Colin Sheridan: Lip service won't save a single Palestinian life

Before all of that, the dogs were eating the dead. Hold that thought in your mind for a moment as you sip your morning coffee.

You knew this, of course, if you were paying attention because wild, hungry dogs eating dead human bodies on roadsides is a logical next step when indiscriminate, state-sponsored killing happens on an industrial scale. 

When the ability to retrieve those bodies by loved ones is denied by those who killed them. 

When the medics are shot by snipers, and the ambulances targeted by Merkava tanks. 

A rotting corpse on a roadside becomes dog food.

Ah but October 7, I hear you say, in an attempt to convince me that it was not Israel that started this, but Hamas, and by Hamas you mean an unborn baby in a schoolteacher’s tummy in Rafah because, by your rationale that foetus and the mother who had carried it — both now dead — were legitimate targets.

Ok, I’ll play your game.

I’m no historian but you don’t need to be William Dalrymple to understand that oppression breeds resistance. The more brutal the oppression, the more violent the resistance. 

That the Nat Turner revolution energised the abolitionist movement and hastened the end of slavery. 

That the Easter Rising, though flawed and unpopular at the time, was the turning point in Ireland finally ridding itself of colonial rule. 

That the FLN’s guerilla war in Algeria was necessary for its independence. Should slavery still exist? Should Ireland still be British? Algeria French? 

Asking these rhetorical questions is not an apology for violence, but a simple statement of fact that Palestinian resistance — legal under international humanitarian law — and Hezbollah’s counterattacks on Northern Israel are symptoms of a cancer of the West’s creation.

Israel carries out its mission of ethnic cleansing under the cloak of self-defence certain of only one thing — impunity. Imagine the chuckling it does when countries like Ireland make grand statements that amount to nothing more than political posturing.

When Simon Harris met Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, a leader that Israel props up, and talks of how the Palestinian Authority — the second most despised entity in Palestine (guess the first) — is central to ‘the day after’, this is not diplomacy, but cowardice.

Pointing at ceilings

For almost a year, Ireland, a nation born from violent revolution, has had the chance to assert itself on the right side of history.

Instead, our Government’s first meaningful act after October 7 was Tánaiste Micheál Martin shaking hands with Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen in Sderot last November, staring up at that hole in the ceiling.

Mr Martin told reporters: “I’m here to see this first hand and to listen; to seek to understand the trauma that your community has gone through and not just in horrific events over the seventh [of October] but as you said for over two decades, if not three decades, in terms of rockets.”

Rockets...

You could almost forgive him for being a prisoner to the moment only that, on that long flight to Tel Aviv he or his countless advisors could have read or been briefed on an encyclopedia of recent history that would have left him in no doubt — none — that the Israeli response to the horrors of October 7 would be nothing short of catastrophic for the Palestinian people.

The 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The 2006 war with Hezbollah. Consecutive intifadas in Gaza. Perpetual collective punishment and torture of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. 

That hole in the ceiling must seem like a tiny crack in an otherwise disintegrating sky of moral duplicity now.

Except, not to the government it doesn’t, as everything since Martin’s visit to Israel points to a strategy of cowering behind a wall of words, content that our international reputation as “Critic of Israel/Friend of Palestine” will be enough to guarantee us a seat at the rebuild party in Al Quds when this big mess is over.

It’s such a disappointment, a disappointment only amplified by the fact that that same international reputation of a champion of the underdog exempts us as a country from wider criticism, the type that might actually hurt, because no amount of screaming from Irish healthcare workers, academics, no-name columnists, teachers — ordinary goddamn people — seems to make a difference.

Elections will come. Coalitions will be formed. Brows will be furrowed. Concern expressed. Condemnations issued. 

Meanwhile, the bombs will continue to fall like, well, bombs. No pithy metaphors suffice.

Which brings us to the UN.

UN worker versus an Israeli tank 

To focus on one person’s death amid the tens of thousands murdered seems redundant, but this example is instructional if only to highlight the subservience of Western governments and UN leadership towards Israel.

On May 13 this year, an Indian member of the UN Department of Safety and Security (DSS) was killed, the UN vehicle he was travelling in struck by a tank round fired — one would have to assume, since they are the only people in Gaza with tanks — by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

The tank round was quickly followed by an airstrike. You know what happens when a UN international is killed or injured in such circumstances? 

The UN ask for permission from the IDF — the very people that have just killed or injured them — to retrieve the dead or injured bodies (before the dogs eat them, I presume).

They then coordinate their evacuation, through Israel, by the IDF.

Think about that.

They shoot them. Then they get to take them away. 

The same is true of countless UN peacekeepers injured or killed by Israeli shelling of South Lebanon down through the decades.

Irish soldiers among them.

There is, of course, no repatriation required for the hundreds of dead UNRWA workers native to Palestine. 

None, either, for UNHCR staff members Dina Darwiche and Ali Basma, both killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon last week. They die in their homes or in overcrowded schools, undoubtedly petrified.

Each death. Each humanitarian convoy stopped or restricted.

Each blatant abuse of international humanitarian law by Israel is an example of their flagrant contempt for the United Nations and the brave souls on the ground who represent it, risking their lives in doing so.

Make no mistake — that same contempt extends to the hundreds of Irish peacekeepers huddled in bomb shelters as you read this. The UN is dirt to Israel and always has been.

This begs the question of why Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to address the UN General Assembly, and why we sat there and listened. 

Like parents inviting a known abuser into their home. 

What an insult to its members who provide those convoys, who protect those children, who vaccinate and teach and nurse and save lives and who report, day in, day out, all wearing the blue vest. They do so believing it means something.

No matter. Before the weekend is done, there will be some more meaningless missives from leaders in New York drunk on fine wine and flagrant careerism. Sure, they’ll be condemning something, just nothing and nobody in particular. 

Meanwhile, on the dystopian streets of Gaza and south Lebanon, the dogs are eating the dead.