The American ruling class learned a lesson from their defeat in Vietnam. Seeing the brutality of war makes people rise up against it. Coverage of the mass killings of Vietnamese civilians – the naked girl running distraught from the 1969 My Lai massacre and the soldiers returning in body bags – fed into the anti-war movement and left a political mark on a whole generation of activists. The ‘Vietnam syndrome’ led governments to make sure that for future imperialist wars such as the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, there would be careful media management to downplay civilian casualties and cover up the horrors of war.
With the genocide in Gaza, we are witnesses every day to the massive scale of Palestinian deaths and suffering. We see countless dead children in tiny white shrouds, bloodied bodies on the ground, weeping faces clutching at their dead relatives, endless piles of bombed out buildings and rubble, under which still more people lie dead. In the last weeks, we are seeing a wilful man-made famine: Palestinian children being starved to death, emaciated bodies old and young being shot at by the IOF at the grim ‘aid distribution centres’. Over the course of just one day in August, at least 91 Gazans were killed as they queued for food, and more than 600 wounded. According to official figures, more than 60,000 people have been killed since October 2023. However, the true figures could be in the hundreds of thousands. This is genocide in plain sight. Across the world, millions of people show their disgust and human solidarity, from Sydney to Stockholm, Tunis to Damascus, Paris, London, Berlin and Dublin.
Yet our governments remain stubbornly unmoved. Gaza, perhaps more than any other recent conflict, has opened wide the huge chasm between us and our rulers. After more than 22 months of killings, bombardments, deprivation of aid and starvation, most governments are still doing no more than issue statements of condemnation, refusing to implement sanctions on arms or trade with Israel. A few leaders like Macron and Starmer have now indicated they will formally recognise a Palestinian state – such calls are a smokescreen to make it look as if they are taking action. These same governments continue to act as partners in genocide by sustaining trade with Israel, maintaining diplomatic relations, providing arms and diplomatic support. The western imperialist powers have remained steadfastly Israel’s perfect allies, the most recent in a long line of settler-colonialist legitimisers of Zionism and its project of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The West’s Israel
Israel is by far the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid. Under the Trump presidency and before the current war – Israel received more US foreign military financing than all other countries in the world combined. The total amount of aid today is staggering, with $14 billion in military aid alone committed for the 2022-2025 period. This aid is part of a larger package that includes $3.8 billion in economic aid and $1.5 billion in missile defence funding.
Crucially, American support extends far beyond financial and material support. The US, for its own imperialist interests in the region, acts as the final backstop in defending Israel politically on the world stage. The US, along with Germany, the EU and the UK, have ignored the International Court of Justice’s 2024 instructions to Israel to stop genocidal acts. They have shrugged off the charges laid against Netanyahu and his former defence minister by the International Criminal Court, charges which explicitly call for preventing and punishing incitement to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel, knowing that it can act with impunity, has become even more emboldened. In February this year, it openly called for the total expulsion of Palestinians and the recolonisation of Gaza – ‘occupy, deport and settle’ as one Israeli minister put it. The new Trump presidency nailed its Zionist colours to the mast and promptly endorsed the removal of Palestinians to Jordan, proposing the obscene idea that American developers could take over Gaza and turn it into a holiday ‘riviera’.
Israel has collaborated with the United States to weaponise desperately needed aid, which it itself has refused to let be distributed. The recent phoney US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation delivery system has been described by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese as a form of ‘humanitarian camouflage’ and as ‘an essential tactic of this genocide’.
The EU displays equally uncontrolled support for Israel. Despite recent talk of the EU’s distancing from the US, on tariffs and on rearming, Ursula von der Leyen ultimately remains on the same side as US imperialism. Her attitude was already very clear from her racist, colonial remark about Israel about it having ‘made the desert bloom’. When Israel pre-emptively bombed Iran in June this year, she, along with the US, stood full square behind the US, and claimed that Iran was a threat to the West and the main source of instability in the Middle East.
Throughout the war on Gaza, the EU has continued its special arrangements with Israel. It continues to partner Israeli institutions under its ‘Horizon’ research and innovation programme. It has given Israeli institutions more than €238 million including €640,000 to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a top aerospace and aviation manufacturer supplying the IOF.
Britain’s Keir Starmer, given his Labour Party label, has perhaps been the most sickening. At the beginning of the war on Gaza, he was firm that Israel had the right to withhold power and water in Gaza. Later that month, he refused to call for a ceasefire. Early last year, he called for a ‘humanitarian ceasefire” but carefully removed the reference to Israel engaging in the “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people. He has even criminalised and attempted to silence the Palestine solidarity movement. Many Palestine solidarity campaigners, elected representatives, organisations such as Palestine Action, artists like Kneecap, Bob Vylan and others have been targeted for their willingness to criticise Israeli terrorism and take action against genocide. People Before Profit Cllr Shaun Harkin in Derry was recently charged for participating in a protest against Israel’s genocide.
At the end of July, Starmer followed Macron in announcing that unless Israel takes substantive steps to end the ‘appalling ‘situation in Palestine, Britain would recognise the State of Palestine by September. Recognition of the state of Palestine means nothing while British made F35’s continue to drop 2000 pound bombs on Palestinians.
Irish Government duplicity
The Irish Government, beyond spin and careful image-building, is not much better. There is a general belief, carefully cultivated by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, that Ireland stands with Palestine. But this is indicative of the strength of the Irish Palestinian movement, certainly not of the Government. The Irish Government has initiated no sanctions against Israel during the entire assault on Gaza.
Ireland declared it would make an intervention to South Africa’s International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel in January this year (along with Nicaragua, Colombia, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Turkey, Chile, the Maldives and Bolivia). It is also true that the decision comes after Ireland’s November Dáil motion and December cabinet vote affirmed its stance that “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza.”
However, this is a rather weak making of the case that genocide is occurring. Filing a declaration of intervention in a case on behalf of Ireland does not mean joining the case on behalf of one side or the other. Rather, Ireland will be able to make submissions to the court on interpretation of provisions of the Genocide Convention. Furthermore, disturbingly, in April the ICJ agreed to postpone the case and announced an extension to the deadline for Israel to file its defence. The new date is January 12, 2026.
Then there is the Occupied Territories Bill. It proposes to ban trade between Ireland and Israel’s illegal settlements in those Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War: the West Bank and Gaza. Thanks to the Government, the bill has faced delay after delay. It was first introduced in 2018 by Frances Black. The Bill passed stages in the Oireachtas but stalled at various committee stages. The Government has gone back and forth on this. First, it posed problems with the legality of it, then it claimed that services could not be included in the ban. Then at the end of July, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Harris indicated ‘an openness to considering a ban on trade in services, if it were legally enforceable’. Harris appears to be just playing for further time, as the bill will not now return to the Dáil and the Seanad until after the summer recess, in September.
Passing the Occupied Territories Bill would be significant in that, if passed, Ireland would be the first Western country to take such a stand. There is overwhelming public support for passing the bill, and Palestine demonstrations and protests and demonstrations across Ireland have called for the Government to stop the delay. It should be remembered that the Bill leaves the state of Israel itself untouched by sanctions. The fact that the Government has delayed so much on this modest proposal indicates just how beholden they are not only to US companies and politicians, but also to bigger imperialist players who support Zionism.
Two-state legacy
Much is made about Ireland’s recognition of the state of Palestine. In July, following Macron’s appeal, Ireland joined 15 other nations in calling for the world to recognise a Palestinian state and for a ceasefire. Simon Harris said the effort “demonstrated there is another way forward” and called for the immediate implementation of the two-state solution.
This is no time for recycled failures. It was the Oslo Accords two-state arrangement thirty years ago, supported by western imperialism to protect their interests in the area, that has provided the structural framework for the Israeli apartheid state. However, unlike in South Africa, where Black people were denied their rights through being second class citizens, Israel does not even recognise Palestinians as citizens but seeks to ethnically cleanse them from their own historic land.
The partitionist two-state arrangement sets in stone the colonialist premise of divide and rule – as we in Ireland know only too well. The old Mandate of Palestine, which existed under the British before Israel’s forced creation in 1948, was divided, with Israel being granted 56% of the land, 42% left to Palestine, and the remaining 2%, in Jerusalem, designated as an international humanitarian zone. This laid the ground for horrific experience of the Nakba – or catastrophe – in which 15,000 were killed and 750,000 forcibly displaced. Two states today means accepting the parcellisation of historic Palestine, later solidified into the post-1967 borders. It means accepting that Palestinian refugees can only exercise their right of return within the state of Palestine, even if their family’s home had existed within Israel’s borders.
The constant talk of a two-state solution has provided the cover for Israel to expand its settlements and swallow up further Palestinian territory. Israel has seized every concession given to it and continued to expand.
Today there are more than 200 illegal settlements in the West Bank and even during its assault on Gaza, the Israeli government has announced it will establish 22 more. The two-state set-up justifies the existence of Israel as a Zionist state which, heavily supported by US imperialism, stands over Palestinian dispossession, the rejection of Palestinian rights and feeds into the constant state of conflict between Israel and neighbouring Arab states. Those who support a two-state solution – including, in Ireland, not just government parties but also parties on the left – should look at what we are seeing in Gaza and rethink what they wish for.
Even if the two-state solution were something other than a fig leaf to cover for the colonisation of the entire land of Palestine, to push for it now is to demand that Palestinians live next to a state that has committed genocide against them and wants to eradicate them.
Nor is this simply a case of a bad government led by Netanyahu. 82% of Israelis support the expulsion of the entire population of Gaza. Almost half of Israelis support the extermination of all Gazans. These are the fruits of the Zionist settler colonial project, whose logic is being played out to its ultimate conclusions.
What is required, therefore, is the defeat of Zionism and the dismantling of the entire genocidal, settler-colonial Israeli state. Only then can we begin to approach a fundamentally different solution, with the creation of a single democratic state of Palestine in which people can live alongside one another, with equal rights, without borders or partitions.
Such a fundamental change would challenge the imperialist order and can come about only with international pressure, in the region and elsewhere. Solidarity with Palestine against the horrors of the Zionist state can become a lightning rod for resistance against the complacency and complicity of rulers. The links between Palestinian resistance and uprisings against governments was a feature in the revolutionary movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya in the Middle East in the early 2010s. An Egyptian revolutionary socialist, quoted by Phil Marfleet in his new book, states “that Palestine has always brought Egyptians into conflict with the state, that Israel’s crimes and those of its allies highlight the history of imperialism [….] Palestinians’ struggle is our own struggle.”1 Phil Marfleet Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom, Bookmarks, London 2025, p.265
The same is appearing increasingly true for many people across America, Europe and elsewhere.
Action Now
The global movement in solidarity with Palestine has been one of the longest and sustained movements in years. Thus far, however – up against the might of Western imperialism and its key outpost in the Middle East – the movement has not yet managed to stop the genocide. Enormous protests, occupations and direct action have all put massive pressure on Western governments to withdraw their support for Israel, but it has not yet been enough.
A key component that has been largely missing so far from the movement has been the action of organised workers. There are hopeful signs that this may be beginning to change now.
Dockers have successfully blocked arms shipments to Israel. In June, workers at the port of Marseille, unionised with the French trade union the CGT, successfully refused to load containers full of military equipment. When the ship moved on to Genoa, the Autonomous Collective of Genoa Port Workers’ protested and inspected the ships for military cargo. These dock workers, with another rank and file trade union group, are continuing to pressurise the Italian state by appealing to an Italian law which prohibits the transit of armaments to theatres of war. French and Italian workers are demonstrating practical resistance to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
This kind of chain of solidarity which the global Palestine movement has brought into existence needs to be strengthened. In Ireland, we need to use our powerful demonstrations and actions in solidarity with Palestine to focus on sanctions against Israel.
We need to end the Irish Central Bank’s facilitation of the sale of Israel bonds. Israeli bonds are used to fund Israel’s assault on Gaza, something that the Israel bonds Issuance prospectus clearly spells out. There has been concerted pressure on the Irish government to stop the Central Bank’s collusion with Israel and successful protests outside the Central Bank’s Headquarters on Dublin’s North Wall quay. 2 September is when the Central Bank’s facilitation contract with Israel is planned to be renewed and further protests are planned. Unite workers in the Central Bank need to be supported in refusing to allow the renewal notice to go through.2Check the IPSC website for further details https://www.ipsc.ie/
Now, more than ever, is the time to step up our actions in order to force the Government to act. Palestine solidarity in our trade unions has thus far been limited and must be built through grass roots rank and file action. As students return to college new groups in solidarity with Palestine need to be rebuilt, using the experience of successful college encampments in 2024. The use of Shannon Airport by the US military must continue to be a focus and the activists who are being criminalised for their actions against military aircraft must be supported.
As Israel continues its genocide and ethnic cleansing, new activists for Palestine will join the protests across Ireland, North and South. We need to keep the focus clearly on sanctions and on the need for collective action – whether at Israeli companies operating in Ireland or our airspace being used for the transport of arms to Israel – to strike a blow against Israel and break its chains of western reliance. Palestine, its people and its inspirational resistance against Zionism and its Western backers, deserves no less.
