Orangemen and Israel

The last few days in the Six Counties feel like someone has powered up the DeLorean and driven us back to 1996.

There was a point during those Drumcree days 30 years ago when the prospect of a lasting peace deal would die on the Garvaghy Road.

Towards the end of that impasse, your humble correspondent was there on that Irish street to witness the seething rage of Orangeism being told, finally, that their days of triumphalism on that nationalist community were over.

Thankfully, the Sash Cloud was dispersed, and the Belfast Agreement happened.

In the past 28 years, there has been peace, and a new generation there only knows of that stuff from hearing about it from older relatives who lived through it.

Now, largely because of some rank incompetence by those in the Parades Commission, there is a legal opening for this march to happen again.

Sadly, this is definitely a developing story.

Faced with the prospect of pushing a community aside to facilitate some traditional coat trailing, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) asked their Scottish brethren for some help on the matter.

Given Fair Caledonia’s seminal role in creating the marching fraternity, I find this rather fitting.

Professor Tom Devine, the eminent historian, has said that the Plantation of Ulster was 17th-century Scotland’s “first colony”.

It was the failure of these imperialist projects, especially in Central America, that bankrupted the Scottish state and paved the way for the 1707 marriage with their southern neighbours.

Those who ran the biggest empire in history understood the lesson of the Plantation.

Ireland was their laboratory for what they would inflict on millions across the planet over two centuries.

Ronald Storrs, Military Governor of Jerusalem 1917-20, commenting in 1937 on the rationale of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, said the following:

“Even though the land could not yet absorb sixteen million, nor even eight, enough could return… to prove that the enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”

The polity created on Arab lands in 1948 has certainly lived down to that description.

I have written here before about the strong cultural connections between the Ulsturr Scatch here and the Zionist State.

With racist supremacism and settler violence being the connecting tissue between the West Bank and anywhere in Narne Arne where you can spot an Israel fleg on a lamppost.

The Zionist state is the Apartheid South Africa of this historical moment.

Moreover, we know from the ultimate defeat of the Boer polity that sporting boycotts can play a vital part.

That is why the FAI  should not have put the Irish players in that situation last night.

A buddy said to me last night that it was Saipan 2.0, but it’s much worse than that.

The 2002 debacle with blazers taking precedence over players, leading to Roy Keane walking out, was one thing.

However, cowardice in the face of genocide is of another magnitude.

Leaving it up to individual players to take a stand was a moral failing by the FAI that should see all of them gone.

It remains to be seen if they will raise the issue of the racist abuse of Adam Idah from the Israeli fans who were in the stadium.

 

Always believe people when they reveal themselves.

Always…