ON Thursday past, the B(ritish)BC’s Question Time came from Belfast. Predictably, there was much discussion of the bloodshed in the Middle East, with panel members and presenter Fiona Bruce reminding viewers that ‘this part of the world’ had also experienced conflict for many years, followed eventually by a hard-won peace process.
The discussion circled around Donald Trump’s recent call for the design of a new Gaza, controlled by Palestinians, and one which would exclude Hamas.
It’s that last bit that all the people on the panel – and in the audience – ducked. Several people lamented the absence of Palestinian representatives in the shaping of this new Gaza, but emphasised that the surrounding Arab states were involved. Nobody said Hamas should be included and nobody, explicitly or implicitly, saw this as a flaw.
How fearful our public figures are. If comparisons with the NEI conflict are made, and they were, then comparisons of the peace-building should also be considered.
To most of us, it’s obvious that republicans – Sinn Féin and the IRA – had to be central to the peace discussions in NEI. What no-one wanted to say out loud now is that Hamas must play a central role in reconstructing Gaza.
Why should they? Isn’t Hamas just a group of blood-thirsty terrorists who butchered hundreds of Israelis on October 7, 2023?
No they’re not. Hamas became a major political force in the Palestinian territories by winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Since 2007, it has been the de facto governing authority in the Gaza Strip. It came to power as a political as well as a military force because the Palestinian people voted for Hamas. But the door has now been bolted shut against them and no one seems to be prepared to point out the absurdity of this.
The stupidity of an exclusion policy in NEI was memorably caught by Fergus Finlay, a senior advisor to the Irish Labour party. He declared that peace talks without the participation of republicans (i.e. Sinn Féin and those representing the republican movement) wouldn’t “be worth a penny candle”.
It took unionists a long time to see this. Even when the DUP had been house-trained to the point where they were prepared to sit at the same table as Sinn Féin, Ian Paisley insisted on the tables being arranged in a weirdly angular way so that while he was sitting beside Gerry Adams, he somehow at the same time wasn’t.
Let’s consider the parallels. In 1948 the state of Israel was established. This required an estimated 700,000 and more Palestinians make room. Palestinian properties were seized by the state and redistributed to Jewish immigrants. Refugees lived (and many still live) in camps across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, often in harsh conditions. Between 1948 to 2023, it’s estimated that at least 100,000 Palestinians were killed by Israelis.
The parallels with Ireland’s history are uncanny. With the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century, for example, at least 100,000 native Irish inhabitants were directly displaced or dispossessed of their ancestral lands. Centuries later the state of Northern Ireland was set up as a Protestant state for a Protestant people, with gerrymander, discrimination and periodic violence aimed at keeping the Irish minority in NEI quiet, while shorn of their civil and sometimes human rights.
Just as those supportive of Israel’s pummelling of Gaza want the history of the region to have begun on October 7, 2023, so many unionists (and some lukewarm nationalists) want NEI’s history to have started in 1969.
As Irish presidential candidate Catherine Connolly says repeatedly, context is everything. If you hear someone avoiding context (the DUP’s Jonathan Buckley on Question Time last week was a fine example), you’ll know they fear hearing the full truth.
