Palestine and the Ulster Plantation
My friend and fellow writer Danny Morrison has been kind enough to alert me to the fact that the Bobby Sands Trust website has posted an important article by the renowned journalist Robert Fisk on the parallels between land seizures in Palestine and in Ireland. The article, entitled “ History - A Great Punisher - Walls never work: in the Middle East or in Ireland" was recently published in the London Independent and can be read at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-walls-never-work-in-the-middle-east-or-in-ireland-1855417.html
However, I would encourage readers to go to the Bobby Sand’s Trust website, details of which I provide after the short backgrounder below.
Historical Parallels
Regular readers of Cic Saor may remember that I won a film director’s award in New York (see –Cic Saor – “Flight of the Earls film feted abroad and ignored by Ireland's “Litterati” - 10th of May 2008).
The film was about the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and starred Stephen Rea as Aodh Mór Ó Neill - Hugh O’Neill (the most important Gaelic chieftain in Ireland at the time) and Dominic Mafham as the English Attorney General Sir John Davies.
One of the central purposes of the film (and the reason perhaps that our benighted intelligentsia chose to ignore it) was to pose serious questions about the way The Great O’Neill has been portrayed by modern historians. For it transpires that Sean Ó Faoláin’s allegedly seminal work on O’Neill (“The Great O’Neill”) was very often inaccurate in its portrayal of O’Neill as a political and cultural chameleon.
Ó’Faolain also portrayed O’Neill in the latter stages of his life in exile as an inveterate drunkard, a kind of bar room rebel marooned in late renaissance Rome, who had no intention of going back to fight in Ireland. Unfortunately for O’Neill’s status in Modern Ireland, playwright Brian Friel then used Ó Faoláin’s flawed novel (yes a novel, not seriously researched historical examination) as the basis for his well known play “Making History”. However, judging by the reaction to our film, we seem to have helped in “Making New History” or at least clarifying some issues in a visual and entertaining way.
Another purpose of our film was to make parallels with modern day Iraq and the middle east generally. This point was made at the sold out showing of the film at the IFC in Dublin when Stephen Rea spoke from the audience floor about colonial powers then and now. As the film's director, I made a point about the abandonment of displaced Irish people overseas.
Land grabbing, and the destruction of the Gaelic order, lay at the root of the conquest of Ireland and there is no doubt that parallels can be drawn with the treatment of displaced and evicted Arabs in Palestine.
This is a particularly pressing issue with regards to the new and illegal land settlements being built by the Israelis in the West Bank, which I believe represent a disastrous, not to say, reckless policy decision on the part of Israel.
Those of you who know me from my younger days as a political activist are aware of my anti Fascist/anti Nazi record. For those readers who were not aware of this, suffice to say that I am proud of that record and it is in this spirit that I invite people to read Robert Fisk’s article which has been posted at the Bobby Sands Trust website. I could not have made the arguments and drawn the parallels better myself. It is an argument for the long term preservation of the Israeli state and not its destruction.
See – History A Great Punisher –
http://www.bobbysandstrust.com/archives/1594