Writing about the recent murders committed by terrorist groups in Northern Ireland, Terry Glavin says that,

… nationalist support for the armed campaign waged by the Irish Republican Army between 1969 and 1994 was grounded in the demand for British withdrawal from Ulster, and for Irish self-determination.

Getting the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland and obliging its Unionist population to join a united Ireland was certainly the aim of the Provo campaign. However, I’m not sure that we can talk in glib terms about nationalist support for that campaign in view of the fact that a majority of nationalists in all parts of Ireland consistently voted for parties opposed to violence and only started to vote for Sinn Féin in significant numbers when it became clear that it was looking for a way out of terrorism and moving towards constitutional politics.

Terry goes on to say that the armed campaign

… arose from outrageous discrimination and structural unemployment, from ghettos that were routinely subjected to pogroms, and where the people saw little choice but to take up arms as part of a political struggle for civil rights. The struggle was set in the context of internment without trial, the Bloody Sunday massacre, and an occupation force of 30,000 British soldiers.

The IRA’s campaign certainly arose in the context that Terry describes and received a considerable degree of impetus from the resentment arising from it. However, it’s an absurd distortion of history to suggest the Provisionals went to war against the British state as part of the struggle for civil rights; they did so with the intention of expelling the British from Northern Ireland and nothing else. To achieve that end they were prepared to, and did, trample on the human and civil rights of all who got in their way.

It should also be remembered that it was the Provisionals, not the people, who decided to go to war against the British state. The nationalists of Northern Ireland weren’t asked for their opinion and they mainly kept their mouths shut and their heads down during the Troubles, for fear of the consequences if they didn’t.

Earlier in his text Terry says,

..the recent eruption of barbarism in Ulster is more clearly understood in its affinities with the jihadist bloodlust that torments and terrorizes so many millions of people around the world today, and which sometimes erupts from disaffected Muslims in “the west.” It is not negotiable, it is not comprehensible in the context of national liberation or human liberty or progress…

He’s right about this. The unification of the mystical body of the Irish nation is not a political objective and the main stream of the Provisional Republican movement gradually had the will to fight for it beaten, shot and jailed out of it by the British state. There now remain a few splinter groups that adhere to exactly the same ideology that propelled the Provisional struggle but in a context where the swamps of resentment created by systematic discrimination against Catholics have long since been drained. The Real IRA, Continuity IRA and their supporters have only the most pathological and racist currents of Irish nationalism to fuel their struggle.

And the relevance of all this to the Israel-Palestine conflict? I think it’s pretty clear; the Palestinians must have their state because they must have it and not because its birth will end the conflict. The struggle to end Jewish self-determination in the Middle East falls into the same category of quasi-religious deliria as the desire to undo 400 years of history and unite Ireland. Some can be persuaded of this, others may reluctantly come to accept it but some never will.