Historian Benny Morris on the Irish and Gaza – How Ireland became Europe’s most anti-Israel island:
Driving around Ireland earlier this month my wife Leah and I saw here and there Palestinian flags hanging from windows or plastered across hedges in remote farmhouses. In Dublin, with its relatively large student and (growing) Muslim populations, one might have expected “Ceasefire Now” signs draped across multi-story buildings, echoing Hamas’s demand that Israel halt its protracted anti-terrorist counter-offensive in Gaza. But in villages like Terryglass off the N52 on the road to Galway?
The support for the Palestinians, today represented by the Hamas, is now the taste of the month, the fashion among Western Europe’s mainly ignorant young, who know nothing about the Israel-Palestine conflict beyond the daily and nightly images, many of them fake, broadcast on TV screens of dead and dying children, images efficiently engineered by the Hamas’s propaganda machine; know nothing of, and care even less about, the consistent Palestinian rejection of all compromise proposals by the international community and, periodically, by the Zionist leaders these past hundred years; and know nothing of, or care about, the constant Palestinian resort to terrorism, culminating in the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which some 1,200 Israelis (a few of them Arab Israelis) were killed and 250 (mostly civilians, aged six months to 89 years old) taken hostage.
He goes on to cite a number of examples from Irish media…
The Irish Independent of 23 July sported two long articles in a two-page spread, accompanied by photographs depicting Palestinian hunger and death, one by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Dawoud Abu Alkas and the other by Nedal Hamdouna (all Arab names and, presumably, Palestinians). The first article was titled “Six-week-old boy among 15 people to die of Starvation in Recent Days”; the second, “Skeletons Marching to Death – Palestinians Face Hunger and Bullets as Israel Steamrolls into Gaza.”
Hamdouna’s opened her article with a striking quote by “Younis,” a 32-year-old Gazan father of four: “The gunfire was so intense that it was like they were aiming to drink our blood.” A curious phrase, given that I have seen no reports of anyone drinking anyone’s blood in Gaza these past twenty months of combat – but, deliberately or not, it echoes the Medieval antisemitic trope about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children and maybe the Gazans have been so indoctrinated that they believe Jews routinely do this.
That day, the Independent also ran two relevant letters to the editor. One, by Declan Foley from Melbourne, Australia, read: “The abhorrent and continuing inhumanity to the people of Gaza cannot be described as anything other than genocide.” It can, but I won’t go into this here. But the letter fails to note that “the people of Gaza” – and, incidentally, the Arab population of the West Bank – overwhelmingly endorsed the Hamas onslaught on Israel on 7 October 2023 (while, of course, denying the mass rape, mass executions, decapitations, etc. that accompanied it). Foley laments “the killing [by the IDF] of innocent people – God’s children” and goes on to decry the “antisemitism” charge voiced by Israel’s defenders by saying, in effect, that Arabs, “Phoenicians” and “Akkadians” are also “semites,” so they can’t be accused of antisemitism.
Yes, we've heard that one before.
The flood of reportage on Gaza’s suffering in the Irish press appears to stake the moral high ground and Irish righteousness. I wonder whether these newspapers devoted a hundredth of their attention to the world’s other humanitarian crises during the past decades, especially crises in which Muslims slaughtered fellow Muslims actually in their hundreds of thousands.
See here for more on antisemitism in Ireland, including the Limerick Pogrom of 1904.
Mick Hartley 