It’s a year since the Ross Lake House Hotel in west Galway was set ablaze, nine days before Christmas. A year since an elected county councillor stood in sight of the smouldering wreckage of the intended refugee shelter and declared “the inn is full”. Some things are worth remembering. In the shadow of the Dublin city riots, the harnessing of the cruellest words of the nativity story by a mainstream politician to oppose a refugee shelter in beautiful Connemara may have seemed minor. It felt like a nadir.
There was something particularly grievous about seeing it in the days of Christmas, the season of light, peace and love and carols purporting to honour a baby born in a lowly Bethlehem manger because his labouring mother was turned away by an innkeeper.
Perhaps it’s possible to be glib about the nativity story because so much is lost in the sanitising of it. In every nativity scene the same miracle occurs before our eyes; the manger is empty, the clock hand moves and lo, there lies a newborn, a clean, swaddled, well-nourished child watched over by his upright, prettily veiled mother and his calm adoring earthly father. None of them carry a trace of the visceral birth struggle, the bloodiness and the pain, the bruised flesh and the low odds of childbirth survival that had surely gripped them for many hours in that cold stable.
As a story for children, the sanitised version is charming. The stable is softly lit over the Christ child, the straw is clean and plentiful, the animals calmly watch over them. But grown-ups rarely never look beyond the children’s version. Yeah, there’s no room at the inn but they’ll be grand and aren’t they getting free stuff anyway. No need for the messy detail.
The sanitised version of nativity story rings increasingly hollow
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Noel Thomas, the then-Fianna Fáil (now Independent Ireland) councillor who said “the inn is full”, has since spoken about being “vilified” for what he described as “standing with my community at the Ross Lake Hotel”. Standing up for a principle is supposed to be uncomfortable, but everything is relative. In a functioning democracy, no one is risking decades of torture in a corpse-strewn basement for giving an interview near a deliberately burnt-out human shelter. Sometimes they just get a higher vote.
Last Christmas, near the site of the original nativity in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, the Lutheran Church placed the baby in a manger of rubble and destruction to reflect the reality of children being born and living in Palestine today. Perhaps many Christians have grown too comfortable with the traditional story if the words can be trotted out so glibly.
Standing up for a principle is often the quiet exhausting dangerous work of a lifetime. Jews fleeing centuries of pogroms and anti-Semitism are entitled to stand up for the only homeland they’ve ever known, to fight for the return of the remaining 100 hostages in Gaza (36 of whom are dead) taken by Hamas in a catastrophic attack on that homeland. But it’s not anti-Semitic to weigh that against the evisceration of tens of thousands of Palestinians, some of whom can be heard raining curses on Hamas in heroic reporting coming out of Gaza. Seven in 10 of the dead are women and children.
Irish interest has always been animated by the notion that we can influence events there, that our UN peacekeepers have helped to hold the line, that Israel was the only democracy in the neighbourhood and that it was buttressed by our US friends with their state-of-the-art arms and air defences. And we had form as peace negotiators.
We also had history, as Mark Regev, a former Netanyahu adviser and ambassador to the UK, wrote under the headline “Why does Ireland hate Israel?” two years ago. In short, he was baffled by Ireland’s super devotion to the Palestinian cause given that both Israel and Ireland were “western democracies born in not dissimilar struggles for independence”. But anti-Semitism plays a part in Ireland’s current “anti-Israel antipathy”, he wrote. “European experience demonstrates that secularisation doesn’t necessarily mean that anti-Semitism dissipates; this oldest of hatreds merely metamorphoses from a focus on deicide to its more modern manifestations”. That from a diplomat might be called crossing a red line.
When I wrote about the numbers of Palestinians displaced since 1948, the response of the Israeli embassy deputy head, Adi Ophir Moaz, in the Letters page was to point to the tens of millions of refugees – including Jews – who hadn’t hung around where they weren’t wanted after the second World War. “Many Arab countries could have absorbed them [Palestinians] a long time ago but the funding that the countries receive through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [Unrwa] incentivises them to keep the status quo and allows them to ‘help their brothers’ and ‘hold the torch’ of opposing the very existence of the state of Israel.”
Their current trajectory is clear. Last August Binyamin Netanyahu and his governing coalition of settler activists, ultra-right nationalists and religious parties approved a new illegal settlement on a Unesco World Heritage Site near Bethlehem, devouring what remains of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem area. In February they declared nine illegal settler outposts in the occupied West Bank as legal under Israeli law.
“No anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of settlements,” said far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. “We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground.” All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967 and encroached on by some 700,000 Israeli settlers – including occupied East Jerusalem – are considered illegal under international law.
The latest government move is to expand settlements and double its population on the occupied Golan Heights, making further encroachments into a war-weary, near defenceless Syria.
Peace to the world.