Irish Examiner view: Everyone can be an enemy in a warzone

Palestinians inspect a house destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Picture: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

The problem with a continual warzone with an enormous military presence is that everything becomes a threat.

Every shuffling foot becomes a possible sniper, every unexpected face a militant or spy.

The situation in the West Bank has been eclipsed by the genocide in Gaza — which just last night Benjamin Netanyahu said would completely come under Israel control — but it is still fraught, with long-running conflict between the Palestinian Authority and hardline militants.

That’s before taking into account the building of illegal Israeli settlements and various ongoing military actions, the most recent of which has been around the Jenin refugee camp. Yesterday, two Irish diplomats and their colleagues got a taste of it without meaning to when their group was fired at.

It wasn’t a small group either — 31 countries were represented. The act has been rightly condemned across Europe.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said the group “deviated from the approved route”, and that warning shots were fired to move them from “an area where they were not authorised to be”. Footage from the incident shows the delegation was spread out in an open area coming up to a gate, with numerous media cameras around them. Some of the diplomats were in the middle of giving interviews at the time they had to scatter.

Given that Netanyahu has said his country is fighting a war for civilisation in Gaza, this does not seem particularly civilised behaviour by the Israeli army. Although, from what we know about life in the West Bank, it seems par for the course. Why use words when you can shoot a gun?

The visit was agreed with the IDF, and the statement makes it clear that the military knew who the group were.

There wasn’t even a fig leaf of cover to say something like “mistaken identity” or “breakdown in communications”.

An investigation is under way, though one suspects this will end up a case where the IDF will investigate itself and find itself blameless. We all remember the dismissive tone it took following the killing and burying of Palestinian medics and first responders after firing on their marked ambulances. Then, they claimed that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously”. They subsequently claimed that eight of the dead men, who were buried in the wreckage of their ambulances, were terrorists.

As we have said, when you’re living in a warzone everyone becomes an enemy. That the army considered the warning shots an “inconvenience” to the diplomatic group says a lot about how it approaches the Palestinian residents in the area.

Diplomats generally have immunity for good reasons: They could be passing sensitive messages or material between warring factions, they are the first point of contact for negotiations, and they facilitate meetings that might not otherwise happen.

In the context of Gaza, this isn’t even close to a nadir — which says a lot about how brutal that war has become. In truth, it isn’t even close to a nadir for Israeli actions in the West Bank.

Just this week, opposition politician Yair Golan, a former senior military commander, came under intense criticism from the government when he said “a sane country doesn’t kill babies as a hobby” and that Israel risked becoming a “pariah state among the nations”.

One thinks the ongoing spectre of famine in Gaza has made that almost a fait accompli. The diplomats yesterday were on a mission to examine the humanitarian situation in Jenin. It would seem they got a first-hand experience — for all the wrong reasons.

Enshrined rights are not a threat 

Today marks 10 years since Ireland became the first country in the world to recognise the right to marriage equality by a popular vote. However, as Maria Ní Fhlatharta and Brian Tobin write in today’s issue, the campaign itself was no plain sailing and the legacy lives on.

Ní Fhlatharta is right to argue out that the government of the day could simply have legislated for marriage equality, seeing as there was nothing in the Constitution expressly forbidding it. The justice minister of the time, Alan Shatter, had argued that existing case law had established marriage to be between a man and a woman, and so a constitutional amendment was necessary. Still, if the legislative route had proven successful, members of the LGBT+ community would have been spared enormous pain — with Ní Fhlatharta herself still uncomfortable going down streets where she faced abuse.

That is something we should all sit with, and all consider, especially given the rising tide of homophobic and transphobic policies emanating from the US. We would remind anybody in this country considering the merits of these that ensuring minority groups have the rights to which they are entitled does not negate the rights of any other group.

However, legislation can be repealed or amended by future governments. While the trend has been to reform laws that have become harmful or out of date, there is nothing beyond a Dáil majority to prevent laws being changed to become more restrictive. This might be worthy in the case of powerful opioids or hitherto unknown drugs; it would be churlish and childish when it comes to bodily autonomy or sexual identity.

Adopting the marriage equality referendum into the Constitution has enshrined it as an inalienable right that cannot be removed — except by another referendum. That 62% of the vote was in favour suggests that attempts to repeal it would be doomed to failure, even if one can never be truly complacent.

Indeed, Tobin does note that it’s given stability even as the wider world seems to be going off-kilter.

Ultimately, we as a society must listen closely to the needs and concerns of the people directly affected by laws. It’s the only way we’ll learn, and the only way we’ll do a little bit better day by day.

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