[Interview] Ireland’s Mary Robinson on Israel-Palestine: ‘Unless there is accountability, the situation is going to get so much worse’

Mary Robinson has long blazed a trail for women in power. The first female president of Ireland later became UN high commissioner and climate envoy, pursing human rights advocacy until this day as chair of The Elders, a global leaders collective formed by Nelson Mandela. Robinson visited the West Bank with the group in July, and came to Brussels shortly after to underscore the urgency of EU action. You just returned from a visit to the West Bank, after which you wrote for The Elders that you were led to believe that Israel “aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically”. Can you tell me about how it must feel to see such little reaction on the part of global leadership to stop this? I had been in the West Bank in 2023, and we were very shocked at how bad things were then, even more because we could see that it was part of government policy. You had hate speech and open talk about annexing the whole of the West Bank, and Palestinians dehumanised on social media by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir [far right Israeli ministers]. The policy is very clear now, even with the outposts [unauthorised settlements] which are illegal under Israeli law. As soon as an outpost is formed by just a few people, they get water, electricity, roads. We saw such fear among the Palestinians as you’d come across 20 or 30 Israeli flags at a crossroads in the middle of the West Bank. When we were there in 2023, we met with Israeli human rights groups who told us that Israel had become an apartheid state. We had not used the word before, but now it’s so clear that it’s a complete apartheid situation and worse, it’s becoming a kind of ethnic cleansing. All of this is so much more blatant, so much more emboldened because there is impunity, which is why we came to Brussels.