By Ahmet Gencturk and Derya Gulnaz Ozcan
ATHENS (AA) – Israel’s deadly war on Gaza has become a “crisis of international law” and highlights the urgent need to reform global institutions, according to European Parliament legislator Clare Daly.
“Gaza is now a test for the whole of the world. It is not that there have not been other genocides … but we didn’t see them in the full glare, deliberately named and bragged about, and the world seemingly unable to deal with it,” Daly, an Irish politician who remains one of the strongest pro-Palestine voices in Europe, told Anadolu.
“What we have now is a crisis of international law, a crisis of UN agencies, and a crisis for humanity.”
While most Western nations and elites continue to support Israel, people around the world are standing up for Palestinians, defying their own governments and exposing their hypocrisy, she said.
“Ordinary people around the whole world are on the one side, and the countries which have the majority of the world’s population are on the one side in a little corner, enabling and making this happen,” said Daly.
“The US, the EU, Canada and Britain, the old colonial powers and empires, they are the minority. But the people in those countries can also see them now for what they are.”
The people mobilizing all across the globe are “the voices of the majority,” she reiterated.
“We have to find a way of structuring that to reimagine the UN and to make international law work. That can only be done transnationally … People everywhere are the same. People everywhere want the same thing, so we have to organize that,” Daly added.
To a question about the particularly strong pro-Palestine sentiments in Ireland, she pointed out that most Irish people see parallels in the Palestinian struggle and their own fight for decolonization.
“The people of Ireland are very, very aware of the struggle of the Palestinian people over generations; us being a formally occupied country, one in the heart of the European Union, that tradition goes back,” she said.
“It’s very much in our consciousness. I’ve been an activist for Palestinian justice all my adult political life. So, when we see the oppression, which had gone on for years, escalating to the stage of genocide, how could anybody be silent in that?”
- Germany’s actions are ‘not what a democratic state should do’
Speaking to Anadolu, Karin De Rigo, a prominent peace activist from Germany, strongly criticized the German government’s support to Israel and repression of pro-Palestine voices in the country.
“The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are doing investigations, which are going to bring something. So, the problem now is Germany doesn’t know anymore how to appear in a good light,” said De Rigo, a candidate of the left-wing MeRA25 party for upcoming European Parliament elections in Germany.
“So, obviously, the easiest solution they found is just to silence everybody. But this is not what a democratic state should do.”
In Germany, people are “being criminalized for defending basic human rights, for asking for peace, and asking for a stop to the export of weapons, and a stop to the second Western colonialism,” she added.
On the reasons for Berlin’s staunch support for Israel, even at the cost of undermining its own global image, De Rigo said it was linked to misplaced efforts to “protect itself and its past.”
“In Germany, we say, ‘never again’ but they have never applied it completely, so it is ‘never again’ only for the Jews at the moment. This indicates very well that Germany has neither understood what it has done in the past and neither is able to accept its racist behavior right now,” she asserted.
“Being in favor of Palestinian means being just being in favor of freedom, and support for their struggle for liberation means liberating ourselves,” she added.