A Little Loyal Jewish Ulster

Ever since, a year ago, I opened a directory called Israel – Sharon Declares War, I knew this Israeli was coming. The parallels between Sharon and his most recent historical analogue, Mussolini, are many. Like Mussolini, he created a sense of destabilisation by mobilizing paramilitaries and assailing the solidity of the conventional instruments of the State. For Mussolini it was the March on Rome. For Sharon, his storming of al-Haram as-Sharif in September, 2000, provoked rioting between Jewish and Islamist extremists. His election several months later was, like Mussolini’s, almost a formality. Sharon’s cynicism, like Mussolini’s, knows no bounds. He assassinates those who stand in his way. His logic of following vioolence with more violence reached its apotheosis when he assassinated Mustafa Zibri, the leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the originators of the current, foolhardy, human bomb campaign by fringe Palestinian extremists. This was swiftly followed by the assassination of the crazy genocidal apologist and “Tourism Minister”, Rehavam Zeevi which, paradoxicially, had the effect of scaring someextreme, fundamentalist Zionist right-winger factions back into Sharon’s coalition.

Sharon’s use of all the apparatus of State terror in the furtherence of his self-interest and what he sees as Israel’s interests is no more or less than I expect from the morally bankrupt leaders in that part of the world. Like many of the despots and hegemonies maintained by US aid and influence, he and the forces he represents have little consideration of “ordinary” people except insofar as they can spin their deaths to serve his political ends. With so much aid and intelligence, he has little need of morality, and little use for mercy.
So much has happened in the last two weeks that I feel overwhelmed and, in fact, have been writing a bit about it. But it’s not ready yet. Or I am not. But I did find two quotes today, conveniently located in the same article, that put things into perspective. Initially I disbelieved the Ulster one, it was too pat. But after a bit of trawling, I found the original sources. Fresh from their success in partitioning Ireland and South Africa, the British were moving forward with their scheme to partition Palestine.

Sir Ronald Storrs, the first governor of Jerusalem under British rule in the 1920s, explained it as “forming for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.

Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general in the mid-1990s, recently said: The discarding of our moral foundation has hurt us as a society, reinforcing the arguments of the world’s hostile elements and sowers of evil and intensifying their influence. The intifada is the Palestinian people’s war of national liberation. Historical processes teach us that no nation is prepared to live under another’s domination and that a suppressed people’s war of national liberation will inevitably succeed. … We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities … we established an apartheid regime”.

When I see the conflagration in Palestine/Israel it fills me with horrified recognition, and a sense of good fortune. Ireland could so easily have slide into the same kind of sectarian funk, and remained there for ever. Indeed, with the support of US Irish-Americans willing to fund a seemingly eternal terror campaign, it almost seemed inevitable. Both sides in Ireland practiced ethnic cleansing and discrimination on a massive scale. But somehow, through luck or more probably because of our lack of any strategic significance, we were not useful to the Great Powers. The division between North and South, between Irish people of different religions, was allowed to settle into dull incomprehension in place of armed conflict. The Middle East’s semitic natives, Jewish and Islamic and Christian, were denied that chance.