IV

What does it mean to say you support or condemn a particular action, the way that Palestinians and their defenders are asked to condemn Hamas? Anyone wishing to defend the rights of Palestinians to exist, and certainly to exist in their own homeland, is expected to start off with a condemnation of Hamas. This is a ritual, familiar to Irish people from the hounding of Republicans, to show that the person accepts the Rules. The entry to global media requires the disavowal of the most obvious expression of Palestinian discontent; that most human desire to fight back after decades of settler aggression. To be permitted to speak on the subject, a person must condemn. It is a little key to enter the cold newsroom. And after that anything someone says may really be ignored: they are there only to condemn; that is their function.  

Again, what does it mean to support or condemn, for those of us at a distance to what is happening? Macdara has no power whatsoever. What force would a condemnation of Hamas have coming from him? Which is why Macdara will skip over this particular ritual. This writer is happy to say that he will never condemn anticolonial violence.

Let us remind ourselves that the colonial violence inflicted by Israel is measurable in Palestinian lives lost (tens of thousands) and destroyed (millions) since 1948, and comes to multiple times the number of settler colonists ever killed by Palestinians. Those who are minded to condemn anticolonial militants would be well advised to figure out the numbers on both sides, and allocate the immense amount of time necessary for condemning Israeli barbarity before moving on, as an afterthought, to a condemnation of Hamas.  

But someone would only do this if they cared about hypocrisy.

V

One can imagine the hectoring media of 1916: the Easter Rising has not advanced the cause of the Irish people. The Rising worked by provoking the colonial authorities to a bloodbath. After all, colonisers know two things: bloodbaths, and the long slow threat of bloodbaths to come. It is a moral victory to move them from the latter to the former, showing up the colonisers’ pretensions to civilisation.  

It is important in reading about Gaza not to take its existence as a given: not to start by thinking within the borders that Israel has in place today. Borders porous for Israelis, of course, who can come and go: come and take: come and kill. But which are fixed for the Palestinians held within. Let’s try this out, as a way to get some history into a sentence: on 07 October, Hamas killed settler colonists in Palestine. Use any verb you wish: murder, butcher etc. But let us keep in mind that there is no Israel. Consequently there are no Israelis, only settler colonists (note that the media prefers to use the term settler only for a subset of the settler population, the better to make it seem that the rest of the settler population is nothing of the sort; surely they belong where they are!).  

With the colonisation of Palestine we are witnessing the Past of much of the world take place in the Present. And we see the resistance of the European powers—the present writer includes as European here those white settler colonists in other parts of the world—to recognising that what they themselves engaged in in the Past is wrong. Which at least is perversely consistent of them.

This is not a war between Israel and Hamas, as the media says. It is the same war as it has been since 1948, between Israel and Palestine, settlers and those whose land was stolen, those native to the land. To call it a war on Hamas is to make it sound as if the relentless murder of civilians is actually a pristine surgical attack only on militants. To call it a conflict between Israel and Gaza is also not enough: this didn’t arise in October 2023, this is no new conflict, no tidy operation.

VI

Macdara will never accept that it could be antisemitic to hold a Jewish state to the Highest Standard. If anything, to expect such standards of the Jewish people is a sign of respect, a recognition that the Jewish people are uniquely qualified from their history to lead the way in demonstrating the great deeds of which humankind is capable. This explains why it is that, perhaps uniquely among global political struggles, Palestinian flags are to be seen in almost any leftist demonstration: the crimes of the settler state of Israel cry out, are almost beyond imagining in their cruelty, stupidity, pointlessness and selfishness. This is a theatrically, wilfully hypocritical society, a State without justification, a pure invention, a folly of modernity, based on an astonishing application of ancient scripture to modern global politics. 

To award land in Palestine to Jewish people on an apparent basis in antiquity surely would give rise to the need to test the purity of those who would settle in Palestine. This settlement, to make sense, would require that Jewish settlers can demonstrate that they are descended from the historical Israelites, to a measurable extent, say a given percentage, and also that the Palestinians are not descended from Israelites or any other ancient race who lived on the land. This is an absurdity, clearly, but it is the natural corollary of what the white powers decided in the 1940s.

For the present writer, the racism of the privileged is more reprehensible than the racism of their victims. Antisemitism amongst those displaced by Jewish settler colonists is not a worse phenomenon than anti-Palestinian attitudes and behaviours amongst those settler colonists. To pretend that Palestinian antisemitism is worse than other forms of racism is a European fallacy: the Palestinians are made to bear responsibility for the countless crimes of Christian Europe, and how little it costs Europe to condemn in this way: nothing could be easier!