Paul Givan is the education minister in the Belfast assembly, a sort of toy parliament which allows his Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin to allocate sectarian patronage to their respective electorates.

Last week Givan spent the half term holiday on a trip to Israel which he says “was organised by the Israeli Embassy”. He did find time to visit a school to “learn more about Israel’s innovative approaches to gifted education and inclusive learning.” A puff piece about the school visit is on his department’s website. It omits to mention that the school is in the occupied territories of east Jerusalem. It also omits to mention that every school and university in Gaza has been destroyed, that Israel has created the highest number of child amputees in the world and has killed more children than any other state in the 21^st century.

He was accompanied by members of other Irish unionist parties on what was nothing but a propaganda junket where their “fact finding” didn’t extend to meeting any Israeli opponents of the eradication of Gaza or a single Palestinian who endured the recent phase of the genocide.

In fact, what is noticeable in all the delegation members’ comments on the trip is a silence on what happened to Palestinians other than one of them muttering something along the lines of “they are all Hamas supporters anyway and had it coming, though it’s a bit tough on the kids”.

Israel was famously established to be “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism” and there was an element of wish fulfilment in this trip. There has always been a strand in unionism which would love to treat northern Taigs the way the Israelis deal with Palestinians. That is what was behind the jubilation over the acquittal of the man involved in the Bloody Sunday murders. Unfortunately for the DUP the British were more sensitive to the reputational damage of genocide than they were.

The DUP has never seen a white supremacist, settler colonial state that it didn’t approve of. They were openly supportive of apartheid. In fact, the father of Emma Little-Pengelly, the party’s deputy first minister in the assembly, was found guilty in a French court of conspiring to smuggle South African weapons into the six counties to be used to kill Catholics.

Predictably enough for a group of people who were gifted a week’s free holiday by Netanyahu and Ben Gvir’s government, Givan and his travel buddies have brushed away any criticism by saying that it is motivated by nothing but hatred of Jews and support for Hamas. It really is the only argument they have.

The story hasn’t been much reported outside the six county media, but it has dominated the press there for more than a week. What in much of the world is a clear left right split, with the left opposing genocide and the right to various degrees going along with it, plays out differently in the six counties. People Before Profit have got the agreement of Sinn Féin, the SDLP and the Alliance Party for a motion of no confidence in Givan as a minister, though it is unlikely that Sinn Féin will go to the logical conclusion and collapse the sectarian based spoils sharing arrangement as a result.

In the scheme of European politics Givan and his travel chums are irrelevancies. The Israeli handlers who were assigned to them were probably miffed to be given such an inconsequential delegation.  What the trip mainly showed is that those parties of the international right which align themselves so brazenly with Israel are willing accomplices to the genocide which is currently barely on pause.