“I was stripped completely naked and was asked to remove my underwear. When I questioned the necessity of this, I was told I would be forced violently if I did not comply and that they did not want any trouble. After removing my underwear, they looked inside my private areas and touched all my sensitive parts.”
In the early hours of the morning following Mother’s Day, 11 members of the Palestine solidarity campaign group ‘Mothers Against Genocide’ were arrested, strip searched, and in one case cavity searched, a practice condemned as sexual assault by Amnesty International. This followed an overnight sleep-out by the group to demand action by the government after 17 months of the ongoing genocide, such as the passage of the promised Occupied Territories Bill, which the government continued to delay.
The arrests happened at 9am, on a day the Dáil wasn’t even sitting, allegedly because the protestors, who planned to continue until 10am, were blocking one of the several entrances to Leinster House. The purpose of this is clear: to have a chilling effect on protest in Ireland. Nor is it the only example: in this week alone, a DCU student was arrested for protesting Micheál Martin’s visit to the campus. A video shows the student knocking on a window of the building the Taoiseach was in, before being promptly dragged away and charged with a public order offence.
Attack on democratic rights
This comes in the context of increasing militarisation in Ireland and globally – with the Irish defence budget set to triple to €3 billion in the next three years, in the midst of a housing crisis – and a government now propped up by rightwing independent TDs which has emboldened it to go further in adopting repressive measures – with the clampdown on opposition speaking rights just one harbinger of things to come. Those protesting the government’s inaction on Palestine and complicity in the genocide are acting as a test case for measures which will be used against other movements which will develop.
This comes in the context of governments worldwide increasingly cracking down on protests. In the US, the case of Mahmoud Khalil, an organiser of demonstrations in Columbia University, who was abducted by ICE and had his visa revoked, is but one example – and of course, under Donald Trump, there will be many, many more to come. But there is also Germany, where this month activists, including two Irish citizens, have been given deportation orders despite not being convicted of any crime. In the UK, Metropolitan Police recently raided a Quaker hall where a youth group was discussing organising protests for this month. Six were arrested for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”.
A system complicit
Support for genocide in Palestine is linked with attacks on the democratic rights of the solidarity movement at home—this is now the approach of states in Europe and the United States. They have armed and backed the massacre in Gaza, and major multinationals such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Meta are complicit in the oppression of Palestine. For capitalism and imperialism, backing the Israeli State is linked with maintaining their domination over the Middle East.
We demand a dropping of all charges and cautions against those arrested for the simple act of protesting, the passage of the Occupied Territories Bill, and an end to the shipment of arms to Israel through Shannon Airport and Irish Airspace. We must remain a mobilised force of protest and civil disobedience to bring this about. This spirit of defiance needs to be brought into our workplaces—there needs to be workers’ action that involves refusing to handle goods and services from Apartheid Israel. Along with this, there should be industrial action to stop the flow of weaponry being used in this genocide.
We need to build a revolutionary socialist alternative to a system that is complicit in the genocidal massacre of Gaza. Fighting for freedom in Palestine means fighting to break the rule of capitalism, a system that is destroying our ecosystem, fueling the rise of fascism and the far-right and creating record inequality.
