Anyone who was in Croke Park on Saturday evening to watch Dublin and Kerry or who was tuned in to TG4’s coverage of the match will not have failed to notice the lighting up of phones on the 20 minute mark.
The gesture had been organised by groups calling for a ceasefire in the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Well done to all the Dublin and Kerry fans, who lit up Croke Park tonight, in a call for peace in Gaza đź’™ pic.twitter.com/Jox09jHONW
— Dublin Gaelic Fans (@DubsGAAFans) February 24, 2024
Satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 taken a month after the retaliatory strikes had begun showed the extent of the devastation already inflicted on what was little better than a crammed conurbation of tenements to begin with.
Missing are not only the buildings, of course, but the people who lived in them.
The display at Croke Park does not mean that most people in the close to 40,000 in attendance participated – and some probably just turned on their light because they saw other people doing so – but it was undoubtedly quite a sizeable proportion of those who were there. I had no idea what it was about until speaking to people about it afterwards.
Which led to other conversations once we had diplomatically downplayed the significance of Dublin hammering the bedamned out of our old chums from the Kingdom.
It is clear to me from these and other conversations and just from listening to and reading what others are saying, that there is huge revulsion against what is happening in Gaza at the present time.
I am talking now of people who have no connection whatsoever to the left which has placed itself at the head of the protest movement. In fact, possibly the one thing that makes many reticent about saying what they think about Gaza is that they do not wish to be associated with the left.
It’s my belief that even people who understood why Israel retaliated are now beginning to question whether the response might not have gone well beyond any targeted take out of Hamas military capability, or even “teaching them a lesson”.
As mentioned before, some of the public narrative in Israel and among its supporters in the United States is focused on reducing Gaza’s pre-attack population of around 2 million to around 10% of that.
There can be little doubt but that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood from which it emerged are a vile bunch. Their actions last October when they launched the raids into Israel and their treatment of the people who they captured is a reflection of that vileness.
The Islamic states which fund and arm them and use them as a proxy are similarly vile. There is nothing good to be said about Iran or Qatar. Most people realise this, but there is undoubtedly a current on the left which regards any regime or movement that appears to be “anti-imperialist” as “objectively oppressive”.
This is what leads to the situation where Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have had no problem defending the Iranian regime- to the absurd degree that when widespread protests were taking place in Iran in 2022 over the arrest of Mahsa Amini for defying the mandatory wearing of the hijab, the non TERF feminist adjacent Wallace condemned the protest in the European Parliament.
However, what irritates some people on the right is also the tone of pro-Israeli sentiment in the United States. I have heard of companies which would otherwise be firmly be on the left liberal side when it comes to funding various pet entities of the Democratic Party who are little short of demanding that employees in pretty senior positions make public declarations, perhaps even backed by financial donations, of their support for what Israel is doing in Gaza at the present time.
I myself managed to get myself blocked, I think by an American who I would otherwise be more or less on same wavelength, for a tongue in cheek reference to a map she had posted depicting the location of the Biblical tribes of Israel. I asked where the tribe of Brooklyn had been.
Poor taste, perhaps, on my part and of course I understand well why there are many people in Brooklyn and Carmel, California and elsewhere who have an understandable and strong emotive connection to modern Israel. Where that veers into celebratory and even mocking references to the bombing of Gaza, I’m afraid I must demur.
This is the point that needs to be made. Given a choice between Israel and its enemies, then I have no difficulty, nor ever had, in choosing Israel. This has been the case for me for 30 years and more since abandoning the fallacy of Marxism in preferring a flawed West against its enemies, whether they be the totalitarian regimes of the left or the various strains of Islamic and “national liberation” autocracies.
I no longer consider myself to be of the left, but I consider the leftist victims of the Cuban prisons and the Iranian torture chambers and the Chinese laogai as objectively on the side of freedom. That’s still the case even if their “internationalist” comrades choose completely to ignore their existence or worse, act as cheerleaders for such regimes – and not always in a pro bono fashion.
In the same way, my sympathy is instinctively elicited by the reports – and indeed, the imagery – of what is happening to the people unfortunate enough to live in Gaza. They are doubly afflicted in their day-to-day existence by medievalist Islamism and for the past four months by what can accurately be described as blanket bombing.
If Israel merits the support of the west, and all things considered if there is a zero sum game then it does, it cannot retain it by waging indiscriminate war against an entire population, which it is what it very much seems is happening.
If the most vaunted intelligence service in the world missed what was to happen on October 7, then it cannot compensate for that with a disproportionate response. Â And it cannot justify new horrors by reference to the horrors of the 1940s.
Well, it can obviously, but it should not.