Sir,—Brian Hanley (HI 33.3, May/June 2025, Letters) construed an editorial response to Zionist defenders of the Gaza genocide who were critical of Michael D. Higgins as an ‘attempt to whitewash anti-Semitism here in the past’. That characterisation is as much mistaken as it is surprising.
Brian’s extended homily on anti-Semitism and ‘the complexities of our past’ utilised the tired practice of debunking so-called myths. One tackled head-on is that from the 1920s ‘Irish nationalists … identif[ied] with the Palestinian struggle’. Where is that documented and, beyond ‘So what?’, what is its importance?
Post-1970s ‘concern for the Palestinians’ was enabled by Maxime Rodinson’s Israel, a colonial settler state? (available online) and other explanations of the roots of Zionist supremacism and ethnic cleansing, plus the emergence of the PLO as an autonomous resistance movement. It was also the beginning of Israel’s anti-Semitism smear, directed at those defending displaced Palestinians.
The smear is aimed particularly at Jewish scholars such as Rodinson. Its targets today include Ilan Pappé, Schlomo Sand, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Greenstein and others who demarcate Zionism’s invented history. Jews inhabiting the state of Israel have little ancestral connection to land stolen from Palestinians. This fact explains why Israeli DNA tests require a court order. Prior to Zionism’s appearance in the late nineteenth century, no significant Jewish hankering for ‘return’ to ‘Israel’ existed. Zionists supported European anti-Semitism as a basis for establishing a separate ethno-supremacist Jewish state. They adapted European, especially British, colonialist ideology and racism. Zionist success is a consequence, especially, of the European fascism that Zionists did little to contest.
Brian diminishes the emergence of Irish opposition to Israel—driven merely by Israeli attacks on UNIFIL in Lebanon, he suggests. But why might that be a deficient form of anti-colonial education, signalling the nature of the Israeli settler colonial state? Non-revisionist understandings of Irish history and of the Cromwellian plantation might have helped too.
Anti-Semitic racism in the West is supplanted by Islamophobia. It is driven by Israel and is popularised by right-wing forces that in the past attacked Jews. They threaten Muslims and non-white people generally. Ulster loyalism, which identified with anti-Jewish fascism in the 1930s, identifies today with Israel and with other forms of racism. The Blueshirts promoted anti-Semitism down South. Their present-day representatives cheer on Zionism while attacking migrants. It is a situation as deadly today for Gazans as was Nazism for Jews.—Yours etc.,
NIALL MEEHAN
Dublin 7