WE are frequently reminded “For evil to thrive, it is sufficient that good men (and women) do and say nothing." That’s true.
There’s a popular litany that goes "I didn’t speak up when they came for the Jews, because I wasn’t a Jew. I didn’t speak when they came for the gays – I wasn’t a gay. I didn’t speak up when they came for the socialists – I wasn’t a socialist. And then finally when they came for me, there was nobody left to speak up for me.”
In preparation for abducting its enemies, the autocrats address the problem of speech. George Orwell’s novel 1984 shows how tyrants work hard to eliminate free speech or certainly any words capable of disrupting their lies. But if there’s one thing worse than the suppression of free speech, it’s the suppression of ethical response.
You sometimes see this when a parent, usually a mother, stares at her child in mortal danger. The car is coming full belt, the child has stepped into the road, the mother watches in horror, incapable of stopping what she knows is about to happen.
On a global scale, that’s where we are now. It’s not that we don’t know what’s going on in Gaza. We get heavy supplements of it, night after night, until we feel sick with horror. The sad little white bundles, bound up, seeping blood. The men carrying them looking numb with horror. And mothers shrieking their grief, over and over. Their loved ones – sometimes their entire family – have been wiped out, thanks to Israel’s relentless destruction. The state of Israel uses drones, bombs, and now they’re using a tactic as old as the siege of Derry: starvation. We watch from our living rooms and feel beaten into a numb state of helplessness.
But are we helpless? Well yes, insofar as Ireland is a tiny dot in the Atlantic. We’re not equipped to interfere politically and certainly not militarily, to tell Israel that what they are doing has been declared a war crime by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Israel doesn’t care; it continues the slaughter, unconcerned about war crime labels. So who then can help?
Well, we missed a trick last weekend. That was when the Eurovision song contest was conducted. The managing director of RTÉ first clutched his pearls and burbled about consulting with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Shortly after, he announced that the southern state would participate,even though Israel was among the participants. Israel came second, but sin scéal eile.
Could RTÉ not bring itself to make this tiny ethical gesture? Ireland is well known among European countries, and its absence would have been noticed. But no. While a couple of dozen Gazan children were blown to bits, the sweet sounds of cowardice sounded clear and loud at the contest.
We can’t, even if we wished, support Palestine with military force. But there are other ways. Ireland even invented the term ‘boycott’. Here’s Charles Stewart Parnell on the topic in 1895: “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the road when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him in the shop, you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.”
Let’s treat every Israeli product, direct or indirect, that we encounter in the same way. That’s if you think the blowing apart of Israeli babies and innocent civilians matters.
