Walls never work: in the Middle East or in IrelandRobert Fisk, in The Independent: The story of the Protestant 'settlements' in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day 'settlements' in the West Bank...
Robert Kee, still one of the finest popular expositors of 16th-17th century Irish history puts it concisely: [six counties, now 'Northern Ireland'] became subject to the most systematic attempt to plant or settle in Ireland strangers from England and Scotland. This was the so-called Plantation of Ulster'...
There had been previous efforts to colonize barbarous Ireland... 'But all such previous plantations had in the end been failures,' writes Kee. 'Collapsing for lack of human support or capital, or else being physically wiped out by the rebellion of those who had been dispossessed to make room for them.'
This remains Israel's fear: that those Palestinians dispossessed in 1948 will return to take their former lands in what is now the State of Israel, or at least those lands stolen from them in the West Bank after 1967... The Elizabethans settlers came as soldiers who settled. Later Scots Protestants came, like Israelis to the West Bank, as settlers prepared to be soldiers...
Cromwell was to inject a new form of violence into Ireland... The slaughter at Drogheda and Wexford acted as a catalyst of mass fear, much as the killings at Deir Yassin and many other Arab villages in 1948 led to the abandonment or capitulation of hundreds of other Arab towns... By 1688, Catholics held only 22 per cent of the original Gaelic Ireland... Arab-owned land in 'Palestine' is now smaller still, heading inexorably to the mere 14 per cent that the Catholics still clung on to in 1703.
Again, these are not parallel narratives, but unborn ghosts are there. On many occasions, acts of 'terrorism' against the Protestants emerged from landless Catholic tenants who were allowed to work for those who had seized their property. So, later Protestant 'settlements' were surrounded by vast defensive walls, angled with watch-towers and ramparts and gun positions...
But the English and Scots 'settlements' failed in Ireland. Protestant hopes of eternal support from London eventually proved false. And so, what of Israeli hopes of eternal support from Washington? I still don't believe in a one-state solution -- which the Protestant minority will one day have to accept in Ireland, if they have not, subconsciously, already done so -- but colonisation leads only to the graveyard. Walls don't work. Nor 'superior' religions. Nor ethnic cleansing. History, which should be studied as eternally as false hopes, is a great punisher.
