Recently an Irish Palestine solidarity organisation posted a report that 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed in 23 months, an average higher than one child per hour.1 “Have been killed”? Traffic accidents? Unknown causes?
They were killed by Israel, isn’t that the case? Then why not bloody say so! They were murdered by a genocidal European Zionist settler colony called Israel and itcontinues to murder them, along with their older siblings, parents, extended families and neighbours.
We can find different ways to present the facts of the ongoing genocide in order to try to shock but it does not alter the fundamental and well-known truth that a genocide is being committed before our eyes. Why is this continuing despite what everyone knows? Well, because it can!
Israel will continue to do what it does because it can and the cost of doing it is not high enough, as Ali Abunimah said three months ago.2 Or to turn that a little, the Irish Government will continue doing what it does in collusion with the genocide because the cost of doing so is not high enough.
The EU is the biggest importer of Israeli goods and the Irish state is the highest importer in the EU, also the 2nd single biggest Israeli goods importer in the world. And still the weapons of genocide fly through our skies. The Irish Government continues collusion because the cost to them is low.
Marches and pickets show solidarity towards a beleaguered people suffering genocide and in that they are very important. They also show us our strength in numbers. But they do not cost our government much. Not even enough to really stop the Central Bank assisting genocide.
In England, Palestine Action raised the cost of collusion in genocide by targeting the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems in Bristol. Activists were arrested but they kept doing it. This Zionist death company has now closed its targeted Bristol factory.
While this was happening, the British Government, in support of Elbit and others and in collusion with the genocide of Palestinians, not only arrested and charged Palestine Action people but designated the organisation as ‘terrorist’ and any supporters as people supporting ‘terrorism’.
People defied that designation and were arrested for holding a placard saying they were opposed to genocide and supported Palestine Action.
Placards in Westminster August 2025 (Photo credit: Mike Kemp In Pictures/ Getty Images)
Following that action and repression, 1,500 gathered in London on Saturday 6th September 2025 to continue that solidarity and to defeat the attack on civil liberties. By midnight, the last arrest recorded by the police for the day, they had arrested nearly 390 people.
The ‘crime’ of nearly all was to display placards stating “I am opposed to genocide. I support Palestine Action.” The police were unable to arrest them all as it took them 11 hours to arrest the 390. The organisers continued the action in London and other parts of the UK.3
More recently there have been other such acts of public defiance, organised by the Save Our Juries campaigning group and the numbers now arrested on charges of “assisting terrorism” (sic) have reached at least 2,269.
In addition, eighteen arrested Palestine Action activists were jailed, refused bail with some embarking on hunger strike4 of whom two were recently admitted to hospital.
The closure of Elbit Systems, the mass defiance of the terrorist categorisation of Palestine Action and the prison hunger strikes are raising the cost of supporting genocide of Palestinians and criminalising Palestine solidarity action, hitting collusion where it hurts, politically and practically.
We in Ireland are the most-pro-Palestine country in Europe … but we are not doing that.
We are not raising the cost high and despite that being clear to us and to our political and solidarity organisations and trade unions, made clear well over a year ago, we are still not doing it. Until we raise the cost high enough to make them stop, our government will continue its collusion.
And until the external cost is raised high enough to make them stop, Israel will continue its ethnic cleansing and genocide. But marchers attempting to blockade Dublin Port in early October were pepper-sprayed without warning and savagely batoned, with some arrested.
Gathering outside Dublin courthouse in solidarity with two Palestine solidarity activists assaulted and charged by Gardaí during early October attempt to blockade Dublin Port (Photo: R. Breeze).
A trio of activists were arrested in May for invading Shannon Airport to protest the ‘neutral’ Irish State’s collusion with US military flights through there4 and last weekend another three young people were arrested for a similar action.
Activists in Ireland are slowly starting to raise the cost of collusion for the State. However, they are not supported by the leadership of the mass movement which, while aware its tactics are not forcing the Government to end its collusion, nevertheless persists solely in repeating them.
End. Note: If you found this article of interest, why not register with Rebel Breeze for free, so that you will be notified by email of subsequent articles. You can de-register any time you wish.
2Director of the Electronic Intifada, speaking on 29 August at a public meeting organised by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Dublin and hosted by the FÓRSA trade union. The other guest speaker was Abubaker Abed from Gaza, now studying in Ireland after being a journalist for the EI and threatened with assassination by Zionists.
3The Six Counties are at the moment in the UK but the British colonial gendarmerie went very lightly there in dealing with Palestine Action supporters – the rulers do not wish do have Palestine activists as political prisoners while they contain also Irish Republican prisoners.
(Reformatted entire for publishing in Rebel Breeze from article of same title in his Substack
(Reading time: 6 mins.)
The saga of the Occupied Territories Bill (OTB) has been dragging on for years now. It was first put forward by Senator Frances Black in 2018 and was approved by both houses of the Oireachtas (parliament) but never enacted.
The Irish capitalist class that is resolutely on the side of the Israelis, despite the illusions of many and the odd PR stunt, dragged its heels on the issue, even boasting that it had effectively blocked it.
Simon Coveney who was the Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time said during a visit to the Zionist state in 2019 that:
We don’t believe that it is legally sound because trade issues are EU competence as opposed to national competence in Ireland. And because we don’t believe it’s legally sound we have effectively blocked the legislation from moving through parliament as it normally would…
It’s essentially frozen in the process and it isn’t making progress. And I don’t expect that it will make progress, either, unless the government supports it, and the government won’t be supporting it.1
A demonstration outside Leinster House, parliament of the Irish State recently. (Image chosen and sourced: by RBreeze on line)
This came as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Ireland is not an independent capitalist state; it is what Marxists term a neo-colony with 88% of all corporate tax paid by foreign companies and just three companies accounting for 38% of all corporate tax.
Foreign corporate tax in turn represents 29% of the total tax take in the country.2 It is entirely dependent on the US and also the British state.
Many months prior to Coveney’s boast, the then Taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar had written a grovelling letter to Joe Biden to apologise for the behaviour of Irish politicians who had voted for the bill. In it he stated:
The Government has consistently and strongly opposed the Bill on both political and legal grounds and will continue to do so… Can I take the opportunity to reiterate my deep appreciation for the strong bonds of friendship between Ireland and the US, including our growing and mutually economic ties.3
There is no world in which the Irish state will stand up to the US. It won’t stop US planes shipping arms to Israel through Shannon Airport, just like it allowed the US to use the airport during the Iraq war.
Putting the OTB to parliament was not a bad idea, believing that is how we would achieve something concrete was.
They are now attempting to water it down further and exclude services from its remit, limiting it to only goods. (Note: at the time this article was written campaigners were still fighting an attempt to limit the bill in that way – Rebel Breeze)
IBEC (the Irish Business and Economic Confederation) came out with a statement that it would harm the Irish economy to enact the bill, whilst paradoxically accepting that trade in goods with Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank only amounted to €240,000.4
On the radio the Government reminded us that we are a trading nation, as if any of us thought that everything we buy in the country was made here and we exported nothing.
The reason they can make these statements of course, is because of the limited scope of the bill itself and the intentions of those pushing for its enactment.
The Irish government was at great pains to say that it would only apply to the territories occupied in 1967 and not to Israel itself i.e. not to the territories occupied in 1948 during the Nakba and the foundation of the Zionist state.
If you accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel or if you are one of those liberals still prattling on about a Two State Solution then all of this makes sense. It could have even been argued when it was first proposed that it was a stepping stone to a wider boycott of Israel, not that any of them said that.
For those who believe in the two-state solution (sic) the map shows what’s available for a Palestinian State (sic). (Image chosen and sourced: by RBreeze on line)
Events have overtaken our liberal friends and they shudder at the consequences. There is no longer any case to be made for a bill that limits business dealings with modern Zionist invasions of the West Bank.
Francesca Albanese in her recent report made it abundantly clear that many companies doing business with Israel are profiting from or contributing to the genocide.5 Now is not that time for half measures. Israel, just like the Nazis is carrying out a genocide.
Asking for a boycott of goods from the Warsaw Ghetto, rather than Nazi Germany would have seemed stupid at the time and actual calls for a boycott of the Nazis were portrayed as anti-German.
Some Jewish organisations opposed the boycott and the US government response to violence against German Jews was that the
U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued a mild statement to the American ambassador to Berlin complaining that “unfortunate incidents have indeed occurred and the whole world joins in regretting them.” He expressed his personal belief, however, that the reports of anti-Jewish violence were probably exaggerated.6
We know how this ended. The Nazis in the face of the timorous and timid response from the US and other western powers would eventually enclose Jews in ghettos, then camps and then push six million of them through the ovens.
Now is not the time to repeat history but to be bold and decisive. Now it is equally ridiculous to meekly petition, those who grovelled to Genocide Joe in 2019, to restrict goods from the West Bank.
In the midst of a genocide there is only one option on the table: a complete and total severance of all trade, military and diplomatic ties with Israel. There are no “settlements” without the Nazis in Tel Aviv, without the Israeli military, without the companies that keep Israel going.
A Banner on the IPSC National March 19th April 2025 in Dublin, appearing to show a believed organic connection between the enacting of the OTB and ending the Zionist genocide in Palestine. (Image sourced and chosen: R.Breeze)
Total isolation of the entire regime is needed. Not an orange, not a single electronic component, not a kilobyte of software. Such isolation should continue not just till the acts of genocide have ceased.
They will cease when the repugnant reality that Israel has run out of Palestinians to murder comes to pass.
Israel should be isolated until all those involved have been tried, had all their assets confiscated, given lengthy prison sentences or hung until dead, depending on the actual degree of participation.
This is not an outrageous proposal, it is what was theoretically done at Nuremberg, though many of the businessmen were given back their assets after a number of years and only a handful of Nazis got the actual death penalty and most never saw the inside of a jail.
No such leniency should be shown to the Zionists.
Those campaigning on the OTB will never make such a call. They will continue to petition the government. They do have another weapon to hand in fighting the Nazis in Tel Aviv, but they won’t call for that either.
The Irish Council of Trade Unions denounced the government’s handling of the OTB and called on the Oireachtas to reject the “business lobby scaremongering” and to pass the OTB.7
Of course, the unions don’t need to persuade the Zionists who dominate the coalition parties, they could just have told their members in 2018 to refuse to handle all products coming from the Occupied Territories, or indeed the entire Zionist state and that would have settled it.
They would have to organise that and back all their members who engaged in such boycotts. But under no circumstances will the fat cat bureaucrats ever confront the government over this issue.
If they are not prepared to fight for decent wages, a proper health system, public housing etc, all of which directly affect their members, less still will they fight for Palestinians. They are traitors to their class and also betrayers of the Palestinian people, despite all their lofty statements.
The OTB was a nice propaganda measure whose time has passed. It is, in the midst of a genocide, no longer fit for purpose, neither is a solidarity movement which limits itself to half measures. We need to be bolder.
The national demonstration called by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign for 31st August began at the Garden of Remembrance and, traversing the city’s main boulevard, crossed the river to rally across from Leinster House, the Irish Parliament.
Having a weekly Saturday commitment until 1.30 and the IPSC march start advertised for 1pm, I had to run to catch it up as it marched away up O’Connell Street. I hurried alongside it to try to reach the front but failed to do so before I had to stop and fly the flag with comrades.
Having to run to catch up with the demonstration after an earlier weekly commitment. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Looking back southward from O’Connell Bridge I could see the march stretching back along part of O’Connell Street while ahead I could see the front of the march winding along the outside of the Trinity College entrance.
Since early October last year, the IPSC and others have organised Palestine solidarity marches at least every second week through different parts of the city, mostly to Government offices and the Parliament. Similar events have also taken place across the land.
There have also been pickets of Zionist-friendly businesses and motorway bridge flag and banner drops, weekly roadside pickets in addition to building occupations and university protest/solidarity encampments.
This community solidarity banner may be seen every Thursday evening in four different areas of North Dublin (but for some reason the IPSC does not include it in its weekly list of events). (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Meanwhile, in Palestine the Zionist genocide grinds on unabated through bombing, ground attack, starvation and disease, along with torture of prisoners, destruction of infrastructure, including buildings, while the Resistance fights back with their missile launchers, guns and explosives.
While the fluid tactics of the Resistance are appropriate to the genocidal and well-armoured enemy, we must ask ourselves whether ours are too. Marches are important in showing numbers and in increasing the feeling of wider participation among individuals and small groups of friends.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)(Photo: D.Breatnach)
However the demonstrations are not moving the Government, much less the State, not even to bring forward the agreed Occupied Territories Bill, much less keeping Irish state airspace free of genocidal collusion.
Targeted direct action seems more likely to exert the necessary pressure, as was the case with Axa Insurance, where regular pickets and some occupations resulted in its divestment from ‘Israeli’ banks. University protest encampments also scored some successes.
But where are their trade unions? (Photo: D.Breatnach)But where are their trade unions? (Photo: D.Breatnach)
There are other possibly suitable targets of protest in terms of assistance to the Resistance. Is the Irish Red Cross fulfilling its duty in seeking access to Palestinian prisoners being tortured and starved? Are ‘Israeli’ imports being blocked?
Quite possibly other kinds of organisation are necessary to discuss, plan and lead these kinds of processes and indeed it was such sprung-up organisations that led those direct action events. Perhaps it is wrong to expect and organisation like the IPSC to lead them.
But is it wrong to think that the IPSC should advertise or at the very least tolerate such actions and not discourage them? Or even more, not warn people off from supporting such groups?
(Photo: D.Breatnach) (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Watching IPSC stewards shepherding people to clear the Molesworth Street from Dawson Street to the junction, even when they are packed solid from there to the rally across the road from Leinster House sometimes looks as though they see themselves as policing the march — and the movement.
Those who want that road cleared are the police but a) that is their concern and b) the demonstration is on the road which it has a right to be and traffic will just have to avoid it.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)(Photo: D.Breatnach)
We don’t have to work against one another. If the IPSC doesn’t want to lead some kinds of actions, they don’t have to. And if others want to do things the IPSC doesn’t, then they can. But no-one has the right to be the police within the movement, much less restrict development.
End.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)Aerial view of the march crossing O’Connell Bridge and the numbers all the way back to the Garden of Remembrance. (Photo sourced: IPSC Facebook)
There is a belief around that the reason that Israel is being supported by the US and getting away with genocide as far as the Western powers are concerned, is because the Palestinians are dark-skinned and that it wouldn’t happen to ‘whites’.
Those who believe that are mistaken: it would and it did. It is only marginally about skin colour but rather about where the Palestinians are.
Palestine sits in a strategic spot in the heart of the Middle East, with borders to Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, with the Red Sea to the South-east and a Mediterranean coastline to the west, connecting by sea to Europe, Africa and Asia. That made it important to old and to new empires.
The historic land known as “Palestine” in the 19th and early 20th Century was that which up until 1917 was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, now occupied by the zionist Israeli State and those areas recognised as Palestinian by international law including Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
After WWI, during which the Ottoman Empire, along with Germany had been on the losing side, in the divvying up of the colonial spoils, Palestine (occupied by the British since 1917) was given by the League of Nations in 1922 to one of the War’s victors, the UK.
The UK began to invite Ashkenazi Jews to settle there as part of a European colonial and partly anti-semitic1 project. Of course in those days “semitic” was understood to apply to the Arabs as well as to the Jews and the latter were often referred to by Europeans as “oriental”.
The British, as is the wont of colonisers in general and of them in particular, played the settlers off against the Arab majority.
And of course broke promises about restricting the number of settlers. But after WWII, a high influx of Holocaust survivors organised by Zionists began to head for Palestine and the British, fearing the destabilisation of their colony, tried to prevent unapproved Jews from landing.
The zionist terrorist militias (Irgun, Haganah, Stern Gang) began to attack the British colonial forces and Arab villages. In July 1946, Zionist group Irgun killed 91 people and injured 46 in an explosion at the King David Hotel, location of the British administrative and occupation army HQ.
Damage to the King David Hotel after bomb planted by Zionist terrorist group Irgun in 1946. (Photo sourced: Wikipedia)
The British pulled out in 1947, reneging on all their promises to the native Palestinians. The Zionists began their genocidal settler project with threats to and massacres of Palestinians and the expulsion of 700,000, mostly Muslims — and declared a Jewish State in 1948.
Thereafter the Israeli State began a program of repression and oppression of Palestinians and of colonial expansion. Naturally, this project required ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians and aggression against Israel’s neighbours.
The USA and the USSR quickly recognised the Zionist State, the USA increasingly funding the state and supplying it with weapons while the USSR permitted its Ashkenazi Jewish citizens to emigrate to the settler colony.
In October 1956, eight years after the founding of the Zionist state, in response to Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the Israeli air force attacked Egyptian airfields without warning while British and French Army and Naval forces invaded the country.
The invaders were forced to retreat and the USA admonished France and the UK for, in effect, not realising that the USA and not the old European colonial powers was now the boss of most of the world.
The zionist lobby (both Jewish and Christian) in the USA is often blamed for that imperialist state’s continual support for Israel’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinians.
But the US imperialists have their own reasons for supporting the only state in the Middle East that is susceptible to neither internal national liberation struggle or muslim fundamentalist uprising. It gives the US a safe foothold and also a guard dog to watch the neighbours (e.g Syria and Iran).
RACISM
The Nazis had a racist view of the Ashkenazi Jews, who were mostly fair-skinned. But they also considered the Slavic people (the majority European and light-skinned) as “untermenschen” (i.e ‘subhuman’). It’s estimated they killed at least 1.9 million Polish non-Jewish civilians.2
The Nazis also murdered millions of Russian non-Jewish civilians in genocidal ethnic cleansing of territory, in labour concentration camps, near sensitive battle formations and in reprisals for partisan resistance.
Fair-skinned and even blonde children victims of Nazi racism and genocide. (Source: New Zealand Holocaust Centre “Button project”)
The South African settler racist regime discriminated against all non-European people, in their official categories of “Native”, “Coloured” (mixed race) and “Asian” (mostly from the Indian sub-continent). Nevertheless, they also made some groups “honorary whites”.3
Racism isn’t primarily about skin colour anyway: It is a discriminatory social ideology based on ethnicity and the marker for ‘difference’ can be ‘racial’, national or religious. The Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland in the mid-12th Century racialised the Irish, who were generally fair-skinned.4
The rational reason behind the racism is to unite in opposition to the targeted groups, whether in order to wage war against them or so as to repress their resistance as slaves or as occupied people. The racists colonise their own minds and attempt to colonise the minds of their targets also.
Not quite two centuries after the initial invasion and part-occupation of Ireland, the British-based Anglo-Normans, now describing themselves as “English”, criticised most of their people settled in Ireland for ‘going native’ and passed laws against their social acclimatisation.
The Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 attempted to prevent “the degenerate English” from speaking Irish, adopting Irish customs and laws, dressing in Irish style, patronising Irish cultural performance, intermarrying with the Irish and becoming “more Irish than the Irish themselves.”
The main purpose for the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland had been occupation by feudal lords to gather rents from the natives but it soon became a question of replacing the natives with settlers. This was not always successful since the Irish people and many clan chiefs resisted.
The cities became fortified centres of colonial occupation, administration and garrison, the colonial city of Dublin known as “the Pale” in reference to the original earthworks surmounted by a palisade; hence “beyond the Pale” signified the native Irish and barbarism to the colonists.
The earlier occupation settlements were in or around fortified constructions, castles and ‘keeps’. Later, town and villages were established with a central square or diamond, i.e in a good defensive shape and entry by natives forbidden. Settler churches were also built as defensive structures5.
Pseudo-scientific racism from white Anglo-Saxon Harper’s Weekly magazine 1899 in the USA. (Sourced: Nothing But the Same Old Story, Liz Curtis).
With the creation of Irish Republican Brotherhood (or the ‘Fenians’) in the 19th Century and their activities in Ireland, the USA and in Britain, the British elite combined anti-Irish racism with pseudo-evolutionary ‘science’ representing the Irish as not quite human or childlike – but violent.
Cartoons in some British popular periodicals, in particular Punch, Fun, Judy(and Puck in the USA) represented the Fenians as monsters, in particular ape-like creatures and racist jibes and ‘humour’ were popularised, a practice which sprouted new variants during the recent 30 Years War.
Updated British anti-Irish racism by cartoonist Cummings, Daily Express, London, 12 August 1970, depicting the colonial British Army as “keeping the peace” between the colonised Catholic/ Nationalist population and the British Loyalists. (Sourced: CAIN)
ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE
All European settler projects imply ethnic cleansing accompanied by genocide to one degree or another: in Africa, Latin America, North America, Australia, New Zealand … but this was practiced by a European power against a European nation also: Ireland.
The British elite used atrocity stories from the 1641 uprising of the Irish to justify and encourage the genocide by Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland in 1649. Through ethnic cleansing, battle and starvation, Cromwell killed nearing 40% of the Irish population.6
British atrocity propaganda image about the Irish uprising of 1641 to justify Cromwell’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, genocide and enslavement. (Sourced: online).
These figures do not include those he had sent to British colonies in the Americas as slaves.7
The Great Hunger (1845-1848) wiped out, through starvation, well over 2 million of the Irish population of around 8 million and during that and the following decade, probably another 2 million emigrated (many of those too dying on the way or on arrival8).
Monument on the Liffey quays in Dublin to the Great Hunger (1845-1852) genocide of the Irish by the British ruling class. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
DOES IT MATTER WHETHER IT’S DRIVEN BY RACISM OR BY COLONIAL EXPANSION?
Yes, it does. The difference between the two does not change the situation of the Palestinians but it does affect how the genocide may be understood and what the targets of our actions may be.
Liberals would probably prefer the issue to be primarily of racism. If that were the source of the problem we could still be pushing for economic and isolation pressure as was the focus with the anti-apartheid campaign against the South African racist regime.
That is being done now and that’s fine. But the assumption would be that with enough pressure, Israel would be obliged to change its ways and the US leaders would feel pressured to advise it to end its racist discrimination (as they did in the case of white South Africa).
But if the project is colonial expansion, presupposing ethnic clearing and genocide, it is a different situation completely.
No arguing with Israeli zionists, boycott or isolation culturally and in sport is going to change that or get ‘liberal’ Zionism to act against their Right; as Finkelstein recently pointed out, the Nakba and all the settler expansions were carried out under ruling periods of the ‘Left’ side of zionism.
Also, if this settler expansion (or supporting such at least) is part of a US imperialism project, then no amount of campaigning to expose the behaviour of the Zionists is going to be effective in persuading the ruling class of the USA to apply corrective pressure to the zionist regime.
The fact that the basic source of the problem is zionist settler expansion means that genocide and ethnic cleansing will continue as long as the Israeli zionist state exists. And US and Western imperialism will continue to support that as long as they believe it benefits their regional interests.
This makes it clear that the long-term solutions can only consist of ending the zionist project or the ending of imperialism which supports it. The former is of course a smaller objective but at the moment western imperialism is energetically defending the zionists.
A whole neighbourhood in Gaza wiped out by Israeli bombardment months ago (Photo cred: WAFA agency)
It is doings so politically and culturally, with armaments, also with propaganda from its mass media, by repression of its own populations where these are protesting in solidarity with the Palestinians – and in the course of that it is endangering all its facades of justice and objectivity.
In the longer term that is probably a good thing, helping to create the subjective conditions for the overthrow of imperialism and monopoly capitalism.
But we need to help that process along in our own struggles while also making their continued support for zionist genocide of Palestinians as costly for them as we possibly can. While we act in solidarity with the Palestinians we are acting also against our own immediate enemies.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1This may surprise some but the British ruling class was deeply anti-semitic even before Shakespeare wrote his Merchant of Venice script. Not only that, but Balfour, infamous for his eponymous Declaration that Palestine was suitable for Jewish settlement, was personally strongly anti-semitic (I am thankful to Ali Abunimah for pointing that out in one of the youtube discussions of the Electronic Intifada)
4I keep telling people struggling against colonialism and imperialism that they should study Irish history. It’s practically all there: racism, invasion, division, settlers, plantations and ethnic cleansing, recruitment of native enforcers, undermining of native culture, religious oppression, genocide (twice), partition, recruitment of sections of the elite and nationalist political parties.
5Though this also had a history in medieval Europe. The administrators of the Ulster Plantation at the start of the 17th Century allocating grants of land specified that those who got parcels of land had to be English-speaking, be Protestant, build defensive structures and not employ Catholics.
7This has become something of a controversy, with racists of Irish diaspora background claiming parity with the slavery experience of Africans in the southern USA and some anti-racists denying it, saying the Irish were indentured servants. Both are mistaken: Irish were sent in slavery by Cromwell but subsequent Irish were sent in indentured servitude which, bad as it is, is not chattel slavery and the historical slavery period of the Irish in the USA was nowhere near as long as it was for the Africans.
8Over 3,000 are buried on Grosse Isle alone, an island in the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada.
(1. Letter in reply to claims that Sinn Fein has betrayed the Palestinians; 2) Reply by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh)
Greetings Comrades,
I am a former member of Sinn Féin who still lives in a Republican and working-class community. I see a lot of point to your views on Sinn Féin and the peace process. But I think you hit the wrong note in your article: Sinn Féin, the IRA and the betrayal of the Palestinians by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh.
The idea that: “Sinn Féin prefers a hooley, even some furtive carnal or political romance in the halls of power rather than show their solidarity with the Palestinians. They are in love with power, money and the screams from Gaza make them uncomfortable.”
Is not true, is offensive and will put off the people who might otherwise listen to you. The leaders put forward a political analysis and the members accept it. If you want to oppose this, kick the ball and not the player.
Yours, Owen
Reply
Thinking of Sinn Féin, trying not to think of Palestine
Gearóid Ó Loingsigh
22 February 2024
Biden poses for a selfie with Gerry Adams.
To my surprise I have received some feedback from a Republican on my article Sinn Féin, the IRA and the betrayal of the Palestinians, published on the Socialist Democracy site and elsewhere in which I took issue with Sinn Féin’s abominable decision.
Which was to fly to Washington to meet and greet Joe Biden, a man whose hands drip with Palestinian blood. Though given the scale of the genocide, dripping with blood is an understatement as Palestinian blood gushes off his hands, like a burst oil well.
There were a number of points made, some of them more important than the others. One, was my insinuation that corruption was at the heart of the decision, that Sinn Féin were not going to give up on a hooley and a lavish shindig paid for by others.
My comment on the matter was a bit facetious in part. I did describe the event as a hooley, and it is fair to say that it is a lot more than that, though the drunken shenanigans are a part of the festivities and the informal deals to be struck.
Colum Eastwood from the SDLP stated that “I could not rub shoulders, drink Guinness and have the craic while the horrifying impacts of the brutal war in Gaza continue”(1).
I had stated that “Sinn Féin prefers a hooley, even some furtive carnal or political romance in the halls of power rather than show their solidarity with the Palestinians. They are in love with power, money and the screams from Gaza make them uncomfortable.”
There is a part of those sentences that is obviously tongue in cheek. I don’t actually believe that Mary Lou will be trying to get her leg over anyone at the White House, though I wouldn’t discount any of the lower ranking minions on the junket trying their hand.
The furtive political romance was a more serious comment.
St Patrick’s Day at the White House is one for showcasing Ireland, not just in the paddywhackery sense of the word, but it is where informal and formal discussions can take place on economic policy, foreign policy and other matters.
Not for nothing that Varadkar used last year’s event to shore up his support for the NATO proxy war in Ukraine with a false historical narrative about US government support for Irish freedom.(2) The Government’s own propaganda about its importance actually says as much.
Sinn Féin have various corrupt reasons for going. I should point that there are various forms of corruption, there is the type of corruption of brown paper envelopes from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politicians seeking or giving favours.
There is another type of corruption, which is that where politicians go along with policies they know to be wrong, immoral, damaging or dangerous for reasons of political expediency, as part of an overall strategy.
Or because money will be legally made by the chosen few as a result of these decisions. Current government policies around vulture funds, the bank bailout (for which Sinn Féin also voted), privatization of the health industry etc., are examples of this type of corruption.
I have no doubt that Sinn Féin members are involved in the brown paper envelope type of corruption, the building industry still reeks of Republican involvement, though they have a long way to go yet to outdo Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
But it is more the latter type of corruption that is important.
Two and a half years ago, Pearse Doherty stated that “big business and investors know Sinn Féin won’t go after them”(3). The issue has come up again recently with Sinn Féin seeking to assure US companies that the corporate tax rate is safe with them.
The new head of the Industrial Development Authority Fergal O’ Rourke, in January this year described Sinn Féin as being on an outreach programme to reassure US companies.(4) He was fulsome in his praise for Sinn Féin and he wasn’t the only one.
Henry Goddard from Deloitte Ireland claimed that Sinn Féin had done a good job in calming down international investors by reaching out to them, by meeting with them and even Mary Lou McDonald visiting Silicon Valley was cited as an example.
He stated “Fair play to Sinn Féin, they went out to the US, they engaged, said all the right things and provided a lot of confidence. They now need to follow through on that.”(5)
They are going to Washington to follow through, to reassure not only US businesses but the Irish capitalist class that the economy will be in safe hands with them and those business leaders from IBEC, various companies like PwC and others who have praised Sinn Féin are not mistaken.
Sinn Féin has stated that it is worried that it might not win the next election and has repeatedly spoken about reassuring the so-called business community.
The other aspect of the visit is that were they not to go, it would send a message to their reactionary base in the US that they are on the side of “Islamic terrorists”. It doesn’t matter how true this is, their base in the US has never been very discerning about these issues.
It would also give the government parties something to beat them with and allow them to claim that Sinn Féin are a party unfit for bourgeois government.
Implicit in the feedback is the idea that my criticisms of the provos would annoy or offend Republicans who would otherwise be open to the general message i.e. ‘kick the ball not the player’. But the player and the ball cannot be separated in politics.
If someone is upset at facetious comments about romances and would otherwise be won around, then they clearly haven’t appreciated the scale of the slaughter in Gaza, nor Biden’s role in it and Sinn Féin’s ditching of what would, once upon a time, have been a no-brainer for their base.
Proof is in the pudding and the fact that some Sinn Féin supporters see through the party’s position shows that those who can be won round have been won round already. Those in attendance at the meeting from which three Palestinians were ejected are all lost causes, political degenerates.
This brings us to the last item which is how Sinn Féin is selling this to their base. Part of the criticism of ‘kicking the player’ is that Sinn Féin has taken a position, spelt it out publicly and its members have accepted this. This is not how democracy works in that organisation.
But the position was best spelt out by Gerry Adams. He stated that Palestinians would understand why they had to go. Would they really?
Apart from the corrupt and contemptible Palestinian Authority that spends a full third of its budget on security and repressing other Palestinians, who in Palestine would understand? The parents who saw their children shot and bombed? The prisoners? The families of prisoners?
The thousands of people who pulled others from the rubble with their bare hands? Or just Abbas who while busy stifling Palestinian dissent has had little to say or do on the genocide.
Adams made one further point. He claimed there was a lack of coherence amongst Sinn Féin critics.
“Some folks are saying the Sinn Féin leadership shouldn’t meet with the American political system… They are not saying we shouldn’t meet with the British political system. The Brits are up to their neck in this.”(6)
He is right about the contradiction, but it doesn’t absolve him, rather it condemns those who are ambivalent about it.
All Adams is pointing out, indeed boasting about, is that they are in cahoots with British imperialism and treasure that relationship as much as they do their “special relationship” with the US. He went on to underline this point.
Serious people involved in struggle, particularly people who are involved in national liberation struggles, understand that your own struggle whether it be internationalist has to be your primary focus.
So, they will expect you to raise their issues and we should. They would expect you to stand with them, and so we should. But they would not expect us to do anything – any more than we would expect them to do anything – which would set back our own struggle.
So, I think it’s Irish-America’s day, it may be dominated by what’s happening in Washington.(7)
Adams clearly hasn’t a clue about what an internationalist struggle is. How could boycotting Biden harm the Irish struggle?
Adams’ question goes to the heart of the matter, he and Sinn Féin not only cling to the illusion that the Irish peace process is bringing unity closer but also that US imperialism plays a progressive role in Ireland.
And that upsetting Biden would be a setback and annoy a regime that is committed to some progressive outcome in Ireland.
Adams is not the only one to believe in this progressive role of US imperialism, Yasser Arafat also believed in it and thus we got the Oslo Accords and 30,000 people in Gaza have been murdered by this progressive imperialism of Adams and Arafat.
Courting reactionary elites in the US is not putting the Irish struggle first, it is continuing with Sinn Féin’s gallop to the right. It is to paraphrase the expression about the struggle for socialism in Ireland that Labour Must Wait!
Now Palestine must wait, indeed everything and everyone must wait. What must never happen is that US imperialisms and Sinn Féin’s reactionary base in the US be upset.
Whilst the Republican who gave the feedback is clearly aware of Sinn Féin’s limitations on the issue of Palestine, there is no republican milieu waiting to be won round on this issue that may be put off by the tone of my last piece or other such pieces by other writers elsewhere.
There is no world in which the player and the ball do not both get a well-deserved kicking, indeed, were I in a position to do so, I would give them the hiding of their lives. Alas my efforts are unfortunately more modest than that.
Anyone who is Republican and thinks Sinn Féin is right to go to Washington is thinking only of Sinn Féin and not of Palestine. They are, like Adams and co, looking the other way in the midst of a genocide, something you would have thought was an easy issue to take a position on.
But when you drink of the Peace Process Kool Aid, you don’t drink half the glass, but chug the whole glass down in one go, like Mean Joe Greene in the famous Coca Cola ad of the 1970s. Like Greene, Sinn Féin has been asked to reshoot the scene time and again.
Greene vomited after his sixth coke, though he had to swallow eighteen, 16-ounce bottles on the final day of shooting.(8)
There is no end to what peace process supporters are asked to swallow and unlike Greene, no sign anyone in Sinn Féin is about to puke at the nauseous spectacle of being asked to sideline a genocide for the meet and greet in Washington DC.
A call has gone out for Irish politicians, as part of pressure on the USA to stop supporting Israeli genocidal attacks on the Palestinians, not to attend friendship ceremonies with the President of the USA on St. Patrick’s Day this year.1
With the US Presidential election scheduled for September, “Genocide Joe” Biden will still be in office on March 17th, a man who apart from representing the major imperialist power in the world, ordered his state’s veto in the UN against a call for a humanitarian ceasefire.
A man who repeated ridiculous Zionist propaganda against the Palestinians of beheading children and rapes, who said that if Israel had not existed the US would have had to invent it, who received more Zionist lobby for his campaigns as Congressman than any other in the whole USA.2
Even without his personal history, after a US-supported slaughter so far of 25,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children and displacement of 85% of Palestinians, you’d think that this would be what UStaters call “a slam dunk”, that Irish politicians would feel too disgusted to make the trip.
Placard carried by a Palestine solidarity marcher in Dublin on 28 October. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Sadly this revulsion is not felt among most politicians in Ireland, who from from Varadkar in the Government to Mary Lou MacDonald of Sinn Féin in the Opposition have indicated that they have no intention of foregoing this annual pilgrimage to the Boss of the World
What is this strange Irish obsession with the United States of America anyway? Yes, of course, it is a (or the) major world power and yes, a number of people of Irish antecedence have become its Presidents – including the first Roman Catholic to reach that office.3
But really, what has the US concretely done for Ireland? Did it send us troops to help drive the English from our land? No, the Spanish Kingdom did that once and the French did it twice, once as Kingdom and again as Republic. But the US? Never.
It might be protested that the USA permitted Irish to emigrate there but a) it did so for many others too and b) only in order to populate its European colonisation of the Indigenous land and c) to compete against other European colonial powers – in particular the Spanish, French and Dutch.
It is true that it has on occasion served as a haven for Irish ‘on the run’ from British jurisdiction but so did France and in any event, those cases were nearly always when the USA was at war or in diplomatic conflict with the United Kingdom in the USA’s own interests.
WHEN THE USA COULD HAVE REALLY HELPED THE IRISH STRUGGLE
When the US-based Fenians raised an army to invade British colonial Canada in 18664, they had hopes that the government of the US would at least not impede them. The British had supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War which had cost 650,000-800,000 lives.5
That number represented the highest number of US dead in any military conflict before that (or since), fought to eliminate slavery, which the UK had abolished 50 years earlier6 – yet it supported the Confederacy7 in a number of ways including building warships for them.
The charge of the Fenians (wearing green uniforms) under Colonel John O’Neill at the Battle of Ridgeway, near Niagara, Canada West, on June 2, 1866. In reality, the Fenians had their own green flags but wore a very mixed bag of Union and Confederate uniforms (if they still had them, or parts of them left over from the Civil War), or civilian garb, with strips of green as arm or hat bands to distinguish themselves. (library and archives canada, c-18737)
The USA closed the border with Canada and arrested Fenian war veterans under arms8 waiting to cross but only after (perhaps to make a point with the British) an advance Fenian force had already entered British Canada, seized Fort Erie and defeated British soldiers of the line and militia.
The US President, Andrew Johnson issued the border closure and arrest of Fenians by Executive Order on June 5th 1866, which was enforced under orders from General Ulysses Grant9 and put an end to the operation, as the US did to subsequent attempts.
The British subsequently paid $15.5 million in 1872 for damage caused by the British-built Confederate warship, the Alabama, after which both states entered into friendly relations.10
The USA did not support the Irish insurrection of 1916 nor the War of Independence. After WWI, while the victorious imperialists held their “Peace Conference” to discuss the new world order and re-divide up the world, US President Wilson declined to meet the Irish Republican delegation.11
The USA did not support the Irish in the War of Independence (1919-1921) nor support the Republican side in the Civil War (1922-1923). Nor again during the Border Campaign, nor during the Civil Rights Campaign followed by armed struggle (1968-1998).
In 1992, after a long legal and political battle, IRA Volunteer Joe Doherty, in the US since 1983 was finally extradited to the Six Counties despite a) the political nature of his charge and b) the well-known low proof standards of the political courts in the British colony.12
It is true of course that, in deference to the feelings of its large Irish-American population and their representation in the US polity, that it has permitted certain Irish solidarity activities on US soil and, at times, issued statements of concern over British actions in Ireland – but nothing more.
The Irish-American political representation is for the most part US first and Irish second, i.e US Imperialist first and foremost. Ireland is also used by US monopolies as a side door into the markets of the EU and, through registering head offices in Ireland, for avoiding taxes in the USA.
NEO-COLONIAL ASPIRANTS TO THE GOMBEEN CLUB
So what is all this US homage in the Irish official polity about — and in particular among Sinn Féin? How can leaders of the party correctly criticise the genocidal actions of the Israeli State and yet speak no word against the main backer of the zionist state, i.e the USA?
It’s a new SF – two of the party’s leaders, Mary Lou MacDonald and Michelle O’Neill, smiling in joint photo with the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces occupying part of Ireland (and engaged in imperialist actions elsewhere) and a hereditary monarch. (Photo cred.: Irish Times)
The answer is simply that the new SF, which was never overall socialist nor even particularly anti-imperialist throughout the Provisionals phase, is now neo-colonialist and knocking on the doors of the established gombeens,13 asking for admittance, which they are sure to receive in time.
They are not the first to make the transition from revolutionary Irish Republicans to gombeen party. Fianna Fáil, representing some of the leadership of the losing IRA side in the Irish Civil War, was an Irish ‘constitutional’ party and became the preferred choice of the gombeen ruling class.
Fianna Fáil has been in government more often than any other party in the history of the Irish State and is there now, sharing government with their former binary opposition party, Fine Gael, along with the Greens. The FF party too considered the friendship of the USA to be important.
For the SF party leadership however the US is important also based on their perception of it being a guarantor in the Irish pacification process. In their twisted reality, US imperialism is forcing British imperialism and colonialism to do – what?
Remove the British colonialists? Remove the sectarian colonial government? Stop the penetration of the Irish economy by foreign multinationals, including those of the USA?
Of course not and in the unlikely event that thoughts of doing so ever crossed the minds of US imperialists, they would discard them instantly in favour of the continued alliance with the imperialist UK as their junior partner.
NO SOAKING THE SHAMROCK IN PALESTINIAN BLOOD
Although there are many other complicit states, the USA is the major supporter of the Israeli State, financially, militarily and politically, using its position as one of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council to veto resolutions proposed against the Zionist state.
The Israeli State represents a western imperialist foothold for the USA in the Middle East, the only one that is entirely safe from either internal national liberation or fundamentalist islamist uprising and it has continued to support Israel throughout the state’s genocidal history.
The role of the US in this conflict is to defend and supply the Zionist state but also to manage client states in the region and around the world get them to support ‘Israel’ (or at least to limit their opposition to the state), alongside preventing or hampering assistance reaching the Palestinians.
Placard produced in support of the demand, seen on recent Palestine solidarity march in Dublin. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Sinn Féin called recently for the Zionist Ambassador to be expelled from Ireland but initially, Mary Lou had declined to do so, saying it would not be helpful. She came under strong pressure from within the party’s membership and had to join the call for the person’s expulsion.
However, that’s easy to explain to Biden as the necessity of staying on top of a troublesome horse in order to bring it eventually under control. After all, the Government wasn’t going to expel the Ambassador, no matter what anybody said, was it?
There is a statement applicable here from the Christian Bible which has since become a proverb (if it was not already one at the time of writing), that “one cannot serve two masters”. One of the ‘masters’ is usually understood to mean money but that’s not what I mean here.14
The SF leadership cannot serve both Palestinian solidarity and US imperialism but there’s no danger of their even trying to do so – they know who their real master is. The Palestinian solidarity posturing is for their supporters and to show they can play their required role in the world.
Their President, Mary Lou did so when she offered the Irish pacification process as an example for the Palestinians15 and the whole of the SF leadership does so in supporting the imperialist “two-state solution” (sic) in which a colonial Palestinian state is to be set up under Israeli guns.
And on 40% or less of their original land, with the least water.
Neither the SF leadership nor the other politicians have any intention of missing the event in the USA in March when they offer their allegiance along with the symbolic tribute, the bowl of leaders’ shamrock which now, however, is soaked in Palestinian blood.
We should at least make it difficult for them by signing the petition and in other opportunities as may arise between now and that date.
11Or even to reply to their correspondence although interestingly he did reply to that of a young Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam in ‘French’ Indo-China (according to research presented in Dublin some years ago and noted by me)
12He had been a member of a unit in Belfast that killed a captain of an SAS undercover unit attempting to surround them.
13From the Irish language “gaimbíneachas”, a pejorative term describing the practice of those Irish with capital who took advantage of the hardships of the Great Hunger to appropriate land holdings and businesses, something similar to the disdained “carpetbaggers” in the defeated states of the American Confederacy. The term is now applied to Irish politicians and business people who facilitate foreign exploitation of Irish natural resources, labour, infrastructure and housing need.
14Although in that sense too the saying is applicable to the SF leadership.
Yes, you peace-loving liberals, we told you but you wouldn’t listen. Told you that Zionism means racism, colonial settler expansion and, ultimately, genocide. But you wouldn’t listen. And you’re not listening now.
There just had to be a way of resolving things so everyone got something and then there would be peace, you all said.
People like you think all that has to happen for peace is that both sides sit down and talk. But what if what one wants is irreconcilable with what the other wants? Well, then you say, they both have to give up something.
The problem with that is that it’s always the oppressed who have to give up the most – or even everything. However, that’s necessary, because that’s how we get peace, you say. But would you apply it to yourselves as easily?
If a thief got your wallets, would you suggest sitting down and talking it over with him or her? Maybe suggesting s/he only stole half the contents? Well, you might, I suppose. But what if they got your cars, your houses and emptied your bank accounts?
You’d very quickly resort to violence! Oh, not you personally, of course not! You’d get the police to use force for you and a judge to use force to put them in jail and prison officers to use force to keep them in jail for an allotted time, to try and ensure they didn’t steal from you again.
We told you that the only peace the Zionists could achieve would be the peace of the Palestinian cemetery; but as many graves as the Zionists dug for the Palestinians, more would rise up fighting and they would never give up their land or agree to be kept down.
Every time the Zionists carried out a massacre or another atrocity, we told you: the only solution to this conflict is a unitary democratic state of Palestine, “from the River to the Sea”. But you wouldn’t listen.
And even now, as you begin to talk about “peace again” “after Gaza”, it’s clear you haven’t learned. The massacre of 22,600, including over 9,000 children, the ruins of Gaza, refugee camps, hospitals, mosques, water and sewage treatment plants have taught you nothing.
Because here you are again, proposing something other than the rational solution, in this case re-marketing the two-state plan. All the imperialists agree and you’ll get Abbas and the corrupt Al Fatah to go along as before of course but the Palestinian people as a whole will never do so.
The irony is that by pushing your kind of ‘peace’ measure and avoiding real peace, you are effectively advocating the conditions for war without end – or wiping out/ expulsion of the Palestinians. Really, it would be better if you just shut up and stop trying to ‘help’.
Because the only ones you’re helping are the genocidal Zionists and their imperialist backers.
It has been said that with one phone call from Joe Biden to Netanyahu the genocide in Gaza could be halted.
Comparisons have been made to Reagan doing just that with the Irgun terrorist, Menachem Begin, who was the Israeli Prime Minister during the siege of Beirut in 1982 or Obama in later years.
Little has been said of the European Union’s equal capacity to make a similar call and bring an end to the slaughter. The EU is not a minor player in the region, and Israel is as much dependent on the EU as it is on the USA, though in a slightly different manner.
From the start the EU decided to support Israel, come hell or high water, and hell it was to be, for the Palestinians. Ursula von der Leyen stated that Israel had the right to defend itself against what she termed terrorism and that “Europe stands with Israel”.1
Ursula von der Leyen, taken at a time when EU staffers complained about her bias in favour of Israel (Photo credit: EPA-EFE/JULIEN WARNAND)
A month later, as the gravity of Israeli plans were clear for all to see, she continued to talk about the Hamas attack on October 7th, much of which has now been proven to be false (there were no decapitated babies, many of the dead were Israeli military not civilians and furthermore Israel itself killed many of the civilians).
She made no condemnation of Israeli bombings of civilians. She and the EU still stood by Israel.2
But on October 20th 842 staffers at the EU signed a letter condemning her position and pointing out she was legitimising a war crime in Gaza, and pointed to her support for the blockade of food and water in Gaza.3
But Von der Leyen continued as before and still stands by Israel and its “right to self-defence”, despite the evidence that what Israel is engaged in, is genocide and multiple war crimes.
Some have made reference to the Nazi past of her family, and though interesting, it is not the reason for her support nor that of the EU, though it may affect the tone of her statements.
In evaluating her behaviour we should, of course, bear in mind her aristocratic and Nazi past, of which she is apparently very proud of and has made reference to.
But they are just anecdotes, others with a clean family tree have also supported Israel.
The reason why the EU supports Israel is one of naked self-interest. Like the USA, the EU has decided that Israel is also its very own Forward Operating Base to keep in check the Arab masses and ensure the flow of oil.
The EU was in a position to halt the genocide from the word go. Von der Leyen could have told Israel to back off and it would have. Without the EU, the Israeli economy collapses.
A ban on exporting to or importing from Israel would see the modern-day Babylon collapse overnight with little effect on Europe itself. Israel is the EU’s 25th largest trading partner, way behind Turkiye which is the EU’s sixth largest trading partner.
However, the reverse does not hold. The EU is a significant trading partner for Israel.
According to the European Commission’s Office in Israel (Von der Leyen & Co.) 31.9% of Israeli imports come from the EU and 25.6% of Israel’s exports go to the EU with total trade amounting to €46.8 billion in 2022.
Israeli imports of services amounted to €16.7 billion in 2021 with exports representing €9.8 billion. Further the EU invested €60.5 billion in 2021. Israel depends on the EU.4 One phone call is all it would have taken to put Netanyahu in his place and stop the genocide.
European complicity in the genocide is not limited to its economic role. Between 2012 and 2022, Israel received just over 5.4 billion US dollars in arms transfers, from three sources. Unsurprisingly, the USA was the primary supplier.
But Germany supplied Israel with $1.475 billion and Italy supplied a further $261 million. In the same period, Israel exported $7.458 billion to a range of countries, including the UK, bastions of democracy such as Azerbaijan ($854 million), Turkiye ($60 million).
But by far the biggest recipient was India which received $2.879 billion.5
The type of weaponry received is important. Israel received $2.734 billion in aircraft, $609 million in armoured vehicles, $752 million in missiles, just the type of weaponry it has used to reduce Gaza to rubble and carry out its genocide.
Israeli Merkava 4 tank in exercise on occupied ground in the Golan Heights 2016; it and other armoured vehicles carry German engines, according to arms watch organisation SIPRI which believes them to be in operation in Gaza now. (Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP)
All of those regimes who supplied Israel with weaponry are as guilty as the Israelis. After Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 – January 2009) it was obvious what type of regime held sway in Tel Aviv.
They have repeated this type of operation on many occasions since then, with major interventions and also a number of smaller, though still deadly attacks.
The nature of the Zionist regime was laid bare to the world, and yet the EU continued to export the type of weapons needed to carry out a genocide.
The nature of the Zionist regime was laid bare to the world, and yet the EU continued to export the type of weapons needed to carry out a genocide.
Hopefully, some day in the future we can hold a Nuremberg-style tribunal to judge those responsible. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, places obligations on states and gives them the authority to try people for the crime of Genocide.6
To be clear about what genocide is, the convention to which most states are signatories defines it in Article II as:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.7
Israel was one of the first signatories to it and has made no reservations on any aspect of it, unlike the USA which has placed some caveats on its jurisdiction in relation to the USA.8
Photo of Nuremberg defendants during the Nuremberg Trials. Will there one day be such a tribunal sitting on the Israeli war criminals and their international accomplices? (Photo sourced: Internet)
Following WWII not only were the Nazis tried at Nuremberg, other Nazis were tried by individual states in the subsequent years. Countries such as France, Germany, Israel, Norway and others brought Nazis to trial after the Nuremberg Trials.
In Hungary alone, around 26,000 people were tried for treason, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Czechoslovakia around 32,000 people met a similar fate. Some 100,000 Germans and Austrians were tried in Western Europe and in the Soviet Union another 26,000 were also tried.9
Any nation can place those accused of genocide on trial. To date it has been a question of power. The US won the war in the East and so were not charged for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nearly all those tried for crimes against humanity have been on the losing side of a conflict in which the US and Europe wished to punish one side.
It is entirely conceivable that the powers that make up the BRICS10 could detain war criminals and place them on trial in a national or supranational court convened by them. It is possible though unlikely.
It is however necessary. International law is dead, buried under the rubble of churches, mosques and hospitals in Gaza.
Netanyahu and the entire High Command of the IDF should stand trial like Göring and others did and should face the same consequences as Eichmann who the Israelis tried and executed by hanging.
Ten top ranking Nazis were executed, with Göring committing suicide the night before his scheduled execution. Others should meet another fate as did those lower ranking Nazis in subsequent trials. Various EU leaders should also be tried.
Von der Leyen is a key case and should meet the fate her Nazis family escaped from. Keir Starmer, Macron, Merkel, Rushi Sunak and others should all be put on trial and at the very least imprisoned. Europe is as much to blame for the current genocide as the USA and Israel itself.
6 See Article IV Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. Article V The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III. Article VIII Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Recently then-Minister for Home Affairs of the UK Suella Braverman claimed the common Palestinian solidarity slogan, From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free! to be antisemitic, genocidal in effect and looked set to try to have it banned.
In some other western institutions, for example Columbia University USA, it HAS been banned and a Palestine solidarity student group has had its rights within the University revoked despite, reportedly, the opposition of the majority of students to that sanction.
Suella Braverman, MP, former UK Minister for Home Affairs. (Photo sourced: Internet)
How can a basic solidarity slogan be claimed to be genocidal?
Definition of a genocidal act: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group …1
Obviously there can be such a thing as a genocidal slogan and, in fact, there are many examples in history: “The only good Indian (sic) is a dead Indian”2; “Juden raus”3; “To Hell or to Connaught”4; “Nits make lice”5; “Kill the cockroaches”6; “There are no Kurds, only mountain Turks”.7
Anti-Jewish racist and genocidal slogan in German with the Nazi Swastika symbol on wall in Florence, Italy.
But really, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”? Genocidal? For the Palestinian people to be free and in control of their own land, there has to be genocide?
Would “Scotland Free from Dunnet Head to Tweed” be considered a genocidal slogan? Or for example slogans such as “Ireland free from Donegal to Cork” or “A 32-County socialist Republic” be thought genocidal?
“Oh, but the Palestinian one means Palestine for the Arabs only, no Jews!” Really? And you know this how? Before the British started driving Jews into Palestine the maximum size of the Jewish population there was 6% but there was no attempt by the mostly Arab people to drive them out.
Could the slogan not equally or even more likely be a call for a free, equal, democratic state across the whole of the original Palestine? Such as the stated objective of a number of Palestinian resistance organisations, the PFLP for example?
The nationalist slogans for Ireland and Scotland could be interpreted to mean clearing out all non-Scottish and non-Irish respectively but for the vast majority they not mean that nor are they generally thought to do so. So why suspect genocidal intention of the Palestinians?
The opposition to the slogan is not at all based on fear of genocide but in fact on support for it: the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians! It is based on denying the right to self-determination of the indigenous Palestinian people, of which a huge majority are Arab.
To deny the right of the Palestinians to self-determination is to support the right of the Zionists to colonise, a project entailing expulsion or massacre of the ethnically Arab Palestinian majority that existed in Palestine even up until 1948.
That Zionist project has continued with a constant ethnic cleansing pressure and genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people.
And the same people who oppose the slogan “From the River to the sea” etc support such slogans as “Israel has a right to self-defence” and “The Jewish people have a right to their own state”, which ARE racist and genocidal statements based on Zionist and European colonial ideology.
If Israel has a right to self-defence, what that means is that those who occupy a territory, steal the land and resources, colonise it and attack the indigenous people … have the right to defend themselves against the legitimate resistance of the people.
It gives the settlers the right to defend their occupation and repress the resistance, which naturally is given no rights at all. The robber has the right to the loot.
If the Jewish people have a right to their own state, where is that to be? Where will a land be found without people in it for them to take as their own?
And if such an empty land does not exist – which it does not – then what gives Jews or anyone else the right to occupy and settle a land, removing the rights of the indigenous people? An alleged promise by a being of religious belief? Or the backing of imperialist colonial powers?
The defence of the solidarity slogan’s content and the right to use it across the world are important democratic standards in the peoples’ struggles for justice and to express and build internationalist solidarity across the world.
The realisation of the slogan will be an important contribution to peace and justice in the world.
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!
End.
FOOTNOTES
1Article II, UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
2Whether correctly attributed to General Phillip Sheridan of the US Army or not it was certainly a popular saying in the white US colonial wars against the Indigenous native people.
4Attributed to Oliver Cromwell in his mid-17th Century genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaign against the Irish Catholics.
5Horrific slogan justifying the killing of children because they will grow up to be the hated/ feared people. This slogan or saying has probably been heard at one time or another in most parts of the world but certainly against Native Americans in the USA; among Nazis against Jews, Slavs and Gypsies; in Israel against Palestinians.
6One of the slogans of the Hutu against the Tutsi in the 1994 ethnic cleansing and massacres in Rwanda.
7Remark attributed to the Turkish nationalist Kemal Ataturk with regard to the very large ethnically distinct Kurdish people in Turkey.
rebelbreeze 