![]() Patrick's Day trip to Washington over the Biden administration's support for Israel. There are signs some Irish voters want to push Sinn Fein further: An online campaign is urging the party to boycott its annual St. McDonald has called for the Irish government to expel the Israeli ambassador over allegations of genocide in Gaza. Sinn Fein has historic ties to Irish Republican Army militants, who themselves had a decades-long alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization. One of Varadkar's rivals, Mary Lou McDonald - whose political party Sinn Fein is leading polls ahead of elections later this year or early 2025 - doesn't have an Irish flag on her profile on X (formerly Twitter). Ireland has also joined Spain in asking the EU to review its trade agreement with Israel, over human rights concerns. "It looks, resembles, something more approaching revenge," he said. 3, less than a month into the current war, that while Israel has a right to defend itself, what he's been watching "isn't just self-defense." Ireland's taoiseach, or prime minister, was one of the first European leaders to condemn Israel's military tactics in Gaza. Atop Ireland's polls, a party with historic ties to militants - and the PLOĪll this history influences modern-day Irish politics. "We saw that in the 1970s in Derry," he says, referring to Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed unarmed protesters at a civil rights demonstration in the Northern Irish city. "When we see what happens in Palestine - people shot dead while waving white flags - that's an immediate cultural memory," Chambers says. In this February 1972 file photo, a building burns in the bogside district of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, one of the most notorious events of the period known as the Troubles. "To see white people speaking out like that, I think that does have international impact." Storrs' idea was that a Jewish state might serve to maintain British interests in the Arab world.Ĭhambers says the idea of a colonial power acting out of self-interest rather than the common good is something many voices in Africa, Asia and Latin America have long called out, in both Western colonialism through the 20th century and in Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories now.īut Ireland "is an outlier in that we're a European nation," he says. The word "Ulster" refers to British plantations in Northern Ireland. He wrote that Jewish immigration to Palestine during those years, "if not to form the Jewish State," might also serve the purpose of "forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism." Storrs, who served from 1917 to 1926, later wrote in his 1937 book, Orientations, that colonial tactics practiced in Ireland were implemented in the Middle East for Britain's political gain. The first British governor of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, made that direct parallel himself. A lot of the brutality of the British Empire was practiced on Ireland first," says David Chambers, better known as Blindboy, one of Ireland's most popular podcasters. Arab civilians being searched by British military personnel in Mandatory Palestine in 1937.
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