Gaza: Ireland Severs Financial Ties to Israel’s Apartheid Regime

A Righteous Rebuke to Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity

In a moral stand befitting its heritage, Ireland has struck a principled blow against Israel’s genocidal campaign by instructing its sovereign wealth fund to divest from six complicit Israeli companies.

The €15 billion Ireland Strategic Investment Fund will immediately liquidate its €2.95 million shareholdings in several of Israel’s most prominent financial exploitation vehicles – including behemoth banks like Hapoalim, Leumi, and Discount Bank instrumental in funding the illegal occupation and settler colonial project.

Finance Minister Michael McGrath acknowledged this decisive move comes in response to the corporate sector’s brazen profiteering from Palestinian subjugation in the occupied territories. No longer will the sovereign funds of the Irish Republic be contaminated by economic engagement with entities perpetuating ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and manifest crimes against humanity.

Ireland’s divestment reinvigorates its storied legacy as a global champion for Palestinian human rights amid the Zionist regime’s escalating Gaza holocaust. Just last month, the government joined a vanguard of European nations officially recognising Palestinian statehood and repudiating the illegal occupation as flagrant transgression of international law.

Ireland joined Spain, Malta and Slovenia in taking the first steps toward recognising Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In severing all financial ties with Israeli racial capitalist interests, the Emerald Isle sets an exemplary standard that shames the clear majority of Western “democratic” allies still economically and militarily underwriting Israeli war crimes – often under ludicrous pretexts of defensive self-preservation.

“I have been advised by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) that it has decided to divest from certain ISIF global portfolio investments in companies that have certain activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” McGrath said in a statement.

The decision will be implemented as soon as possible over the coming weeks, he added.

The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway’s $1.6 trillion fund, has over the years divested from nine Israeli companies over activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.

While the small nation of Ireland acts on the ethical conviction of its anti-colonial soul, the American, British, German, Canadian, and other putative liberal democratic bastions continue facilitating industrial-scale democide through illicit arms transfers and joint weapons development with the Zionist state’s genocidal military-intelligence apparatus.

The sheer moral bankruptcy is staggering. Just as the Israeli killing machine’s bombardment of Gaza rages into its sixth month of apocalyptic fury, the U.S., UK, Germany and others ramp up the very munitions deliveries enabling the massacre to extend indefinitely with no foreseeable diplomatic resolution whatsoever.

Over 33,000 Palestinian civilians now lie dead – the vast majority children, women, and infirm elderly choking on the dust of rubbled cities or shredded alive by experimental American bunker-busters and German high-precision missiles expressly optimised for urban murder.

An entire civilization endemically exterminated in real time while the “human rights upholding” West goes along for the grisly ride.

Calling out this genocide is the duty of all…

I don’t think anyone can disagree with a country’s right to defend itself, and it is accepted that the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel was an appalling act. However, can what Israel is now doing in Gaza and the West Bank be referred to any longer as “defending itself”, could it ever?

But lets not kid ourselves – The blocking of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territories is not self-defence – it is collective punishment of a civilian population. Switching off water access is not self-defence – it is a weaponization of basic human necessity as a tool of ethnic persecution. Killing children is not self-defence – it is a grotesque war crime violating the most sacrosanct laws of armed conflict. Destroying healthcare facilities is not self-defence – it is the deliberate ruination of civilian critical infrastructure being legally safeguarded.

Yet the UK and US governments watch these undeniable atrocities unfold in real-time and absurdly repeat the mantra that Israel maintains some apocryphal “right to defend itself.” They chastise the regime with tut-tutting about the “unacceptable civilian death toll” only to then hand over more bunker-busters and guided munitions with which to continue raining democide upon the captive Palestinians.

After six unrelenting months of bombardment have extinguished over 33,000 innocent lives in Gaza alone, the likes of Rishi Sunak and his coterie of obeisant lickspittles can only muster protracted “standing by Israel’s right to defend itself” as their cumulative response. Not punitive withholding of military aid. Not sanctioning the patently criminal abuse of British-made weapons transferred in egregious violation of domestic and international laws. Just the same vapid “standing by” as the killing fields stretch from horizon to horizon.

Worse, the official parliamentary opposition has shed any pretence of ethical oppositionality on this genocide. Sir Keir Starmer and his post-Labour travelling minstrels have revealed themselves as full-fledged choreographers of the slaughter – echoing Israeli regime talking points that the deprivation of food, water, energy and human rights for 2.2 million captive Palestinians constitutes the “right to self-defence.” A totalitarian inversion of language and morality more befitting Goebbelsian kapos than any legitimate parliamentary force of democratic renewal.

The UN pleads for humanitarian access to relieve #Gaza's agony. But Labour's leader ignores this cry, fixating on Hamas rockets as the source of conflict. His rhetoric perpetuates a medieval siege mentality that prolongs suffering, rather than uniting moderates for peace. pic.twitter.com/uMBQyDlGTr

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) October 11, 2023

What kind of world have we become where such sociopathic moral leprosy is not just tolerated, but elevated as statesmanship in the highest realms of Anglo governance? We can only lament that the death of conscience itself has been ethnically cleansed to the benefit of a genocidal colonial rogue’s bloodletting depravity. Perhaps the tombstone etching of the West’s vaunted human rights legacy reads simply:

“We Fell Silent.”

But the one thing they are not coy about is the sale of arms to Israel. The United States leads in arming this grotesque death cult, showering its number one military client with an additional $14 billion arms package even as the true extent of its enabling culpability in facilitating historical genocide comes into nightmarish focus.

So let Ireland’s righteous example serve as the world’s ethical conscience on this interminable crime. For it is the nations fuelling the Zionist regime’s industrial-scale massacre through perpetual arms shipments and economic embeddedness who now inherit the indelible mantle of callous, flagrant crimes against humanity themselves.

There is no negotiating with such systematic monstrosity. The aim of the Palestinian liberation struggle and its allies can now only be to utterly decouple from the political corpse-syndicates cheerleading genocide as banal foreign policy. To divest, defund, and deplatform all career virologists of state racism toward the hermetic sealing of their colonial project.

Only then may justice’s arc reassert itself over the civilising continuum. And only those who actively extricate and repudiate their culpability in Zionism’s death march will be spared the eternal torment of being recorded among history’s vilest accomplices to industrialised inhumanity.

The righteous path is clear. Join Ireland’s morally clarifying example and fully quarantine the Zionist pariah regime – revoke its international standing, comprehensively sever all economic and military facilitation, and recognise Palestine’s national sovereignty immediately. Or stand permanently tarnished as active collaborators in humanity’s longest continued obscenity against human rights and international law.