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    Israel Politik: Illegal settlement

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    After completing his Ph.D in the University of Pennsylvania, the former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, lectured in financial economics at the elite Ivy League Wharton School in the US. Among his students was a brash undergraduate named Donald Trump who did little study, flunked his exams and was expelled from the university. With the help of his very rich father, Trump was readmitted and, despite his poor academic credentials, went on to greater things. “He was not a good student. He dropped out and his academic standard did not come up to scratch. I was teaching advanced corporate finance and he flunked the courses. The idea of this man as President of the US to me shows the decline of American civilisation”. Some half a century later, Trump is leading the latest assault on the historic right of the Palestinian people to their own land, including international recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of their independent state. Last December, President Trump confirmed that he intended to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a move that deeply angered the Arab world while elating many Israelis who have long had their sights on ultimate control of the holy city, which has been traditionally shared by Muslim, Christian and Jewish religions. The decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem was authorised by the US Congress some years ago but was put on hold by President Barack Obama, who believed the decision could only hamper efforts to find a lasting peace in the region and, in particular, the achievement of a two-state solution with east Jerusalem as capital of Palestine. For the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and for Nabil Shaath who acts as foreign relations advisor to him, this divisive action by the Trump administration has confirmed a view they have long held privately: that the US cannot be considered as an honest broker in the search for a just solution to the Middle-East crisis, arguably one of the world’s most egregious human rights scandals. Over recent weeks, 35 Palestinian people have been killed and over 1500 injured by live rounds fired by Israeli army snipers from behind a fortified security fence erected in Gaza. Each Friday thousands of people from the besieged and almost destroyed Gaza Strip have protested for their “Right to Return” to the lands from which they and their families were expelled during the Nakba or catastrophe when the state of Israel was declared in 1948, and over the decades since. The policy of the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) is that the right-to-return protests must be resisted with maximum force, including by the killing of unarmed activists and the maiming of thousands. Already overstretched and under-resourced Gazan hospitals have been unable to cope with the recent slaughter, while their efforts to transfer shooting victims with serious injuries to hospitals in the West Bank have been obstructed by the IDF. Two young men who each had had a leg amputated after suffering severe bullet wounds lost their other leg after doctors were prevented by Israeli authorities from transferring them from Gaza to better-equipped hospitals for treatment. The reason they were refused access to urgent medical care in Ramallah was because their “medical condition is a function of their participation in the disturbances”, the Israeli authorities confirmed. One of the young men, Yousef Karnez, said that he was a trainee journalist and was holding a camera at the demonstration which he sought to document. “I got two bullets. One hit my left leg and crushed it and the other hit my right leg, where it gravely injured my shin. Doctors have already amputated my left leg and I am begging; I don’t want to lost my other leg,”, he pleaded in the days after he was shot in early April. A young journalist, Yaser Murtaja, who was wearing a white ‘Press’ sign on his chest during the same protest on 6t April, was shot dead by IDF snipers and wrongly accused by the Israeli defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, of being a member of Hamas who had been operating a ‘spy drone’ before he was killed. His claims were denied by the International Federation of Journalists who said that Murtaja had worked for both national and international media over recent years including for the BBC and Al Jazeera, and that his company Ain Media had been funded by the US Agency for International Development. His production company had used drones for aerial filming and he was due to start a new job with the Norwegian Refugee Council two days after he was shot. Nabil Shaath, a Gazan, believes the people of the strip are desperate and the large ‘Right to Return’ protests are a reflection of their appalling living conditions. The electricity in Gaza, where some 2.5 million Palestinians live, is turned off for sixteen hours each day, there is no clean water, and there are severe shortages of food and medical supplies. Efforts to establish a unity government across the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza which commenced last year have so far been unsuccessful due to the inability of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah (the political organisation led by President Mahmoud Abbas) and Hamas to reach agreement. At the core of their disagreement is the refusal of Hamas, which took political power in Gaza following elections in 2006, to cede control of security to a new government of Palestine. “We have a presidential system in Palestine and the President is in charge of security and foreign relations,” Shaath explains. “Hamas was elected in Gaza in 2006 by popular vote and we accepted that mandate. However, the PA remains responsible for ensuring that the people of Gaza have sufficient finance to cover the costs of education, health, water and electricity. We have now said to Hamas that we can only continue to pay the bills if they agree to complete discussions for a unity government that will include security”. This

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    50 years since 1968

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    Not a week has gone by in 2018 Ireland without several street demonstrations, especially about abortion and the housing crisis. In France, protesting is part of the vernacular. Riots are common: just look at 1789 and 1968. Ireland and France share a reputation for feistiness. A comparison between Irish and French demonstrations could be instructive. “What do we want? Public housing! When do we want it? Now!”. More than 10,000 people are currently home- less in Ireland. The demonstration I attended, organised by the National Homeless and Housing Coalition, on 7 April was good-natured: festive and serene. People played and sang music as they marched. The Garda seemed engaged and smiled while overseeing the demonstration: a safe protest. It appeared the crowd was representative of the general population, as perhaps you might want. It started at the Garden of Remembrance and ended in front of the Custom House in Dublin in light rain, as cheerful as the weather allowed. Its effectiveness was its mainstream attendance; there was no danger here. It would, I reflected, be different: more fractious, less representative, angrier – in France. Ireland fights for Human Rights At the moment Ireland is in arms over: abortion, education, sex education, health, animal welfare, drugs. But I have the sense that some of these campaigns are not mainstream, even as protests. Certainly the Water Protests were successful, albeit the underlying political message (no new taxes?) and symbolic value were not too clear. Abortion is a long-standing divisive issue in Ireland, symbolising the hegemony and, later, decline of the Catholic Church. Protests date back to 1983 when an unwise blanket prohibition was approved in a referendum. In May there will be a rerun. There are many events, debates and demonstrations on both sides, with pro-choice as fashionable politically as pro-life must have been a generation ago. The demonstration I attended in April was ‘pro-choice’- for ‘Equality, Freedom and Choice’, organised by Rosa. The rally was jubilant and confident, almost over-confident. The Daddy of all modern Irish marches is the PAYE protests from 1979-1980. Around 700,000 Dubliners marched against the stifling ‘Pay As You Earn’ tax. The BBC called it “the largest peaceful protest in post-war Europe”. But I sense things have changed since then. There is no longer an Ireland the sense that the regime is fundamentally at odds with its electorate. Perhaps it’s because the country now mostly complies with international norms or is fast moving in that direction; perhaps it’s because the country is simply much wealthier and has never been so confident. In 2003, Irish anti-war protesters organised a demonstration for peace in Iraq. The British and Americans had invaded Iraq. 100,000 walked on the streets of Dublin. It was a thoroughly internationalist protest. In 2006, a violent demonstration took place in Dublin’s O’Connell Street. For some reason Northern Unionists wanted to organise a ‘Love Ulster’ Parade to honour the victims of the IRA. A counter demonstration materialised and a riot started. Several Molotov cocktails were thrown and cars were burnt. A total amount of 14 persons were wounded and 41 arrested by Garda. Locals put the intense violence down to the alien influence of recalcitrant Northerners: it didn’t symptomise a new riot mentality. These kinds of demonstrations are pretty rare in Ireland compared to in France, where there are wide-ranging politically-driven strikes and demonstrations every year. Governments can fall as a result of demonstration culture in France. If France had had an international bailout that was forcibly inflicted on the population; if France had had the iniquities of Nama bailing out the richest failed developers there would have been strikes and riots. A country’s protest mentality varies from generation to generation. We’ll put down the Irish monster meetings and boycotts of the nineteenth century as the fruits of a different era. Where a country is colonised and not run for the benefit of the majority – or a significant minority – wideranging subversion is to be expected. In Ireland it culminated in the Easter Rising in 1916 and the War of Independence 1919-21. In the North of course discrimination against Catholics fuelled a later whirlwind. In the Bogside riots of 1969, eight people were killed, a majority Catholic, and over 150 homes destroyed; and the IRA campaign resulted in 1696 deaths. But, though important, this all speaks little to the modern-day Republic of Ireland.   France, protest pioneer French demonstrations have been well-known and lethal since at least the 18th century with a sustained and celebrated (though not of course by Edmund Burke) historic riot: the French Revolution, facilitating a declaration of the rights of man and changing forever the notion of the political establishment. In the twenty-first century, protests are still an important political phenomenon. France has been a global leader in dissent. The rockstar of street opposition was May 1968 when strikes and demonstrations led by students and workers and the occupation of universities and factories across France brought the entire economy of France to its knees and political leaders feared civil war or revolution. The moribund government itself ceased to function for a while after President Charles de Gaulle secretly fled France for a few hours in Germany. ‘68 changed France’s democracy: the super-annuated President De Gaulle resigned, the Assemblée Nationale was dissolved, and government committees were formed to restructure secondary schooling, universities, the film industry, the theatre and the news media. The Grenelle Accord gave better conditions for the unemployed, a 35% increase in the minimum wage and a fourth week of paid leave for those in employment. Mentalities started to change too with a sexual revolution from the young. Mixed schools became more common. 1968 sundered a post-War France of austerity, conservatism and asceticism. Nevertheless the movement succeeded “as a social revolution, not as a political one”. President of the Republic (2007-12) Nicolas Sarkozy famously denounced May 1968 as the source of contemporary France’s problems. The student revolts against bourgeois society introduced a “relativism”, he argued, that undermined national identity, the spirit of

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    Nati(on) off

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    In 1985, the Irish-Australian writer Vincent Buckley, after spending some time in Ireland, wrote in his book ‘Memory Ireland: “Ireland has been asked to lose its national memory by a kind of policy, in which politicians of almost all parties, ecclesiastics of all religions, media operators, and revisionist historians co-operate to create (and let us hope they do not need to enforce, for if they need to, they will) a new sense of corporate identity. This sense contradicts the immediately preceding one (the one based on the rising of easter 1916 and its aftermath), which proved first so exhilarating and then so wearying to its generations, some of whom had fought to realise it. Ireland is not a nation, once again or ever, so the new story runs, but two nations; maybe several; it does not have its characteristic religion—or if it does, it ought not; it does not have its characteristic language, as anyone can see or hear; it has no particular race or ethnic integrity. Ireland is nothing – a nothing – an interesting nothing, to be sure, composed of colourful parts, a nothing mosaic. It is advertising prose and Muzak”. Buckley was saying in effect that Ireland had lost its national identity: the fact of being a nation distinguished from other nations by a combination of language, history, culture and values, and the knowledge of being that. Since 1985, the collective condition that Buckley depicted – that of being together nothing in particular – has intensified. At the centre of Ireland’s capital city a tall monument, designed in London, has been erected which honours and signifies literally nothing. (A joke says ‘The Spire’ was meant to be delivered to the other Blackpool – Duibhlinn means “black pool” – the seaside resort across the Irish Sea.) Ireland’s distinctive religious culture – women blessing themselves as they pass a church; traffic jams at city churches on Sunday mornings; fasting during Lent; May and Corpus Christi processsions; the family rosary; the TV newsreader finishing the evening news with “God bless you” – has withered almost to vanishing point; and with it a set of moral values, forceful because they pointed towards a happy eternal life and gave security against punishment there. With the study of Irish history made unnecessary for the Leaving Cert, and all forms of mass media blind to that history beyond the Famine, knowledge of Irish history by most Irish university graduates reaches no further back, with the post-revolutionary missionary movement into Africa, Asia and South America bringing Christianity, hospitals, schools and anti-imperialist sentiment omitted as a ‘merely religious matter’; not to mention, earlier, the repeated resistance to conquest or those dark times before Europe began when Irish monks and monasteries brought Christianity, literacy, art and learning to Britain and the Continent as far as Germany, Austria and Italy. Meanwhile, with the nation speaking the same language as the much larger nation beside it, its journalists, instead of writing or saying ‘in Ireland’ or ‘in the Republic’ commonly make do with ‘here’ or ‘in this state’. Irishmen use the word ‘Irishness’ derisively; politicians avoid uttering ‘Ireland’ or ‘the Irish’ with pride or in exhortation; the media treat English football and politics including ‘the Royal Family’ as part of the Irish scene. The only still habitual demonstrations of Irish nationhood, far from being everyday are occasional: everyone cheering for Ireland when an Irish football team is playing a foreign team, or people drinking together on St Patrick’s Day. In short, with regard to distinctive identity, Ireland, as an offsore island of Britain, is close to becoming a larger version of the Isle of Wight. A nation can lack a national identity for either of two reasons. It can, like Ireland, have lost the national identity which it previously had. (Ireland had a well-known, distinct identity from the sixth century to the eighteenth when it began to fade to the shadow of itself it still was in 1916.) Or it can, like say Zambia, never have had one. Formerly Northern Rhodesia and named after the river Zambezi, it was created in 1964. With English as the official language, Zambians belong to about 70 ethnic groups, speak a similar number of languages, and adhere to many religions. It is widely believed that a national identity is an important thing for a nation to have – that it favours national wellbeing; creates, when needed, a national collective effort; generally urges the nation towards success and buttresses it in bad times. If one googles “national identity” one finds at least 25 pages – I gave up counting – filled with items dealing with it. (Denmark, a small country like Ireland, seems to be particularly interested in the matter.) It is, of course, entirely possible to get along without a national identity, as Ireland and Zambia have been doing; living from day to day. Even with the consequent absence of collective zest, it is not catastrophic. But when after the Breivik massacres in Norway a few years ago, the Norwegian Prime Minister told his people: “This must strengthen our resolve to make our Norwegian values prevail”, some old-fashioned Irishman might have felt a pang of regret that no Irish Taoiseach could speak of “our Irish values”, because no such things exist. national values indicate that at least Something is there rather than nothing. They suggest that in that nation aspiring minds are at work. The present cultural condition of Ireland is the result of successful cultural colonisation by two forces: first, by the Protestant british from the sixteenth century onwards, second from the 1960s onwards by American neoliberalism working through its Irish converts. The process by which cultural colonisation works was well illustrated by an incident in which the present writer participated in the 1970s. A Dubliner, I was living for some years in a still Irish-speaking part of South Connemara. Talking one day in Irish to a local 16-year-old boy who was telling me about a Frenchman he had met on a

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    Re-Ligion!

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    Michel A aq (1910-1989) was the principal ideologue of the pan-Arabist Ba’ath Socialist party which still rules Syria, as it previously did Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Although born Christian, he believed Islam to be proof of Arab genius and allegedly converted before his death in Baghdad. The Arabs were a motley collection of illiterate warring tribes inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula until the Prophet Muhammed (570-632 CE) and his successors built an enduring empire with extraordinary speed. The early Muslims were not only successful warriors conquering territory from Spain to Persia but also projected a ‘soft’ power allowing them to convert subjugated peoples. The era brought great advances in philosophy, art and mathematics and was marked by a tolerance unknown in Christendom. The Qu’ran itself was the first book written in Arabic, and according to the historian Albert Hourani Muslims believe Arabic is revealed in it; it certainly ushered in a great era of literacy. It is perhaps unsurprising that contemporary Arabic political movements have expressed themselves in the idiom of Islam however diverse that inheritance is. Furthermore the failures of Arab nationalism especially under Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) appeared to make Political Islam the answer to the project of throwing off the economic and cultural shackles of imperialism, and confronting Israel. The brutalisation of the Middle East through internal repression and outside intervention has shaped the emergence of ISIS, but its unsophisticated ideology has an historical trajectory. Likewise Christianity has had a lasting influence on the idea of Irishness: first because Christianity’s arrival in Ireland brought with it literacy (Ogham script hardly qualifies) that generated a seismic cultural awakening; second, and another source of pride, Irish Christians performed vital missions in restoring Christianity to Britain and other parts of Europe; third, the Reformation in Britain occurred simultaneously with its second wave of colonisation of Ireland, creating an effective method of creating a ruling caste; fourth, the decline of the Gaelic language left Catholicism as the most obvious point of cultural differentiation between the Irish and English. Thus in George Moore’s novel ‘The Lake’ Father Moran opines: “Religion in Ireland was another form of love of country and if Catholics were intolerant to every form of heresy, it was because they instinctively felt that the questioning of any dogma would mean some slight subsidence from the idea of nationality that held the people together”. He continues: “Like the ancient Jews, the Irish believed that the faith of their forefathers could bring them into their ultimate inheritance”. Moore himself eventually renounced Catholicism, just like the main character in the novel Father Gogarty who says: “my moral ideas were not my own. They were borrowed from others and badly assimilated”. Gogarty bemoans the Church’s attitude to women, recalling how “at Maynooth the tradition was always to despise women”. Well before Irish independence in 1922 the Catholic Church held a firm hold over Irish society especially in the crucial sphere of education. Maynooth was estab- lished in 1795 and Irish primary education had become increasingly denominational by the end of the nineteenth century. To some extent this suited the British administration as it recognised the Church as a force of conservatism that would protect private property against social revolutionaries. James Joyce also violently repudiated Catholicism. He wrote to Nora Barnacle in 1904: “Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently … Now I make war upon it by what I write and say and do. I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond”. In ‘Portrait’ he resolves: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning”. It took artists of the stature of Joyce and Moore to escape their Catholic upbringings. Unfortunately most of the revolutionary generation rapidly conformed and thereby stamped out the pluralism, feminism and even vegetarianism that animated the more free-thinking period before hostilities began. One of the most powerful ministers in the first government, Kevin O’Higgins, remarked: “we were probably the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a revolution”. That it should have been an ‘Easter Rising’ that kicked off the affair is revealing. There was an obtuse connection drawn between the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the blood sacrifice and emergence of an Irish nation state. Remarkably, in the wake of the Rising such illustrious revolutionaries as Roger Casement, Countess Marckievicz and James Connolly converted to Catholicism. The Civil War between two children squabbling over the spoils of a new state imported no relevance for the relationship with the Church. Observers were already noting the “sombre bodyguard of priests” surrounding de Valera as he ascended political platforms in the early 1920s; and the first Cumann na nGaedheal administration (1922-32) alienated many erst- while progressive supporters, including WB Yeats, by bringing in a ban against divorce in 1925. We now know that the Catholic Church was virtually untouchable in its position of power in Ireland until the 1990s when the staggering effect of sexual repression and a culture of impunity became apparent. The same-sex marriage referendum last year affirmed that the once vice-like grip was no more: only Roscommon voted against the proposal, despite the Church’s opposition. It remains firmly entrenched in education but such is the prevailing distrust for priests in particular that this situation is unlikely to endure much longer. Moreover, Irish people are no longer drawn to the priest’s house or convent as they were in droves. The Church simply does not have the personnel to project its message any longer. Of course there are residual defenders of Catholic conservatism in the Iona Institute and the broader Pro-Life movement. But the abuse scandals seem to have changed most Irish people’s outlook and the Pro-Life movement now looks

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