Click on any image for a larger versionI suppose if I were to start from the beginning, my earliest memory of the Jews, stoked by my church, was that they crucified Christ. Not a good start. As there were no Jews living in proximity in those days this concept had no operational meaning. I'd just add here that it took up to the 1960s and Pope John XXIII to absolve them of this horrendous crime.
However, in the course of my youth I had great admiration for the Jews, and by extension for Israel. The main player here was the Holocaust, and no member of my generation could have been unaffected by it. We were all on the side of the persecuted Jews. We empathised hugely with them and hated the Nazis for what they had done. Truth told, we hated the Nazis anyway, having been raised on British comics and British war heroes.
Then there was the Exodus and the establishment of the State of Israel. A huge achievement for the Jews and a fitting act of reparation for what had been done to them. At last, a safe homeland, not only democratic but sort of socialist as well. We admired the Kibbutzim and many Irish people did a stint in one of them. The coming together of people to help one another. Ar scáth a chéile. The Meitheal.
We became more aware at home of the huge contribution of the Jews to Irish society. And at a later stage, Yanky Fachler wrote a book about a hundred such people. We had never realised there were so many of them.
And there the matter sort of rested until, over time, we came to realise that there was more to it than we had been led to believe.
Israel had not been virgin territory waiting for the return of the Jews who had been scattered to the four corners of the earth two thousand years ago. It had, in the meantime been inhabited by Arabs, Palestinians, scraping a living from a difficult land. And the glorious establishmnet of the State of Israel had a totally different meaning for them.
For them it was the Nakba, "The Catastrophe", which I had been totally unaware of until my later years. The new settlers/occupiers banished half the population out of the area and spent the next seventy years grabbing the land of the rest of them, killing and torturing them, and finally locking them up in a vast concentration camp which was totally dependent on Israel for its existence and day to day survival.
The United Nations, God help us, had decided on a two state solution to the problem. An Israeli state coexisting with a Palestinian one, but this had been long ignored by the Israelis, who actively encouraged Jewish immigration to, inter alia, swell their population while they continued unimpeded in their land grab from the Palestians who they held in general contempt.
To cut a long story short, that's where we are today. And it is crystal clear to me that the displacement of the Palestinians, started with the Nakba, is the ultimate aim of current Israeli action against the Palestinians.
Israel has a habit of getting its own way and harnessing the unqualified support of other states, such as the US and UK, and it currently considers itself unstoppable. In this, it is probably right. A long propaganda war, conflating the Jews and the State of Israel, has struck fear into the hearts of those who might think of supporting the Palestinians but who know that any criticism of Israel will have them labelled as antisemitic and who wants that around their neck.
So, today and tomorrow I am flying the Palestinian, not the Hamas, flag in support of the London march. And I'll fly it again on appropriate occasions.
Which group are you in?And I will wear with honour my blocking on Twitter by the Israeli embassy in Dublin, whose record on inspection is one of what they most give out about, antisemitism. They are doing Jews worldwide no favours and it is interesting that significant Jewish participation in the pro-Palestinian marches is beginning to emerge.
Check this out. It made me cry, though the experience was is far short of that of the current genocide/ethnic cleansing or whatever you're having yourself that is going on today
Togha Fir
ReplyDeleteI mentioned Yanky Fachler in the main post and that he took issue with me on my interpretation of why the Israelis were bringing schoolchildren to see the concentration camps in Germany and Poland.
ReplyDeleteWhile any motivation arising from keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive is praiseworthy I had a feeling that there was more to it than that. I detected an underlying implication that “this is what the Palestinians will do to you if we let them”.
Yanky disputed my interpretation and there ensued some email correspondence after the event where Yanky took me to task. This seemed to be developing into an interesting discussion (to put it mildly) and I suggested that we continue it in public in the comments on my Anne Frank blog post. Yanky refused and that was the end of that.
However, in more recent times, and particularly following the Hamas murders of 7 October last, Israeli government ministers have been coming out with outrageous sentiments about the Palestinians in general, and not just Hamas. They are animals to be wiped off the face of the earth.
While I find these remarks abhorrent they are in one way reassuring. They suggest that my original interpretation of part of the motivation for the concentration camp visits was not far off the mark.
I am particularly upset to find Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President among this crew. His father was Chaim Herzog who was raised in Bloomfield Avenue in Dublin’s Little Jerusalem and of whom his fellow residents, if not the whole of Dublin, was very proud. Local boy made good.
Chaim was also President of Israel and had been one of first to enter Bergen-Belson with the liberating forces at the end of WWII. His record back in Israel, however, seems to have conformed to the Israeli conventional wisdom of the day.
Chaim’s father, Yitzhak, had been Chief Rabbi of Ireland before emigrating to Israel in 1939. Yitzhak was apparently a fluent Irish speaker, was known as "the Sinn Féin Rabbi" for his support of the First Dáil and the Irish Republican cause during the Irish War of Independence.
Why would you wear with honor being blocked by the embassy of a friendly state? And why do you think you get to decide what’s in the interest of Jews internationally?
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