Ireland has always had a close personal relationship with Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. Two peoples, a world apart seeking the same thing…simply, freedom. A verse in a poem by James Connolly called, ‘We Only Want The Earth’ comes to mind regularly, when I think of the similarities between our two peoples:
“For labour long, with sighs and tears,
To its oppressors knelt.
But never yet, to aught save fears,
Did the heart of tyrant melt.
We need not kneel, our cause is high
Of true men there’s no dearth
And our victorious rallying cry
Shall be, we want the earth!”
The relationship between the Irish and Palestinians has become an unbreakable bond. Regularly Palestinian Ambassadors, political personalities and figures of resistance are invited to events like the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis to have their say and tell their tales of oppression and resistance. No doubt there will be stories from last night when Israel attacked targets in the Gaza Strip retaliating against Hamas rockets fired ‘toward’ Israel. This entire chain of events started with Israeli police and settlers invading the al-Aqsa mosque ahead of their Jerusalem Day event in which Israelis commemorate Israel’s dubious claims of regaining control over the city in 1967. It is celebrated every year in May or June, with festivities and events held across Jerusalem. There is an on-going problem with Israeli settlers essentially carrying out an almost constant siege of the mosque for no other reason than its a place of worship for Palestinians. Not a million miles away from Loyalists attacking Catholic Chapels and places of worship, like Harryville in Ballymena, attacked so badly and so consistently by Loyalists that the Harryville Chapel actually had to be demolished and removed from the area.
Hamas fired rockets toward Israel from Gaza just minutes after the passing of its ultimatum for Israel to withdraw its security forces from the Jerusalem compound which is home to the al-Aqsa mosque, and from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in the city’s East. The ultimatum followed the latest clashes around the compound on Monday that left over 300 Palestinians injured. The latest violence came after Israeli police stormed the compound early on Monday firing stun grenades and tear gas and clashing with Palestinians inside following days of the worsening siege.
This comes after weeks of evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the Old City’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, which was an almost entirely Palestinian. The real kicker here, is that all these homes, once the property of Palestinian families, were handed to Israeli settlers in the latest wave of annexing of Palestinian land, displaced out of a country they have every right to live in.
Many people will have heard of the Palestinian ‘Right of Return’. Simply put, this is a politically held position and principle that after the Six Day War between Israel and its neighbours, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in which many Palestinians were displaced, that they have a right to return to their lands and property. Formulated for the first time on the 27th of June 1948 by United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte, it dictates the proponents of the Right of Return hold a sacred right, as well as a human right whose applicability both generally and specifically to the Palestinians, is protected under international law.
This view holds that those who opt not to return or for whom return is not feasible, should receive compensation for their land lost. Israel’s opposition stands in contrast, with its ‘Law of Return’ that grants all Jews the right to settle permanently in Israel and on Palestinian land, while withholding any comparable rights from Palestinians.
Israel does not view the admission of Palestinian refugees to their former homes and lands in Israel as a right, but rather as a political issue to be resolved as part of a final peace agreement. Israel is essentially withholding Palestinian homes and land from them while annexing huge swathes of Palestinian neighbourhoods and then telling them they’re not getting their land and property back until they live in peace. Again, not a million miles away from our own situation.
The Gaza Strip, or Qiṭāʿu Ġazzah in Arabic, is 25 miles long, and 3.7 to 7.5 miles wide, with a total area of 141 square miles with a population of over 2 million Palestinians. For a 13th consecutive year, Israel has enforced a generalised travel ban on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and sharply restricted the entry and exit of goods. These restrictions, not based on an individual assessment or security risk, robbed, with rare exceptions the 2 million Palestinians living there of their right to freedom of movement, limited their access to electricity and water, and devastated the economy. 80% of Gaza’s residents depend on humanitarian aid.
Israeli authorities also facilitated the further transfer of Israeli citizens into illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, by definition, a war crime. The Israeli group ‘Peace Now’ has claimed that Israeli officials in 2020 advanced plans for more housing units in West Bank settlements, amounting to 12,159 as of the 15th of October 2020, more than in any other year since it began tracking these statistics in 2012. As of the 19th of October 2020, Israeli authorities demolished 568 Palestinian homes and other structures in the West Bank alone, including in East Jerusalem, displacing 759 people. Most buildings were demolished for lacking Israeli building permits, which are virtually impossible to obtain for Palestinians.
As the Covid-19 pandemic spread between March and August 2020, Israel averaged its highest home demolition rate in four years. On the 3rd of November 2020, Israeli authorities razed the homes of almost all residents of the Palestinian community of Khirbet Humsah in the Jordan Valley for being in an area it designated as a “firing zone”, displacing 73 people, 41 of them children. International Humanitarian Law, and in particular, specifically the Fourth Geneva Convention, prohibits the unnecessary destruction of private property, despite the commitment made by the Israeli authorities not to target Palestinian residential structures during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Incendiary balloons launched into Israel by Palestinians in Gaza prompted Israeli authorities in August 2020, in retaliation, to limit the entry into Gaza of goods, including food and medicine, to block access to Gaza’s territorial waters for Palestinian fishermen and to slash fuel imports to Gaza’s power plant, further reducing the already limited supply of electricity for almost three weeks. These measures, targeting Gaza’s general civilian population, amount to unlawful collective punishment and so, again, war crimes.
Israelis are living on Palestinian land; Palestinians are being displaced and removed from their homes and property with it all being handed to Israeli citizens from as far afield as America and Europe. Entire Palestinian villages are being razed to the ground to make way for additional illegal Israeli settlements. Palestinians are being forced to live in apartheid conditions with limited food, water, electricity and with little to no Covid vaccines and medicine in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and all while Israelis live on Palestinian land, living like kings and queens.
If this was happening anywhere else on the globe, America, the UK and UN would be on a war footing right now, screaming about human rights atrocities and apartheid like they did in Syria. However, because AIPAC has infiltrated almost every facet of American society and countries like the UK have allowed the Israeli lobbies to hold so much power, nothing is ever meaningfully done to subdue or hold Israel to account.
It falls to ordinary, everyday people to keep these atrocities in the face of politicians and put pressure on those same politicians to use their influence to hold Israeli to account which rarely happens. It will take a huge ground swelling of activism and pressure from ordinary people to stop Israel wiping out an entire people in full, plain view of the world.
To date, over 5,000,000 Palestinians have a ‘Right of Return’ to the state known as Israel and claim much of that land as their own.
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