The city council of the Irish capital Dublin has endorsed the BDS and called for expelling the ambassador of the “apartheid” state of Israel, which was established “through ethnic cleansing.”
One of the two resolutions, which endorsed the BDS, reads: “Since its violent establishment in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of more than half of the indigenous people of Palestine, the state of Israel has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law.”
The resolution, proposed by leftist Councillor John Lyons, stated that “this City Council fully supports and endorses the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for freedom, equality and justice.”
In addition, the text states that Dublin will cut all business ties with Hewlett-Packard as the technology giant “provides and operates much of the technology infrastructure that Israel uses to maintain its system of apartheid and settler colonialism over the Palestinian people.”
Another resolution, proposed by Mac Donncha, called on the national government to expel Israel’s ambassador to Ireland Ze’ev Boker.
The spokesperson of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, denounced the resolution “as utter nonsense” that is “worthy of dark dictatorships.”
“This is lowbrow anti-Semitism, not what you’d expect of the capital of an EU member state,” he fumed on Twitter.
Consequently, Israeli Interior Minister Arye Deri said he would bar the city’s first Lord Mayor Mícheál Mac Donncha from entering the occupied West Bank as he was planning to attend a conference on the status of Jerusalem in Ramallah, at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority.
Mac Donncha was due in Ramallah this week, where he said he wanted to “acknowledge that East Jerusalem is the designated capital of Palestine under the two-state solution, recognised by the international community, but forcibly prevented from being implemented by successive Israeli governments.”
He also travelled to the region to “express solidarity with the people of Palestine who are suffering violence from Israeli forces, as witnessed in Gaza most recently with the shooting down of protesters.”
Explaining his decision not to let Mac Donncha into Israel, Deri cited his longstanding pro-Palestinian activism.
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