Precedents in decolonisation
What Ireland, Algeria and South Africa can offer Palestine
The recent case of genocide brought against the Israelis at the ICJ has foregrounded global awareness of the deep bond between Palestine and South Africa. As Nelson Mandela said, “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians", words that offer a reminder that the sanitised version of Mandela (as with MLK) that Western society prefers to promote is a far cry from the man himself, who was comfortable with both the universalism and necessities of a liberation movement.
The case got me thinking about the similarities and differences between Palestine and South Africa, but also other successful liberation movements and what they share with the Palestinian cause. This isn't any concrete thesis, more a sort of back-of-the-envelope decolonisation working-out, but I think it is important to look to history, and I think it's important to see that for all the suffering and heartbreak, the liberation of Palestine is another cause that will see its victory.
South Africa
An abiding difference between what the Israelis have constructed in Palestine, and the apartheid state in South Africa, is an entwinement of labour. While the South African economy in apartheid was reliant on the labour of black people, the Israelis, despite many businesses profiting from exploited Palestinian labour, have done all they can to remove this reliance. The Thai farmers (since released) who were caught up in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation are testament to where the Israelis now endeavour to source their labour. Likewise a lot of speculation exists that significant migration deals will take place to bring-in Indian labour to service the Israeli economy in Palestine. This move would also consolidate the Zionist-Hindutva axis, currently headed in India by Narendra Modi, and which has a shared-use for virulent Islamophobia in targeting both Palestinians and India's enormous Muslim population.
Algeria
Another cause often referenced alongside the Palestinian is that of Algeria, which threw-off French colonisation after 132 years; a poignant reminder that liberation comes painfully slowly, but eventually arrives. Where both the Algerian and South African case differ from the Palestinian is in population; though Palestinians represent a small and growing majority between River and Sea, and of course were once a population significantly larger than the Zionist one, the Israeli project is built on the idea of a “Jewish majority”, rather than the small colonial elites that in South Africa and Algeria lorded over the native population. In Palestine the Israeli goal is to remove and replace that population, but methods for doing this require either a violence that accelerates the rejection of Zionism, or elevating the more fundamentalist Jewish groups of the settler movement that provide the demographic support of greater numbers, but bring with them an increased religious-nationalist conservatism that again makes the Zionist project more precarious, both in its internal stability and external perception. An obsession with demographics and numbers, rather than cultivating genuine legitimacy or inclusivity, is likely to play a starring role in the histories that will be written of how Zionism in Palestine finally fell apart.
Ireland
The other decolonisation movement that travels close to the Palestinian cause is the Irish, where a small majority of Unionist Protestants were - in the final stages of British occupation - guarded by the British military as part of broad subjugation of the Catholic population in the north of Ireland.
The facet of this struggle that strikes me as most relevant to Palestine today is the role of the United States, where a large and nationalistic Irish-American movement gave full cultural, political and financial support to Irish republicanism, refusing any suggestion that armed resistance was anything but the legitimate right of an occupied population. The prominence of this tradition is probably best represented by Irish-American President, Joe “Genocide Joe” Biden; proudly of Irish heritage and also proudly as I type replenishing the Israeli genocide effort with bombs, money and UN vets of resolutions for a ceasefire.
Genocide Joe, and his Irish liberationist language, in some ways represents the lie of the land for why Irish liberation was successful in and through the US, and what Palestine would need to reach that same stage where the US is willing to sit down a client state (in the Irish case the British, in the Palestinian case the Israelis) and tell it that its time is up.
Firstly, the Irish diaspora in the US had the advantage and privilege of being a whiter, wealthier and largely Christian group. Palestinians in the US are seldom white, often Muslim (or presumed so and profiled with Islamophobia all the same), and always Arab. The cause of Zionism in Palestine is intertwined with the cause of domestic US racial injustice, because both rely on an ability to politically repress Palestinians and other racial or religious groups in support of them.
While that domestic racism will go on being resisted, there is a further Irish role to be played against the notion of the “Plastic Paddy" that Biden so epitomises; someone in and entirely from the US, claiming the historic credo of an ancestry they are barely connected to. The Irish who lived British occupation in Ireland are, as such, deeply connected to the Palestinian cause, while the Irish-American, already in the imagined community of a diaspora, finds it easier to pick and choose in ways that exclude Palestine from the meaning of what it is to be Irish. The Irish here have something of a struggle on their hands, between themselves and Irish-Americans, over what it means to be Irish.
This is but one reason why the strength of support for Palestine in Ireland is so valuable. Boycotts in Ireland (pro-Zionist coffee company Starbucks has rebadged its Dublin Airport branch, while low-cost airline Ryanair has cancelled its Dublin - Tel-Aviv flights upon catering demand) are in themselves invaluable, but the tails of these actions and protests cannot be confined to Ireland; the meaning of them will help redefine and assert Irish-Palestinian solidarity in the US. There is also at the present time a growing movement for a boycott of Barclay's bank, which is guilty of particularly deep ties with the Israeli economy.
No one community, history, action, or national or diaspora narrative will on its own bring down a force so well-networked as Zionism. But collectively, and with the determination of a global movement that has always been successful in mobilising against injustice, Palestine will be free. Of this, history teaches, we can be sure.