Suzanne Harrington: Catastrophe in Gaza has resulted in some tricky, delicate conversations
What’s happening in Gaza has created ripples all the way into the private space inhabited by my partner and I. Picture: Andrew Hasson
How do you privately negotiate something that has been baffling international diplomatic negotiation for decades now? How do you navigate something within the arena of your personal life that is the cause of such horror in the wider world?
Carefully is how. What’s happening in Gaza has created ripples all the way into the private space inhabited by my partner and I. We are on different pages. As the UK media gaslights its citizens with selective broadcasting about what the state of Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, in Ireland our reaction is quite different; we are the most pro Palestinian country in the EU.
On Irish telly, we see starving Palestinian babies and children. These images are not on British telly. Everyone in Britain is terrified of being called anti-Semitic, as Netanyahu rains bombs on refugee shelters and hospitals, and the death toll continues in the tens of thousands.
My partner is Jewish. He is pro-Israel. Not pro-Netanyahu, obviously, but pro-Israel in terms of a Jewish homeland. This current catastrophe has resulted in some tricky, delicate conversations; I have been going on Free Palestine marches, he hasn’t. He is conscious of rising anti-Semitism, despite lots of Jewish people campaigning for peace alongside their Muslim counterparts.
None of this is about religion – we are both atheists – but about the right of Israel to exist alongside the rights of Palestinian people not to be murdered by the current monster in charge of Israel. My best friend, coincidentally also Jewish - one of those rare Irish ones from Dublin who is as horrified as the rest of Ireland at what is happening in Palestine – says that the increase in anti-Semitism is alarming.
Initially, my partner and I skirted around the whole thing. We seemed to have made some unspoken agreement to Not Go There. It was unknown territory. We were already good at negotiating our very different approaches to areas like animal rights – he eats them, I don’t – in our day to day lives because we are adults and we can work stuff out. But this was different.
What we learned was that you can’t Not Go There. Persistent skirting of a contentious issue is like trying to hold a beachball underwater – it will keep bobbing up. In the end, there were long and heated conversations about stuff that, while not impacting us directly in our day to day lives - we were not being bombed - was creating unspoken division. So we had to do that most incredibly difficult thing – to listen to what the other person had to say without jumping in.
Given the strength of feeling on both sides, this required a ton of tongue-biting and ear-opening, but we managed it because we wanted to understand each other properly.
If it was that hard for two people who love each other, what hope is there for two warring states who don’t?
