Irish Support for Palestinian Struggles

Why are the Irish so pro-Palestine?

We have a history of occupation as well.

We ourselves were colonized by an oppressor.

It's Britain's first colonial project here in Ireland.

And it's something we fought back against for 800 years.

The Irish have always stood side by side with Palestinians, so I wanted to know

what Irish people say is the connection between the two

struggles.

The British.

The British.

The British.

British.

The British.

The British.

The connective thread is the Brits.

Yep, it's the Brits. You see, back in the 12th century, English

colonizers invaded Ireland, sparking a fight against them

that would last hundreds

of years. By the 1920s, Britain also extended its colonial rule

to Palestine, and used some of the same colonial

oppressors as they

did with the Irish.

The infamous Black and Tan force from the 1920s-

Who were the British terrorist force in Ireland through our war of independence

... the same British force that was set up to come here as a bulwark

against Irish

revolution, carried out atrocities.

They then went to Palestine and carried out the same things later on.

There's someone you may have heard of before, Arthur Balfour.

He shows up in both Irish and Palestinian history.

Balfour was the British foreign secretary who wrote an infamous letter in

1917 that promised a national home for the Jewish people in

Palestine. It became known as the Balfour

Declaration, and it paved the way

for decades of Palestinian dispossession, which the British started, and which

Israel has since continued. But before that-

Arthur Balfour repressed the people of Ireland

... the Irish actually called him Bloody

Balfour.

That's because in the late 1800s, he oversaw the violent repression of Irish

people fighting for their freedom from Britain.

Another parallel between Ireland and Palestine?

Ireland was taken off us.

It's the parallel of settler colonialism.

In Ireland, it really took off during the Ulster

plantation of the

1600s. That's when the English government sent

Scottish and English

settlers to the north of Ireland, and planted them on land confiscated from

indigenous Irish Catholics. And when it came to Palestine, British

authorities directly referenced that tactic.

Sir Ronald Storrs, the first governor of Jerusalem,

said that, "What we must create

in Palestine is a little loyal Jewish Ulster," referring to the northern Irish

state, "Because what we did there is a model for how we must

colonize and defend our interests around the world."

For their own strategic interests, the British backed the Zionist project,

which

aimed to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Palestinians suffered the same fate as us, dispossession, the Nakba, as yous call

it.

To make way for Israel's creation in 1948, Zionist militias

violently expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from

their land, and Israel's land grabs have continued for

decades, with

nearly 800,000 Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian

land today.

Ireland was very much a blueprint for a lot of what happened across colonized

land.

Powerful states, whether they be Britain

or whether it's Israel, are

allowed to act with impunity.

But the Irish fought back for hundreds of years, and eventually won partial

independence from Britain in 1921.

Ireland, in its history, has had a colonial power,

but we're here today.

They didn't win, we won, and history will show

that the Palestinians

will win.