PALESTINE and IRELAND: UNITED BY PARTITION – I

by Jayantha Somasundaram

“Partition is the Englishman’s favourite way out of a difficulty. But it is a confession of failure” Irish Independent Dublin.

On Sunday, 15th December, Israel’s Foreign Minister closed their Embassy in Dublin. The following day The Jerusalem Post pointedly remarked that “if Israel were to close embassies in all countries that are diplomatically hostile, its number of representations would be dramatically reduced…Norway and Spain have also recognised a Palestinian state, and their criticism of Israel is often as equally harsh…the same is true of Belgium and smaller EU states such as Malta and Luxembourg.” Interestingly Dublin did not retaliate and closed its Embassy in Tel Aviv. Ireland had recognised Israel in 1963 and they exchanged Ambassadors in 1996.

The Irish Army has, since 1978, participated in the UN peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon, named UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), as does the Sri Lanka Army. On three occasions UNIFIL was commanded by Irish Army officers. Not only has the Irish Army suffered 48 fatalities, the most casualties of any of the UNIFIL participants, but they claim that in 1987 Corporal Dermot McLoughlin was deliberately killed by Israeli tank fire.

Though the Tel Aviv-Dublin diplomatic standoff may seem trivial, and marginal, given the brutality, the intransigence and the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian War, the Irish sideshow throws up a plethora of issues relating to history, religion, nationalism and conflict that impact on the main drama.

Though Jesus of Nazareth and His disciples were Asian, His most influential follower Paul, through his missions to Turkey and Greece in the first century, took Christianity to Europe. There, with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in AD313, Christianity became the religion of the Empire and consequently of Europe. And, in time, traditional European religions and local beliefs disappeared.

As early as the 4th Century missionaries to England established churches along the Bristol Channel; while St Patrick is revered as having Christianised Ireland in the 5th Century. Though England would become Protestant during the reign of King Henry VIII in the 16th Century, Ireland remained faithful to Roman Catholicism despite English persecution. But over the centuries many people in Northern Ireland did adopt Protestant Christianity.

The Irish War of Independence 1919-21 led ultimately to the predominantly Catholic southern counties becoming the State of Ireland in 1937. While Ulster, the predominantly Protestant counties of the north, remain part of the United Kingdom.

Jews in Europe

The Jewish presence in Europe preceded the rise of the Roman Empire. Once Christianity dominated Europe the Jews remained the exception, a conspicuous minority who rejected Christianity. Moreover, Jewish contemporaries of Christ had listened to Him, seen His miracles and yet refused to acknowledge Him; and succeeding generations in Europe, living among Christians, continued to deny Him. This refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah long promised to the Jews was construed not as ignorance, but diabolical obstinacy.

In fact St. Augustine (354-430) the most influential Christian theologian of his time, argued that Jewish communities should be allowed to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence to underline the failure of Judaism and the triumph of the Church. Consequently Christian attacks on Jewish Synagogues in Europe began as early as the fourth century. Soon the Jews would be denied all rights and access to office in Christian Europe.

The Greek Christian John Chrysostom in his ‘Sermons against the Jews,’ delivered in Antioch, presented the Jews as murderers of Christ. Thus by the 5th Century anti-Jewish pogroms spread even to Palestine resulting in the burning of entire villages. And in 629 when Emperor Heraclitus retook Jerusalem from the Persians, there was a massacre of Jews by Christian Rome.

In Spain, Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death, and the Inquisition was established by the Church to uncover under torture, those Jews who remained secret believers. When the Moors from North Africa invaded Spain in 711 the Jews welcomed them because under the Caliph, Cordoba became a centre of Jewish learning, a city of Jewish scholars, philosophers, poets and scientists. By the 11th Century the Muslims had created an Islamic Commonwealth that stretched from Spain to India. To the Muslims, Jewish monotheism was as pure as their own.

Rumours that Christians were being ill-treated in Palestine by Jews and Muslims, fuelled hostility in Europe and sparked the Crusades. The first Crusade was launched in 1095, and as they marched across Europe these ‘holy warriors’ targeted the Jews. “Marauding crusaders on their way to the Middle East in 1096 stopped to slaughter Jews in the Rhineland. One crusader account recalls thus: Behold we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine and to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling amongst us whose ancestors killed him and crucified him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance first upon them – let us wipe them out as a nation,” records Collin Hansen in the journal Christian History.

Martin Luther

Anti-Semitism

By the 15th Century Jews had been expelled from all major west European areas: Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442, Milan in 1489 and Florence in 1494. And in Venice, in 1541, the term ghetto nuovo was applied to the area in which the Jews were confined. European Jews tended, therefore, to move east into Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

In comparison to continental Europe the Jewish presence in Ireland was not significant, but when all Jews were expelled from England, in accordance with the Edict of Expulsion of 18 July 1290, a Jewish holy day (the ninth of Ab, commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple in AD70), it is believed that Jews in the English Pale in Dublin would have been also evicted.

Initially, European Jews had welcomed the Protestant Reformation in the expectation that the persecution they had endured for centuries at the hands of the Roman Church would end. Martin Luther in turn expected the Jews to voluntarily accept Protestant Christianity. When he realised that the Jews still remained faithful to their own beliefs, Luther turned on them with fury in his 1543 publication On the Jews and their Lies. “First their Synagogues should be set on fire…their homes smashed and destroyed…they should be put under one roof or in a stable like Gypsies…banned from roads and markets…their property seized…drafted into forced labour.” The Holocaust had been chartered!

Not only Karl Marx but Eduard Bernstein in Germany, Rosa Luxembourg in Russian Poland, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria and Leon Trotsky in Russia dominated revolutionary politics in Europe. Jews like Martov, Dan, Radek, Zinoviev and Trotsky were conspicuous in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The Russian Revolution prompted the creation and dissemination of a forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion about an international Jewish conspiracy. The ‘Revolutionary Jew’ became a further excuse for Europe’s Christian establishment to persecute Jews.

Holocaust

Race theories that Nazi intellectuals were formulating concluded that as Teutonic Aryans, the Germans were inherently superior to the Jews of Semitic ancestry. Even before the Nazis took power in 1933, Jewish lecturers and students were being driven out of German universities. Adolf Hitler himself was explicit – as early as 1922 he said: The annihilation of the Jews will be my first and foremost task. Paradoxically, there is reason to believe that Hitler’s own father may have been the illegitimate son of a Jew.

Once they took power, the Nazis used the 1935 Nuremberg Decrees to strip the Jews of their basic rights. On the Kristallnacht or Crystal Night the Nazis attacked and looted Jewish shops and burned all the Synagogues. Hitler had promised a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’

Himmler responded by opening the first concentration camp at Dachau. By the end of World War II in 1945, of the eight million Jews in German-occupied Europe, six million had been killed.

Not far from the Dachau concentration camp is the Bavarian village of Oberammergau. Because its inhabitants believed they were spared during the Bubonic plague of 1634, they enact a now world-famous passion play every 10 years. In 1934, having witnessed the performance, Adolf Hitler said, “it is vital that the passion play be continued; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed. There one sees Pontius Pilate, a Roman racially and intellectually superior, who stands out like a firm, clean rock, in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.”

At the height of the Holocaust, in 1942, when the Papal Nuncio – the Pope’s Ambassador – in Slovakia was asked to intervene on behalf of Jewish children destined for the gas chambers, his response was: “There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of the sin of deicide (the murder of God).”

A contrite Pope John Paul II admitted in 1997, that many Christians had looked the other way during the Holocaust because in their estimation, the Jews were getting what they deserved for rejecting Christ.