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The Irish and Gaza

(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Benny Morris - Driving around Ireland, I saw Palestinian flags hanging from windows or plastered across hedges in remote farmhouses. In Dublin, "Ceasefire Now" signs were draped across multi-story buildings. Support for the Palestinians, today represented by Hamas, is now the flavor of the month, the fashion among Western Europe's mainly ignorant young, who know nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond the daily images, many of them fake, of dead and dying children, images efficiently engineered by Hamas's propaganda machine. They know nothing of, and care even less about, the consistent Palestinian rejection of all compromise proposals by the international community and, periodically, by the Zionist leaders these past hundred years. They know nothing of, or care about, the constant Palestinian resort to terrorism, culminating in the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 Oct. 2023, in which some 1,200 Israelis (a few of them Arab Israelis) were killed and 250 (mostly civilians, aged six months to 89 years old) taken hostage. Over the past years, the Irish, including their government, have emerged as Israel's most vociferous beraters in Europe as reflected in the Palestinian flags draping the hedges. During my visit, I read the Irish newspapers and I found the space devoted to the Gaza war and the nature of the coverage truly mind-boggling. It was as if, perversely, the Gaza war was the only crisis on the planet and central to Ireland's very life and destiny. The writer is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University.
2025-08-05 00:00:00
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