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Henry
McDonald’s article and Brian Kelly’s response
bring a welcome debate into the pages of The Blanket.
Over the past few months, I’ve been mulling over
files I’ve assembled for a work-in-progress on
Irish support for Palestinian and Zionist causes among
the nationalist, republican, and loyalist communities.
Presenting part of my initial survey to a gathering
of Irish Studies academics as well as bona fide natives,
I was struck by how enthusiastic the follow-up questioners
appeared - not for my ginger tread into a little-charted
minefield surely, but for the sheer energy that parallels
between Irish and Middle Eastern experiences ignite.
I’ve often wondered why the Celt-Hebrew comparisons
entertained from the ancient chronicles to British
Israelites, from Leopold Bloom to Ben Briscoe, into
an Israeli chief rabbi and a president with cousins
in Belfast and Dublin persisted; why too our PLO or
Star of David flags, the cult of Tara, a six-pointed
star emblematic of Ui Neill defiance against and Ulster
reliance upon the Crown.
While
not wishing within the limits of this short column
to engage in the intricacies of my survey or the debate
raised by my two fellow writers in these pages, I
would like to correct Mr. McDonald’s reference
to Seán South’s membership in the anti-Semitic,
reactionary movement Maria Duce (not, as McDonald
has softened the Marian adjective into ‘sweet,’
but rather she as the Leader, or, in Dermot Keogh’s
translation, a faction ‘Under the leadership
of Mary’: Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland,
p. 228). Founded by Fr Denis Fahey in 1942, surviving
into the 50s before being forced by Archbishop McQuaid
to change its name to the misnomer ‘Fírinne,’
- truth, before fading away by 1964 - its Limerick
branch was planted in 1949 by the IRA activist immortalised
after his martyrdom by balladeers and fianna.
Not
having received my copy of Bryan Fanning’s new
work on Irish racism yet, I cannot comment on it.
But his book’s publicity appears to make much
of South’s Maria Duce ties. These may not have
gained wide attention, but they have not been hidden.
Mainchín Seoighe, in his 1964 biography Maraíodh
Seán Sabhat Aréir, characterises
Maria Duce’s paper ‘Fiat’ as ‘exposing
sometimes anti-Jewish reporting’-- ‘Tuairimí
. . . uaireanta, frithghiúdacha a nochtaí
i Fiat’. (p. 49). As Dr Pat Walsh notes in
his 1994 Irish Republicanism and Socialism,
Seoighe’s largely positive view of South could
not endure in a nationalist climate more guilty than
the gaeilgeoiri for which the earlier account
presumably satisfied. Link now to Ciaran
Crossey’s Irish in the Spanish Civil War website
for accounts of Irish and Jewish volunteers against
Franco, and then those who fought against them - however
briefly - in la bandera. As Peadar O’Donnell’s
career shows, the left has not always ruled republicans,
then or now; the complicated relationship between
and against Irish-Jewish solidarity, as Keogh’s
history tells, resists stereotype. Walsh cites not
only Eoin O’Duffy and Griffith, but such republican
pioneers as J.J. O’Kelly (‘Sceilg’)
begrudging the “Hebrews” any wartime refuge
and Mairtin Ó Cadhain as penning from his Curragh
confines praise for the Nazi regime in his Irish-language
letters to Tomas Bairead. Sympathy for any anti-British,
as in ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’,
often sways republican strategy; thus anti-colonial
efforts of both Zionists and Palestinians against
the Crown have created common causes among various,
not always opposed, Irish factions.
The
whole issue of Irish republican and nationalist support
against the Jews, before and after the establishment
of ‘the Zionist entity’, remains to be investigated.
As does the counterreaction of the Loyalists in favour
of first Palestinian-British and later Israeli links.
Ed Moloney’s book reveals more than previously
known about republican-Arab and Middle Eastern ties;
rumours continue about how extensive these links may
have been. Finally, the increasing Muslim representation
within Belfast and Dublin and the declining Jewish
presence in these cities, in my estimation, plays
into the increasingly opposed displays of symbolic
and ideological support by the two Irish traditions
for the two Middle Eastern peoples. A century ago,
few Jews but hardly any Muslims lived in Ireland.
Now, the opposite holds true. Irish - at least some
among the more idealistic who square off as Bloom
did against the D.P. Moran/Michael Cusack-inspired
‘Citizen’ - tend to root for the underdog,
then as now. A century ago, the republican cause took
hold as a pogrom raged in Limerick. Arabs and Jews
both found themselves under the machinations of the
same British powers that the Irish fought. Arab, Jew,
and Irish all sought national freedom from the same
empire. This appears more than coincidence. Over the
20th century, revolutionaries from Iran, Libya, the
Irgun, Palestine and Saudi Arabia all claim to have
been inspired by The Big Fellow and his urban guerrilla
strategies. Qadhafi, Begin, Arafat, Khomeini, and
the House of Sa’ud: all ‘up the ‘ra’?
Simplifications
certainly, but worthwhile for those seeking to understand,
as both Kelly and McDonald show, how allegiances between
Celts and beyond the Levantine travel back as far
as legends of Moses and as recently as these pages.
(Any comments you might have I’d be happy to
receive privately via the webmaster.)
In future issues of The Blanket, I hope to
share with you my notes in more documented and sustained
fashion. But, as news keeps emerging in both the Irish
and Palestinian streets, the story never seems to
pause long enough for us to catch up with it. Yet
twists beckon us on. As I finished this, my son came
in, saw the title of Seoighe’s biography, and
wondered what I was reading on “Shabbat.”
Close to Sabhat. A thought akin to Leopold
Bloom’s indeed.
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