The cheering coming from a hotel room in Amman last Sunday sprang from an astonishing source. Gathered in front of a big screen, 32 Palestinian children from the West Bank were watching the All-Ireland final on the GAAGO streaming service. Some were sporting Tipperary jerseys, a gift from a donor.
After the final whistle, one of the boys produced a length of string and fashioned it into a clothes line over the bath upon which he hung his precious Gaelic jersey to dry after washing it. Such resourcefulness is second nature to a child who has lived all his life in a refugee camp; as have his parents and his grandparents.
The children – avid hurlers and camogie players aged from nine to 16 – should have been in Ireland, but they and 14 adult mentors were refused visas by the Department of Justice. “But Ireland loves us,” they responded, confused, when the tour organisers, GAA Palestine, told them their visit to 152 waiting host families had to be cancelled.
When Mohammed cannot come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. A group of volunteers flew from Ireland to Jordan last Friday to give the children an alternative holiday there.
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One teenager failed to make it across the border from the West Bank because his requisite school certificate had burned to ashes when the Israel Defense Forces attacked his camp.
On the day the other 32 left their homes in Ramallah and the Tulkarm, Jenin and Am’ari camps, soldiers shot a 13-year-old boy dead. Amr Ali Qabha had unwittingly walked down a road in Jenin where soldiers were present during violent raids by Israeli settlers. When he rounded a bend and saw them, Amr turned to go back. They shot him seven times – in the neck, abdomen, back, groin and right thigh. As he lay dying, the soldiers prevented an ambulance from going to his aid.
“But Ireland loves us,” the children said.
That is true, the GAA Palestine volunteers reassured them and showed them videos on their phones of last Saturday’s solidarity protests when tens of thousands of people took to the streets of this country.
These children need tender loving care. They’ve lost parents. They have family members in prisons, in detention with no charges. They are refugees all their lives. They are repeatedly displaced. They see the crops being burned, the sheep being killed. They need to be able to spend time without a gun in their face
— Volunteer Claire Liddy
“Let them come,” the marchers had chanted.
“They say that for us?” wondered the children.
They are not the only ones who are confused by the contradiction between Ireland’s policy of solidarity on the Occupied Territories and how it treats the victim-occupants.
The Government, admirably, has withstood orchestrated international opprobrium for its decision to officially recognise Palestinian statehood, which culminated in Israel shutting its embassy in Dublin. The Occupied Territories Bill currently before the Oireachtas has elicited accusations of anti-Semitism and warnings of ruination for the Irish economy. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist pastor and former Fox News talkshow host, dredged the muck of drunken-Paddies stereotypes, unapologetic for his own racism.
[ Heartbreak as Palestinian GAA players are refused visas to visit IrelandOpens in new window ]
To its credit, the Oireachtas appears resolved to outlaw trade with illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Injecting steel into that resolve is the knowledge that since last January and up until last week, according to United Nations agency OCHA, 162 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. At least 32 of the dead were children. The killings and illegal seizures of Palestinian homes and farms, with the assistance of Israeli soldiers, have been a fact of life throughout the lives of the children watching Tipperary beat Cork last Sunday.
As it becomes ever more obvious that Israel is trying to kill as many Gazans as it can while it still can with complicit way-leave by the US, Germany and the EU, Micheál Martin’s condemnations have become more forthright and fearless.
Yet Ireland’s defence of Palestinians’ freedom is a strange kind of love. GAA Palestine applied in February for the summer tour visas. It was only at the eleventh hour this month that the Department of Justice notified the organisation the visas were being refused, citing a failure to produce sufficient documents. Stephen Redmond, GAA Palestine’s chairman, who is currently in Jordan, countered that all required documentations had been submitted; in fact, more than ever before for past tours.
One West Bank group having to abandon its plans might be presumed a glitch or merely the pedantry of some stickler officials in the department’s visa section, but two suggests a pattern. The Lajee Centre in the West Bank town of Bethlehem has had to postpone its planned tour to Ireland by 40 musicians and dancers this month after failing to obtain timely decisions on their visa applications. It would have been the third visit organised by the cultural centre.
The hurt, confusion, upheaval and disappointment caused by these aborted tours can but be imagined.
“These children need tender loving care,” volunteer Claire Liddy told me on the phone from the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea on Tuesday, during an outing with the young Palestinian hurlers. “They’ve lost parents. They have family members in prisons, in detention with no charges. They live in camps. They are refugees all their lives. They are repeatedly displaced; some twice since May alone. They see the crops being burned [by Israeli settlers], the sheep being killed. They need to be able to spend time without a gun in their face.”
Ireland’s stringent admission policy for Palestinians also strikes a contrast with how it has treated Ukrainians, who do not require a visitor’s visa. Within months of the Russian invasion in February 2022, this country was, rightly, accommodating 42,000 Ukrainian war refugees. Meanwhile, 208 Palestinians have been refused short-stay visas since Israel began its killing rampage in Gaza in October 2023, according to data published by TheJournal.ie.
While there is a distinction to be made between a campaign of all-out war and a prolonged campaign of violent and illegal annexation, the ultimate consequences are the same for those on the receiving end.
The common factor between what Israel is doing in Gaza and in the West Bank is an international crime called ethnic cleansing. The methods may differ – aerial bombardment, mass killings and man-made famine in Gaza; systemic discrimination, forced displacement and murders in the West Bank – but they belong to the same grand plan to colonise the Palestinian territories.
