jews", but "if for no other reason than it dishonours those who have died as innocent victims in the Holocaust, one cannot remain silent in the face of the manifest injustice that is visited primarily but not exclusively upon the Palestinian people".