The Facile Fisk

Robert Fisk, that is. In The Independent:-

This Easter, the 92nd anniversary of the Rising, it is intriguing to look at the parallels that connect Ireland and the Middle East. The "Black and Tans", whom Churchill supported when they took their revenge on Irish civilians in 1920, were later sent – again with Churchill's support – to Palestine, where they became the "British Gendarmerie" and continued their reprisals against Arab and Jewish civilians to considerable effect. Decades later, John Hume (Ireland's only living statesman) wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel and "Palestine" should take a page out of Ireland's Good Friday Agreement. It was all about compromise, he said.

He was wrong. Israel's settlements on Palestinian Arab land in the occupied territories were as illegal as the Protestant settlements and the dispossession of the Catholics in 16th-century Ireland.

Well, here's my response:-

In a facile attempt to draw a link between Ireland and Israel, Robert Fisk suggests that "Israel's settlements on Palestinian Arab land in the occupied territories were as illegal as the Protestant settlements and the dispossession of the Catholics in 16th-century Ireland" (Mar. 23). Illegality cannot apply to this instance.

In the first place, Arabs invaded the area of Palestine, a country they never have quite managed to refer to in Arabic, adopting the Latin corruption of Philistine from the Roman conquerors. Their presence as interlopers begins in the 7th century, some 2000 years after the Jewish migration to the country which, until their arrival, was but a collection of feudal kings of perhaps ten different populations groups. It was under the Israelite monarchy that the land was united.

In the second place, the highest international legal authority of the time, the Supreme Council of the League of Nations, acknowledged the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute their homeland in all the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in a series of decisions during 1922-23, the land mass having been whittled down by British imperial interference. That is the land area the Israel government administers at present.

If there is any true parallel, it is the underground resistance of the Irish that encouraged Jews to seek their independence from the British occupation, eventually forcing England to give up her Mandate.