Palestine, Ireland, Israel,and the British  

Today  as my daughter and I were watching David Cameron address the British House of Commons re the slaughter of the people of Gaza by the state of Israel, it brought back to my memory a lesson I learned at my history lessons given by a great Offaly man Br. Hanley  C.B.S who inspired in all us pupils a sense of our history and the fact that it took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1950/60 added a bit more meaning to us than it would have to our fellow country men in the South of Ireland, who I later discovered were not taught any Irish history of meaning as it was a throwback from the civil war in an effort to heal the wounds of those times.

So back to David Cameron and the British Parliament, he was trying to justify the actions of Israel and their so called actions to protect their people.

 Part of this protection of the Zionist state was and is to dispossess the Palestinian people of their land and homes and products to enable them to have a viable state where they can live in freedom and justice, their brand of freedom and justice as their culture dictates.

 Since 1948 the Zionists have been steadily raping the people and confiscating their land and have ignored every UN resolution that was agreed by them or imposed on them and the excuse has always been their security, (reminds me of the Unionist population in Northern Ireland!!!) their answer has always been to expand their borders and reduce the actual land that is the true homeland of the people of  Palestine and build their settlements for their own Jewish emigrants from America, Europe and Russia, all of which has been condemned by the United Nations etc., and all ignored by Israel and of course the meanly mouth West did nothing to stop them as they had the sympathy of the world after the horror of the Second World War for fear of being called anti Semitic and not respecting the suffering of the Jews,  in other words they blackmailed the west, and so we have Gaza and the West Bank, both open air prison camps and who live in total despair of justice or that the world will ever stand up for them and their human right to a homeland, and who was at the root cause of this situation ? well none other than the British who along with America set up and guaranteed the security of this new nation called Israel and in the process expelled 1000s of Palestinian people to refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Egypt and the Lebanon never again to return to their homes. They were treated worse than animals and left in the desert to die or fend for themselves.

So what do you say has this to do with Ireland?

Well this was also the type of treatment imposed on the true Irish Gael by the British starting with Oliver Cromwell from 1649-1653 when he drove the Irish and by this time catholic population to the most uninhabitable part of Ireland when he coined the phrase to hell or to Connaught and confiscated all the land which belonged to the Irish  which was then planted by British royalists  which continued into the 1800s which included the plantation of Ulster, a situation which to this day has caused death and destruction in Ireland and divided the true nation of Ireland. right up to this day.

The one thing that continued to rise its head was the thirst of the people of Ireland for justice and freedom when at various times the people would answer the call to arms to strike a blow for freedom; this included 1798 and Wolf Tone, Henry joy McCracken, Robert Emmett  etc., which all failed but kept the torch alive that some day a generation would succeed in gaining Ireland's freedom and so came 1916 when the British empire was at its strongest and a group of Irish republicans caused a rebellion in Dublin and even though it was defeated and the leaders put to the sword it lit the fire which led to the eventual war of 1918 -1922 where the IRA defeated the might of the British army, the first ever guerilla war which gave heart to the people of Kenya, Cyprus,and ironically the Zionist of Israel , to take on the British and win, a system of war that will sustain the people of Palestine who will some day regain their promised land, their homeland just like we Irish have done.