News & ViewsNo.16 Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 3 mins.)
Mary Lou went to London to speak at the rally after a huge Palestine solidarity march in that city. Nothing wrong with that and it could even be a good expression of solidarity — were it not for something she said there.
Mary Lou MacDonald is the President of Sinn Féin, a former revolutionary Irish Republican political party and which, since the last general election, has the most representatives in the Dublin parliament and is widely expected to lead the next coalition gombeen government of the Irish State.
A number of media reports, including SF’s own, quote Ms MacDonald, after rightly expressing condemnation of Israel and support for the Palestinians, referencing the Irish pacification process as a way forward for the Palestinians to peace and freedom. 1
However, the Palestinians have already experienced their own pacification process, back in the early 1990s, which culminated in the Oslo Accords. In exchange for local government and increased opportunities for corruption, the PLO recognised Israel and ended its armed struggle.
They also put the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees on the long finger or more accurately on the pipe-dream-never-never shelf. Although the secular Al Fatah was the dominant member of the PLO it was not long until the youth in particular replied with the Second Intifada against them and ‘Israel’.2
From then on the political stock of Al Fatah and its leader, Yasser Arafat, fell dramatically – the islamist Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in 2006, with the result that the latter rule Gaza but decided to avoid civil war and not claim its electoral victory and the PA HQ in the West Bank.
There, the PLO-Al Fatah continue to rule in corruption and in repression of dissent and it is widely accepted that most Palestinians view Al Fatah as enforcers for Israel. But the EU and USA funding continues to flow into the PA’s office which Al Fatah refuse to vacate.
There is no doubt that the corrupt PA leadership is reviled by most Palestinians in the West Bank and abroad or that most Palestinians reject the Oslo Accords and the two-state proposal, even if it were practicable, which it is not.
Didn’t she know? Didn’t Mary Lou know that the Palestinians had already tasted the pacification brew and spat it out? She should have, because PLO and ANC delegates at Sinn Féin Ard-Fheiseanna had both been of use in selling the pacification process to the party’s supporters.
It is possible she did not know – with some exceptions, ignorance of politics and revolutionary processes on the international plane is wide among her party, including at its management level. (After all, does that knowledge help your party get elected? No? Well, then!)
If she did know, what does it mean? It would mean that she was offering her offices and those of her party in selling pacification process Mark II to the Palestinians, i.e backing up the Biden administration’s wish to have the corrupt PA replace Hamas in managing a ruined Gaza.3
Nor would it be the first time SF participated in exporting the poison. Adams did so to the Basque national liberation movement (alongside Tony Blair’s representative) so that its leadership too collapsed its struggle (unlike the Provisionals without having any of its political prisoner freed).4
Mary Lou’s comments represent yet another disgraceful episode in her party’s post-Good Friday Agreement development, yet another milestone on their long road of betrayal and collusion.
But this time in backing the dismemberment of Palestine under neo-colonial Zionist rule in the imperialist-backed two-state “solution”, the poison is being pushed at a fraternal people in the struggle, one which the broad Irish people have overwhelmingly taken to their hearts.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1https://vote.sinnfein.ie/sinn-fein-president-addresses-march-for-palestine-in-london/ and https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41308273.html
2“The Second Uprising”, 2000-2005.
3https://www.reuters.com/world/us-wants-shakeup-palestinian-authority-run-gaza-after-hamas-2023-12-16/
4The EH Bildu party under Arnaldo Otegi, who promoted the pacification process in the Basque Country, is currently helping to prop up the Spanish social-democratic coalition government. Nearly 50 of the network of political prisoner support groups some years ago, in order to stay out of jail, pleaded guilty to false charges of “supporting terrorism” and EH Bildu no longer refers to “political prisoners” – just to “prisoners”.
SOURCES
https://vote.sinnfein.ie/sinn-fein-president-addresses-march-for-palestine-in-london/
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