My semifinalist interview for the Mitchell Scholarship took place on October 30, 2023, less than a month after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War. Unsurprisingly, the conflict was one of the topics we discussed. Given the political context of the United States, I voiced my surprise at the widespread support Palestinians had received from Irish civilians and, to some extent, government officials. I recall making an offhand comment about the potential affinities between two peoples who had historically been subject to violent dispossession of land and life at the hands a powerful neighboring state.
Since arriving in Belfast nearly two months ago, I have come to see how much I underestimated the salience of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the island. To take a walk down Falls Road is to realize that, in the minds of many Irish people, it is not merely that there exists a symbolic link between Ireland and Palestine; rather, as they see it, Palestine is the most important theater in an ongoing global struggle against modern-day imperialism.
This perspective enjoys enough support that pro-Palestinian discourse is now even part of the academic mainstream in Belfast. Queen’s University regularly hosts pro-Palestine events and lectures, including, most recently, a multi-day conference. At the opening panel, the theme of which was finding a “roadmap to liberation,” speakers inveighed not only against Israel, but also against the United States government for perceived inaction and complicity in tens of thousands of needless deaths. It’s fair to say that such an event would be more or less unimaginable at most U.S. universities.
Of course, Belfast is not unified in its stance. Turn off the Falls toward the Shankhill, and you’ll be greeted by a large portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu and an endless display of Israeli flags. In March of this year, Jane Ohlmeyer, a history professor at Trinity College Dublin, stated that “there can be a tendency — and we see this, for example, in the street murals in Belfast — to see the conflict through the prism of Northern Ireland, where republican nationalists sympathize with Palestine and loyalists, unionists with Israel.” I wonder if it might be more accurate, or at least equally so, to invert the formulation. Perhaps it is Israel-Palestine that is the prism for sectarian divisions in Belfast—divisions which bubble under the surface in search of new outlets, less visible since the peace process but keenly felt by locals in a way they cannot be by an outsider.