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Earlier this week, like many millions of her fellow citizens daily, Senator Lynn Ruane took to Instagram to share, or in this case re-share, some thoughts. Clearly, a particular meme about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caught her eye, and she thought it was a worthwhile thing to share to her followers:
In case anyone wanted to know how things are going here: an Irish senator posted this on her stories yesterday. pic.twitter.com/JUKRLz4kUo
— Rachel Moiselle (@RachelMoiselle) September 3, 2024
The theme of the image is in keeping with much criticism of the State of Israel: That it, and the 8 million or so of its citizens who are Jewish, are interlopers and colonisers, illegally living on land stolen from others. I do not propose to re-litigate that argument here, since that has always struck this writer as an esoteric point. In my own family, various relations are descended from people whose ancestors were interlopers and colonisers, but on balance I think the social and financial costs of uprooting them and sending them back to Normandy or Scotland might outweigh any justice that might be derived from the process.
I am more interested, as we all should be, in the logic of the image. Where are they really from, it asks, and then answers that question, in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, with Poland.
Netanyahu, as a quick google will tell you, was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv. It is true that his father, Benzion, was a Polish-born academic who migrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in 1920. Netanyahu’s mother Tzila Segal, by contrast, was born in 1912 in the town of Petah Tikvah in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and is now a town right in the heart of central Israel. On his maternal side, Netanyahu’s family have lived in what is now called Israel for over 150 years.
When Netanyahu was born, the state of Israel had already been established and had already defeated the combined Arab armies in the first Arab-Israeli war. The event Palestinians call the “Nakba” (their defeat in that war to destroy Israel) had already taken place. Netanyahu was born a citizen of Israel, and of no other country. Those are simple facts.
Of course, facts are only of limited importance in debates around nationalities.
I am reminded of the attacks that have been made, in recent years, on former US President Barack Obama, whose more hardcore opponents tend to refer to him as a Kenyan, on account of the fact that his father (Barack Senior) was born in what is now Kenya in 1934, and that he only immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s. Like Netanyahu’s parents, Obama’s were half and half – his father Kenyan, his mother with American heritage going back over a century. The same accusation is thrown at Obama as appears to have been thrown by Ruane at Netanyahu: That his father’s birth makes him a foreigner, and out of place in the country of which he became leader.
I thought this was important enough to ask Senator Ruane about: Does she, I asked, believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is Polish, and Barack Obama is Kenyan? Her answer, provided through a spokesman, was as follows:
““I do not share the view outlined. Further, I reject entirely the assertion being made. My understanding of the content shared is that it sought to highlight the inconsistency of the position regarding the right to return which is bestowed on Israeli citizens and their parents and grandparents before them, a right which is actively being denied to the Palestinian people.”
That answer, I have to say, strikes me as utterly incoherent: From where did Benjamin Netanyahu return? He was born in Israel. As to his father being Polish, Benzion Netanyahu moved to what is now Israel in 1920, long before the existence of the country, and long before any legal “right of return” was established. If the Senator is being genuine about what she understood the content to be – and we must of course assume that she is – then the examples in the image she posted make no sense. The very best we can say for her is that she’s attempted to make a point in a very clumsy way.
Indeed, few others who make the link between Netanyahu and Poland ever suggest that this has anything to do with the right of return: Do a search for Netanyahu and Poland on almost any social media platform and these are the kinds of thing you will encounter.
If you believe the assertions made in those tweets, then there is nothing that I can write here that will change your mind. That is not the point of this article.
However, on past performance, it seems very unlikely that Senator Ruane is the kind of person who would share an image referring to Barack Obama as a “Kenyan” in order to make some esoteric point about racial harmony and the rights of refugees, in a context where almost everybody else referring to Obama as Kenyan was doing so to make a racist point. Her interpretation of Netanyahu as Polish being related to a “right of return” is, speaking generously, a relatively unique interpretation amongst others who cite his alleged Polishness.
My friend Jason O’Mahony declared yesterday that Ruane deserves the benefit of the doubt:
I don't think Lynn Ruane has fully thought through what she is actually saying here. I don't think she really believes that someone who has lived in Ireland their whole lives can never be really Irish if they have foreign parents. pic.twitter.com/uz0WC1uuFh
— Jason O’Mahony🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇳🖖 (@jasonomahony) September 4, 2024
“She hasn’t thought it through”, he says. On the evidence of her reply to me, he is correct. Yet I wonder would we initially grant that level of benefit of the doubt to some working class white guy from Alabama who tweeted that Barack Obama was a Kenyan? Or would we – by which I mean the chattering classes – simply assume that his statement was rooted in the worst kind of prejudice?
I see no reason why Ruane should be given as much benefit of the doubt here as Jason gives her. And I think we should remember the media’s silence on this, the next time they flog some random person for making a comment in a similar vein about somebody or something else.
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