Concessions are essential to win peace: Tragic legacy of the Six-Day War
The Six-Day War followed and Israel prevailed, but the legacy of that short, sharp act of self-preservation festers to this day. Sadly, a resolution to one of the greatest tragedies of our time seems as remote as it ever was, maybe even more so. There is hardly an issue that so polarises opinion. Even discussing it in public, as UCC discovered, brings difficulties. Israel’s propaganda machine constantly challenges the equally questionable culture of shared victimhood that underpins international support for the Palestinian cause, a culture that saw the Palestinian flag flown over Irish public buildings in recent weeks.
This is an intractably complicated story and, just as in our history, there are conflicting versions of a shared past. That past, just like ours, is pockmarked with imperialism dressed as an assertion of one religion’s primacy over another. After all, the Plantation of Ulster differs little enough from Israeli settlements, other than that 16th-century colonisation has been sanitised by time. Just as today’s political impasse in the North is a consequence of victories for the most extreme expressions of conflicting cultures, neither Israelis nor Palestinians have been blessed with leadership capable of the compromise needed to end their ongoing tragedy.
