Fintan Drury to discuss new book ‘Catastrophe – Nakba II’ with Eamonn McCann in Derry’s Little Acorns

Drury is in conversation with Eamonn McCann at Little Acorns on June 18 at 6.30 pm.

In the 1980s, as a young journalist with RTÉ, I’d followed the Palestine-Israel story closely. Presenting programmes like Morning Ireland meant you had no choice - like NI, the Middle East was always news.

Over the decades, much of a largely Dublin-centred media has been reluctant to draw comparisons between the struggle of the Palestinians and those of the nationalist community.

There are fundamental differences; notably that Israel is a settler colonialist, but oppression was an essential part of Britain’s approach, as it is manifest in Israel’s conduct.

The people of Derry need no tutorials on life as an oppressed community; their empathy with the cause of Palestine is rooted in that shared sense of generational loss.

Israel wants more than to oppress the Palestinians, and while, since the first Nakba in 1948, it’s had different manifestations, the constant is the desired removal of all Palestinians.

In his book, ‘A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’, Ilan Pappé writes of the first Nakba: “Each village and neighbourhood was to be surrounded from three sides, leaving the fourth side free for residents to leave as they were expelled or fled in terror.

"Then the village was to be reduced to rubble, and explosives planted in the rubble so that no one could return.”

Pappé says that underpinning the strategy was an intent to eradicate the Palestinians: "Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods the Zionists coveted were doomed to be ethnically cleansed from the start.”

Initially, I was shocked when Hamas carried out its audacious attack on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023. It was horrifying and remains so even looking back at it through the rubble, the dust and the smell of death that must pervade a Gaza Strip unrecognisable and minus many tens of thousands of Palestinian souls.

Israel began its offensive in Gaza that same night. Over the following months, as it increased its bombardment and ramped up the annexation of the West Bank, we were continually told it was acting in self-defence after an unprovoked attack by terrorists.

This is the heart of the self-defence argument, allied as always with the platitudinous nonsense that Israel is a democracy with Western values that provides a bulwark against the deliberately bloated threat of Islamism, represented by Iran.

‘Catastrophe Nakba II’ presents the counter-narrative, written by someone who disbelieved Israel but wanted to understand the history and timelines.

I wanted to pick over the evidence, opinions, and anecdotes to test my sense of Israel as an aggressive colonist. I knew of the Nakba, the Six-Day War, the Intifadas, Camp David, and Oslo, but, like many, I’d always found Israel and Palestine dense and complex to follow.

It’s valuable to start by looking at Saturday, October 7, in the context of the previous day, Friday, October 6, 2023.

Israel controlled most of Palestine in complete defiance of international law and kept the people of Gaza under a blockade. Palestinians were without electricity for an average of 13 hours a day, and more than 96% of the groundwater in Gaza was considered ‘unfit for human consumption’.

Israel controlled the supply of food and other critical supplies, meaning that before the Hamas attack, 80 per cent of the population of Gaza relied on humanitarian aid.

In the West Bank, throughout 2023, Israel continued to support the illegal settlement (theft) by its people and by Jewish immigrants of large tracts of Palestine while it built extensive infrastructure in the West Bank, exclusively for the use of Jewish settlers and the IDF.

Before Hamas struck, Israel had already killed around 250 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 50 children.

Israel’s security services and its prison service were arresting increasing numbers of innocent Palestinians, including hundreds of minors, held without charge in appalling conditions.

Less than 1% of complaints of abuses by Israeli forces filed by Palestinians in the West Bank between 2017 and 2021, and 7% of complaints of settler violence between 2005 and 2022, led to indictments.

Last summer, Israel warned 2.5m in the West Bank its intentions were the same as for Gaza: to make all of Palestine a living hell, somewhere it would make sense to leave before you were killed or starved to death.

My book places the Hamas attack in the context of decades of gross abuse of the Palestinians. With even the broadest understanding of that truth, it was entirely predictable that Israel’s settler-colonialism, its western-sanctioned abuse of human rights, its violent theft of land, its refusal to meet international obligations and its apartheid system of governance would lead to such an event.

The warnings, including those of many Jewish scholars, were many and consistent. They also go back more than a century to when Edward Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British cabinet that sanctioned the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917, prophesied its dire consequences.

As the 1967 Six-Day War was ending, French President Charles de Gaulle said: “Israel is organising occupation on the territory it has seized.

"This cannot proceed without oppression, repression and expulsion and without the emergence of resistance to it, which in turn it [Israel] characterises as terrorism.”

De Gaulle wasn’t alone in seeing an emerging pattern of malevolence, but fewer political voices of substance have been heard over the last twenty-five years.

‘Catastrophe - Nakba II’ emerged from a view that the aggression Israel unleashed on Gaza within hours of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 was unjustified.

It seems to me any reasonable person looking at events since the first Nakba would find it unsurprising Hamas did what it did on that day.

Twenty months on, emboldened mainly by the West, Israel’s brutal settler colonial intent means the Palestinian people continue to endure Nakba II.