Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin Sure. I simply wished to congratulate the Minister on the statements that she has made and the leadership she has given in our explicit condemnations of Israel's actions. To be clear, the Israel Defense Forces is a multi-confessional organisation. It has Jewish, Druze, Sunni Muslim, Christian and Shia Muslim members. It is a multi-confessional force, so to criticise its illegal actions and its acts of genocide is not a statement of antisemitism, as Senator McDowell said. The charges that have been made against members of the Government and Opposition that they are antisemitic are, in and of themselves, racially motivated. It is Hibernophobic because the extreme elements in the Israeli Government resent the fact that we call them out on their illegal actions. Approximately 16,000 civilians have been killed in Putin's criminal and appalling invasion of Ukraine and the Irish Government has done everything in its power to sanction Russian in that regard. We have been involved in countless rounds of sanctions against Russian goods and services. We have supplied Ukraine with all sorts of supports, including military equipment. We gave away all of our air defence weapons and this is quite right. We should do this but we should also act with the same alacrity and urgency when it comes to our Palestinian brothers and sisters of whom 75,000 have been murdered by the Israel Defense Forces. In the occupied territories it is a figure of about 1,000 since the genocidal attack on Israel by Hamas of 7 October. I want to be really clear; I condemn Hamas. They are an absolutely reprehensible and odious organisation, as are Hezbollah, who have murdered Irish soldiers, including a peacekeeper not long ago. They are war crimes but we have to be very careful. I was in Senator McDowell's office recently and he has a framed black and white photograph of a young boy with his hands up, surrounded by German soldiers. I asked him, "Why do you have that picture there, Michael?" - I do call him Michael in an informal setting - and he replied that is why we are here. It is that simple. We are here to prevent this type of genocide and it is happening now on our watch, as public representatives. The shooting of children, selectively, in the abdomen one day, in their genitalia the next day, in their heads a day after, is being documented. This is a premeditated, methodical act of terrorism against the Palestinian people. It is genocide in tooth and nail. In order for the Israelis to carry out the level of slaughter they have, they have been mobilising artificial intelligence. We now know they have a number of targeting algorithms, including Lavender and Habsora or The Gospel - one of them is called Daddy's Home - where from all of the data they scrape from the Internet and compute, the intersectional points are often when a target, which is randomly assigned not by a human but by an artificial intelligence search engine, is at home with his or her family. That is a place he or she will return to and that is why so many civilians have been butchered. That is why, as one of my colleagues set out, an entire family were killed in the occupied territories, because they know the family are all together as one unit and it is a deliberate tactic to kill. They call it "mowing the grass". It is disgusting and obscene. I want to be really clear about this; it is not technology that permits this - it is computing power. That is why services are so important. The Israelis cannot have access to the computing power of our data centres because that is what they do. You do not need physical proximity to a data centre to harness its computing power. We know they have harnessed some of the computing power for programmes for something like Uber to enhance their targeting acquisition and their logistics. It is really important that we should have included services in this Bill, but as Senator Black said we will return to this and will push for it. We had an opportunity here, given our Presidency of the European Union, to create the consensus Senator Ahearn talked about, when all of Europe would come together. This is a missed opportunity to do that. I thank Senator Black for all the work she has done in this regard. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:10+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-08