This summer I visited Ireland for a few days with my mom. When we arrived in Belfast, the itinerary was entirely political- my ideal ‘vacation.’ We went to the Eileen Hickey Irish Republican Museum, run by the late Eileen’s sister, the museum had a plethora of artifacts from the British occupation of Ireland. Objects like mini-cameras that were snuck into prison camps, rubber bullets, posters with the message that rubber bullets are lethal, and other memorabilia. In Belfast, there is a wall that separates the protestant loyalist community and the catholic republican communities. It is known to visitors and tourists as the “peace wall” which is an ironic title considering that even the current reality of Belfast heavily reflects and continues the time of The Troubles- a conflict between loyalists and republicans of Northern Ireland from ‘68-’98. The wall is still there for a reason and has expanded to be taller over the past decades because people would throw things over it to harass the Irish Catholic people. The wall was built in the literal backyards of Irish Catholic neighborhoods while the protestant loyalist neighborhoods are farther away, safeguarding them from harassment and retaliation. It's almost comical how one side of the town is doused in jingoistic British paraphernalia, fully embracing and enforcing Britain’s occupational violence. During the Troubles there were casualties on both sides but because loyalists were part of the occupying forces, their murderous actions were considered victories by military heroes while IRA (Irish Republican Army) members were thrown in prison camp (i.e. H-block) for whatever reason the British police wanted.
England’s stain on Ireland actually goes further back than what mainstream history refers to as the ‘Irish potato famine’. The idea that one failed crop would starve a whole country is an imperially favored revision of history. The famine was actively manufactured as the ruling English shipped out other foods produced by the Irish as they starved. Over a century later, British occupational forces had not left Northern Ireland alone. The IRA (and later, Provisional IRA) represents a force for independence and a defensive force against occupation. These days it is not a controversial stance to consider the success of Ireland’s defense, and Irish culture is popular especially among Americans.
The British have their own unique involvement in the colonization of Palestine. They established the Balfour agreement, which anointed Palestinian land to be the location for the national homeland of the Jewish people in 1917. This agreement was heavily influenced by anti-semetic and evangelical Christian notions of the worldwide power of Jews and that through Zionism, Britain could begin their influence and colonial presence in the Middle East.
The people who did the work and are still doing the work in Northern Ireland not only stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation cause, but they actively choose critical support. After the recent severe escalation of Israel's violence on the Palestinian population in reaction to their breakthrough of Gaza’s apartheid wall, EU aid which had previously been directed towards the Palestinian population was suspended. Ireland rejected this suspension. “Ireland, like Palestine, has a long history of occupation by a foreign power, with famine, dispossession and vicious military crackdowns etched into the nation's collective unconscious,” Irish researcher and artist Adam Doyle. Ireland, a nation which has been subjected to exploitation and occupation by the British state, stands firmly in solidarity with Palestine, as should everyone else.
The difficulty in accepting this and taking action in solidarity comes from the racist imperialistic propaganda industry which produces manufactured consent in carrying out a genocide or other form of mass violence. Mainstream news and media has the interests of those who fund it, so if the US, UK, and other western countries control the most popular media organizations, their interests are projected onto society at large. It is already an assumption that people from global south countries live in a less-advanced, barbaric, less human, and constantly warring state of affairs. This image is maintained through neo-liberalism and a variety of dominant ideologies. Later, I will discuss explicit examples of the Western media reporting lies for the past weeks.
The framing of the phrase ‘Israel - Palestine Conflict’ is an outstanding and relentlessly vicious form of erasing settler colonial occupation that seeks to erase the indigenous population. The occupational force in this case is Israel, but the reason they have such a stronghold on material means and media narratives is through their feeding nations of the British and United States. Our American tax dollars are directly involved in funding terror and violence against Palestine “Over the last nearly 75 years, the US government has provided more aid to Israel than it has to any other foreign country. Between 2001 and 2020, Israel received more military aid from the US than all other nations combined… In 2022, the US spent a total of $4.8 billion on military, economic, and missile defense aid for Israel'' (Business Insider).The US’ persistent support of Israel falls in allignment with the imperial and colonial nature of the country’s military tendencies and history. Afterall, The United States of America was built using stolen labor on land stolen from the indigenous population its settlers genocided. Because of these intricately shared interests between the US and Isreal, we must apply heavy pressure on our government officials to stop funding Israel's war crimes.
In recent history, the largest harm done to Jewish populations was by the European Holocaust, yet it is the Palestinians who are paying the price for Europe’s atrocities. The countries who failed to protect Jewish people initially have continued this failure through the imposition of a settler colonial nation state in Judaism’s name on a land in which most are not indigenous. A number of Holocaust survivors have spoken against the Zionist project. Here are a short few: Hajo Meyer, “I am pained by the parallels I see between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palistinians today”, Reuben Muscovitz, “I compare what I went through during the Holocaust to what the besiegen Palestinian children are going through”, Dr. Marika Sherwood, “I will not remain silent in the face of the attempted annihilation of the Palestinians..I will not allow the confounding terms ‘anti-Semetic’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ to go unchallenged” (abujanazah 2023). Palestinians are not the ones associating the Jewish identity with Israel, there are Jewish Palestinians and Jews in Israel who organize against the government and people of many other faiths involved. This conflation of identity is manufactured, as it has to be to succeed, by white supremacist devices.
The British, United States, and Israel are a few of the states that the west calls ‘civil society.’ These countries exhibit indiscriminate repression of anti-zionist opinion and are also breeding grounds for real anti-Semitism. An Israeli news company called Haaretz reports that Communications Minister Karhi wants to imprison Israeli citizens that ‘harm national morale’ (Bar-Eli 2023). Israel is not ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ it is fascist totalitarian in nature. These countries are the imperial powers of the world, the ones who consistently claim that this issue is complicated. Especially as residents of these countries, it's easy to cling onto their rhetoric and want to suppress anti-colonial sentiment when all you know is the imperial core. But let the common acceptance and appreciation towards Ireland’s independence show you what real political integrity is and embrace common, unwavering acceptance for Palestine’s liberation. When the subjects of colonial violence are Black, brown, Muslim, etc, we need to be infinitely stronger because non-white people’s humanity is constantly diminished in the mainstream agenda as the ultimate weapon of manufactured consent.
It is true that once you understand the nature of Israel's settlement on Palestine, the ‘conflict’ is actually easy to understand and solidarity with the Palestinian cause can be established. They forced the population into small areas, seizing land and homes which are turned into settlements, restricted access to basic resources, subjected to missiles and various forms of violence, forced to move from generational community homes, and the list goes on. What more is necessary to draw a conclusion? Why hasn’t everyone gotten there? Why have people only dipped their toes in solidarity after thousands of people have already been murdered in the past week?
If we simplify this cause as ‘easy’ to be on the right side of, and state that we generally are always on the side of justice, maybe that belief is because it (the right side) is something to decide once all the “facts”, or rather fatalities, are laid out in front of us. It becomes easy when the damage is done, not when imperialist propaganda has allowed the occupation to exist since 1948. Even with the facts, opposition narratives will string them into imperial propaganda. The lethal rubber bullets in the Irish museum were from decades ago, yet in 2020, the United States militarized police used them against BLM protestors--the same police which shares tactics and equipment with the IDF. Again, taking the ‘high road’ isn’t obvious or easy because it is not presented as the high road. It's presented as barbarism and terrorism and any narrative outside of that is suppressed.
We are mistaken to think true allyship and comradery is simple and easy, it does require hard work. The US military industrial complex seeks to make themselves the worldwide arbiters of so-called peace, justice, and law through maintaining their violent, exploitative presence in the global south. Their side has all of the media coverage, sets the agenda for what topics are emphasized, invests in the enemies of resistance, profits off of the oppressing side, and collaborates with other imperial powers. In a recent video, palestinian activist Mohammad El-Kurd makes a point about media literacy as he points out that western run news and health media orgs label destroyed hospitals and schools in Gaza as ‘Hamas-run’ in order to feed on your bias. Meanwhile these destroyed locations and resources are adding to the Palestinian death toll. Everything in Gaza is technically ‘Hamas-run’ and so this labeling effectively removes sympathy for the victims of ethnic cleansing. A few days ago, the BBC cut away from a live broadcast where a journalist began talking about Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gazan civilians in the middle of his sentence (jacksonhinklle 2023). Joe Biden has repeated again and again that the US backs Israel- this fact has never been a question. His empty platitudes claiming he cares about Palestinian lives have no material effect as of right now, while the media rapidly shifts the blame for Israel's crimes to Hamas. Vigilance is necessary in analyzing claims made about Hamas, which is the west’s typical War on Terror scapegoat group for their real intentions. Read about the history of Hamas and the dozens of debunked claims made by Israel and the US. Do not succumb to shielding full solidarity with Palestine by condemning Hamas because Israel is not fighting terrorism, they are ethnically cleansing Palestine. Notice how the news media has shifted from changing their framing of ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ to ‘Israel-Hamas war.’ Condemning Hamas has no beneficial effect to the people currently in Palestine, who seek unification on the front of liberation. Furthermore, ‘terrorism’ is a politically and racially charged war-mongering narrative. The simplest search result from the Wikipedia page on terrorism explains the words use: “The terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" gained renewed currency in the 1970s as a result of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Basque conflict, and the operations of groups such as the Red Army Faction. Leila Khaled [Palestinian] was described as a terrorist in a 1970 issue of Life magazine.” Israel is constantly projecting lies about Hamas’ actions that they themselves rescind- such as the beheading of babies and the sequence of events at the rave. This is the nature of a fascistic state. The richest, most powerful governments do not make accidental mistakes. Anything Biden or other politicians have said in favor of Palestinians has been after the genocidal war crimes have fully processed and continue as we speak. Their new promises of debt relief to Egypt for taking in Palestinians is not a real concession, it is implying that Palestinians should be fully expunged from their indigenous land under the guise of humanitarianism. It would be furthering ethnic cleansing.
I am not Palestinian, however my hatred for Zionism and vigor against it are personal. In this example, I can deconstruct the idea that powerful muslims and some of the richest Muslim countries apply their power against Israel. Firstly, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have agreed to the Abrahamic accords which normalize diplomatic relations and economic ties with Israel. The Abrahamic accords are a direct betrayal of the Palestinian cause.
At the start of 2022, I was invited by a Wayne State University professor to an Interfaith Fellowship trip, meant to foster civil discourse among students of multiple different faiths. This was a trip to Dubai, UAE sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC/AJC) in partnership with the Detroit Center for Civil Discourse. My initial assessment was that there would be students from other faiths besides Islam and Judaism, and we would be having more theologically and culturally inspired discussions. Because of COVID and other reasons, a few students dropped, leaving two Muslim and two Jewish students which was still balanced. Because of the World Expo in Dubai as well as the Abrahamic Accords, this location was seen as an ideal setting for an Interfaith Fellowship. The events we partook in and conversations that ensued on the trip would eventually hit me like a slap in the face. I wish this happened more than two years ago so I could further excuse my naivety in being ill-equipped to deal with such highly political and charged topics and even thinking this trip would be about actual interfaith, which is something I truly value. I should have further inquired about the sponsors of the trip and sat with my already developing opinion of the UAE as the least-muslim-muslim-country. While we did have the opportunity to compare and contrast faiths and experience facets of both Islam and Judaism, this trip was riddled with Zionist ideology. Every group and speaker we ate with had strong ties to Israel and spoke only about that country, not Judaism. When we had lunch with JCRC correspondents and muslim guests- the muslim guests in question were two Emirates and one Saudi man who were all wealthy investors in Israel. I specifically remember one of them calling the Palestinian people weak, and it is a painful memory to this day. These guests had little grasp on either Islamic practice in general or even the culture of the majority of Muslims. I was not told before the trip that every event would hinge around Israel and their invasion onto Arab land. I’m not even Arab, I am a Pakistani Ahmadi Muslim so my voice as a representative in these discussions was rather irrelevant. After this specific trip and seeing some terrible people before my eyes, barely finding the words and strength to oppose the false logic from every angle I turned (I said many things and tried my best, but anti-Zionists were outnumbered- even the other Muslim kid invited was a Zionist), I felt guilty for accepting anything from Zionists under any circumstance. This issue is not about me in any sense, but I feel uniquely indebted towards the Palestinian cause for what I took part in. Zionists want to pretend that rich, corrupt Muslims who love Israel is the biggest interfaith accomplishment. But anti-Zionist Jewish, Christian, Muslim and more organizations around the world show that real interfaith lies in solidarity and not business and military investments which unequivocally oppress the working class.
One week ago, Islamophobic hysteria had white American Jews warning each other about being attacked in some ‘global day of Jihad.’ On October 14th, a 6 year old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death, his mother stabbed to critical condition, by their landlord. From just the past week, at least one million Palestininas in Gaza have been displaced, water and electricity has been cut off, upwards of 3,000 Palestinians have been killed, thousands more are injured, basic infrastructure including news stations, hospitals, ambulances, have been destroyed (AlJazeera). There are a plethora of more unfortunate details I could spend a lifespan of time listing out. At its core, this is why we all must stand in solidarity with Palestine. We cannot let the world fail them and if the Palestinians in Gaza have not lost hope, hope is the absolute last thing we in America should be willing to lose. End the occupation now. May Allah elevate the souls of the martyred, Ameen.
Sources
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/how-us-tax-dollars-have-supported-israel-and -its-military-for-75-years-and-whats-next-for-american-aid/articleshow/104400105.cms#:~:text=I n%202022%2C%20the%20US%20spent,fighter%20jet%20in%20the%20world.
https://x.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1713616003186241553?s=46&t=TATL-egtdx-l5UYYl6tz7w https://x.com/abujanazah/status/1712438998474318159?s=46&t=TATL-egtdx-l5UYYl6tz7w
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-15/ty-article/.premium/israeli-minister-seeks-to-im prison-citizens-who-harm-national-morale/0000018b-33a7-d0b2-afff-33e788c00000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism
https://x.com/m7mdkurd/status/1713615174010073535?s=46&t=TATL-egtdx-l5UYYl6tz7w
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/14/israel-hamas-war-live-us-moves-second-ai rcraft-carrier-to-mediterranean#:~:text=the%20Israeli%20shelling.-,At%20least%202%2C670%2 0Palestinians%2C%20a%20quarter%20of%20them%20children%2C%20have,registry%2C%20 the%20health%20ministry%20says.
https://www.cair.com/press_releases/breaking-cair-chicago-calls-for-hate-crime-charge-for-you muslims-must-die-killing-of-palestinian-american-child/
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/history-irelands-support-palestine
