1. In response to my post about Ireland’s law of return, a reader who signs himself “lapsedmethodist” asks,
Who would the potential Irish citizen be displacing upon his/her return to Ireland should he/she avail of that option?
I think that this question reflects a view of history that plagues much commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those who hold it see the Zionist enterprise as unjust from the outset because it sought and seeks to persuade a great number of people to move somewhere else, to a place where people who are not part of that enterprise already live.
2. In order to find something inherently unjust in Zionism on these grounds your conception of history would have to go something like this, “Every people in the world occupies a natural, legitimate and correct territory. History is something that happens to peoples settled on their ancestral territories. Large-scale, voluntary migrations that have effects on the pre-existing populations are something that simply do not occur. Zionism is unjust because it represents a rupture of this ‘a place for everybody and everybody in his place’ natural order of things”.
3. I trust that I don’t have to labor the point of how false this view is. Vast flows of migration - both voluntary and involuntary - have shaped and reshaped the world in the modern period. To give just one example; every single country on the American continent is a product of massive immigration from Europe, an immigration that frequently had genocidal consequences for the indigenous inhabitants of the new nations. There is no “originally” in history, no virgin moment when everyone was where they are supposed to be; there is only a certain state of affairs at a certain date and a certain balance of forces, with a scaffolding of class, national, ethnic and religious interests, yearnings and desires supporting them.
4. An interesting peculiarity about those who hold this view is that they only apply it to the Israel-Palestine conflict. They only see the nation building project of the Jews to be fundamentally unjust, never that of any other people and, of course, never their own.
5. To return to “lapsedmethodist”; it would appear that he sees no difficulty with Ireland’s law of return because the Irish state appears to him to be a natural, timeless phenomenon rather than the product of the struggles of women and men who dreamed themselves Irish, a polity which came into being without the aid of an ideology or the participation of people living on other continents, and the birth and life of which have only involved the correction of previous injustice and never the producing of fresh injustice.
I accidentally placed this comment in the wrong post, which was directed towards ‘lapsedmethodist’ in the ‘Ireland’s Law of Return’ topic. But here it is again, and I would like him to address this.
This is not a reflection my my actual views, but a satirisation of anti-Zionism, which is popular in Ireland:
The IRA helped violently bring about the illegal creation of the Irish State, which was built on the mass displacement of Protestants that had lived in the region for centuries. This little ethnocracy on the edge of Europe handed its educational institutions to the Catholic Church, the only people who really benefited from the creation of the Republican regime - other than the a cligue of vile nationalists whose families dominated the country in almost all respects for decades. Members of Opus Dei in the Irish government like Michael Woods ensured the Catholic Church would get over one billion euros from the taxpayer to cover the legal costs associated with their child abuse.
The vast majority of Irish people do not live in Ireland. This racist state, that gives massive privileges to the speakers of a near-dead language - which served a useful agenda of ethnic cleansing - does not speak for all 80,000 000 Irish people. The region was ruled from England for centuries and its foundation was against the wishes of the majority in Westminister, the democratic parliament of the UK. I call for one state solution to the Irish question: One State in the British Isles!
i was sorry Eamonn didn’t respond to my comment here:
http://blog.z-word.com/2010/10/irelands-law-of-return/#comment-18994
That said, after reading yet another post of contortions and painful prose to justify ethnic cleansing, it wasn’t surprising.
Way over the top here but you have some valid points.
My own parents fought in the Irish War of Independence, alongside Protestants, who were not displaced and were allowed to hold on to the churches and cathedrals confiscated from the Catholics centuries before (no point in undoing past centuries). Except in part of Ulster most Protestants supported an independent, Republican, and secular Ireland. So did my Catholic parents. In fact part of the reason they left Ireland was the belief that deValera’s semi-establishment of the Catholic church would corrupt both church and state, which is precisely what did happen. Had Collins not been assassinated by deValera’s crew Ireland would have gone in a far better direction.
As for the Catholic Church’s control of the schools, the British government had already established a system of “National Schools” run by the Catholic church. The deValera regime went far too far in consolidating education in the hands of the Catholic. In fact some of my Catholic relatives chose to send their kids to Protestant schools (freely operating) because they despised the brutality practiced in most Catholic controlled schools and they knew the Protestant school education was far superior.
You do hit on a valid point that the government came to be controlled by deValera’s regressive coterie. Why? Because the party of Collins that started the Free State, far more progressive, was too busy nation building to build cozy relations “on the ground.” It also suffered from being made up of a more educated and prosperous demographic.
DeValera was truly the ruination of Ireland but the country has never been bigoted against Protestants just far too proviniual and pro-Catholic.
As for calling the War of Independence illegal, you are being ridiculous. By definition a war of independence is illegal, even when justly waged against an unjust occupier. Your petulant accusation of illegality would apply, for instance, to the US war of independence as well (but perhaps you are a fanatical Tory and believe the US should sill be a British territory). You neglect to mention that British non-combatants could travel freely about the rebel country without fear of harm. The War of Independence was fought only against agents of the British regime.
The Irish law of return applies equally to Catholics, Protestants, seculars and black or East Indians with one Irish grandparent. It is not confessional or racist.
What happened to Ireland deserves criticism, especially the role of the Catholic Church and the Fianna Fail coterie, but you go too far and you make unjust accusations. Sober up.
someone who won’t even use their real name demands accountability from me…
John Mack: The Irish law of return is plainly racist as you can only benefit from it through a blood relationship. Being interested in sean nós and Seamus Heaney won’t cut it. How hard is that to understand?
Israel’s law of return also accepts black people, yellow people, brown people etc. They just have to have one Jewish parent or grandparent. They don’t even have to be Jews themselves.
The current head of the Israeli Navy is partly of Chinese descent.
btw: Israel has gone to great trouble and risk to bring thousands of black Jews from Ethiopia
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ejtoc.html
and a very large percentage of Israeli Jews were either born in Arab countries or are children of people who were.
I can imagine what they’d be called behind their backs in some quarters in Ireland
In partial answer to lapsedmethodist, the immigration of an Irish-American would take up a spot for a person in the immediate area (Irish, English, Scottish) trying to get a job and accept citizenship in Ireland… Or perhaps it would displace the potential immigration of a person from a non-European country.
not about accountability eamonn - just your inability to defend your own illogic.
like the following:
“The Irish law of return is plainly racist as you can only benefit from it through a blood relationship.”
A blood relationship…with an Irish *citizen*. Whereas the Law of Return is based on… come on now, you do the rest
this whole article is relevant, and here’s a snippet.
“The sort of Jewish state that Israel became is more discriminatory and marginalizing of its minority than most contemporary ethnic states. For example, whereas other ethnic-states accord preference in immigration to members of its majority ethnic group, Israel bestows automatic and immediate citizenship to anyone who is considered Jewish religiously or racially, provided that he or she was not an adherent of another religion. Again, unlike many other ethnic states, which accord preference in citizenship to native minorities, Israel’s Arab minority is not considered favored in immigration; on the contrary, there are emergency orders forbidding spouses of Israeli citizens to become naturalized, if the citizens are Palestinian Arab. Again, unlike other ethnic states that have procedures for nationalizing those who are not members of the majority ethnic group, Israel has no naturalization procedure besides the fiat of the minister of Interior. A minister of Interior from a rightwing or religious party ensures that there will be no naturalized citizens.”
http://972mag.com/israels-arab-problem-by-jerry-haber/
Whattaboutery, you have missed the entire sense of the article. Read it again.
Whatabouttery, someone claiming Irish citizenship by descent does so because their grandparent was born in the island of Ireland - very possibly before Ireland became independent. That grandparent may be deceased; the grandchild may never have met the grandparent; in fact the grandparent may have emigrated from Ireland as an infant and never returned. None the less, the ties of blood and soil are ineradicable. Is this an accurate statement of your position?
John Mack: As I said, those are not my views of Irish independence. I support an independent Ireland, and an armed militia for Catholics in the North that protected them from Loyalist death squads.
But there is no question Protestants were displaced in the creation of the Irish Free State (later the Republic). After the War of Independence, IRA gunmen went on a killing spree in Munster directed at local Protestants. After a string of sectarian murders, which were directed not at wealthy land-owning Protestants or prominent Unionists - but everyday small farmers, shop-ownerrs and house-painters- trains out of Cork were filled to capacity for weeks with Protestants who went to escape. In many counties, particularly near the border of Norther Ireland, the eldest Protestant sons of landowners were often targeted for assasination so no one could inherit the farm and such.
And by the way, the National Schools were founded not on actual legislation but on a letter from Lord Stanley to the Duke of Leinster. Technically, it wasn’t legislation, but it was definitely the rule that religion had to be taught outside of the normal school day. The Catholic Church squeezed itself in and the Irish state accelarated this process and now the RCC control 98% of Irish Primary schools in some way. Check out this link:
http://bocktherobber.com/2010/08/catholic-bishops-and-irish-primary-schools
It seems funny to think now that Brendan Behan, whenever he met a Jew in a Dublin bar, would hop on a table and sing ‘Hatikvah’ in perfect Hebrew… he was a committed Republican and Zionist. Menachem Begin was nicknamed ‘Michael’ after one of his great influences, Michael Collins.
What was the alternative in 1948, when the world was full of displaced people and the millions who died were the ones who couldn’t get the small number of visas to whichever country decided they might be useful? And if Iran attempts to murder the last of the Jews there, does Israel say ‘fill in this form and if you have a useful profession, then, subject to quotas, you may come in’? What would be the point of Israel if it couldn’t give the Jewish nation a place of safety? A law of return - doesn’t preclude those from other nations becoming citizens. And anyone who has worked in immigration knows that the decision ultimately rests in the UK with the Home Secretary.