AUGUST 2005

Ireland and the Palestine Question 1948-2004 - Rory Miller

By Raymond Deane©

(Irish Academic Press)

45 Euro hardback

25 Euro paperback

Dr Miller begins his story not in 1948 but in 1937, when Eamonn de Valera told the League of Nations that the Palestine question should not be solved by partition, "the cruellest wrong that could be done to any people..." Ten years later, when that wrong had been inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs, the reaction in Ireland was predictably hostile.

In the early years of the Israeli state Ireland's main preoccupation was with guaranteeing free access to the Holy Places. Our UN accession in 1955 was welcomed by the Arab world, "aware of Ireland's anti-colonial credentials and its policy of neutrality". As Minister for External Affairs from 1957, Frank Aiken focussed on the question of Palestinian refugees, Ireland becoming a generous contributor to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. After the 1967 war, Aiken called for "the withdrawal of Israeli forces to 4 June lines", asserting that Israel "ha[d] no right whatever to annex the territory of [its] neighbours". He believed "that a solution to the refugee crisis was a necessary prerequisite to (rather than a welcome consequence of) a general solution to the problem."

Significantly, Irish newspapers unanimously condemned Aiken's interventions. The Evening Herald wondered whether Aiken "would be just as anxious to hand back the Hill of Tara if it had been used to shell Meath farmers" (sic). But as Israel remained ruthlessly intransigent on the issue of Palestinian refugees, attitudes changed. By 1970 the Irish Independent was calling Israel "stiff-necked" and the Irish Times was demanding "justice for the Palestinian refugees".

1980 saw the Bahrain Declaration in which foreign minister Brian Lenihan recognised "the role of the PLO in representing the Palestinian people" and called again for "the withdrawal of Israel from all territory occupied since the 1967 conflict". This became the basis of the EC's Venice Declaration later that year, thus confirming Lenihan's role as a major architect of ostensible Community policy on the Palestine question. Israel was predictably enraged.

In the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords Israel acquired its long-coveted residential embassy in Dublin, although Ireland still postponed appointing an ambassador to Tel Aviv. Relations were soured again by the 1996 massacre of civilians at Qana, in Lebanon, when Michael McDowell led condemnation of Israel while David Norris blamed Hizbollah!

Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada following Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Haram Al-Sharif in September 2000, Ireland has consistently outdone its EU partners in defending Palestinian rights at a rhetorical level, while voting with the rest of them at the UN. In July 2004 Ireland's individual submission to the International Court of Justice on the question of Israel's separation wall forcefully favoured the Palestinian position, yet Ireland also signed up to the much weaker collective EU submission.

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Dr Miller's account of Ireland's relationship with Israel/Palestine is informative and intriguing, if rather sloppily edited and indexed. However, his description and interpretation of historical events in the Middle East follows the old-fashioned Zionist party line to the letter. Let us look more closely at some of his more significant omissions and distortions.

He consistently decries the Palestinians for having spurned the 1947 UN Partition plan, but fails to spell out the lopsided figures involved: 56% was allotted to Jews who constituted only 33% of the population and owned less than 7% of the land.

He claims that the refugee problem ensued after "the invasion of Israel by the combined [Arab]


armies on 15 May 1948" and Israel's subsequent victory, but omits to mention that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs had already begun long before the invasion took place. The most he concedes is that "by April 1948... over 100,000 Palestinian Arabs... had fled to the surrounding Arab states" but he advances no opinion as to why this happened.

Concerning UNSC 242, he claims as "fact" the pedantic allegation - long since discarded by all but the most diehard Likudniks - that "the absence of the definite article 'the' from the official English drafting of the resolution was an acknowledgment...that... Israel would not have to return to borders as they existed before the war..." He fails to mention that 242 emphasises "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force", or that subsequent resolutions (e.g. UNGA 38/180) unambiguously demand "withdrawal by Israel from all the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem". This selective allegiance to UN resolutions is characteristic of Israel's defenders.

He asserts that "The war occurred because Israel (correctly) believed that the various Arab states... were preparing to mount a final offensive against the Jewish state." This contention has long since been undermined. He fails to cite such statements as this by Menachem Begin: "In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." Such honesty is foreign to Dr Miller.

It is not necessary to share this reviewer's belief that Dr Miller is drastically wrong about these issues in order to disparage his omission of all reference to those historians - including the Israeli "new historians" - who contradict his analysis. But most unpardonable of all is his attempt to exculpate Israel for the Sabra and Chatila massacres in 1982: these, he tells us, "were carried out by Lebanese Christians rather than the Israeli army." He refers to Ariel Sharon's "alleged role in the massacre while he was Israeli Minister of Defence..." (my emphasis).

There is no mention of Israel's official Kahan Commission of February 1983 which found that (in its own words) "Israel had indirect responsibility for the massacre". Sharon was found "responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge when he approved the entry of the [Christian] Phalangists into the camps as well as not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed", and was forced to resign. Such an omission surely borders on falsification.

Dr Miller's book ends with the customary sterile demonisation of Arafat, and the claim that Ireland's supposed loyalty to him "threatens to tarnish Ireland's reputation among a younger generation of Palestinian leaders." He should be told that such leaders have long since given up on Ireland, because of our abandonment of an independent foreign policy within the context of what is perceived as growing EU support for Israel. Dr Miller's eponymous subject is merely a Trojan horse for the dissemination of unvarnished propaganda. This is Irish historiography in the service of the Israeli state.

Raymond Deane is a founder and current chairperson of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Author no longer 'in love with the Zionist narrative'

http://www.amin.org/eng/uncat/2005/aug/aug2-0.html

By: Deaglan de Breadun
Irish Times

** Israeli activist Susan Nathan who recently visited Ireland was interviewed by the Irish Times July 28. On August 2, the foreign editor of the paper gave permission to post the following article:

The most accurate description of Susan Nathan comes from herself: "What I do is that I live what comes out of my mouth." She is the only Jew among 25,000 Arabs in the northern Israeli town of Tamra and has taken up the cause of the Palestinians who remained inside the borders of Israel after the state was set up in 1948.

Her harshest critics could not say she has chosen a comfortable path. Friends and even some relatives have turned against her, she says, but she is standing by her controversial claim that the Palestinians in Israel are victims of apartheid-style discrimination and mistreatment.

Now she's written a book to tell her story and make her case, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish-Arab Divide (HarperCollins). The writing style is direct and simple: she wanted "Joe Bloggs on the street" to be able to read it and say, "I didn't understand that it was like that". In person, too, Nathan is direct and to the point. As far as she is concerned, the issue itself is a simple one. Her Jewish co-religionists took the land from the Palestinians, who have been severely oppressed and treated as second-class citizens ever since.

She only came to this conclusion in her 50s, having been an ardent Zionist all her life. It took a long time for the penny to drop but there is now no self-doubt or hesitation.

Nathan says that initially she was "brainwashed and in love with the Zionist narrative". Very few non-Jewish people understood the power of Zionist propaganda.

"You are brought up to believe that you are outside of society, that you are forever persecuted, that Israel is your safe haven . . . It is like being part of a cult." The Zionist claim that Israel exists for the salvation of the Jews in case of another Holocaust was "a very cynical misuse of people's fears and the Holocaust".

She is the daughter of a Harley Street physician. Her father, Samuel Levy, studied in South Africa and then Trinity College Dublin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. "He used to spend Friday night and all Saturday with the family of Chaim Herzog [future president of Israel, whose father was Ireland's chief rabbi]."

The family came from the Baltic region. Fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms, they made their way to Odessa on the Black Sea. Family lore has it that they wanted to go to Hamburg but the ship was full so they had to sail for South Africa instead. "And that's how we escaped the Holocaust."

Born in 1949, she grew up in South Africa and England. She got married, reared a family and got divorced when she was 50. Initially she was an avid supporter of the Israeli state. Having worked as a teacher and HIV/Aids therapist, Nathan decided at last to realise her lifelong Zionist dream of emigrating to Israel. "I applied under the Right of Return," she says. Under Israeli law, anyone with a Jewish grandparent can emigrate to Israel and become a citizen.

"It was a wonderful homecoming. I believed the Zionist ideology, I really believed this was 'a land without a people for a people without a land'. Palestinians were not on the map for me in any shape or form." She was offered "a very good job" teaching business English in Tel Aviv. Around the time of her arrival, the latest intifada rebellion erupted at the end of 2000. She saw "the wonderful achievements of our forces" being extolled on Israeli television.

"I really fell for that line," she says. But then she became very ill and had to be hospitalized and this brought her into close regular contact with Palestinians. She began to ask herself, "Where am I in this society, what is my role?" She became involved with a Palestinian-Jewish NGO dealing with deprived communities, and worked on a project in Tamra. "I started to understand the enormous similarities between Arab-Israeli society and black society during the apartheid years in South Africa."

But it's not as if Israel adopts petty measures such as having separate Arab and Jewish toilets the way South Africa had separate toilets for blacks and whites. "In Israel it's far more sophisticated than that, because it's all heavily veiled. It's very important for Israel to be seen to be democratic,
Western, accepted by the US and Europe." But as far as she is concerned: "Israeli society in its current form really equals a half democracy, a democracy for Jews only."

Nathan's version of Israeli history would not find favour in Zionist circles: "The major form of discrimination comes in the confiscation and appropriation of Arab land. All of the state of Israel is built on Palestinian land. Around 480 to 500 villages were totally destroyed during the battle of Israeli independence in 1948. And this discrimination and dispossession goes on and on and on.

"Israel is the only country in the world where you can be an eternal refugee, where you can be present but absent by law from your property, being deprived of the right of return to your property and your land, even though you own the deeds for that property and that land, and to be without compensation. It is appalling.

"And once I had seen the comparison with South Africa, I decided that I could no longer keep my mouth closed." Nathan decided to go and live among the Arabs in Israel and "help to activate change".

She vigorously rejects any allegation that she is an anti-Semitic or "self-hating" Jew. "One is not called anti-British if one criticizes the policies of the British government." This is "just a rather nasty political ploy".

But she knows there is a price to be paid for the stand she has taken. "Everything in life comes with a price." Taking a phrase from the late Edward Said, she says: "What I do with my life is the politics of embarrassment." Predicting there will be another intifada uprising soon, she adds: "Israel should have been the safest place in the world for Jews to be and actually . . . now, ironically, it has turned out to be the most dangerous." Nathan's "personal dream" is that Israel will ultimately be a bi-national state."

Her sympathy for the Palestinians is largely unqualified and she sharply rebukes a member of the audience at a Dublin meeting who raises a question about the rights of gays and lesbians in the Palestinian Territories. The question is "incredibly offensive", she says, warning of the "moral superiority of the West".

"As far as I know, you're not a Muslim, you don't live in the Muslim world. The Arab world is perfectly capable of dealing with those issues in its own time and in its own way."

Speaking to her afterwards, I said many people would regard gay and lesbian rights as universal human rights, so why couldn't outsiders raise them? "Because I don't think people from other cultures should interfere."

As for suicide bombing, she says: "I don't condone it. I don't say it's right. But I think we have to say, 'How does this come about? Why do we have this phenomenon?'" When I put it to her that the Irish were oppressed but didn't use suicide bombers, she responds: "Yes, but did you have the entire army unleashed on you? Did you have jet-fighters bombing your homes? Did you have your
homes demolished while you were in them? Did you have 40 years of brutal occupation and conniving to come to some sort of artificial peace process? Did you have that?"