Ireland boasts of being the first EU country to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, and the last to accept the opening of an Israeli embassy in its capital. Wearing a “kefiya” (the traditional Palestinian scarf) is considered a sign of distinction, and those who wear it are greeted, applauded or even hugged on the streets of Dublin. Cars honk in his honor. “Free, free,” some shout. “Palestine,” others respond.
What unites both peoples is the colonial experience. Ireland only became independent from Great Britain in 1921, and Palestine came under British mandate after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The Irish identify with the Palestinians because their territory was taken from them (the six counties of Ulster), because they suffered from the imperial yoke, because London did nothing to combat a famine that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and because of the excessive violence of the army. Of occupation.
Many of the colonial officials who served in Ireland until independence were later sent to Palestine, and former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (author of the Declaration that bears his name and by which London spoke out in favor of the creation of a home for Jews in what was then a territory that he administered) had been responsible for Irish Affairs in the Cabinet at the end of the 19th century, firmly opposing home rule and giving the green light to the Mitchelstown massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes of the colonial occupation.
Pro-Palestinian sentiment is universal in Ireland and shared by all political parties. “Israel has the right to defend itself, but what it is doing does not look like self-defense but rather revenge,” declared the previous Taoiseach (Leo Varadkar) a month after the massacre of October 7. Mary Lou MacDonald, the leader of Sinn Fein, does not have her country’s tricolor on her the responsibility of the Netanyahu Government in the “Gaza genocide.” Players from the national basketball team refused to shake hands with their Israeli rivals in a recent international match, rock, pop and rap groups call for the liberation of Palestine in their songs, and Belfast murals celebrating peace have been replaced by others in support of the Palestinian people. Supporters of the Irish football teams (and of Glasgow Celtic, associated with the Irish community in Scotland), fly the Palestinian flag in their stadiums. Northern Irish Catholics see Israel as the equivalent of what Protestants and London have been to them. them, and the Gaza massacres as a large-scale Derry “bloody Sunday.”
The IRA (of which Sinn Fein was the political arm during the Troubles) maintained cordial relations with the PLO, which included the shipment of weapons. Also – and this is much more controversial – with Nazi Germany, which provided him with materials for his attacks in England, it is speculated that in exchange for intelligence information to facilitate the bombing of Belfast during World War II. In that conflict the Republic of Ireland was neutral, not so much out of affinity with the Third Reich as because it felt incapable of being in the same alliance as England, its colonial oppressor until twenty-five years earlier. Eamon de Valera, the father of the Irish nation, officially offered his condolences to the German diplomatic representative in Dublin upon learning of Hitler’s death. After the conflict, notorious Nazi war criminals, such as Otto Skorzeny, settled in Ireland.
A former Israeli ambassador has commented that “anti-Semitism exists in Ireland,” and that it is due at least in part to its strong Catholic tradition. The Church had a very ambivalent role in the Nazi era, and has been accused by various historians of maintaining silence about the sending of Jews to concentration camps instead of denouncing it and helping to mobilize international public opinion. Ireland denies that such sentiment exists, recalling that Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s father and grandfather were born in Dublin, and the latter was rabbis at a synagogue in the city. In fact, many Irish were initially favorable to the creation of a state of Israel, but attitudes changed with the occupation of Arab lands.
The last British governor in Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, explained in a book that the colonial practices tried in Ireland were later applied in Palestine, and that London welcomed the arrival of immigrants to what was territory under its administration to create “a “a kind of Jewish Ulster” in the Middle East that favored British imperial interests in a predominantly Arab area. When Ireland became independent, the Blacks and Tans (military units known for their extreme violence) were moved to Palestine.
For all these reasons, the Irish (and their government) feel a special communion with the Palestinian people, and consider themselves victims of the same colonial oppression from which some have emerged a century ago, but not others.
