Ireland and Palestine: the roots of resonance

Abstract

This article argues that, despite major differences across time and space, there are similarities between the colonial experience of the Irish in the mid-seventeenth century and the present-day colonial experience of Palestinians. This is illustrated by a detailed comparison of attacks by the Irish against English and Scottish settlers in 1641 and the Palestinian attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. In both cases, the indisputable violence of the attacks was exaggerated, thereby carrying out a crucial ideological role in underpinning the brutality of the state response. The collective memory of the Irish in relation to their own colonial experience allows for an easy identification of similar colonial experience elsewhere. The suffering of the people of Gaza resonates with people in Ireland in ways that it would not were the Irish not catching echoes of their own past in the contemporary experience of the Palestinians. That is the basis of the strength of pro-Palestinian actions in Ireland. Dismissed by some as evidence of antisemitism, these actions are instead instances of intense international solidarity.

Introduction

In many ways Ireland and Palestine are worlds apart. But where the two societies can be said to have something in common is in relation to the experience of colonialism and in particular settler colonialism. This allows for a sense of resonance in Ireland, expressed most obviously in the Palestinian flags and pro-Palestinian murals visible on the streets of working-class areas in the North. Examining that resonance is at the core of what follows. More specifically, the question is how that resonance might be framed. In effect, two frames exist; the first sees Irish support for Palestine as antisemitism if not support for terrorism; the second understands it as anti-colonial solidarity.

Ireland, Palestine and antisemitism

In May 2024, Israel recalled its ambassador to Ireland following Ireland’s recognition of the Palestinian state, alongside Norway and Spain. In December 2024, Israel closed its embassy in Dublin, citing Ireland’s support for South Africa in a case to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. ¹ Reacting to criticism by Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar that the closure was proof of antisemitism, Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris responded angrily: ‘You know what I think is reprehensible? Killing children, I think that’s reprehensible. You know what I think is reprehensible? Seeing the scale of civilian deaths that we’ve seen in Gaza. You know what I think is reprehensible? People being left to starve and humanitarian aid not flowing.’ ²

In January 2025, Irish President Michael D. Higgins gave a speech in Dublin on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He noted that Ireland abides by its commitments under the 2000 Stockholm Declaration to counter antisemitism and Holocaust denial. He continued: ‘The grief inflicted on families by the horrific acts of October 7th, and the response to it, is unimaginable – the loss of civilian life, the majority women and children, their displacement, loss of homes, the necessary institutions for life itself. How can the world continue to look at the empty bowls of the starving?’ ³ It was this contemporary reference that drew some criticism. A few of the 300 people in attendance left in protest, and Chief Rabbi of Ireland Yoni Wieder stated: ‘It is deeply disheartening that President Higgins opted to politicize it [the event] by singling out this war and taking issue with Israel’s response to the atrocities of October 7th.’ ⁴

Far from being apologetic, President Higgins continued to voice his criticism. At the funeral of Pope Francis in April 2025, he said that it was ‘outrageous’ to accuse those critical of the Israeli government of being antisemitic. Rather, it was perfectly acceptable to ‘criticize a prime minister who is strengthening an army that is in breach of international humanitarian law and many other aspects of international law, if there is no respect for civilian rights, in addition to [those of] women and children’. ⁵

Simon Sebag Montefiore, ⁶ whose grandfather was a Jewish refugee to Ireland, judged the closure of the Israeli embassy in Dublin as a valid response to Irish antisemitism which is evidenced by

visceral hostility from the government and activists to the very existence of Israel, by a lack of proportion and perspective in policy toward the Jewish state, by the deployment of medieval antisemitic tropes, harassment of Jewish students, and the inversion of Jewish history against Jews and Israelis, and by the blind acceptance of the often mendacious Hamas terrorist narrative. ⁷

Ten months earlier, Alan Shatter, a former Irish Minister of Justice and himself Jewish, argued that ‘Ireland, which likes to pretend to be neutral, has evolved into the most hostile state towards Israel in the EU’. ⁸ Former Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich, in responding to Ireland’s intervention in the International Court of Justice, went even further, accusing Ireland of being ‘the most extreme country against Israel internationally’, adding that comments by Taoiseach Simon Harris were raising antisemitic hostility in Ireland. ⁹

If, as these commentators insist, Ireland is currently antisemitic, it is a short step to see this as linked to a prejudice evident in the history of twentieth-century Ireland. One could point to the antisemitic statements of such heroes of Irish nationalism as Maud Gonne, Thomas Ashe, John Devoy and Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin. More specifically, one could recall the Limerick ‘pogrom’ of 1904 where the sermons of local priest, Father John Creagh, led to a two-year boycott of traders from the small Jewish community in the city. Creagh may have argued that his target was the extortionate credit-terms offered by Jewish traders, but his sermons reveal outright antisemitism. Perhaps fifty incidents of relatively low-level violence against Jewish people occurred during the period, allowing historians now to conclude that what happened was not a pogrom but ‘it was certainly as close as we came’. ¹⁰

Perhaps more substantially, critics could focus on incidents at the end of the second world war. For example, a Red Cross scheme, Operation Shamrock, brought 500 Christian children from Germany to Ireland for three years. At the same time, a plan in 1946 to admit 100 Jewish orphans who had been freed from the concentration camps was rejected by the Irish Department of Justice on the grounds that ‘any substantial increase in our Jewish population might give rise to an anti-Semitic problem’. ¹¹ Much could also be made of the decision of Taoiseach Eamonn De Valera to pay his respects in person to the German legation in Dublin on the death of Hitler, against the advice of some of his officials. He stated that it was only a matter of courtesy given Ireland’s neutrality during the war. However, neutral Switzerland did not visit the German legation in Geneva claiming they had not been officially informed of Hitler’s death. ¹²

Research shows that there was no time since the foundation of the Irish state in the early 1920s that there was not a fascist party or a fascist party in waiting, leading Ó Ruairc to conclude that ‘the Irish do not have an intrinsic immunity to fascism and Nazism’. ¹³ Likewise, contemporary Ireland, north and south, is not some magical non-antisemitic zone, bucking the trend in Europe. There is indisputable evidence of verbal attacks on Jews in schools, dissemination of Hitler CDs, and references to conspiracy theories about Jews circulated in free newspapers. ¹⁴

However, there is no evidence in Ireland of the levels of antisemitic violence witnessed elsewhere in, say, the last decade. ¹⁵ For all that antisemitic verbal attacks are to be deplored, the absence of more dramatically violent actions makes it difficult to conclude that Ireland is more antisemitic than the societies concerned. In addition, the Irish government has recently ¹⁶ agreed to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism – which counts as one indication of prejudice: ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’ ¹⁷

Overall, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the targeting of Ireland has less to do with some objective measure of antisemitism than with the weaponisation of antisemitism. ¹⁸ The end result is that criticism of Israel or Zionism is taken as tantamount to hatred of Jewish people; by extension, support for Palestine is also antisemitic. By this measure, Ireland would have to plead guilty. The official recognition of Palestine, the support for the case to the International Court of Justice and the utterances of the President are in fact only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the public face of politics, the level of popular support for Palestine is highly significant in Ireland. Let’s take just three random examples.

Independent Irish senator Frances Black introduced the Occupied Territories Bill into the Dáil in 2018, the effect of which would be to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. She was backed by the government on the basis of an International Court of Justice advisory opinion issued in July 2024 urging countries to ‘take steps to prevent trade or investment relations’ that maintain these illegal settlements. ¹⁹ The government eventually passed a watered-down version of the bill on 28 May 2025, banning only goods, not services which make up the bulk of Ireland’s economic relationship with Israel.

In the aftermath of the 7 October attacks on Israel, the brutal consequences of Israeli retaliation against Gaza became daily apparent. Republican muralists in the North of Ireland had regularly depicted Palestinian rights and resistance, but the feeling was that the current situation required something special. Links were made with a contact in the foreign affairs ministry in Ramallah. As a result, artwork created by Palestinian artists was sent to Belfast and reproduced on the walls. Fifteen separate murals were created on West Belfast’s ‘international wall’ which graphically displayed the horrors of Gaza. ²⁰

Kneecap is a three-person group from West Belfast who rap in Irish and English. Despite the partial language barrier, they have become a huge international phenomenon. ²¹ They have a clear commitment not merely to the Irish language but also are outspoken in relation to Palestine. When playing at Coachella in California in April 2025, they projected large messages on stage saying: ‘Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. . . F*** Israel. Free Palestine.’ ²² There were immediate accusations that they were antisemitic and pro-terrorist, but the protracted and international debate which followed their performance raised the issue of Gaza internationally. ²³

Popular support for Palestine may be enhanced in the situation of the sustained obliteration of Palestine and its people but it is not new. The identification of the Irish with Palestine is based on a framing which is radically counter to the one we have been considering so far – not based on antisemitism but deriving from a shared experience of settler colonialism. Events in Palestine resonate with people who see comparisons with their own experience and history. There is an element of abstraction or flattening involved in these comparisons, a focus on similarity and an ignoring of difference. But that does not detract from the feeling simply expressed as: ‘what’s happening to them happened to us’. The pronoun here is flexible. It can refer to direct experience; thus ‘administrative detention’ of Palestinians in Israel meshes with internment without trial which existed within living memory in the North of Ireland (between 1971 and 1975). Similarly, politically-motivated prisoners have gone on hunger strike in both societies in the recent past. ²⁴ Or the reference can be less immediate: the Israeli blockade on food supplies to Gaza reminds people of the actions of the British government in the mid-nineteenth century where the effects of a potato blight were massively exacerbated by the actions and inaction of the British government leading to possibly one million deaths. Emphasising this resonance, then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said when visiting Washington in March 2024: ‘When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why [we] have such empathy for the Palestinian people. The answer is simple: we see our history in their eyes. A story of displacement and dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now, hunger.’ ²⁵ If a centre-right politician can express such views, it is clear that even stronger views will be expressed by those on the Left in Ireland, including republicans, who view Irish and global politics through an anti-colonial lens and who are open to hearing echoes of Irish national resistance in Palestinian intifada.

The collective memory of colonialism produces a number of tropes which can be identified as being replicated in other colonial experiences. Benedict Anderson’s well-known argument is that the nation is built on a collective feeling which he calls ‘imagined community’. It is ‘conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’. ²⁶ What is being added here is that similar imagination and shared feeling can transcend national borders to create an international community of anti-colonial solidarity.

We shall tease out this resonance by comparing two historical events: the 1641 rebellion in Ireland and the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Reference to ‘imagined community’ may give the false impression that what is involved is fantastical. The point made here is that the resonance involved in comparing these two historical incidents is not simply imaginary or romantic but that the similarity apparent at a number of levels can lead to an identification which transcends space and time.

Ireland 1641: What Happened?

Resistance to conquest in Ireland was ongoing throughout the centuries, mostly localised and sporadic. But in 1641 it took a significant turn. Irish chieftains and some Anglo-Irish gentry joined together in what was called the Confederacy and engaged in a rebellion to overthrow English rule in Ireland. They demanded an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, greater self-government and the return of stolen lands.

The force of the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath were felt most strongly in Ulster. There the clan system, with its consequent law and custom, remained almost intact after centuries of colonialism. Given that, the English concluded that a belated successful conclusion to conquest required conquering Ulster, diminishing or removing the power of its clan leaders and ultimately Anglicising the region. At the turn of the seventeenth century, after an expensive military campaign, the leaders of the two main clans left for continental Europe. That cleared the path for the second phase: settler colonialism. Land was confiscated and given to tens of thousands of Scottish and English planters.

From the first days of the rebellion the extent of what happened was hotly contested. Historians since have grappled with key questions of fact, not least attempting to determine how many settlers were killed. In Portadown, Protestants were thrown into the river Bann and shot at as they tried to swim away. The settlers in Armagh suffered badly, as did those in parts of Tyrone. But how many?

The story of the rebellion was quickly recounted in a number of contemporary pamphlets and books; among the most influential were those of Bishop Henry Jones and Sir John Temple. Jones suffered personally in the rebellion, losing his castle and being held captive by rebels. Having escaped to Dublin, he worked tirelessly to collect money for the victims. As a result, he was appointed head of the Commission for the Despoiled Subject, set up to document how Protestants had suffered in the rebellion. The Commission presented a report to the House of Commons in 1642 and ten years later Jones published a book based on the depositions, An Abstract of some few of those barbarous, cruell massacres and murthers of the Protestants and English in some parts of Ireland. Sir John Temple was a key figure in Irish and English politics, a privy councillor and close associate of King Charles I. However, during the rebellion, he was imprisoned on suspicion of being too sympathetic to the rebels. On his release, he began working on a book about the rebellion which was published in 1646 with the title The Irish Rebellion. Temple was determined to convince his readers that all Irish Catholics were involved in the rebellion. Two factors seem to have motivated Temple’s often exaggerated and lurid accounts: a post-hoc justification of the genocidal response to the rebellion and his desire to be rehabilitated in the eyes of the state.

These publications were meant for an English audience, to galvanise support for the settlers, and were consequently deeply ideological. For example, the claim was made that the Irish rebels’ first target was the settlers, but that their ultimate goal was the invasion of England; this was accepted by Cromwell as part of his justification for his subsequent actions.

Most obviously, they exaggerated the statistics of the rebellion. Sir William Petty claimed that 37,000 settlers were murdered, while Clarendon put the number at 40,000. At the trial of Lord Maguyre, a rebel chieftain, it was claimed that 152,000 died, while Temple claimed it was 150,000 in the first two months, rising to 300,000 over two years. ²⁷ All of these figures are dubious, even the lowest. There were no more than 100,000 settlers in Ulster at the time. ²⁸ Approximately 100 were killed in the Portadown incident mentioned above ²⁹ and an estimated 1,250 settlers died in County Armagh overall. ³⁰ These are not insignificant numbers, representing approximately a quarter of the planter community in the county. But they do not come close to the wild exaggerations of the time. Recent historical wisdom has it that approximately 12,000 settlers were killed. ³¹

What incensed many who read their accounts was not just the number of those dead but also the alleged manner of their dying. Settlers were said to have been forced out of their areas and made to travel naked where some died on the way. ³² The most shocking claim made by Temple was that unborn babies were ripped from their mothers’ wombs. ³³ There is no doubt that some of the actions of the rebels would be classified as war crimes were they to occur today, ³⁴ but these most lurid claims do not hold up under dispassionate scrutiny. Some settlers did die as they travelled naked to safety. But the claim about the unborn rests on ‘two vague hearsay reports and a third more authentic-sounding report from Donegal’, leading Padraig Lenihan to conclude: ‘Thus, what may have been a single ghoulish atrocity became, imperceptibly, commonplace fact.’ ³⁵

A further question asked by the propagandists related to motivation. The answer was straightforward: the rebels acted out of sectarian hatred. As Catholics, they sought the annihilation of Protestantism in Ireland. Henry Jones characterised the rebellion thus: ‘most bloody and Antichristian combination and plot hatched, by well-nigh the whole Romish sect . . . intending the utter extirpation of the reformed Religion, and the possessors of it’. ³⁶ Interestingly, the refutation of this claim is there in the very source which Jones used, the Depositions collected by the Commission for the Despoiled Subject. ³⁷ Some victims did indeed note the religious zeal of those who attacked them, but more often they noted that the rebels had cited the dispossession of their land as the reason for their actions.

On this reading, the rebels’ motivation appears rational, but for the propagandists the rebellion had to be represented as a popish plot to exterminate Protestants rather than a case of anti-colonial resistance. Recognising the validity of the rebels’ motivation may have lessened metropolitan belief in and support for settler colonialism; hyperbole and lies, on the contrary, stirred up righteous anger in England, represented most forcefully in the person of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell saw what was happening in religious terms. For him, the goal was to destroy the Antichrist as much as defeat the Confederacy. So, it was the fervour of a zealot and with the backing of a nation that Cromwell and his New Model Army descended on Ireland in August 1649. Cromwell left the following May, but the army remained until 1653. During that time, their military actions took on an intensity that was unprecedented at the time in English and indeed European conflicts. When the town of Drogheda was taken after a siege, the defenders were singled out: ‘Every tenth man was shot; the remainder were sent to the penal settlement at Barbados.’ ³⁸ In addition about 1,000 civilians, including clergy, were massacred in St Peter’s Church, an action justified by Cromwell as ‘the righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches’. ³⁹ When the town of Wexford later fell after a siege, 2,000 defenders and civilians were massacred. ⁴⁰ In the four-year period, somewhere in the region of 20 per cent of the population of Ireland died, at sword point, through disease and through famine. ⁴¹

With the Irish defeated, Parliament drew up the Act of Settlement in 1652. This led to a fundamental restructuring of Irish society. Previously, the Adventurers’ Act of 1642 stated that the confiscation of land from Irish rebels would eventually pay for the war. The Act of Settlement ensured that between two and three million acres were confiscated. One million acres were used to realise bonds paid for in advance and the rest was given to Cromwell’s army in lieu of pay. ⁴²

The question remained as to the future of the native Irish and in particular those who had rebelled. The plan was to send them ‘to hell or to Connaught’; the Irish were to be transported to the least fertile parts of the island, the western province of Connaught. ⁴³ Catholic landowners moving there would receive between one third and two thirds of the land that had been confiscated from them. ⁴⁴ An estimated 2,000 native landowners were transplanted. In addition, many boys and girls were transported as indentured servants to the Caribbean by Cromwell’s son, Henry. ⁴⁵

The extent of the radical transformation of Ireland quickly became apparent. By 1657, the population had dropped from 1.5 million to 850,000, 150,000 of whom were settlers. ⁴⁶ Overall, ‘The Catholic share of land ownership had plummeted from almost 60 percent to not more than 9 per cent.’ ⁴⁷

The transformation of Ulster was stark: where there had been fifty-eight Gaelic Catholic landowners in 1641, twenty years later there were five. ⁴⁸ In Ulster, outside of Antrim in the east, less than 4 per cent of land remained in Catholic ownership. ⁴⁹ Overall Protestants

emerged as the clear victors from the wars of the mid-seventeenth century, with Catholics left in possession of only one fifth of the land total, a huge reduction from the 60 per cent they owned prior to the 1641 rebellion. This represented the largest single shift in land ownership anywhere in Europe during the early modern period and proved to be Cromwell’s lasting legacy in Ireland. ⁵⁰

As James Connolly later concluded, the Cromwellian campaign resulted in ‘the final consummation of the conquest of Ireland’. ⁵¹

Israel 2023: What Happened?

On 7 October 2023, approximately 3,000 armed Palestinians, from Hamas and other armed groups, infiltrated Israel’s southern border with Gaza and attacked civilians and soldiers in their homes, at an outdoor music festival and on military bases. In total, 1,200 people were killed, approximately 250 more were abducted and thousands were injured. This was ‘the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust’. ⁵²

Unlike in Ireland in 1641, there was no prolonged debate about the casualty figures and consequently no hyperbolic exaggeration of the numbers of dead. But what was contentious from the outset was the reported manner of the deaths. Stories quickly emerged of rape, mutilation, beheading of babies, dead babies in ovens, disembowelling of pregnant women, etc. These stories were broadcast by the Israeli government and military and were widely accepted not just in Israel but internationally. They were repeated by media outlets globally, perhaps most spectacularly, on 28 December 2023, when the New York Times published a major piece titled ‘“Screams Without Words”: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7’. ⁵³

Politicians outside Israel repeated the gruesome stories taken straight from media reports. Addressing a senate hearing on 31 October 2023, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken painted a picture for those listening: ‘a family of four, a young boy and girl, six and eight years old, and their parents, around the breakfast table. The father, his eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off. The girl’s foot, amputated. The boy’s fingers cut off, before they were executed. And then their executioners sat down and had a meal.’ ⁵⁴ US President Joe Biden stated that he had seen ‘pictures of terrorists beheading children’. ⁵⁵ British Foreign Secretary David Lammy referred to ‘1300 people dead, murdered, babies raped’. ⁵⁶

The issue of sexual violence attracted a lot of attention, not least in a number of formal reports which followed. In November 2023, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel published a report which begins: ‘It is becoming more apparent that the violence perpetrated against women, men and children also included widespread sexual and gender-based crimes.’ ⁵⁷ In March 2024 UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, issued a report on a visit to Israel. ⁵⁸ She concluded that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape’. A report by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel in February 2024 stated: ‘Hamas’s attack included violent acts of rape . . . In most cases, the victims were murdered after or even during the rape.’ ⁵⁹ In September 2024 a United Nations body, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, submitted its third report to the General Assembly. Although it concluded that there was ‘credible information about some hostages being subjected to sexual and gender-based violence while in captivity’, ⁶⁰ and also reported on sexual violence against Palestinians within Israeli prisons, it had nothing to report on sexual violence during the 7 October attacks.

It quickly became obvious that there were problems with many of the stories, particularly the most lurid, which underpinned these reports, in terms of credibility and accuracy. One organisation, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, was blocked by the Israeli government and military on the grounds of the UN’s supposed opposition to the state of Israel. Other groups had better access but did not manage for the most part to interview direct victims, relying instead on newspaper and social media reports along with accounts of ‘first responders’. They also consulted official Israeli sources, including military sources and in one case (Physicians for Human Rights-Israel) had access to reports of interrogations of Palestinian captives by Shin Bet, Israeli intelligence. The team from the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence had access to some testimonies but did not have the resources to cross-check the veracity of these respondents’ statements and therefore ended up relying on its ‘own assessment of the credibility and reliability of the witnesses it met’. ⁶¹ Even the Association of Rape Crisis Centers notes the virtual absence of direct testimony from women victims of sexual violence on 7 October. They put this down to the reluctance, massively enhanced in a situation of violent conflict, of victims to speak about what happened to them.

Methodologically speaking, the reports do not come across as totally robust. In effect, what the reports collectively do for the most part is recycle much of the same information that was already in the public domain in newspaper reports and online sources, including (with the exception of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers) the most unreliable source of all, social media.

At the core of the problem of veracity is the reliance on a very narrow base of sources. Many of the reports above note that they spoke to ‘first responders’; whether directly acknowledged or not, that is shorthand for saying that their information derived from ZAKA. ZAKA was founded in 1997 to provide an outlet for ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not serve in Israel’s military. ⁶² Their role is to collect bodies from conflict sites or accidents and to prepare them for burial. They are volunteers who are not trained as medics or investigators. Specifically, many of the atrocity stories of 7 October originated with Yossi Landau, ZAKA’s head of operations in southern Israel. Blinken and Biden were both quoting Landau without direct acknowledgement. Patten was accompanied on her visit to Israel by Landau and his stories formed the basis of important parts of her report. ⁵⁸

Numerous investigations by journalists both inside and outside Israel have concluded that Landau’s testimony is not only unreliable but frequently fantastical. To take one example: Landau claimed that upon entering a home in Kibbutz Beeri, ‘we see a pregnant lady lying on the floor, and then we turn her around and see that the stomach is cut open, wide open. The unborn baby, still connected with an umbilical cord, was stabbed with a knife. And the mother was shot in the head.’ This story was later referred to by Israel’s first lady, Michal Herzog. ⁶³ But there were only two female victims in Beeri and neither was pregnant. ‘In fact, no pregnant women were registered among those killed on October 7.’ ⁶⁴ Moreover, in a statement to Haaretz, a spokesperson from the kibbutz stated: ‘The story of the pregnant woman reported by ZAKA is not relevant to Beeri.’ ⁶⁵ The Israeli police also acknowledged that they had no record of any such incident. ⁶⁶

It would be too easy to conclude that the fog of war means it is impossible to have a clear picture of what really happened. But reputable research by media organisations such as The Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, Mondoweiss, The Intercept and Al Jazeera, ⁶⁷ as well as occasionally by the Israeli paper Haaretz, have done much to urge at least caution when approaching the atrocity stories. The pull-back from hyperbole has led at least one organisation to retract somewhat; Physicians for Human Rights-Israel stated in May 2024: ‘In the extensive investigations conducted in the months following the publication of the position paper in November, some testimonies referenced within it have been disputed or deemed unverifiable, and more may face similar scrutiny in the future.’ ⁶⁸

This is not to deny that atrocities happened. Armed Palestinians on 7 October engaged in some actions that were not compatible with the internationally recognised principles of necessity, proportionality and imminency as regards armed conflict. Tom Stevenson lists some of these: the shooting dead of unarmed women who were fleeing on foot, the beheading of some Israeli soldiers, the killing of Nepali and Thai workers. ⁶⁹ The UN is investigating the Palestinians, as well as Israel, on the grounds ‘that Palestinian armed groups had committed serious violations of international law on a wide scale, including attacks directed against civilians, killing and mistreatment of civilians, destruction of civilian objects, and taking of hostages, which amount to war crimes’. ⁷⁰

Given that, the exaggeration apparent in the stories of atrocity seems unnecessary. As Stevenson puts it, ‘Israel and its supporters exaggerated and manufactured what needed no exaggeration or manufacture’. ⁷¹ But that is to miss the value of these stories in terms of bolstering a narrative that has clear propaganda purposes. It is likely that many Israelis were already predisposed to believe the worst of Palestinians. But as quickly became apparent, there were sharp political divisions in the society. Many, especially relatives, were focused on the return of the hostages and therefore supported a ceasefire. The atrocity stories served to underscore the narrative of the hawks, in government and outside, that nothing less than the annihilation of Hamas (and, by extension, Gaza) was paramount. The stories were also of immense value in relation to the global audience. After recounting one of Landau’s fictional stories (as noted above) Antony Blinken drew this conclusion at a US senate hearing in October 2023: ‘That’s what this society is dealing with, and no nation could tolerate that . . . Israel has not only the right, but the obligation to defend itself, and to try to take every possible step to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’ ⁷² That Israel was about to get in effect a blank cheque in relation to Gaza in no small measure depended on these atrocity stories.

At the time of writing, 55,000 people have been killed in Gaza, 70 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed, most hospitals are operating at best at a minimal level of efficiency and a blockade has meant that no food or medical supplies have entered the territory for a month except through the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Organization. ⁷³ This has been justified by Israel in terms of ensuring that Hamas is incapable of ever mounting a similar attack in the future. But the mantra of Israel’s right to defend itself goes further. It has been stretched to imply that the only safe Gaza is a Gaza empty of Palestinians. With the backing of US President Trump, Israel intends displacing the Gaza population to neighbouring Arab states (and even, most recently, further afield, namely Libya), ⁷⁴ leaving Trump to fantasise about the coastal real estate that would be made available. It is the Middle East equivalent of ‘to hell or to Connaught’. To this end, Israel has its own Cromwells urging the decimation of the Palestinian population and motivated by a similar religious zeal. ⁷⁵ Thus, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated: ‘We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness. . . we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah’ (25 October 2023). ⁷⁶ This God-given righteousness allows for brutal actions, as Likud member of the Knesset Revital Gottlieb urged: ‘Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!! Stop with this impotence. You have ability. There is worldwide legitimacy! Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!’ (7 October 2023). ⁷⁷ The issue of civilian casualties is easily solved, as President Isaac Herzog stated: ‘It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true’ (13 October 2023). ⁷⁸ And Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, agreed: ‘Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated’ (9 October 2023). ⁷⁹

The propaganda offensive has been remarkably successful in countries such as the US and the UK where it has underwritten the military aid and support given to Israel. But there are many people globally who have marched and spoken out and performed in opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. And they are backed by a number of international organisations which accuse Israel of genocide, such as Amnesty International, ⁸⁰ Human Rights Watch, ⁸¹ and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. ⁸² At the same time, there is no doubt that in one major respect the Israel-friendly narrative has been eminently successful in reducing the space for dissent in many countries far beyond Israel, redefining dissent as antisemitism or support for terrorism.

To take one example: the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and statehood is recognised by a number of reputable international organisations, including the United Nations. ⁸³ Further, the United Nations states that peoples have the right to resist ‘subjection to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation’. ⁸⁴ Yet, if an academic, broadcaster or protester in the US, UK or Germany were to urge Palestinian self-determination or the right of Palestinians to resist illegal occupation, the chances are they would be accused of supporting terrorism. The space to voice an opinion on Gaza is increasingly being reduced, replaced by the single mantra which emphasises Israel’s right to self-defence and the terrorist nature of Hamas and other Palestinian groups.

Conclusion

In Ireland in 1641, a large-scale rebellion proved an existential shock for the English and Scottish settlers. A framing of that rebellion quickly emerged which exaggerated the numbers of dead, produced fictional accounts of some of the suffering experienced by the settlers and narrowed the range of possible explanations of motivation of the rebels to one only, that as Catholics they sought to obliterate Protestantism. In Israel in 2023, attacks by Palestinians from Gaza caused a similar existential shock for Israeli citizens. The framing of the violence which emerged was accurate in relation to the statistics of casualties but produced in a number of cases exaggerated or fictional accounts of the suffering inflicted on Israelis, not least in relation to accounts of sexual violence and rape. In both cases, the stories produced within those respective frames served as stimulation for the subsequent brutal suppression of the populations from which the attacks emerged.

This is not to insinuate in any way that the two scenarios are identical. Israel 2023 and Ireland 1641 are obviously worlds apart in so many ways. Each instance of settler colonialism is, of course, unique, but, at the same time, there are common structures which express themselves in similar ways. In addition, there are tropes that are common across the years. But the contention of this article is that they resonate with each other across space and time. For example, the story of a pregnant woman having her foetus cut from her in Israel in 2023 echoes stories from Ireland in 1641. There are numerous other comparisons that can be made: the genocidal responses to the original violence, the religious zealotry involved, the proposed solution being the displacement of the remaining population, etc.

That is why it is possible to view Israel 2023 from the vantage point of once-colonised Ireland and to sense the resonance. It is not necessary to have a historian’s familiarity with the details of what happened in 1641; it is enough at the level of political identification and emotion to see that settler colonialism behaves in certain ways and that the oppressed respond in certain ways. From this vantage point it is also possible to be at very least sceptical regarding the framing of the episode which benefits the colonial state and to suspect that exaggerated claims about the brutality of the colonised exist to justify the subsequent brutality of that state.

The colonised (or post-colonised) in one society can identify with the colonised in another despite the differences. Ireland, colonised over centuries, has shown an affinity to other colonised societies, including Palestine. This is most obvious when it comes to Irish republicans. The early Irish republicans of the late eighteenth century supported republican revolutions in France and America. Many Irish republicans fought and died on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. ⁸⁵ In 1958, Frank Aiken, Ireland’s foreign minister, a former IRA member, set the tone for Irish foreign policy in relation to the Middle East for decades to come. At the United Nations, he singled out the plight of the Palestinian refugees as the ‘greatest single obstacle’ to a solution of the problems of the region. ⁸⁶ Sinn Féin, the republican party, and also currently the largest party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, plays a significant role in terms of support for Palestine. ⁸⁷

To first appearances the Irish government could be included in this line-up. It notes proudly that in 1980, ‘Ireland was the first European Union Member State to declare that a solution to the conflict in the Middle East had to be based on a fully sovereign Palestinian State, independent of and co-existing with Israel.’ ⁸⁸ And, as we have seen, some government and presidential statements and actions allow for tendentious accusations of antisemitism. But there is another side. As some in Europe float the idea of a European army, EU member Ireland tentatively hints at the possibility of abandoning its neutrality which has existed since the formation of the state. Already, contradicting that neutrality, US military planes going to and from the Middle East refuel at Shannon Airport. ⁸⁹ Ireland is the only European Union country whose central bank has a regulatory function in relation to Israeli war bonds; it approves the prospectus for the trade in which other banks – such as Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Citi, Barclays and JPMorgan Chase – actually engage. ⁹⁰ A Sinn Féin attempt to outlaw this involvement was defeated in the Dáil on 28 May 2025, ⁹¹ the same day that the watered-down Occupied Territories Bill was approved by the government. ⁹² Recent figures show that

Ireland is, per person, the single largest economic supporter of Israel on Earth. In 2024 alone, it imported $3.2 billion in goods and services from Israel, ⁹³ over $600 for every resident. Most of that was dual-use electronics: components that power both consumer tech and military drones. Shockingly, that’s more than 12 times the U.S. import figure per capita. ⁹⁴

Gogley concludes: ‘While the Irish government speaks the language of justice, its material role in Israel’s genocide is among the most substantial in the world.’ ⁹⁵ And Browne concurs that official Ireland’s support for Palestine is often more performative than real. ⁹⁶

But that leaves ‘unofficial’ Ireland, North and South. Irish support for Palestine has always been and remains grassroots-driven. It is there that collective memory is strong, whether of the recent conflict which rocked the North in particular for thirty years or the conflicts of earlier times which leave their mark even after the direct witnesses are long gone. As a result, it is there that the resonance with Palestine remains strong.