An attentive observer strolling the streets of Northern Irish cities could not fail to notice that the Middle East conflict has spread its tentacles to this westerly part of Europe. It is especially striking in Belfast and Derry, where solidarity murals as well as Israeli and Palestinian flagsāsometimes planted on top of bonfiresāhave been visible since the 1970s. In the Republic of Ireland, on a wander through the cobbled streets of Temple Bar in Dublin, one is bound to come across posters advertising events organized to express solidarity with the people of Palestine and Gaza. Support for the Palestinian cause is also on display every Saturday on Grafton Street, Dublinās main shopping street, with an Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign stall run by a handful of activists, rain or shine. The fact that the famous Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy devoted her last two books to Gaza (A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza, 2013) and to the West Bank (Between River and Sea: Encounters in Israel and Palestine, 2014) does not contradict the perception developed in the numerous passionate letters written by some readers to the Irish Times that there is a special connection felt between a section of Irish civil society and Palestine.1 It is no coincidence that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) became the first European trade union federation to support the boycott of Israel in 2007. 2
The period covered by this book (1967ā2015) encompasses the birth and the development of the first pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian organizations in Irish civil society. The conviction that Ireland has the moral duty, as a former colony of the British Empire, to stand by peoples or nations that currently endure ācolonial oppressionā is not new. This belief was instrumental in guiding Irish foreign policy as it was taking shape in the 1950s. The Republic of Ireland made the uncommon decision (for a European country) to side with unaligned states after the Bandung conference of 1955, and has repeatedly asserted that position at the United Nations from 1956. Traditionally, it has shown empathy with the decolonized states in Africa, Asia and Latin America while defending its neutrality policy with vigour. On the issue of the Middle East, the Irish government displayed its sympathy with Palestinians in the late 1960s and 1970s; Minister for Foreign Affairs Frank Aiken, for example, spoke at the UN on 27 June 1967 in support of compensation for Palestinian refugees and their right of return. On 22 November 1967, the United Nations adopted resolution 242, which introduced the principle of āpeace against landā, the restitution of the territories taken from the Arab countries so as to allay the tensions in the area, a policy stoutly defended by successive Irish governments. One may note the significant role of Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Lenihan3 who, on an official visit to Bahrain in February 1980, published a joint communiquĆ© with his Bahraini counterpart, stating that the Palestinians had a right to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state in Palestine. The Bahrain declaration also recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people. With this statement acknowledging the rights of Palestinians to self-determination, Ireland was a precursor in the European Economic Community, as this statement was made a few months before the Venice declaration (June 1980) was issued by the nine member states of the European Community, making much the same commitment. In a similar vein, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs Michael OāKennedy was the first to refer to the PLO in a European declaration at the UN General Assembly, during the second Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union in 1979.4 This position reflected the sympathy of Irish public opinion for what were perceived as āliberation movementsā, that is to say movements struggling against colonialism. In the 1930s, and for some decades afterwards, those advocating the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East appeared to be in conflict with British imperialism and, hence, seemed to embody that anti-colonial ideal. It is a perception still encouraged by Israeli supporters who mention, for instance, that Yitzhak Shamir, an officer from Lohamei Herut Yisrael5 (Lehi) adopted the nom de guerre āMichaelā as a homage to Michael Collins, the Irish republican hero. However, at the end of the 1960s, for reasons which this book will address, perceptions began to be reversed and those once seen as oppressed strugglers against imperialismāthe Jewish people of Israelāgradually came to be viewed rather differently; they became the oppressors in Irish popular opinion, while the Arab people of Palestine became the oppressed. This shift, which began to take place at the end of the 1960s, is the starting point of this book. It is the outcome of a combination of factors favouring the apparition of transnational mobilization, emerging from Ireland but also from the Middle East. A crucial moment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and for its perception in Ireland, was undoubtedly the Six Day War, which saw Egypt, Jordan and Syria take on Israel in June 1967. The Arab forces were quickly crushed by the powerful and rapidly deployed Israeli army, with serious long-term consequences, as refugees streamed out of the contested zones, particularly after the Israeli capture of the West Bank, the Gaza strip and East Jerusalem. As many as 250,000 refugees fled to camps already swamped by the generations of Palestinians who had been born after the Nakba in 1948.6 The end of the Six Day War saw the mushrooming of colonies, as a population of Israeli settlers entrenched themselves in āsettlementsā within the occupied territories.7 A feeling of solidarity towards Palestine and the displaced Palestinians began to grow in Ireland and the Israeli state faced severe criticism in the Irish media. This was mirrored by a smaller but vocal mobilization by those on the island who supported Israel. As a result, at the end of the 1960s, the first pro-Israel and pro-Palestine associations were created, the Ireland-Israel Friendship League (1967) and the Irish-Arab Society (1969). This marked the beginning of a small but very active civil society solidarity movement that has not lost its strength and has grown further in more recent years, particularly following the Israeli assaults on Gaza in 2009 and 2014.
The end of the 1960s was a breeding ground for transnational solidarity between Ireland and the Middle East, due to the combination of strong tensions in the Middle East and identity conflicts in Ireland. In Northern Ireland, the āTroublesā, which erupted in 1968, brought a special sensitivity towards national and religious identities and a hardening of positions. Armed groups turned to the Middle East in search of allies, and also of weapons. For Irish republicans, in particular, this was about developing a relationship with brothers-in-arms, fellow fighters against imperialism. The acquisition of material and vocal support from Middle Eastern groups had a twofold purpose for republicans: there was a sharing of knowledge and experience, but also a propaganda element in reflecting the legitimacy of their cause in the eyes of the public. Wesley Hutchinson, in his book Espace de lāImaginaire Unioniste Nord-irlandais, counterposes the traditional propensity of the republican party Sinn FĆ©in to invest in multiple international causes, among them Palestine, to the apparent lack of interest from unionists in the development of such transnational solidarity networks, except perhaps with Israel in more recent times.8 The strong identification of the Irish republican community with the Palestinian cause, especially noticeable since the 1970s, must be studied in comparison with the more recent support for Israel by northern unionist political and religious actors, some of them members of the influential Orange Order and the Royal Black Institutionātwo organizations which officially do not take a position on foreign affairs. Likewise, an analysis of the history of the solidarity shown by republican organizations towards liberation movements in Palestine must be studied within a general understanding of the development and evolution of those organizationsā foreign policy since the end of the 1960s. What is more, the foreign policies of the various republican organizations cannot be seen as a monolithic blockānuances of approach and political differences between the several republican trends have to be taken into account. These manifested themselves gradually following the development of partnerships with different Palestinian resistance movements and in the context of the rise and fall in popularity of a Marxist analysis of geopolitics. For republican organizations as for unionist/loyalist organizations, the objective is to analyse how the debate on Palestine is likely to feed reflexive comments on Ireland, and how talking about the Middle East is often also talking about Ireland, its values and its history.
The peculiar solidarity of Irish opinion with the Palestinian cause is not limited to republican circles in Northern Ireland. Indeed, an acceptance of the post-colonial theory applied to Ireland is widespread in Irish public opinion and in the discourse of a large part of the political class; there is a sense of a shared history, however constructed, between Ireland and Palestine. Post-colonial theory is the explanation of social, cultural, economic and political phenomena in a territory, through a colonial past that engenders similar processes in different colonized territories.9 The debated issue of the validity of the colonial identity of Ireland matters less to this work than the perception of Ireland as a former colony by a majority in the Republic of Ireland and a minority in Northern Ireland. I am not only referring to abstract perceptions here, but to their consequences in terms of the positioning of Ireland on the international scene. The 1970s also saw the appearance of a revisionist historical discourse in Ireland, which called into question the prevailing nationalist account of the countryās past and queried the political dynamics at the foundation of the Irish state. Moreover, post-colonial theory, which became a critical instrument in Ireland in the 1980s, grew in force at the same time as the rise of Palestinian nationalism from the start of the 1970s, giving the Palestinian nation an intellectual language to describe the narrative of their own story, as was explained by Edward Said:
For the first time in modern Palestinian history, a critical language and, of course, a critical awareness developed that enabled historians, novelists, poets, feminists, sociologists, and demographers to forge an adversarial style that made important inroads against the prevailing but carefully Zionist and exclusivist vision of how Palestine had always been the Jewish national home.10
It was not only accidents of history that apparently brought Ireland and Palestine together, nor just the issue of colonization, but also the construction of their shared historical narrative with the aim that it would become hegemonic, that is to say accepted and integrated by the majority.11 The period under scrutiny is of crucial importance, as it was during those years that Irish and Palestinian post-colonial theories met, interacted and engaged in a dialogue within the discourse of the civil society.
The Irish connection with the Middle East is neither uniform nor homogeneous, but splits into a multitude of perspectives that shape domestic readings of the Palestine/Israel conflict in Ireland. Domestic readings are informed by the historical narratives of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In other words, the adoption and diffusion by political actors12 of an explanatory account of the genesis of the two states is formed within particular contexts. Some of the domestic readings enclose the Middle East in an Irish framing that tends to iron out the differences and to overlook the specificities of dissimilar geopolitical situations to favour the reign of comparison. Comparison involves an identification with the Israeli or Palestinian causes in Ireland, with some activists deploying markedly Irish reading-grids to analyse the situation in Palestine/Israel. Such processes encourage local activists to gravitate towards an international level and engage with foreign causes. Indeed, a cognitive construction of the Ź»otherŹ¼ is at play, using geography as a space for projection. I am here referring to the concept of Ź»imagined geographiesŹ¼ coined by Edward Said, which consists of distinguishing the Ź»selfŹ¼ from the Ź»otherŹ¼, of separating in oneās mind a familiar space, inhabited by everything that is similar to you, from an unfamiliar space containing everything alien to you.13 These imagined geographies assist in the construction of structures of sympathy and antipathy, which include the allies and opponents of the political entities inhabiting the spaces that were identified above. Thus, imagined geographies result from the narrative of oneās own history, an account of self-construction, which sets up a value system defining the outlines of otherness. The deployment of the concept of domestic readings of th...