Ghettoisation of Palestinians is an indictment of all of humanity

I’ve just finished reading Dervla Murphy’s Between River and Seal: Encounters in Israel and Palestine. The contrast between Murphy’s narrative and Derek O’Flynn’s (from the Israeli embassy) letter last week is stark.

No one reading O’Flynn’s would believe that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea there are equal numbers of Palestinians [including roughly one million, ‘second-class’ Palestinian-Israeli citizens] and Jewish-Israelis.

The vast majority of the Palestinians are indigenous, having being born between the river and the sea, but the vast majority of the Jewish-Israelis are immigrants and the majority of those are non-observant. The Jewish-Israeli population comprises Ashkenazi (European), Sephardi (Turkey and the Balkans), Mizrahi (Syria, Egypt and Iraq etc), one million Russians, and a half a million illegal ‘settlers’ in the OPT (significant numbers of whom are Americans).

The dispossession of the Palestinians began in 1948 with the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people and it continues with a vengeance. The forbearance of the Palestinians in the West Bank — in the face of illegal military occupation [endlessly condemned in UN resolutions], expropriation, house demolitions, arbitrary detention, the imposition of permits and general daily harassment — is quite extraordinary.

The military experiment that is Ghetto Gaza — 1.6m people are trapped in a tiny piece of land — is an indictment of all of humanity.

We all recognise that the Holocaust, perpetrated mainly against the Jews of Europe by the Nazis, was one of the major crimes of the 20th century. The dispossession of the Palestinians is the remaining, unrecognised crime of that crime-ridden century.

The convenient and intellectually lazy equation of anti-Israeli Government or anti-Zionist with anti-semitic is itself immoral and we must all continue to say so as loud as we can.

Con Hayes

Tower

Blarney

Co Cork