How the Irish can liberate us!
John F. Kennedy once used to talk about how much he wanted to solve the Palestinian refugee problem, and any number of presidents and cabinet members have stressed the importance of a political solution to the I-P conflict. But until yesterday, I’ve never heard a high ranking American politician say something that implied some genuine emotional engagement with the Palestinian cause.
Yesterday that changed: Patrick Leahy, long serving Vermont Senator and chairman of the Judiciary committee, compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of his Irish ancestors in the 19th century. This is huge in American politics; everyone loves the Irish (or at least pretends to). The comparison is very apt: it is made by Ian Lustick in his monumental and scholarly “Unsettled States, Disputed Lands” and much less rigorously by journalists like yours truly.
How long before Jeffrey Goldberg and John Podhoretz claim that Leahy is a rabid anti-Semite?
no need to wait for goldberg or podhoretz:
unhinged pearlman rant in three, two, one..
The similarity between my ancestors and the Palestinians is a bit off. The English never claimed that there weren’t any Irish in Ireland to begin with as the Israeli’s do about the Palestinians. The English did accept the Irish as fellow subjects of the crown unlike the Israeli’s, who pretend that the Palestinian Arabs are someone else’s problem.
The Irish Potato Famine was not caused by a British blockade but by natural causes, and many deaths were caused by English indifference and poor planning, unlike Palestinian deaths caused by Israeli rocket, artillery and tank fire.
Still, your point about Democrat American political figures recognizing the humanity of Arabs is very encouraging and spot on.
Were Irish allowed to hold any land? Weren’t they driven on the land and made essentially serf’s for English land owners for something like 100 years until land reform started in the late 1800′s?
I really should get more educated on this…
Palestinians don’t drink.
I tend to agree with the broad analogy:
While the physical presence of the Irish was recognised in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, it was basic policy to deny the basic personhood of not just the Irish but of Catholics in general within the British dominion. They were all regarded as potential enemy combatants, or the enemy within, so to speak.
Military conquest and the Penal Laws had previously established the political and property regime of the Protestant Ascendency, and the legion of local tyrants known as Landlords. Catholics – the majority of the Irish – were essentially non-persons legally (Dissenters from the officially “Protestant” State Church – such as Methodists and Presbyterians – were Second Class subjects within the British regime; one reason why there was such a inter-denominational flavour to the Republicans in the 1798 “United Irishmen” rebellion).
And while The Great Hunger – as it is known in Ireland – may have been triggered by a natural event, like many famines it was essentially man-made; Ireland was an exporter of food during the famine, with warehouses full of grain extracted from the resource colony. The reliance on a type of Peruvian tuber (“Lumpies”) nowadays considered inedible as a potato, was not due to culinary tastes but to its fast and high-yield possible on the small plots of land the natives were forced to live on tenuously, but could never own (or even improve).
Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, was a large gulag floating in the north Atlantic, with an institutionally alien and colonial metropolitan elite, at once hostile and murderously irresponsible to its indigenous, captive population. We had previously had our Gaza in the west of the country – “to hell or to Connaught” as Cromwell put it to us (those lucky enough not to get sent to the Barbadoes as slaves first, in the original attempt to turn the country into a large sheep-walk – a land without a people).
And in case you think I’m just harping on (badda-boom… tishhh!) about one particular ethnic experience, this is a systemic pattern arising from physical conquest common to many if not all European colonial powers. The British just tested it in Ireland first, before applying it elsewhere; the enlightened republican French repeated it at a quicker pace starting in Nineteenth Century Algiers; and the desperate Israelis with their progressivism did it at high speed in their Twentieth Century Western exurb in the Middle East.
By the way, whatever else you may think of him, Sartre did an interesting analysis on this called “Colonialism is a System”, which could equally be applied to the Anglo-Irish, or the Israel-Palestine conflicts.
We’re all carrying the mark of Cain on our foreheads, and keep replaying the crucifiction on each other. Here’s hoping for a Happy Easter.
[PS In response to above: There was voting introduced for certain economic strata of Catholics in 1837 thanks to the efforts of Daniel O'Connell (no relation). The Land Reforms of the late Nineteenth Century were actually to establish basic rights of tenure previously available to Protestant tenants in the north - the "Ulster Custom." Other "buy-back" schemes were being introduced at the same time as Georgist rent/land-value taxes just as WWI broke out (alas the Georgist ideas didn't make it through the war, although the rejection by the House of Lords led to the reform of that institution instead). Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day.]
The English were tough on all Catholics living in the British Isles, including those in Scotland. But they did not deny they were the indigenous inhabitants and they did not follow a policy of assassination, provocation and dispossession after the religious wars were over. They were tough on all the rural poor for that matter.
You’re right that they did chase Catholics off their land after the battle of the Boyne. But this policy was not universal. I think a lot of the nasty side of English occupation was caused by the tendency for absentee landlords to let their surrogates do whatever they pleased.
One difference stands out. While the Irish took up arms along side England’s enemy, France. The Palestinians so far as I know, never served as a fifth column for any invading army in any of Israel’s wars.
I am Irish and I do not like the Irish. Through tremendous effort the Palestinians have managed to be even more obnoxious than we are.