Jews Against the Occupation

 A Jewish Voice of Opposition to the War on Palestinians

 

      

Irish activists see parallels in Palestinian struggle

 

Irish Echo, July 31

OP-ED

Emmaia Gelman

It’s been a while since the Irish community endured soldiers on every street corner, watched young people disappear into military detention for weeks or years without trial, or saw the army fire on peaceful marchers and then label them “terrorists”. It’s been a few years, but we still remember. So when a group of Irish American activists went to the West Bank to monitor interactions between the Israeli army and Palestinians, those memories resonated.

Having watched the Israel/Palestine drama unfold on American television, we'd been inundated with the images of Palestinians as misguided antagonists, and the Israeli army as the beleaguered defender. But as soon as we crossed the checkpoint into the West Bank, we knew we’d been spun. Remember how everyone shot on Bloody Sunday was a “gunman?” Remember how the whole world knew for sure, courtesy of the BBC, that Irish Catholics were “dirty, primitive animals?” The truth about Palestinians – the unrelenting assaults they endure at the hands of the Israeli army, their attempts to meet military force with dignified resistance, and their struggle for basic survival – has never made the news here.

We entered Nablus by a four-hour hike over mountain paths, because under the Israeli-imposed curfew no one is allowed to travel the roads or even leave their houses – not to work, to school, or even to buy food (in case anyone who isn’t allowed to work can still afford food.) We met some tired, frustrated Palestinians on our way, but the only people who made us feel unsafe were the teenaged Israeli soldiers who are empowered to shoot on sight, and the fanatical armed Israeli settlers who have seized Palestinian farms on high land, and who snipe into fields and paths throughout the West Bank.

Palestinians, by contrast, seized the opportunity of our visit to hold peaceful demonstrations against the debilitating curfew. When Palestinians stage marches without the presence of internationals, they are regularly tear-gassed, shot and taken into indefinite military detention. We were a bit surprised to see demonstrations; we’d never seen them on the news, we’d never seen anything but suicide bombings and a few shootings of soldiers. But as we talked to Palestinians who were too terrified to come on the march, it became clear that the armed acts we’d heard about were just what people had been reduced to, since the Israeli army has made peaceful protest impossibly dangerous for Palestinians. We thought of Burntollet Bridge.

The settlers also put us in mind of Ireland, and of the evictions and land-thefts that laid the groundwork for interminable conflict. The Israeli occupation follows that script almost to the letter. With the aid of military force and government funding, local Palestinian farmers are evicted. Their land is turned over to loyal settlers who build big houses, launch industries which siphon off local resources, and raise their children with a claim to the land. The evicted locals can either emigrate or become low-wage laborers for their new masters. If they resist, they are “traitors” and "terrorists.” Sound familiar?

We saw plenty more things that resembled the Irish struggle – the funeral of two resisters, assassinated by the Israeli army in contravention of any idea of fair trial, looked startlingly like Loughgall, as did the desperation of mourners weighing their grief against their will to resist; young children, half-dressed and thrown out of bed, screaming in fear as Israeli soldiers enacted house-to-house raids on a refugee camp, looked like Belfast; and 25 miles away in Tel Aviv, complete and deliberate ignorance of the realities of the Occupation felt unsettlingly familiar.

But the thing that struck us most was how clearly we understood, standing in the ghost towns of the West Bank under weeks-long curfew, that this was a Palestine we were not supposed to see. Americans are not supposed to know that, 24 hours a day, Israeli tanks patrol every West Bank town, shooting on sight at anyone who dares venture into the street, often killing them; that in UN refugee camps, the Israeli army regularly rounds up all men aged 15-55 and detains them indefinitely, and not all make it home again; that daily, deliberately, the Israeli army makes war on Palestinian civilians. We are not supposed to realize that Palestinians have no tanks, no invading troops, and few weapons at all; that there simply is no war – only an occupation, some desperate acts of resistance, and an unbelievable amount of media spin which paints Palestinians, like Irish Catholics, as crazed terrorists.

The Irish community knows the nightmare of occupation well enough to spot the lies and deceptions so carefully cultivated around it. We know the spin which makes occupied populations into “warmakers” and resisters into “terrorists”. And in an America which sometimes simply declines to look at inconvenient facts, it’s important now for Irish Americans to call on our own strengths, including the memory of our past, to pull aside the curtain. The “Israel/Palestine conflict” is not a war, it’s an occupation. Palestinians are a people struggling to resist in spite of the worst possible conditions – poverty, economic shutdown, and a powerful spin-machine which degrades them.

Irish Americans have been unduly timid in supporting the right of Palestinians to exist and to be free. Who are we if we can’t take a lesson from our own history, and stand up when history repeats itself? It’s down to the Irish community to stand on principle against the injustices of occupation, and to start speaking against the injustices of this one – against the daily acts of oppression, and against the vilification of Palestinians who resist – if only in memory of the struggles that came before.

(Emmaia Gelman is an Irish-American and Jewish community activist, and a frequent visitor to Israel/Palestine. She recently traveled to the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement.  To read more reports from Emmaia and other JATO members, click here.)