Bill Rolston reflects on the importance of international solidarity today in the context of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and explains why such a resonance exists between Ireland and Palestine, as explored in his latest Race & Class article.
When the Sumud flotilla left Barcelona at the start of September heading for Gaza, there was a rally in Belfast where small paper boats were launched in solidarity. A woman whom I had not seen in years was standing beside me and explained why she was there: ‘It’s in our DNA’, she said. In a nutshell, that’s what I am arguing in ‘Ireland and Palestine: the Roots of Resonance’ and that is at the core of the solidarity actions in Ireland.
Irish people can easily identify with the Palestinians on the grounds that what ‘they’ are doing in Palestine ‘they’ once did to ‘us’. The pronouns here are very elastic. The ‘us’ can be within living memory; thus the internment without trial of people in the North of Ireland in the 1970s matches the Israeli policy of ‘administrative detention’. But the connection does not need to be so immediate. Starvation is at the centre of the Israeli genocide in Palestine currently, and starvation is a frequent phenomenon in Irish history. In a three-year period in the mid-seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army wiped out 20 per cent of the Irish population, partly through weapons and partly as a result of using starvation as a weapon of war. In the mid-nineteenth century, during the Famine (or as it is called in Irish An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger), one million people died while boatloads of food left every day to fuel England’s industrial revolution. As Sinead O’Connor says in her song, ‘Famine’: ‘There was no famine’.
Kneecap, the rap group from the North of Ireland, miss no opportunity to speak up in support of Palestine and in condemnation of Israel. In fact, one of the group, Mo Chara, was recently before the British courts, charged with waving a Hezbollah flag at a gig and thereby ‘supporting terrorism’. (He was acquitted on a technicality.) Rapping in Irish as well as English, Kneecap represent the present generation of the broad political movement in the North which has spearheaded an impressive revival of the Irish language.
Kneecap is not alone. Other Irish groups, such as Fontaines DC and the Mary Wallopers, likewise are outspoken in their support of the Palestinians and likewise face the possibility of being cancelled. Irish Senator Frances Black has spearheaded the Occupied Territories Bill in the Dáil, the effect of which would be to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. In 2024, artwork created by Palestinian artists was sent to Belfast and reproduced on the walls. Fifteen separate murals were created on West Belfast’s ‘international wall’ which graphically displayed the horrors of Gaza. More positively, Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) Palestine has set up several clubs in the West Bank where Palestinian children compete in Irish football and hurling games.
Of course there is considerable public support for Palestine elsewhere, but in Ireland there is an additional connection. When the experience of colonialism and genocide is in your collective memory, current occurrences of colonialism and genocide take on a more personal, more weighty meaning.