Why Do European Leftist Parties Support Palestinian Cause?
European leftist parties have been criticised for their pro-Palestinian positions and for placing the blame for the current state of affairs in the Gaza Strip on Israel.
SputnikThe left-wing Podemos party in Spain, which is a member of the governing left-wing coalition headed by the socialist Sumar platform, said that "the situation of violence and death in Israel and Palestine is the fruit of occupation and apartheid".
Meanwhile, at least 340,000 Palestinians have been displaced across the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israel-Hamas conflict and nearly, 220,000 people are sheltering in 92 UNRWA schools, according to the United Nations on Thursday.
European Leftist Parties' Support for Palestine
Earlier this year, the Belgian city of Liege became the third European city to support Palestine by voting to boycott Israel. Similarly, the Belgian Workers' Party proposed the resolution, which called for "a temporary suspension of all relations with the state of Israel and the institutions that are complicit until the Israeli authorities put an end to the systematic violation of the Palestinian people".
Other cities which have supported Palestine are Oslo (Norway) and Barcelona (Spain).
"Whether it is
Israel or Hamas - attacking civilians is a violation of the Geneva agreements on humanitarian law", European Parliament Member Ernest Urtasun said earlier this week.
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis referred to Israel as "the apartheid state" and Gaza as "the largest open-air prison in the world".
"Apartheid, whether it's practised in South Africa, or Palestine or
Israel is always going to procure violence, because it's a violent, misanthropic system", he stated in an X interview.
According to a statement made on Monday by the Greek Communist Party, the Palestinians "have a right to fight against long-term occupation".
Israeli Illegal Settlements
Meanwhile, approximately 1.9 million Palestinian citizens and permanent residents make up about 21% of Israel's population, an Amnesty International report said.
The
Amnesty International report further elaborates that within the limits of Jerusalem Municipality, there were 358,800 Palestinian citizens, or 38% of the city's population, and about 150,000 of them reside in neighbourhoods divided from the rest of the city by a fence, wall, and other military checkpoints.
In addition, per the report, 225,178
Jewish Israeli settlers were residing in 13 illegal Israeli colonies that had been constructed as well as private residences that had been taken from Palestinians by discriminatory means.
In addition to this, more than 441,600 Jewish settlers reside in 132 settlements that have been formally established by the Israeli government, 140 unofficial outposts that have been established since the 1990s without government approval and are regarded as illegal even under Israeli law. Approximately three million Palestinians are living in the rest of the West Bank and two million in the Gaza Strip.
Around 1.4 million individuals (more than 70% of Gaza's population) are registered refugees with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Irish Support for Palestine
Ireland has supported numerous humanitarian and development initiatives in the Gaza Strip, home to over two million Palestinians.
These projects range from hospitals to solar energy installations and water desalination. The Irish Foreign Ministry has even planned trips to Gaza to monitor the progress of these initiatives, which are meant to improve the dire humanitarian situation there.
In 2004, a petition advocating for a boycott of Israel, signed by 12,000 members of the public and 52 politicians, was presented by an NGO to the Irish government.
Palestine, Ireland: Shared Historical Perspective
Parallels can be found between the battle of Irish Republicans against British authority in Northern Ireland and the struggle of the Palestinians against Israel's settler-colonial project.
These similarities are not lost on the individuals who make up these two groups, reflected by the graffiti and signs that can be found in Northern Irish cities supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and celebrating the Palestinian struggle.
The 1948
Palestine War was fought on the territory of what had been British-ruled Mandatory Palestine — known as the War of Independence (Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut) in Israel and in Arabic as “the disaster”(Nakba), sparking the first conflict between Israel and Palestine as well as the larger Arab-Israeli conflict.
An estimated 700,000 Palestinians, or about 80% of the Palestinian Arab inhabitants in modern Israel, fled or were expelled during the 1947-1949 Palestine War and the territory was divided into three parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip.
Similarly, Ireland was historically the first country that England invaded, forcibly establishing it as its first colony. This was seen as a crucial component of the English imperial system.
In fact, Ireland served as the birthplace of the institutions, laws, and ethnocentric ideas that were fundamental to the British Empire's survival and were later applied for centuries to other peoples and regions throughout the world.
Black and Tans
The Black and Tans, a group of 10,000 men from the UK who were notorious for their brutality and indiscriminate acts of violence against Irish civilians, were deployed by the British government during the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence to strengthen its forces in the country against the emerging Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Due to the Black and Tans' blatant cruelty in putting down the Irish Resistance. Then Winston Churchill sent them to Palestine to quell the rising anti-British sentiment there.