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Last
Saturday morning, along with perhaps fifty others,
I stood at the front of Belfast City Hall in silent
rage hoping to draw much needed attention to the plight
of Palestinian civilians being mercilessly slaughtered
by Israeli forces. Someone in a Glasgow Rangers top
drove by and howled 'up the Jews.' We were not protesting
against Jews, but this little vignette reveals something
about tribal loyalties in Belfast. I waited on him
to shout 'up Linfield' just to round off his philosophical
reasoning.
Two
days earlier I had finished reading Hitler’s
Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. This
book, when it was first published in the 1990s, met
with a blaze of publicity which arrived with no scarcity
of controversy. Its author had accused German society
in general and not just the Nazis of being complicit
in the elimination of the Jews of Europe during the
Second World War. Whatever the alleged limitations
of Goldhagen’s explanatory framework, his account
was powerfully constructed. The mass murder of men,
women and children for no reason other than they were
Jews has no way of disguising itself, no mitigation.
A
particularly interesting feature of Goldhagen’s
book was his insistence that a pervasive eliminationist
perspective gripped Germany prior to actual widespread
physical elimination kicking in. At the same time,
he showed how German society quite often rebelled
against and occasioned a halt to certain Nazi policies
which it found unpalatable. Despite its fierce ideological
passion, the Nazi regime was depicted as being pragmatic
and constrained, doing what it could and not merely
what it wanted. This begs the question, would Goldhagen
identify similar phenomena at play in Israel today?
Modern
genocide is meticulously prepared by calculating planners,
and there is invariably forewarning. Jewish people
more than most should be able to recognise genocidal
inclinations when they see them. And if they do what
has been their response? It would seem there has been
more uproar in Israel in reaction to an article by
one of the country’s professors, Lev Grinberg,
than there is an outcry against the massacres being
carried out in the name of the county's citizens.
Grinberg said ‘unable to recover from the Holocaust
trauma and the insecurity it caused, the Jewish people,
the ultimate victim of genocide, is currently inflicting
a symbolic genocide upon the Palestinian people.’
Certainly,
what there is to be read about Gaza in recent weeks
bears a striking similarity to what Goldhagen wrote
of Poland under Nazi occupation. There was no milk
for babies, no means for women about to give birth
to get to hospital, no electricity, no water. It is
a place where even ambulances are shelled. Did the
Nazis target animals? The Israeli Army destroyed the
only zoo in Gaza. And what animals they didn’t
kill they stole as loot. The region was saturated
with tanks, bulldozers, planes and helicopters. Contrast
this mechanised phalanx with the donkey carts used
by Palestinians to escape the terror.
The
passion for murdering Palestinian children which seems
to pervade Israeli military personnel was all too
evident. When Goldhagen details how one Nazi killer
would lift Jewish infants off the ground by their
hair, hold them aloft and then put a bullet through
their brains, before dropping them into a mass grave,
all escape routes open to revulsion are, hopefully,
immediately closed off within our minds. Are we supposed
to employ the alibi of context and feel less revolted
by the actions of Israeli military child slayers?
They murdered Rawan Mohammed Said Abu Ziad just short
of her fifth birthday; her crime – going to the
shop to buy sweets at 10 in the morning. Then 14 year
old Asma Mughayar, her life snuffed out by an Israeli
sniper as she brought in clothes from the roof of
her home. Ahmed, her brother and two years younger,
murdered while feeding his birds.
There
was a certain eerie resemblance about the events taking
place in Gaza and those that this country witnessed
just over thirty years ago. Thousands of people taking
to the streets carrying bottles of milk and water
for the children in the Tal Al Sultan district in
Rafah which was the first area to be attacked by the
marauding Israelis, immediately invites a comparison
with the Falls Curfew of July 1970. It ended when
the women and children of West Belfast marched on
the Lower Falls carrying milk, water and food. The
purpose of the relief march by Palestinians was to
relieve the siege and ask the world to halt the slaughter
and starvation that was taking place in Gaza. It never
reached its destination because Israel used Bloody
Sunday tactics to kill the demonstrators including
children. Whereas British paratroopers murdered innocent
Irish from the ground, the Israelis murdered defenceless
Palestinians from the skies. Perhaps this explains
why support for the Palestinian cause in Ireland comes
in the main from the nationalist community. People
there experienced both relief marches to break sieges
and the massacre of civilians taking part in demonstrations
to protest state violence. Unionists applauded the
oppressors and invariably called for more of the same.
How
people in Gaza sustain their faith in anything that
exalts life is one of the modern wonders of our world.
As puzzling, how a body of people with an acute sense
of its own history could produce and perfect a murder
machine such as the Israeli Army Einsatzgruppen. Kofi
Annan may look at these paradoxes and then wax ethical
before informing the Israeli government that its action
is inhumane. But as Peter Murtagh, writing in the
Irish Times asserts, Annan’s United Nations is
an organisation ‘about which Israel has shown
it doesn't give two hoots.’ And why should it?
The power behind the UN throne, the United States,
backs Israel and finances its war on Palestinian children.
After Rwanda where the UN pulled its troops out and
allowed genocide to sweep the country, Israel knows
it has nothing to fear.
And
when the UN refuses to strike fear in Israel and curb
its murderous wrath, Palestinians will do it themselves.
They will do it in crowded cafes and packed buses;
they will do it at checkpoints and in settlements.
Those of us who sought a just outcome will recoil
in despair at the resort to such nihilistic activity.
Others content to stay mute while Israel dished it
out will find that their wails of disapproval will
not weigh in the slightest in the deliberations of
those who kiss their families good bye, strap a bomb
to their bodies and walk off to do what was done to
them.
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