"I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return." W. H. Auden
There were elements in Ireland whose anger against Britain overwhelmed any other sentiment. Three hundred years of settler colonialism, dispossession and denigration of language, culture, and religion, left a legacy of deep-seated resentment. I was born in Donegal, part of the province of Ulster, and often heard my father's smoldering resentment at the historical traumas still raw in Ulster up to the 1998 Peace Accord when the Easter Friday agreement allowed indigenous Irish Nationalists to experience the same civil rights as British Loyalists.
I had rebelled at my father's one-sided view of history, which considered one nation as the source of all evil as it pertained to Ireland. But after reading and reflecting on 17th-century Irish history that involved three invasions from England resulting in a 40% reduction of the native population and then a million Irish starving to death in the Great Hunger of the mid-19th century in a famine that could have been averted if not for the English policy of "laissez-faire". I then read insightful books by Caroline Elkin on Britain's colonialism in Kenya and Thomas Dalrymple on Britain in India and gradually came to a better understanding of my father's perspective.
It was not until the late 19th century that Prime Minister Gladstone helped to enact legislation to free the indigenous Irish from the onerous and exacting rents that had supported a landlord system that had seen the majority of the wealth of the country siphoned into British and Anglo-Irish hands.
It was during the WWI postwar period that Britain enacted the Balfour Declaration, which gave tacit approval to Zionism, thus allowing an influx of Jewish immigrants into Israel. In the Declaration only a couple of phrases were given over to acknowledging that the indigenous Palestinians needed to be treated fairly.
By 1930 the Jewish population was one-third of the population of Israel but only owned 7% of the land. By 1935 Haifa had a majority Jewish population. In the early 1930s PM Ramsey McDonald admitted that Jewish settlements in Palestine was the purpose of the League of Nations Mandate.
David Ben-Gurion in 1934 stated: "The Palestinian Arabs will not be sacrificed so that Zionism might be realized. According to our conception of Zionism, we are neither desirous nor capable of building our future in Palestine at the expense of Arabs."
With the onslaught of WWII and the tragedy of the holocaust, funds from Europe and an annual subsidy of $3 billion worth of weapons from the U.S., Israel population substantially increased. But this was not the case with the Palestinians. Their land continued to contract as dispossession became normalized. The result was a further marginalization of the indigenous Palestinians and their desperation as the Jewish leadership, in league with the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, found even more ways to expropriate Palestinian land.
As was the case in Ireland and the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries, the victims of land expropriation were blamed for resisting or fighting back. In Israel's case any criticism concerning the dispossession of Palestinian land was seen as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. Peace groups, such as Gush Shalom, founded in 1993 by Uri Avnery, have decried the illegal taking of land by settlers in the West Bank. Gush Shalom does not believe in the "so-called national consensus" that it considers to be based on misinformation. It wishes "to establish an independent and sovereign State of Palestine".
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