Gareth O'Callaghan: Murder in the name of war
Palestinians pray by the bodies of the a family that was killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in Rafah on Friday. Picture: Hatem Ali/AP
When the IRA blew up two packed pubs in Birmingham in November 1974, they didn’t care about the aftermath of their deadly intentions.
They cared not for those they murdered or the 182 people who were mutilated and injured, nor for the thousands of Irish people who had made the West Midlands their home.
Many of those were intimidated, spat at, beaten up, and burnt out of their homes in the weeks following the bombings. Why? Because they were Irish and, therefore, guilty by association. The IRA turned us into a “suspect community” across Britain.
Maxine Hambleton was one of those killed. Her mother Margaret Smith says, looking back, she hated all Irish people for a long time following the murder of her 18-year-old daughter. Maxine died at the scene from her injuries, along with 20 others.
Six Irish men, living in Birmingham, were wrongly convicted of the bombings and given life sentences. It would take 17 years for their convictions to be quashed. Those who planted the bombs were never charged.
Most Irish people living in English cities back then wanted nothing to do with the IRA. They were proud of their homeland and their heritage, but they were witnessing their good names and their decency being plundered by a bunch of paramilitary killers who claimed to carry out their bombing campaigns in the name of Irish freedom.
We’re watching something similar being played out right now, on both sides, in the war between the Israeli army and Hamas.
This is a battle of bloody wills between two opposing leaderships, namely Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas.
It’s evident as weeks pass, and thousands more innocent civilians lose their lives, that the ordinary decent people of both Israel and Palestine don’t want war.
They want to be allowed to live in peace, side by side if that’s what it takes, along with millions of expats — from both nations — scattered around the world.
Sadly, they are also the individuals who are left to pick up the pieces and deal with the fallout of these warring factions.
I checked the weather yesterday in Gaza city. It was just after 2pm on a balmy sunny afternoon, a temperature of 26C.
Mothers should have been collecting their children from schools. Gaza’s food markets should have been bustling, selling their manakish and taboon, and other freshly baked breads, fragrant herbs, aromatic spices, fresh olives, za’atar, tahini, sumac, and the local exotic fruits and vegetables. It’s a foodie’s heaven, or, at least, it was.
The markets in Gaza are all gone now, with once-bustling streets buried in the rubble of apartment blocks, offices, shops, and schools. Any school left standing is now a refugee centre for the homeless, for displaced parents, and children left wondering if that next sound will be the bomb that snuffs out their own innocent lives.
But wait. There’s another nation whose people have also been displaced in many ways, and they are the Israelis. The Hamas attack of October 7 enraged every Jewish person on the planet, but the level of revenge by their prime minister’s army is truly shocking and no longer acceptable.
As of last Tuesday — one month later — 10,022 people are reported by Hamas to be dead, 4,104 of them young children, while more than 230 Israeli hostages remain missing, including eight-year-old Irish girl Emily Hand. It’s difficult to make sense of what’s happening, because the many levels of this war are shifting and changing with every new day.
It’s human nature to take sides in war, and that’s precisely what has happened.
But by supporting one side, we are allowing ourselves not to acknowledge that atrocities have been carried out by both warring parties. Those parties are not their nations’ citizens; on one side you have a prime minister and his army, and on the other a killing machine of terrorists — whose only remit is the destruction of the enemy at any cost.
This is a war of revenge, fought by two enemies who see each other as a lifelong nemesis. We need to step back and breathe deeply before wandering into the blame game. It’s imperative.
We are witnessing a nation and its population being annihilated, but we are also witnessing innocent people from the opposing nation being blamed for crimes they never had any act or part in inflicting.
That blame rests with their government.
It is slaughter of the innocents on an unthinkable scale, and it’s soul destroying: A 10-hour-old baby girl receives a death certificate, but she doesn’t have a birth certificate. A man carries his dead eight-year-old son in his arms as he tries to flee Gaza, because he can’t bear to leave his body behind. A medic performs surgery without anaesthetic on a five-year-old girl, to remove shrapnel from her stomach, because the hospital’s supplies have run out. These are tiny helpless children.
What happens next is that 300 more Palestinians will die every day until Western nations shout “enough is enough”. But they won’t.
A total of 84 countries, including the US, Britain, Australia, Germany, and even the EU as a collective entity, have openly declared their support for Israel, with most of them proclaiming their acceptance of Israel’s legitimate right to self-defence.
However, what we’re witnessing in recent weeks is not an act of self-defence. We’re watching war crimes being committed in real-time while we sit at home, drinking our wine and eating our takeaways. This is what our world has become, and it doesn’t auger well for anyone, least of all those whose lives are being pulverised in Gaza, or Israeli citizens who are being made to feel they are to blame.
Taking sides is like walking a tightrope. Protests like the ones we’ve seen at home and abroad create a sense of solidarity. But, by supporting one side, we are deliberately condemning the other.
Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have chosen to make Ireland their home.
By favouring one nationality while condemning the other, we are no different to the political leaders and terrorists in history who will only ever be remembered for the depths of hate and revenge they descended to, and the cruel destruction they wrought on the lives of innocent people who never wanted a war in the first place.
Sinn Féin should remember this when it shows its public support for Palestinian liberation.
In 2007, the then Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams met with, and apologised to, the family of parents of 12-year-old Tim Parry, one of two children killed by an IRA bomb in Warrington in 1993.
He said at the time: "Irish republicans — the IRA — was responsible for what happened that day. It brought huge grief to these two families, as well as to others hurt in that incident.” A year after the Warrington bomb, the IRA’s first ceasefire began.
Tim and three-year-old Johnathan Ball were children, just like so many of the victims in Israel and Palestine who will never see their teenage years because of a mindless war.
Sinn Féin party leader Mary Lou McDonald condemned the attack by Hamas “outright”, but the party must go further and make it even clearer now that they regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
