MEP: Israel’s Gaza Genocide Proves Need to Reform UN
BRUSSELS (Dispatches) –
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 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 U.S., 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 re-imagine 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?”
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 any more 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.