Shalom Dublin?? – viewing Irish anti-Israeli sentiment through the lens of the IRA’s Nazi collaborators

I write this blog to layout for myself, the antecedents to what many puzzled Israelis and Jews see as an uncalled-for Irish antipathy to the Jewish state, and to say again that peace will only come when the current pro-Palestinian orthodoxy and exhortation to violence and martyrdom is challenged everywhere and always. I hope you find it of interest.

 “Israel has been demonized by an Irish media slavishly dancing to the Palestinian drumbeat for decades... - [yet] Israel has a far better and more progressive record on human rights than any of its neighbors…The truth must be told.” Fine Gael chairman Charlie Flanagan, 2014.

In his article “Why Are the Irish Increasingly Siding With Palestine Over Israel?” written for the New Republic in May 2014, Jason Walsh recounts the time he wrote a feature article for the Irish Times on Ireland’s Jewry. 

He interviewed retired Belfast businessman Adrian Levey, who is Jewish. Levey was “…keen to point out that anti-Semitism as such is not a problem, even on the divided streets of Belfast. 

“Northern Protestants support Israel and Catholics support Palestine, it doesn’t really play out on the streets,” he said. 
 

When you understand that Protestant and Catholic are not actually religious terms, but stand-ins for pro-British unionists and pro-Irish republicans the statement makes perfect sense. For Irish republicans have long felt they were, as much as Palestinians, living in occupied territory. Hearing Northern Ireland described as the "Occupied Six Counties” was not uncommon in my youth during the 1990s. “

What Walsh is saying is embedded in the colonial antecedents of Ireland, Israel, and a would-be “Palestinian” Muslim state. 

He explains that Israel’s struggle against the British during the Mandate years resonated with an Irish (Roman Catholic) public subjugated for centuries by brutal British domination of their national aspirations and what they called “colonisation” and “occupation” of the six Counties which make up (Protestant) Northern Ireland today. 

But as Israel became more successful, the Irish psyche projected its experience of (essentially Protestant) Britain onto Israel’s failure to decide the “Palestinian” definitively, and the narrative of a “dispossessed” and “disenfranchised” “Palestinian” struggle for “freedom” blossomed. Israel thus began to function as a surrogate for Britain because it too was “imperial, imperious and, above all, modern.” This view, together with Brian Hanley’s exploration of the IRA’s collaboration with Nazi Germany in the Republic’s struggles against Britain form the core of this piece.

The ongoing support and collaboration between Hamas and Sinn Fein, Irish Republic politicians and the Palestinian Authority, and historical ideological and notional links between the PLO, Arafat and the Republic of Ireland are well documented, if not always in the public eye.

Certainly the links between the IRA and Arafat’s PLO have been well documented. This connection is due to historic circumstance, where the British were wrongly perceived as pro-Jewish. And this affinity went north of the border with Northern Ireland and infused the culture and politics of both the Republic of Ireland and the positions held by the IRA in Northern Ireland and its political wing Sinn Fein.

Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, which has elected representatives in the Irish and British parliaments and shares power in Northern Ireland, has continued to be a virulent critic of Israel. 

In 2006, Aengus Ó Snodaigh, the party's international affairs and human rights spokesperson in the Dublin parliament, described Israel as "one of the most abhorrent and despicable regimes on the planet." 

In May 2014, he was one of three Irish politicians prevented by authorities from leaving Cyprus to join the Gaza-bound flotilla headed by the Mavi Marmara….

Arthur Griffith, who founded the original Sinn Fein movement in 1905, used the pages of his newspaper to rail against "Jew Swindledom" (9/10ths of all Jews were, he proclaimed, "usurers and parasites") and the Dreyfusards.

There were similar prejudices commonplace in all the political parties which broke off from his organization, but only the eponymous rump which remained after the splits of 1921 and 1926 habitually preached Jew-hatred, culminating in a demand for an Irish-German alliance in 1939.

The "new" IRA, itself soaked in anti-Semitism, took a similar view and attempted to forge a working relationship with the Germans.

As noted in the republican newspaper The United Irishman of October 1951, Seán Russell, the then IRA chief of staff and a registered representative of the Irish Republic, spent the summer of 1940 in a ‘very large’ villa in the leafy Grunewald, near Berlin, surrounded by extensive grounds and parks, enjoying all the privileges of a diplomat with regard to access to food, petrol and other rationed goods.

Russell met leading Nazis such as Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Following the fall of France, Russell urged that the German high command make use of the IRA to strike at British forces in Northern Ireland as part of a general attack on Britain. His plans were accepted and incorporated into Operation Sealion (the plan for the invasion of Britain) as a mark of the ‘respect and esteem’ in which Russell was held by the German military leadership.

The IRA’s main publication, War News, became increasingly pro-Nazi in tone, but more worryingly, it began to ape anti-Semitic arguments. The paper expressed satisfaction that the ‘cleansing fire’ of the German armies was driving the Jews from Europe. British war minister Hore Belisha was described as a ‘wealthy Jew’ only interested in ‘profits’. War News condemned the arrival in Ireland of ‘so-called Jewish refugees’.

Even though pre-war Ireland was united in its dislike of the British, there were at least four discernible factions in the IRA. 

The majority leadership grouping was sympathetic to social radicalism but primarily concerned with developing the IRA as a military force. An important section of the leadership was socialist, while a third section—of which Russell was probably the best example—were committed entirely to armed force and uninterested in political debate. 

A fourth smaller group was attracted to Sinn Féin’s espousal of right-wing ‘Christian social’ policies even as further differences existed over the relationship between the IRA in Northern Ireland and its much larger and more influential southern counterpart.  

Much of the northern IRA, and Sinn Fein, their political arm, were attracted to Russell’s position, because they felt marginalised and ignored by their southern comrades, even as Russell’s own isolation in, and disillusionment with, the Republic led him to forge now-embarrassing ties with the Nazis.

Putting the efforts of IRA leaders like Russell into context, Brian Hanley notes that “…the IRA in 1940 was under severe pressure and in decline. Hundreds of its members were jailed or interned in the Curragh camp. Undoubtedly a measure of desperation contributed to its thinking. Similarly, …much of what was written in the [War News] was fantasy, especially the claims that the IRA was playing a major role in the German war effort….Furthermore, War News was illegal and therefore written and distributed surreptitiously. [Only a] small number of people were responsible for its content and only a few IRA members could have had any input into it. Despite the violence of some of the anti-Jewish rhetoric in War News the IRA did not attempt to physically attack Irish Jews.”

Even so, with the partition of Ireland by the British in 1921, the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland imported a deep hostility towards partition as a solution to territorial conflict. 

This in turn led to consistent support for the Palestinian cause some fifty years later. The “Provos” received weapons and training from Arafat’s PLO  around the early 1970s; today the IRA allegedly provides sophisticated bomb-making materials and know-how to terror group Hamas in war-ravaged Gaza.

But, because the Irish Republican Army made common anti-colonialist cause with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with the PLO allegedly providing arms and training for the IRA as early as the 1970s, Irish Protestant leaders, for their part, allied themselves with the Israelis and their struggle against a genocidal Muslim enemy.

Ironically, in March 1945, a correspondent to The Bell, a leading Irish magazine, raged about current events in Mandate Palestine: "Never let it be forgotten that the Irish people ... have experienced all that the Jewish people in Palestine are suffering from the trained 'thugs' 'gunning tarzans' and British 'terrorists' that the Mandatory power have imposed upon the country."

But once the Zionist movement accepted the partition of Palestine, the Irish began to draw unflattering parallels between Israeli policies and their own divided existence. To many, the Jewish state now looked less like a besieged religious-national community struggling valiantly for its natural rights and more like a colony illegitimately established by British force of arms and intent on imposing itself on an “indigenous” population.

As a result, Ireland only extended de jure recognition to Israel in 1963, 15 years after its declaration of independence.

After Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, successive governments in Dublin took the lead in championing the Palestinian cause within Europe.

 In February 1980, Ireland was the first EU member to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state. It was also the last to allow Israel to open a residential embassy, in December 1993.

Throughout the Oslo Accords era and the post-Oslo era a decade later, Irish governments continued to provide the Palestinian cause with valuable, if not unlimited, support.

Thus, in June 2003, Brian Cowen, then Ireland's foreign minister, visited Yasir Arafat during the height of the Second Intifada.

It was during the Second Intifada that 887 (78%) of the 1,137 Israelis killed in Arab terrorist attacks from September 2000 – 2005 were civilian casualties. Another 8,341 Israelis were wounded during this period, of which 5,676 were civilians while 2,665 were security forces.

The majority of Jewish casualties during Cowen’s visit and lauding of Arafat were caused by suicide bombings, bombs, shootings, stonings, stabbings, lynchings, rockets on civilian population centres, and other methods of attack.

And, inexplicably, Cowen spoke for many in Ireland when he described Arafat as "the symbol of the hope of self-determination of the Palestinian people" and praised him for his "outstanding work ... tenacity, and persistence."

This feting and legitimising of terror and destruction still continues in an unbroken line and the words of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams who, in 1983, laid down a blueprint which remains the playbook for the PA and Hamas in the international arena. 

Back in a May 1983 interview with Britain’s Sunday Times,  Adams’ stated aim was “…to confront the British with an ongoing armed struggle which is enjoying popular support and a principled political party which refuses to compromise on the basic issue of British involvement in Northern Ireland."

The aim of such a policy of confrontation, he added, was so that the British "…would be unable to govern."

Thus, as Adams expanded, the political role is merely to "broaden and popularise the struggle. For in the end the movement will have to depend on whatever armed pressure the IRA can bring." 

If that sounds eerily familiar to Israel watchers today, it is because, if Hamas/PA is substituted for IRA, we have a copybook re-enactment of Sinn Fein strategy being perniciously played out by Hamas in the Middle East today.

The parallels with the actions of Hamas are too striking to be ignored: continued confrontation, no negotiations, active endangering of civilian populations, an internationally supported political wing in Ramallah and no compromise on borders or choice of capital.

This ongoing tacit Irish apologism for Palestinian wrongdoing together with a disdainful disregard of the Jews’ unbroken connection with the country going back to one thousand years before the Arab conquest of an indigenous Jewish peoples and nation, is an inversion of Orwellian proportions, the scale of which the British author himself could only dream of.

It is, therefore, this peculiar Irish post-colonialist pathology which continues to nurture to a recurrent Arab psychology of intransigence, intolerance and a refusal to take responsibility for actions, which lethally endanger a new generation of Jew and Arab alike.

 And as with all dictatorships of the mind, distrust and fear of other feed periodic outbursts of pointless violence.

In Belfast in 2014, upon his arrest for alleged involvement in the grisly 1972 IRA murder of widowed mother of ten, Jean McConville, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said “….I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will…”

In Israel in 2014, Jews today continue to pay the price, through murder and wanton destruction, for a frightening foreign ideology of hate and segregation whose time we thought had long passed.

Is Hamas losing its Protective Edge?

Most media outlets across the world without any particular axe to grind peg Hamas as the instigator for this latest round of violence in the Middle East. 

It continues to hurl rockets at nearby Israeli civilian centres with the express purpose of causing solely civilian Jewish casualties. But why is it doing this?

It is increasingly clear to many observers here in Australia, that Hamas has been stung by the Israeli operation in Judea and Samaria in the wake of the kidnapping of the three Jewish teenagers.

Their 5-year long wait for release of arab prisoners in the Shalit deal has come to naught because Israel has used the west bank initiative to re-imprison most of the top Hamas west bank-based operatives who were released back in 2011.

In the psychology of perceptions in mid-east politics, Hamas lost face.

Not only face, but Hamas is financially strapped now that Shia Iran has withdrawn its financial backing of the terror group because of its support of the rebel Sunni militias in Syria. Needless to add, Assad to has revoked backing the group.

Add to this PA refusal to pay Hamas salaries, the lukewarm support from PA chief Abu Mazen across the country and his reticence to further foment a second front there, and the near hermetically sealing off of the land/tunnel access to Egypt and the Sinal by al-Sisi, has meant that Hamas needed an event to justify its existence.

That leaves only the sea access, but Israel has recently reduced the perimeter blockade to its original distance of three nautical miles, further negating gains made by Hamas in the international arena.

Thus, the round-up of top Hamas operatives in Judea and Samaria provided just such an excuse for Hamas to try and restore its flagging fortunes and relevance in the “Palestinian” street.

Until the two Hamas members who murdered Gilad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Ifrach are located and brought back to Israel, it is not entirely clear or proven beyond reasonable doubt that Hamas itself was actually involved in the kidnap and murder.

This would have added to Hamas’ sense of “injustice” at the hand of the Israelis, and would have been a blow to their image as the only arabs taking the physical fight to the ‘Zionist entity’. In this regard, they might yet turn out to be entirely vindicated!....

For his part in the discomfiture of Hamas at the hands of the Israelis, Abu Mazen in Ramallah must be privately delighted that political rival Hamas is bleeding men, materiel and prestige in the current ill-advised debacle. He has further turned the screws by refusing a recent Hamas demand that the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah take employees of the disbanded Gaza government onto its payroll. 

This dispute over money is symptomatic of the wider malaise and schism afflicting a ‘unity’ government recently sworn in in a bid to end seven years of rival administrations in Gaza and Ramallah. Politically too the two groups are on different trajectories, and Hamas is incensed at the ongoing international recognition of Ramallah as representative of the “Palestinian” struggle at the expense of its violent sibling in Gaza.

Militarily, it is in a bind. Now that Egypt has closed off tunnel access to smuggled medium and long-range rockets from Iran, its need to replenish its stock will grow stronger the longer this conflagration drags on. 

In addition, the longer the successful Israeli aerial assault continues on Arab rocket infrastructure in Gaza without any reciprocal success in taking Jewish lives, the more likely it is that a focused ground offensive by the Israeli army would destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and morale even further. This is because hitting the rocket launching system can be done in a far more systematic manner, in places where the rockets and their production facilities are hidden deep in the heart of their non-combatant population. 

And finally, an IDF ground assault would effectively signal a psychological blow to Hamas who may well believe that Israel is reluctant to initiate a ground operation. 

Thus, with Hezbollah and Syria tied up in the north, with Egypt barricading them from the south, with Jordan increasingly turning to military cooperation with Israel against an ISIS threat in the east, Hamas is inexorably running out of options.

And that is quite OK by Israel. 

Operation ‘Protective Edge’ will have succeeded in its stated mandate of stopping the rockets.

Why Israel is hitting Gaza

Propaganda value aside, why is Israel attacking Hamas in Gaza today?

Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) is considered a terrorist organization by much of the non-Arab international community including the U.S., Canada, Japan, the U.K., Australia, the European Union and Israel. 

Its declared goal is to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with an Islamic one. Indeed, its enmity is directed not only toward Israel but toward Jews in general.

Hamas has deliberately targets Israeli civilians and endangered the welfare of  Palestinians. 

It has made a mockery of Jimmy Carter’s now-infamous statement: "Hamas' return to unified Palestinian governance can increase the likelihood of a two-state solution and a peaceful outcome.”

After the Hamas/PA “unity government” signing, Hamas deputy chief Musa Abu Marzouk, immediately insisted that despite the agreement with the American and Saudi funded PA, Hamas would not recognize Israel's right to exist.

Then Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal himself declared that "the only campaign we have is against Israel...Our common enemy is Israel. Israel must be fought through force and diplomacy." 

All this in 2014…..

Israel is pressured by the European Union and America to make concessions and give up territory to a terror group whose very reason for existence is suspect.

While Hamas’ distaste for a legal Jewish state in the Middle East is palpable and on the record, there are excellent reasons, apart from their rocket attacks why Hamas in Gaza should be curbed.

1) Hamas completely rejects a Jewish state.

Hamas believes that Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims. Hamas Charter, Article 28 states: “Israel with its Jewish identity and Jewish people is challenging Islam and the Muslims. May the cowardly know no sleep.”

2) Hamas's ultimate mission–"no matter how long it takes"-- is to "fight the Jews and kill them" and to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic caliphate.

Hamas Charter, Article 7 states: “The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,'…"

Hamas Charter, Article 9 states: “[The goals] are to…defeat [the Jews] so that…the [Muslim] call for prayer will ring out announcing the rise of the rule of Islam, so that people and things shall all return to their proper place.

 

3) Hamas' enmity is not directed against Israel alone but against the Jewish people as a whole. Jews are demonized repeatedly in Hamas' governing document.

Hamas Charter, Article 22 states: “[Jews were] behind the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution and [they are behind] most of the revolutions about which we hear from time to time here and there. ….the Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, the Lions, the Sons of the Covenant [i.e. B'nei B'rith], etc….are organizations of espionage and sabotage….They were behind World War I... They were [also] behind World War II, through which they reaped enormous profits …They [also] suggested the formation of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of the United Nations [sic] and to rule the world through this [new organization]…..”

4) Hamas (and the Palestinian Authority) regularly incite “Palestinians” to violence.

In Dec. 14, 2010, Interior Minister Fathi Hammad explained to “Palestinian” Arabs on Al Aqsa TV:

The Jews have become abhorred and loathed outcasts, because they live off corruption and the plundering of the peoples…The entire world says: "Bravo, Hamas, for confronting these people pf corruption." Whenever we score a goal, by achieving something against the Jews, the world applauds us.... the hatred for the Jews is on the rise, and people who hate the Jews…will support us.”

In a further televised rally in 20111, Hamas' Al Aqsa TV told West Bank Palestinians that: “You [Allah] have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship through which we come closer to you.... Oh sons of Palestine, oh sons of the Gaza Strip, oh mujahedeen, wage jihad, wreak destruction, blow up and harvest the heads of the Zionists.”

5) The language of violent, racist confrontation and zero-sum rhetoric regularly inflame “Palestinian” passions.

" We demand the liberation of the West Bank, and the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital – but without recognizing [Israel]. This is the key – without recognizing the Israeli enemy on a single inch of land...This is our plan for this … Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. This is unequivocal..."

“The Zionists – I swear to you, by God, by the world... We will not recognize Israel. If you want security or peace, you should go back to where you came from."
(Hamas "message" to the Israeli people: Broadcast Jan. 11, 2009).

"The day will come, within several years, when this world will change, submitting to the Arab Islamic will, Allah willing."
(Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, Al Jazeera TV, October 12, 2008). 

"The approaching victory, about which we are talking, is not limited to Palestine…Why? Because Allah has chosen you to fight the people He hates most – the Jews. Allah said: "You shall find the worst enemies of the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists….Therefore, the reward of our martyrs is great, and your reward is also great."
(Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, Hamas Al Aqsa TV, Sept. 8, 2008).

"The annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine is one of the most splendid blessings for Palestine. This will be followed by a greater blessing, Allah be praised, with the establishment of a Caliphate that will rule the land and will be pleasing to men and God."
(Hamas cleric Muhsen Abu 'Ita, Hamas Al-Aqsa TV, July 13, 2008). 

6) Hamas' targeting of Jewish civilians is deliberate policy. Today’s ongoing rocket attacks aagainst random Jewish civillian population centres is proof enough of that. 

Since September 2000, Hamas has carried out hundreds of attacks targeting civilians.

Even after Israel's disengagement from Gaza in August 2005, Hamas has continued to use the Gaza Strip as a launching pad to escalate rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel's sovereign territory:

• Port: Ashdod Port, March 14, 2004: Hamas double suicide bombing at Ashdod Port which killed 10 people and wounded 16.
• City buses: Hamas has carried out numerous attacks on Israeli commuters: more than 18 attacks on or near civilian buses, bus stops, train stations and taxis.
• suicide bombing of Bus 19 in the center of Jerusalem which took the lives of 11 civilians and wounded 50 more
• two suicide attacks targeting city buses on Be'ersheva's main street, killing 16 and wounding over 100 people.
  Abduction: Hamas claimed responsibility for the abduction and murder of Israeli businessman Sasson Nuriel.

• Shopping mall: Hamas claimed responsibility for suicide bombing at a shopping mall which killed one woman and critically wounded her husband, as well as 38 more people. A Hamas statement following the event urged more such attacks.
• Rocket and mortar attacks: Hamas consolidated its control over the Gaza Strip and enabled Palestinian terrorist organizations both to expand the facilities that manufacture rockets inside the Gaza Strip and to smuggle rockets into Gaza from Egypt. Rocket and mortar attacks soon became the main method of attack emanating from Hamas-controlled Gaza.

*Since 2005,  5,700 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel (more than 3,500 rockets and 2,200 mortars), killing 14 civilians and one soldier. In addition, hundreds of people were wounded, and thousands were treated for shock of minor injuries.

*In 2008 alone, 3,500 rockets and mortar shells landed in Israeli territory (almost 2000 rockets and 1,642 mortar shells) and put almost 1 million Israelis (i.e. 15% population) into rocket range.

On 8^th July 2014, more than 100 rockets hit Israeli civillian targets in urban population centres.

By 9^th July, 2014, more than 1.8 million Israelis sleep in or near bomb shelters in event of Hamas rocket attacks.

4) Hamas rejects compromise, peace negotiations or a diplomatic end to the conflict.

[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement (see above). Hamas Charter, Article 15 states: “...There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.”

5) No Hamas representative has ever renounced the charter calling for the killing of Jews and destruction of the State of Israel.  

Quite the opposite. The incitement to violence and a further ethnic genocide continue:

On the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of Statehood, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh stated: "Palestinians mark 'Naqba Day' this year with great hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine.”

At an earlier Hamas/Fatah reconciliation agreement in Cairo, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal stated:  "Our aim is to establish a free and completely sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose capital is Jerusalem, without any [Jews]. Israel must be fought both with force and through diplomacy." 

That mission is still being carried out today.

 

No sovereign nation should have to put up with that.