In
the Irish Independent, 12.11.2004, news of
vandalism of Irish Jewish sites after the death
of Yassir Arafat appeared. On the front wall of
the Irish Jewish Museum on Dublin's South Circular
Road, a black swastika was daubed. At the National
War Memorial at Islandbridge, yellow paint was sprayed
on the cross, altar, and memorials. Slogans urging
'Free Iraq', ''Traitors' and ''Burn in Hell' were
written.
I
know that many readers of The Blanket disagree
with my own support for a two-state compromise.
Palestinian solidarity committees in Dublin and
Belfast receive coverage here frequently. I recall
doggerel in the letters section musing how while
the media cries at the incineration of Jewish youth
on buses, it fails to bemoan the shooting of Palestinian
children. My own contribution will not trumpet the
'whataboutery' so prevalent in Irish discourse as
each side tallies its casualties. My admission that
a mature reaction to the need for Israel and Palestine
to reach an agreement to each let the other live
does not equate with any more enthusiasm for the
Sharon's Likud than the regimes of its Arab and
Muslim neighbours. My acknowledgment remains a practical
one. The British suggested Uganda and Hitler's cronies
Madagascar, but these remain ludicrous. Nobody wanted
the Jews, if Ireland's own response to the refugee
crisis sixty years ago has shown. Now as then, those
who rally behind a single Palestinian expanse appears
to lose their voice as to where four million Jews
would go. Or if they would still be around to drive
out--this one more time. Perhaps the eagerness for
an Endtime transcends born-again Christians?
The
specious argument that Jews fared better in their
Sephardic rather than their Ashkenazic diaspora
depends upon the fact that both Christian and Muslim
powers needed to keep them (those whom they did
not 'convert' or crush in bursts of divine inspiration)
intact for business manipulation, convenient targets
of blame for economic downturns, and (as with the
Coptic Christians in Egypt), a ready source of heavy
taxation. Both the Koran and the Christian scriptures
offer many more fulminations against the 'stiffnecked
Jews' than they do professions of ecumenical harmony
with the first 'people of the Book'. Jewish militancy,
due to a definite disadvantage in pitting never
more than its few million against now billions,
may gain headlines but suffers from a certain historically
proven underdog mentality. Those trying to take
the Temple Mount were driven back by forces of that
Jewish state; those vying for an Islamic theocracy
have the support of not a few millenarian-deluded
evangelicals and Jewish right-wingers, but over
a billion believers. The condition of Palestine's
people has been manipulated by not only Israel but
by Arafat's cynicism and the Arab world's connivance.
Darfur, the Congo, and the Hmong have all recently
encountered genocide; lacking a (partially) European
oppressor, they languish without an iconic gun-toter
in a kafiyyeh or an Edward Said to publicise their
plights. Instead, the hatred of much of the world
focuses upon a scapegoat who its enemies want to
lash out into the wilderness once and for all. No
right of return. The Zionist entity's enemies only
need to be lucky in war once, you know. If you wonder
where the use of yellow, once again a chosen color
when scrawled by thugs, originated as a marker of
the condition of 'the Other' so fetishised by anti-Orientalists
today, look not to Nuremberg but to the stars required
in twelfth-century Baghdad.
In
this age of fundamentalism from both religious and
political extremes, we should take this time to,
as Sam Harris proposes in his recent anti-religious
polemic, The End of Faith (New York: Norton,
2004), remember what he suggests would put an end
to all such acts perpetrated in the name of a fanaticism
that harbours no room for compromise, tolerance,
or diversity. He calls for an end to belief-based,
unfounded rationalisations due to their very impossiblilty.
Harris avers that if each of us told the truth to
our children when they ask us questions, that this
would eliminate hatred and cruelty committed in
the name of surety, whether religiously or politically
fueled.
Of
course, the families of Palestinian suicide bombers
cherish their own revealed truth, for their sons
and daughters, husbands and wives believe in martyrdom,
happy to destroy the lives of their fellow innocents,
whether they follow Allah, Christ, Tanach, or a
secular creed. Paradise can be found not by being
killed but by killing. And, among the Israeli settlers
who bring down their own terrible reign of fire
as they insist on clinging to corners of a too small,
too crowded land, their own smug assertions--often
from those outside Israel--to claims three thousand
years old ring shallow against those who watch their
groves, farms, and homes bulldozed in the name of
a triumphalist state. The stalemate depresses me,
as does the news from Dublin. Neither side can justify
its brutality, yet both sides act out of their concern
for their children's future. Harris' utopian advice
does not offer answers any easier to find than those
within scripture--whether attributed to Marx or
Moses, Mohammed or Mark.
This
meditation, as I reflect upon one of the ultimate
acts of desecration, that of another's ancestral
burial site, revisits a perspective that many Irish
republicans have lost sympathy with over the past
thirty or forty years. The exceptions of future
Lord Mayor of Dublin, Bob Briscoe, who aided the
old IRA and then those fighting against the British
for the establishment of Israel, and the Dublin
and Cork Jewish families who harboured republicans
during their own fight for independence against
the same British a generation earlier, have given
way to a more insular and stereotypical reaction--a
legacy of first the Church and then anti-imperialist
tendencies combined with pro-insurgent PLO alliances
by many Irish--of the few Jews in Ireland as a dangerous
presence.
Extensive
evidence between swastika paraders and the Arabs
who entertained the German presence during WWII,
not to mention continued alliances between fascists
and the Muslim Brotherhood after the war up to current
far-right support for Muslim fundamentalists can
be found in Martin A. Lee's The Beast Reawakens
(Routledge, 1999). Irish antisemitism often merged
with nativists in their shared antagonism to international
financial control, and this blended in turn into
fringe Irish-Ireland ultra-nationalist movements
such as that joined by the father memorialised in
Hugo Hamilton's 2003 memoir The Speckled People.
The threat attributed to this 'alien' influence
far exceeded its actual size. At their peak in the
1940s, Ireland's Jews numbered around 4,000--noted
and quantified on the Nazi plans for the European
reich's own one-state option; now less than a thousand
remain.
The
Limerick pogrom fueled by Redemptorist preachers
in 1904, the invective hurled at Leopold Bloom by
the Citizen in Joyce's Ulysses (based on
GAA founder and noted nationalist Michael Cusack),
the antisemitic stances publicly taken by nearly
all entities and spokespeople for nationalists and
republicans during the 'Emergency'', and the sympathy
and ties--symbolic and practical--from the late
1960s embraced by republicans for Arab and Muslim
extremism all document this habitual tendency to
fight against suspected Jewish dominance. Those
who respond with the Loyalist support for the Mogen
David need not be alarmed. Their counter-reaction
is very small, their factions tried to buy from
Qaddafi in the 1970s too, and the impact of any
Ulster influence has been cancelled in turn by strong
antisemitic elements in the North that lurk among
reactionaries. Unfortunately, here left and right
again converge.
The
vandalism against the cultural centre of the past
Jewish community in Dublin, and at the memorial
for those who fought in two wars that set up the
conditions in which half of the Jews in the world
were murdered--for those who see in the long-demonised
caricature of 'the Jew' the epitome of capitalism,
colonialism, and conspiracy--must please those who
refuse to allow today's Jews even 1/300th of the
territory controlled by Muslims today. The majority
of Israel's Jews want a two-state solution. One
state, it has been recently reasserted on behalf
of the IRSP in The Blanket, is all the despised
Zionists deserve, and the sooner demographics work
to attain another Arab state in a Palestine where
the name of Israel returns to the history from which
1948 revived its contested dominion, the better.
The
contempt for Jewish lives comes, again, even to
their few remnants in an Ireland where Ballyhaunis
has nearly a thousand Muslims, where Belfast's mosque
attracts the masses vs. the city's only surviving
temple's couple of hundreds, and where halal (perhaps
packed in Mayo) meat can be far more widely purchased
than at Dublin's sole surviving kosher purveyor.
True to the xenophobic fear of the Jewish presence,
those who rally around its destruction must seek
out whatever evidence exists, scant as it may be
in Ireland. We call for a multicultural Ireland;
the lessons of prejudice and persecution endured
for centuries by its earliest non-Christian residents
remain often ignored.
The
wishes of the majority of Jews, outside and inside
Israel, for a two-state system cannot be tolerated
by those sure that their form of a deity tells them
where to live. The few settlers in Israel capture
much of the world's attention and scorn. Those who
have, in the name of Hamas--which means literally
'chaos'--have obliterated thousands and who have
in turn been hunted by Israeli weaponry, earn murals
and schoolchildren's praise, and their surviving
families rewards. Haven't Irish republicans learned
from this morally bankrupt 'freedom struggle' not
to condone and glorify the sacrifices of the young
of another generation in another statelet? Luckily
for Ireland, its own 'physical-force tradition'
and the use of 'state terrorism' both played out
their own wargames at least deprived of the biochemical
and nuclear technologies within reach of the Mid-East's
followers of scripture and manifesto.
If
I am accused of contradiction as an Irish republican
opposed to the GFA, this does not preclude my recognition
of those advocating their own Ulster Britishism
within a united Ireland. This cultural and political
tolerance, contrarily, would not occur within a
Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
The Jewish people would face a future within Palestine
that would treat them again as a minority, as they
were in Christian Europe and the Muslim empires.
Subjugated, they would be forced to flee or fold.
This is why a two-state answer becomes necessary,
for survival of Muslims, Jews, and the region's
dwindling Christian minority. Criticism of Israel
should not result in calls for its own elimination.
What's
left unsaid in all the carefully guarded, rhetorically
sanitised eulogies for Arafat, with whom $300 million
seems to have been spirited away from the Palestinian
nation he claimed to cherish, is how he never gave
up the aspiration that its surplus Jews would leave
or be driven out of his one-state Palestine. When
the swastika drips again from a Dublin wall, this
only shows how ineradicable is this desire to bring
back ethnic cleansing in the name of an ideology,
and how committed Arafat and his cheerleaders across
our fragile planet are to bringing about another
Judenrein--not never, but once, again.
P.S.
Read Dermot Keogh's Jews in Twentieth-Century
Ireland (Cork UP: 1998) for context. Visit http:www.jewishireland.com
for information on the Irish-Jewish community. Donate
to the Irish Jewish Museum, 3/4 Walworth Rd, Dublin
