[00:00:00] Martin McCormack: Hey everybody, great to have you with us and happy St. Patrick's Day. Today I want to talk a little bit about the Irish because the Irish are in a very interesting place right now in this part of the 21st century. One of the things that they're being very vocal about, the Irish people, the citizens of Ireland, is their displeasure Israel's treatment of the people of Palestine in the area of Gaza.
[00:00:38] To date, well over 30, 000 men, women, and children have been killed in Gaza. We don't have any accurate statistics of what members of Hamas have been killed or anything like that. But what we do know is that a lot of people have been caught in the crossfire in a very confined place. It has created quite a quandary for President Biden because a lot of Americans Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans and Jewish Americans Do not like the idea that all these innocents are being slaughtered, killed, for a few terrorists. Why are the Irish so sensitive to this? And that's what we're going to talk about today.
[00:01:38] Let me give you just a little current events what's going on. South by Southwest is taking place in Austin, Texas. It is primarily a music event, but since its inception, it has morphed into something more. Now it has tech parts and video parts. And it's walked away to some degree from its roots as a musical event.
[00:02:08] However, there are still musical events there, and about 19 bands were coming over from Ireland. Those bands found out that one of the big sponsors of South by Southwest is the United States Army. Can only guess that the reason why the U. S. Army is a sponsor for South by Southwest is A, it's a big event and B, probably more so not the music part, but the tech part. They're interested in that. They're going to look for people or ideas or whatever they want to obviously work in the technical areas, especially in areas that can be adapted for military. The United States is the largest provider of arms to the state of Israel. And as many Palestinian commentators have pointed out, it's very hard to not point a finger at the United States when everything from uniforms to bullets to canteens to whatever have the imprint of the United States Army or made in the USA on it.
[00:03:24] So this is put on the
[00:03:28] Army in the position of being looked upon as something that is supporting an outsized response to a horrible massacre that took place on October 7th.
[00:03:47] So the Irish bands are withdrawing from South by Southwest, probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for some of these guys, but they're not going to be part of something that they say is a national sponsored by the United States Army, which in turn is symbolically at the very least being the supporter of the Israeli actions in Gaza.
[00:04:18] Now, by the time this podcast comes out, there will be the festivities that usually take place every year at the. The White House. And the White House usually has the members of Ireland come over and it's a big deal. An exchange of pleasantries of reestablishment of the fealty between Ireland and the United States, of which there is a lot, but there's a lot of pressure this year not to have anybody go there not to partake in the celebration because of everything that's going on again with the thousands and thousands of innocent people who are dying in Gaza.
[00:05:06] So that puts President Biden and Irish leaders in a bind. Their people are for the most part saying that they don't care. I don't want to have that kind of symbolism be misinterpreted as tacit approval for the United States, i. e. indirectly tacit approval for what is going on by the Netanyahu administration in Gaza.
[00:05:34] There's a lot of fine lines and splitting of hairs folks with this. So bear with me. Do Irish people support Israel? Do they support the idea of an Israeli state? They do. They also support the idea of an independent state for Palestine. Do certain members of the Netanyahu cabinet not support an independent Palestinian state?
[00:06:10] Yeah. So that's a problem. Very bad optics here. So why? What is it that rankles the Irish so much? Why, when they see what's going on, does this resonate so much with them? It is everything that has to do with the fact that both Palestine and Ireland were once under the same thumb, and that was the British Empire.
[00:06:49] British, the world's superpower at the time after World War I, had a lot of power and a lot of problems that they had to solve. So we have to take a little bit of a look at the history of Ireland specifically and how much that is mirrored in what happened with the creation of the state of Israel. It's no secret that Ireland was subjected to a lot of brutal oppression by the various forms of the British government for a long time.
[00:07:28] And one of the things that happened was that there were many kind of situations in which the lack of British understanding of Irish humanity led to that oppression turning into something even worse. A fine example of that would have been the potato famine. And the potato famine was a time in which there was a fungus that came from the North America. And it blighted the potato crop. The potato crop became a miracle crop for the Irish.
[00:08:13] They could raise a lot of potatoes in Ireland. People could be fed, it was nutritious. They had it for breakfast, lunch, dinner. But when the blight came, the Irish starved. They starved because there was this thing called rents. And at the time, the Irish peasantry, Basically forced to pay rent on their ancestral lands.
[00:08:41] They paid rents to their landlords, British lords. Anglo Irish lords in the form of food crops. Not so much money. So the bitter irony of the potato famine was that while people were starving, Ireland was still exporting food to the UK to, to England specifically. So that's, In short, one horrible, bitter memory.
[00:09:14] A lot of people died because of that in Ireland. A lot of people emigrated because of it. And it could be argued that the United States of America was altered by the numbers of Irish people that came over to the United States. Did they get a warm reception here? Not really. There was a lot of prejudice against the Irish.
[00:09:43] And one has to just look at the cartoons of Thomas Nast, the same guy that brings us Santa Claus, to see how the Irish were portrayed along with African Americans. Nast portrayed both the Irish and African Americans as apes. We were subhuman. We were not considered european and that actually went on to cause another thing, phrenology, the study of heads the, and all that sort of, bogus science, which gave rise to Nazi ideology about the purity of people that were Aryan, such as the British, the Anglo Saxons, and the Germans.
[00:10:39] All this stuff percolated with the Irish. When Ireland fought for its independence around 1916, in 1916, In 1917, the person that was the General Secretary of Irish Affairs in the UK government, his name was Arthur Balfour. And Balfour came up with this idea that we could partition Ireland. We will give the Irish 26 counties, but what we're going to do is keep 6 counties for ourselves.
[00:11:25] And they took the choice area of Ulster and they turned it into Northern Ireland, the result being that the partition of Ireland took place. And in some ways, I think it was an effort on the part to keep a little control over Ireland. and jump forward to the 1970s when people in Northern Ireland, mainly Catholics, were just asking for civil rights and they were attacked.
[00:12:07] They were killed. This gave rise then to the resurgence of a brand new army, but called the IRA. Wasn't the same as the IRA of But this was a group of soldiers that were going to fight against the British. And you had what was called the Troubles. The Troubles did not come to an end until the late 80s.
[00:12:41] When the United States, Canada, and a couple other nations, but mainly the descendants, if you will, of the Irish and North America, worked with the British government to come up with what was called the Good Friday Peace Treaty. That peace has now stood in Ireland for a long time. And what's interesting with it is that The British controlled Northern Ireland has gone through a lot of repercussions mainly because of the rest of the UK going through Brexit.
[00:13:33] With the UK leaving the European Union, there was this realization that All of a sudden, you now had the Republic of Ireland, which was part of the European Union, and still is, kinda having this for once, a better economy, a better social safety net, if you will, with the EU, and sharing the only land border.
[00:14:07] between the United Kingdom and the European Union. There were those in the six counties of Northern Ireland that were thinking we should just put up some sort of border. That's not going to sit well with the Irish because the aspiration of the Irish people is to have those six counties through peaceful resolution, because with the Good Friday Accord, the Irish Republican Army agreed to lay down its arms.
[00:14:42] So through peaceful resolution that the six counties at some point could have a referendum and be able to become part of the nation of Ireland once again, it's coming tantalizing close. And the reason why I'm bringing this up before I, I talk about the Palestinian side of the equation, and why it feels so, so familiar to the Irish is that.
[00:15:10] This is something, too, that we have to look at when we try to look for answers in how to solve the seemingly unsolvable problem of Israelis and Palestinian people learning to live together and govern together, if you will. We are now in the 21st century, a little over 100 years since The Republic of Ireland got its freedom, relatively short time, if you will, facing the idea that Northern Ireland, the area that was where the Irish people were basically oppressed, removed transplanted by Scott Irish Protestants back in the time of Queen Elizabeth up to Now, there's been predominantly the majority of people of those people that did the plantation that came in were settled, resettled.
[00:16:26] But it's about to change. Now there is a majority of nationalists. And nationalists are people that are primarily of Catholic descent, but people that believe that Ireland should be united. Not all those people are Catholic. There's Jews, there's probably some Muslims, and there's some Protestants. But, the majority of the people are the descendants of the people whose land were settled on.
[00:17:01] We could very easily see within the next 20 years the possibility of the six counties of Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, peacefully transfer to the Republic of Ireland. There's some benefits for the people of Northern Ireland. They will be part of the European Union, which is, for all its bureaucratic nightmares, a better bet.
[00:17:38] This is what's going on. And all this history is recent history with the Irish. Good Friday Agreement, the Troubles. Not even a hundred years has passed since the partition of Ireland in which you have now Ulster, or Northern Ireland. Add to that about roughly 500 years of direct oppression.
[00:18:14] This is the history. Now, we'll take a little break here. And when we come back, I want to talk a little more about that Arthur Balfour and how he took the same idea of Northern Ireland and applied it to what was then the area called Palestine. You're listening to Strung Out.
[00:18:43] All right, we're back. So we are asking why do the Irish get the Palestinians?
[00:18:51] There's a lot of parallels between what the Irish people tried, especially in Northern Ireland, and what's going on in Palestine.
[00:19:01] And Arthur James Balfour, who was the Irish, secretary, prior to Ireland's independence this idea that he thought that after World War One, the area of Palestine, which. was now under British control because up to that point the Turks, the Ottoman Empire, had control over that area.
[00:19:31] And there were Jews and there were Muslims living in Palestine. Okay? But here comes this idea from Balfour that maybe an independent national home could be a national home. could be made for the Jewish people. It was called the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
[00:19:58] So at the same time that he's talking about this, you have the war going on with Ireland trying to get its independence, okay? The World War I doesn't end until Armistice Day of 1918. So this legislation, this idea was provided there. And this was this was an idea that then was used in many different other parts of the British Empire.
[00:20:33] India. They had India and Pakistan. There is Israel and Palestine. Okay. And all those kind of happened after World War II, but this idea that we could break things up and in some ways exert some level of control.
[00:21:00] So this was the idea with the creation of a Jewish home state in Palestine. It wasn't. Israel by per se, but the idea, at least in the mind of British politicians was that if we could just get people from Europe there of Jewish descent they might be a little more amenable to us Brits.
[00:21:33] And so their kind of their divide and conquer kind of idea. So that's what's happened. But then the, Israel struck for its independence.
[00:21:50] And since Israel struck for its independence, you've had the State of Israel, and you had areas that have been under Palestinian control, mainly the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And I'm jumping over a lot of different skirmishes and wars that took place in Israel and in which the Israelis won.
[00:22:22] And because of that, every time the Israelis won Palestinians land was lost . And so now you have what's left. You have the West Bank and you have the Gaza Strip. Now into the Gaza Strip and West Bank there's a lot of problems with these two bits of land because first of all they're not joined together.
[00:22:57] They're different parts of the country, okay, of Israel. One's bordering Jordan, the other's bordering the Mediterranean. What has happened is that various administrations in Israel have rebuffed the idea of a two state solution. One person that was going for the two state solution, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated for standing up for that idea.
[00:23:38] You now have the events that have led up to October 7th. You have these areas of the West Bank, Palestine, poorly led by the leadership. You have Hamas, which is an organization that espouses violence and wants to see the end of Israel and clearly supported by Iran. So you have a lot of players on the field that are there.
[00:24:21] and you have a lot of people that wanna see the destruction of Israel.
[00:24:28] So naturally the Israelis feel defensive, but it gets complicated when the Palestinians don't have any recourse in determining their own future. And what I mean by that is, is that even though the Palestinians have the West Bank, there's a lot of settlements that have been forced on the Palestinians by certain elements of the Israeli government.
[00:25:08] There is arrests, there's direct military intervention. A peaceful solution that occurred in Ireland with the Good Friday Accords, where nobody got anything 100 percent that they wanted , has not happened in Israel and Palestine. This is the problem.
[00:25:42] And I'm being very overly simplistic here. So why is it then that the Irish are totally honked off at Israel doing this to the Palestinian people? It's because the Irish look. The Israeli government, the current Israeli government, is taking over the mantle of oppression from the British. Now there's a lot of affinity between Israel and Ireland, just like there is affinity with the United States.
[00:26:25] President Herzog of Israel his grandfather, I believe, was once the Grand Rabbi of Ireland. And there is a Jewish population in Ireland. And they've been very successful. Living there. It's not anti Semitism here. What it is more it seems is that it's about the fact that there is an inordinate amount of power being used against people in Palestine, in the Gaza Strip that cannot, defend themselves. And this is what the Irish people are finding. Is affecting their psyches. It reminds them too much of what happened to them. Where and how can the U S help the situation? Let's talk about it when we come back after this break. You're listening to Strung Out.
[00:27:54] What I'm trying to bring to everyone here listening is trying to explain a little bit about the Irish look at supporting the Palestinian cause. And the Irish themselves tried violence tried violence with the Irish Republican Army. It didn't give them what they wanted.
[00:28:24] And thank God for the peace accords the good Friday peace accords. A lot of people got killed during the 30 years of the troubles as well. So there's nothing really there to be proud about on the part of the Irish, except for the fact that peace was finally achieved. And again, that peace was led by the United States of America, who was the ally of the British at the time and still is.
[00:29:02] And this is where I think the frustration with America is right now with the Irish, because they look at America and they like are wondering how can you condone this inordinate amount of force? against these people in the name of trying to get rid of this horrific terrorist organization.
[00:29:28] And this puts the United States into a very difficult position, because we do provide a lot of weapons and support to Israel. How do we solve this?
[00:29:41] I think the United States, , has to, first of all, give aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza. That's the immediate thing. The second thing Is they have to leverage with the current Israeli government under Netanyahu to create a ceasefire. They may not be able to get all the Hamas terrorists out of Gaza.
[00:30:16] Truth be told, whatever happens there it's going to, there are going to be terrorists that are going to come around no matter what. As long as the situation. All Palestine and Israel exists as it currently exists. Can there be a two state solution? I don't know. I think what maybe might need to happen is the idea that representation, one man, one vote, one person, one vote, has to take place in the state of Israel with equal rights.
[00:30:57] Israel might have to, Turn away from the idea that it would be just primarily a Jewish nation. It's not going to sit well with some people who really would like to see Israel be just a Jewish nation.
[00:31:14] If there was going to be a two state solution, then it would have to be at the loss of some land for Israel. That might be the price of getting that. And for the Palestinians, they would have to accept the fact that the Israelis have a right to exist, that is their home.
[00:31:38] With the Irish, I think where they fall is they see at least what good has come out of the Good Friday Accords
[00:31:54] and the peace has held in Northern Ireland.
[00:32:02] And the ballot box and voting will ultimately decide what's going to happen with that territory. I hope this helps to give a little bit of an understanding with the mindset of Irish. They're not anti Israeli, but they are anti Israeli government when it comes to the idea of illegal settlements, of denying that the Palestinians people have a right to exist as Palestinian people.
[00:32:42] Those sort of things are the very things that happened to the Irish and in the not too recent past. Hopefully the Irish will understand from the United States of America that just as we were able to help. Ireland, the island of Ireland with the Good Friday Accords, that America will ultimately prevail in helping to bring peace to Israel and Palestine.
[00:33:16] I think it's gonna take the same amount of effort and the same amount of time That it took for the Good Friday Accords to take place in Northern Ireland. None of this stuff is easy. And what Hamas did to all those innocent Israeli people is beyond horrific.
[00:33:46] And I don't think there's many people that are cheering for Hamas. What I do think is that Israel does have a golden opportunity here to have a ceasefire, negotiate with a real Palestinian government, bring in other Arab countries, bring in the United States. and make some tough concessions in order to have two states in peace. Or, there will have to be the creation of something that brings both peoples together and they're going to have to learn how to live peacefully side by side. Either one is going to take a lot of work.
[00:34:46] And the Irish people hopefully will remember that the United States, being the most powerful nation on earth, is saddled sometimes with no good answers.
[00:35:03] That sometimes it's very hard to thread the needle of diplomacy. That doesn't diminish the horrible loss of life that has taken place in Palestine and the unnecessary loss of life, it could be argued. But hopefully there will be peace and there will be peace soon.
[00:35:25] So that's it for this podcast about the Irish. and why they're so vocal right now about their support of Palestine. And we will talk to you soon. Bye bye.
