No nation once again
A ceasefire in Gaza is something to be glad about and celebrate – that some of the slaughter has stopped – but the nature of the reality of the ‘ceasefire’ is uncertain and the underlying situation is still just as dire as it was. 104 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks overnight after one IDF person was shot and killed in late October. Justice demands a viable Palestinian state and the ceasefire, such as it is, makes no demands on Israel in that direction – indeed Netanyahu was adamant that there would be no such development. There cannot be peace without Palestinian statehood, something which Israeli right wingers deny and ignore because their aim is to permanently dispossess all Palestinians. And there are no moves to end illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Seeing Donald Trump lapping up Israeli adulation in the Knesset was nauseating, not because a ceasefire was not a good thing but because when the ego of Trump has landed it is all about him, and he has backed Israel to the core and effectively also, through the supply of weapons and finance, a shoah or holocaust of Palestinians (both terms appropriate for their etymological origins) and their ability to live a humane life. President Biden was no different or as bad in a different way. To say Gaza has been bombed back to the stone age would be a euphemism; with rubble and contaminated ground everywhere, it has no clear waters or abundant wildlife that neolithic people had, and no freedom to move.
The agreed ceasefire is vague about what will happen in future. Gaza needs urgent reconstruction, definite timelines, and security guarantees (there should also be security guarantees for border Israelis but an end to occupation and colonialism in the West Bank). Major action by world states, including the USA, is necessary to get Israel to abide by international norms; the demand for Palestinian statehood needs to be clearly and repeatedly enunciated with sanctions if it refuses to cooperate. While most western European countries are also guilty, it is the power and money of the USA which has permitted Israel to act as it has in destroying Gaza.
The nature of US support for Israel comes not so much from the Jewish lobby – and some Jewish people would be highly critical of Israel – but from the conservative, evangelical Christian lobby who have particular or peculiar beliefs about Israel needing to be strong for the perceived second coming of Jesus Christ. This level of support is strange given that there are still a small number of Palestinian Christians who US evangelical Christians seem to ignore.
The attack by Hamas and others from Gaza on Israelis on 7th October 2023 was brutal and deadly. Israel has gone on to inflict not just an eye for an eye but many eyes for each of the nearly 1200 people killed in Israel at that time. Netanyahu and the Israeli state proclaimed they would totally eradicate Hamas but by their actions have ensured even greater hatred of Israel and many new recruits for Hamas as they killed existing Hamas members.
It may seem unrealistic to the extent of being quixotic but one aim should be Palestinian-Israeli friendship; turning enemies into friends. That can only happen a long way down the line when Palestine has got justice and this requires not just its own state but economic development to allow its people a reasonable life. Pro-Israeli people in the West point to Israel being the only ‘democratic’ state in the region; what this does not cover is that Israel is denying justice and self determination to another whole people, a crime which is compounded by its colonialism in the west Bank and previous displacement of Palestinians in the Nakba of 1948.
Isolationism
Ireland and Irish neutrality are targeted in various ways by those who are pro-NATO. This includes such comments as Ireland is not stepping up to the mark in ‘defending Europe’ or indeed Ireland itself, that it is not shouldering the burden and expense of defence, not being proper Europeans, and so on. This is militarist nonsense. It is also nonsense which is spouted by numerous pro-establishment commentators in Ireland. Edward Burke, for example, https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/new-president-neutrality-and-eu-presidency-irelands-defence-dilemma sets up Irish neutrality as a straw man and states “The Irish left and Catherine Connolly are badly out of step with much of Europe” and “While Ireland debates its neutrality and the triple-lock, much of the rest of Europe is preparing for the prospect of a major war with Russia.” There is no exploration given of the possibilities of a positive neutrality – or how war and further conflict can be avoided in Europe. Assumptions are made about the necessity of preparing for war.
Ireland’s best defence was, and is, being properly neutral and contributing to global peace. In a war situation there is no belligerent power that would respect Irish neutrality if they felt there was strategic interest in ignoring or overcoming it – and there is no military defence that even a heavily armed country the size of Ireland with its population could effectively offer. There is no point in trying. This was also the case in the past as the Billy King column refers to, in this issue, about both NATO and Warsaw Pact in the past being willing to ignore Irish neutrality if they saw fit.
Within the military world there is the possibility of ‘non-offensive defence’, a military approach which cannot be perceived as aggressive. But there is also nonviolent civilian defence, a cost-effective approach involving the population’s resistance and the planned denial of facilities in the country that might make an erstwhile invader decide invasion was risky or pointless. But a much larger danger for Ireland is nuclear or other WMD warfare; the risk of ‘old-fashioned’ invasion is much less than Ireland being bombed to oblivion. And avoiding the latter can only come through widespread warfare being averted.
Ireland needs to be much more positive in its neutrality. The idea of neutrality being isolationist is laughable if the country invests more in being active for peace, both in Europe and elsewhere. In fact if you want to use the term ‘isolationist’ it can be used for those who believe that their expensive militarism is an answer to their and the world’s problems (‘isolationist’ because other, opposed, forces think the same way about their own militarism). And ‘Europe’ (often used as a term for the EU) is not the world. A proper and active neutrality is needed – something the Irish government has been avoiding by cosying up to NATO as closely as it can without actually becoming a member – which would be politically unacceptable.
Neutrality in being pro-peace, pro-disarmament, and pro-world justice would be the very opposite of isolationist. There is a bigger world out there than NATO or the EU with global threat issues such as rampant climate change which threatens mass migration and dislocation on a scale we can barely imagine. Ireland should play a constructive role in the EU but it should oppose the militarist path which it is engaged in, on course to become another superpower. And the world has too many ‘super’powers; the EU, it is already clear through its ‘Fortress Europe’ and militarist policies promoting armies and armaments, would not act much differently to any other superpower, which is to say, unjustly, and things can only get worse if EU military capacity continues to grow.
The EU, with its origins in a post-World War Two peace project, is in real danger of becoming a European isolationist superpower.