Cillian McGrattan: Irish nationalism's sense of victimhood is buttressed by spurious claims about Israel​​​​​​​

The weekly anti-Israeli gathering in the city centre on St Patrick’s weekend revealed something of the divide within Irish nationalism.

Sinn Féin had apparently put pressure on the organisers to allow it a speaker who was shouted down by elements in the crowd (which People Before Profit denied they had engineered).

Both parties portray Israel as an aggressor; they never mention the fact that Hamas terrorists wish to eradicate the Israeli state; they draw an untenable distinction between the right of national groups such as the French or the Germans (or the Irish) to have their own country and a religious group such as the Jews have to seek similar state protections; they ignore human rights abuses across the globe to focus on the Israelis and somehow claim to be not antisemitic.

Both Sinn Féin and PBP outbid themselves to claim Hamas victimhood – evidenced by their willingness to accept the contestable Hamas death tolls and ignore the hostages and the atrocities of 7/10 which make the idea of a two-state solution tantamount to asking Jews to write a collective suicide note.

But all this is more about nationalism than it is about the Palestinians – if it was about the latter, we would see more calls for the type of scheme the British government offered to Ukrainians.

There is also a racial hierarchy at play in the absence of such calls. (We hear nothing from Irish nationalists regarding Yemen or the dire situation in Haiti.)

The lack of such substantive proposals from the Dublin government point to the fact that the real battle is for the soul of nationalism.

Unionists can learn that posturing and virtue signalling are the substance of this politics; and, of course, antisemitic populism is not foreign to ethno-nationalism (see Germany 1933-45).

Antisemitism seems to be so deep-rooted that it is a mistake to discount it completely; but unionists might also recognise that they and not the Israelis are the target.

This is exemplified in Gerry Adams’ recent intervention on the St Patrick’s weekend altercation:

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"Those who disrupted the pro-Palestinian rally did a grave [dis]service to the Palestinian cause … They have no right to deny us the right to speak. Our focus was and is on raising the plight of the Palestinian people and seeking an end to the genocide, a permanent ceasefire, an end to the settlements and the provision of aid.”

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As ever with Adams, the ‘real’ victims are republicans – never mind that Sinn Féin may have set their speaker up to fail.

Nationalist victimhood is buttressed by a range of spurious but deliberately offensive claims:

The idea that Israelis are committing a ‘genocide’ is a shocking but sadly normalised accusation to the people who suffered the sui generis eradication and which ignores the fact that the putative genocide is the only one in history where the target population has grown exponentially.

It is also an affront to Jews and anyone of any decency to compare one of the most democratic though benighted societies to white-supremacist South Africa.

Israel as a colonist state ought to ring alarm bells for unionists: Just like white-supremacist South Africa, genocidal Nazi Germany and the fascist terrorists of Hamas, a lesson must be learned.

For nationalists, that lesson is that Israel and the state that protects the Jews must be punished. How would that look in Northern Ireland?

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Cillian McGrattan lectures in politics at Ulster University