Friday, Jul 4, 2008
In Northern Ireland, anti-Semitic groups back Israel and Sinn Fein flies the PLO colors.
Jul 18, 2002 | My American friend and I took a taxicab tour around the city as Irish flags were raised atop storefront canopies and park fences while people ran through the streets waving the green, white and orange colors over their heads. Moments before, center-forward Robbie Keane had scored Ireland's only goal in a first-round tie with Germany in the World Cup. People were going nuts.
But within minutes, our tour guide, Paddy, had delivered us from an ebullient patriotic Irish fervor to signs of a much more ominous type of flag-waving. Driving through perhaps the best-known Protestant neighborhood, the Shankill Road, we saw numerous English flags paired with Israeli flags. It appeared that Israel had found itself a new ally.
From the moment I arrived in Belfast to learn more about the Catholic-Protestant conflict that has haunted this island for close to 400 years, I had used the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as my lens of understanding. I had lived four of the past nine years in the Middle East, the last two years spent (with a year each) in both Jerusalem and Cairo. And yet, after 30 minutes on the tour, I was startled to see how intensely many of the participants in this conflict identified with those in the Middle East.
As an American Jew, the alignment of Northern Ireland Protestants with Israel flabbergasted me. I had seen Israeli flags hung in both Israel and the United States, but to see the blue Magen David, or six-pointed star, raised proudly on the streets of Belfast was an entirely strange experience. Thereafter, things got even stranger.
As we drove through a second Protestant area, called the Village, we noticed graffiti encouraging the Israeli prime minister to "Go on, Sharon, K.A.T." -- the last word an acronym for "Kill All Taigs" (derogatory slang for Catholics) -- in addition to spray-painted slogans melding Gerry Adams, president of the Irish Republican party Sinn Fein, with Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat, calling him "Gerry Arafat Adams."
Soon after, we saw Israeli flags and pro-Israel graffiti next to graffiti, murals and flags in support of pro-Protestant paramilitary groups. These were groups such as the Ulster Freedom Fighters (a nom de guerre of another paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association) and the Ulster Volunteer Force, the paramilitary wing of the Popular Unionist Political Party -- groups that many Irish Catholics deem to be terrorists. Even stranger, a small number of swastikas appeared in the graffiti in some of these Protestant areas. Asking about the apparent discrepancy, I learned that the UDA had alliances with various United Kingdom neo-Nazi groups, such as Combat 18. The anti-Jewish doctrines of those groups seem to be conveniently overlooked by some UDA supporters.
My gut reaction told me that this show of support by Irish Protestants for Israel was meant to imply that Gerry Adams and the IRA were terrorists, just as Yasser Arafat and various Fatah offshoot groups, such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, are understood by many Jewish Israelis to be terrorists.
According to Tony Gallagher, a professor in the graduate school of education at Queen's University in Belfast, my first reading turned out to be somewhat accurate. According to Gallagher, some of these paramilitary groups are expressing a belief that the British government should resort to a military response against violent extremists within the IRA, like the response of Sharon and the Israel Defense Forces to such acts as Palestinian suicide bombings. "Protestant sympathy for Israel is most likely based on an assumed commonality of interest in opposing 'terrorism,'" Gallagher said.
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