Interesting article on how the Mideast conflict is resonating in Belfast. Wonder how this ties into the IRA's apology for terrorism the other day. Somehow, I tend to doubt apologies for terrorism if the speaker is waving a Palestinian flag. But maybe that's just me. Naturally, yesterday I read a sanctimonious Guardian op-ed (which I won't bother to link) whose writer hoped that someday Israel and "Palestine" would also apologize. Don't you love the assumption that Israel has lots to apologize for, but Britain is pure and unspotted? If the writer of this article is right, Britain is going to find a resurgent terrorism problem on its doorstep, and will have pre-emptively removed from its own arsenal of ideas nearly every argument against nationalist terrorism.
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MARTIN SIEFF: Fighting Jenin in Belfast
Copyright © 2002 Nando Media
Copyright © 2002 upi.com FTP Nando
United Press International
WASHINGTON (July 16, 11:25 a.m. PDT) - The summer "marching season" is now well under way in Northern Ireland and the sectarian clashes have been low-key but ugly, and they may get worse. The British and Irish governments and the international media were taken by surprise. They should not have been. The Israeli and Palestinian flags that now festoon Belfast should have given them fair warning.
Had British officials been reading UPI Analysis over the past year, they would have seen the re-emergence of sectarian tensions in both the Catholic nationalist and Protestant loyalist communities of the long-troubled British province of 1.6 million people.
They would have learned what they did not want to learn - that their policy of releasing hundreds of the most hardened veteran paramilitary terrorists and killers from both sides had radicalized the grassroots, working class leadership in both communities.
And, even worse, that their policy of gutting the old police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, while failing to build its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, up to comparable size, had ceded control of the streets in Belfast and many other places to the "hard men."
But even if they refused to not see what they did not want to see, and did not read analyses that conflicted with their own complacent and myopic assessments, the bizarre intrusion of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle into the sectarian ghettos of Belfast should have made reality clear to them.
For, following the Israeli Army's hotly contested retaliatory strike into the Palestinian West Bank city of Jenin in April, Belfast suddenly erupted in first Israeli and then Palestinian flags.
The Israeli Stars of David bloomed first. They joined the traditional Red Hand of Ulster in fluttering from the small store fronts of Sandy Row and the rows of working class terraced - or as Americans would say, townhouse - homes on the Protestant Shankill Road and out in the Rathcoole estate on the northern fringe of the city.
Catholic nationalist neighbors responded quickly to this symbolic offensive. Traditional IRA strongholds in areas like the Falls Road in West Belfast and the New Lodge Road in the north of the city as if by magic suddenly flowered in thousands of red, green and black Palestinian flags.
This existential identification of the long-feuding Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics with the combatants of the Middle East conflict may appear ludicrous, shocking or unexpected to outsiders to their ancient contentions. But it comes as no surprise to those who know Northern Ireland well. And some of the lessons it teaches are different from what they appear.
The identification is in part religious on the Protestant side but entirely political on the Catholic one. On both sides, it is, however, overwhelmingly tribal in nature.
The Protestant loyalists see themselves as the Israelis of Northern Ireland - a small besieged minority of God's "chosen people" who follow and uphold true Bible ways besieged by far more numerous enemies inspired, they believe, by the "forces of darkness." Middle class, moderate Protestants do not believe this or accept this world view. But working-class Protestants who follow strong, uncompromising literal versions of fundamentalist Protestantism embrace it.
Their faith is of a kind now effectively extinct in mainland Britain at least since World War I and therefore no longer either understood or sympathized with there. But many Americans should understand it a lot better.
It is essentially the same as the prophetic-based faith held by the many millions of Americans who bought Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth" and its exceptionally successful sequels. Its devotees believe that believes Jesus Christ's second coming is imminent and that they, along with the Israelis, are featured, crucial, heroic central figures in the eschatological drama.
Of course not all of the Protestant militants do not believe this literally - though very many of them do. But almost all of them do viscerally identify with the Israelis in kinship with what noted scholar Donald Harman Akenson calls "covenant societies" defining themselves by the divine, Biblical sanction they feel and their "chosen people" sense of superiority and of being apart from those around them.
For these reasons, the Protestants of Northern Ireland, or Ulster, have identified with the state of Israel ever since it was created in 1948. Their enthusiasm for it intensified after the 1967 Six-Day War, which to many of them appeared to be a miraculous sign that the "end times" before the "second coming" were finally among them. It got an extra edge when the most recent cycle of sectarian conflict or troubles flared anew in 1968 and flared or spluttered for the next 30 years.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement banked those fires but did not extinguish them. Even more than the Israelis, the Ulster Protestants over the past four years have increasingly come to believe that the 1998 agreement was not a genuine end to the conflict but just a new and more insidious way to sell them out to their enemies.
When they saw the Israelis strike back in retaliation for this year's wave of suicide bomb attacks against their civilians, they identified enthusiastically with it. Hence the Israeli flags on the Shankill Road and Sandy Row.
But if the Ulster Protestants identify naturally with the plight of the Israelis, the Irish Catholic nationalists of the North gravitate in reaction and equally naturally to the Palestinians. This is a more recent phenomenon and lacks the remarkable prophetic-theological underpinnings of the Protestant response. But it is deep-rooted and profound too.
When the Israelis fought their guerrilla war for independence from the British Empire in 1945-48, they received some of their strongest popular and practical support in Europe from the Irish Free State. Robert Briscoe, later the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin and a close friend and political ally of Irish Prime Minister Eamonn De Valera, also served at that time as head of European operations for Menahem Begin's guerrilla Irgun organization.
For most Irish nationalists, north and south, the identification was clear: Irish guerrillas fighting to be free of the British equaled Israeli guerrillas fighting to be free of the British. This view was reciprocated, though less widely on the Israeli side. Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the Lehi group, called by the British "the Stern gang," the toughest and most implacable Jewish guerrilla force, chose as his underground code name "Michael" after his hero, the 1920-21 Irish War of Independence commander Michael Collins.
But after 1967, this changed. The Palestine Liberation Organization fighting the Israeli Army now appeared to be the obvious counterpart to the re-emerging Irish Republican Army fighting the British in Northern Ireland. The then-fashionable Marxist neo-revolutionary ideology and slogans expressed by some IRA supporters and the PLO and other Palestinian groups strengthened this sense.
The identification of Ulster's Protestant loyalists with the Israelis and of her Catholic nationalists with the Palestinians indicates that the Irish sectarian conflict, though on a far smaller scale, is at root as implacable and resistant to complete solution as the Israeli-Palestinian one.
The time both sides chose to parade their loyalties was ominous for the prospects of peace in Ireland. The Protestants rejoiced in the most aggressive Israeli military response against the Palestinians since the Oslo Peace Process began and, indeed, since the 1967 war. The Catholic nationalists flaunted their identification with the Palestinians after they had inflicted a wave of suicide bombing massacres unprecedented in that conflict for savagery and number.
Had British officials or international reporters paying their usual brief, "milk run" short, flying visits to Northern Ireland bothered to note what the flags waving in front of their eyes, they might have better anticipated the ugly revival of old enmities there this summer. The Middle East symbolism on the streets of Ulster signifies that the suffering there is far from over.
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