ASSASSINATIONS & RESISTANCE IN GAZA; UNPUBLISHED LETTER SENT TO FIVE IRISH NEWSPAPERS
Editor,
Padraig Pearse’s eulogy at the graveside of the old Fenian leader Jeremiah O’ Donovan Rossa in August 1915 comes to mind every time a Palestinian resistance fighter is killed. Pearse ended his spirited incantation by noting: “They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! – they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”
Following the 1916 Rising the occupying forces of the British Government executed most of the leaders to much public outcry. Britain’s occupation then had to confront the previously unknown Michael Collins, Harry Boland, Cathal Brugha et al. The rest is our history.
The raison d’etre of all the violence in Palestine-Israel is a coercive subjugation of the native population as part of a settler colonial project that practices the crime of apartheid informed by a racist and supremacist ideology that is fully supported by Western imperial powers. Unless this is firstly acknowledged and, secondly addressed, through a meaningful political process, then there will always be resistance from Palestinians; resistance that is justified both morally and under international humanitarian law.
Political leaders in Tel-Aviv and Washington who gloated last week about the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinyar, while perpetrating or enabling the continued mass slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children – 73 alone murdered in an Israeli airstrike on the Gazan town of Beit Lahia early Sunday morning – should reflect carefully on Padraig Pearse’s prophetic words.
Yours etc,
JIM ROCHE,
PRO Steering Committee, Irish Anti-War Movement,
PO Box 9260,
Dublin 1.
