Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • How to Prevent a Brexit ‘Domino Effect’

    As the United Kingdom inches perilously closer to a ‘no deal’ Brexit, Frank Armstrong recalls the European Union’s origins as an antidote to destructive and ill-conceived nationalism, which tore the continent apart for thirty years between 1914 and 1945. He argues that explanations for British exceptionalism should not be reduced to post-imperialist delusions, instead highlighting a long-standing failure to make adequate provision for post-industrial ‘rust belts’, regions witnessing a recrudescence of nationalism right across the continent. He also interprets Brexit as a product of competing nationalistic forces within the U.K., proposing the E.U. should avoid an acrimonious separation, and leave the door ajar for a return. Finally, he identifies necessary reforms to the E.U. Treaty to avoid the very real possibility of a ‘Brexit Domino Effect’ threatening the wider union.

    Community Origins

    At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.’[i] Grey’s foreboding ran contrary to the dominant ‘it’ll be over by Christmas’ view. From that war’s outbreak the continent descended into thirty years of almost continuous violence and instability – with non-combatant civilians often victims of collective punishment.

    At the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919 ascendant ‘Wilsonian’ ideas of democracy and self-determination swept away multicultural empires, (Hapsburg-Austrian, Hohenzollern-German, Romanov-Russian and even Ottoman-Turkish) which for centuries accommodated multiple ethno-linguistic ‘nationalities’, ruled by a transnational aristocratic caste.

    Cobbling together states based on often plastic identities proved problematic almost everywhere, however, as dispersals of nationalities rarely cohered with distinct geographic frontiers. Moreover, many nations possessed insufficient populations to make up viable sovereign entities, engendering dual- (Czechoslovakia[ii]) and multiple- (Yugoslavia) nation-states. Meanwhile, in violation of ‘Wilsonian’ principles of self-determination, the Peacemakers prohibited any unification between Germany and German-speaking Austria.

    Throughout the inter-war years, across Europe, a significant challenge for many governments lay in accommodating German minorities – the volksdeutsche that had settled in Central and Eastern Europe over the course of the Middle Ages – but also others such as Hungarians living beyond their rump state. This poisoned relations between newly emerged countries from the outset, while embedding seemingly implacably hostile minorities within states such as Czechoslovakia, and others.

    Establishing what Benedict Anderson referred to as the ‘imagined community’[iii] of the nation as the basis for a state, also elevated racial notions of a single volk, or people, with ‘blood’ attachments to a particular territory. This further estranged widely scattered, and linguistically heterogeneous, Jewish communities – without a state of their own or any prospect of creating one in Europe – from dominant national groups. Jews became convenient scapegoats, characterised as either bloodsucking-capitalist-Rothschilds, or transnational-Communist-ideologues, depending on political expediency.

    The U.K. was among the few European countries where anti-Semitism was not rife in this period. Indeed, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British Empire committed to ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, to the consternation of its indigenous population. By the 1920s, however, the British were confronting a distinct fraying of imperial bonds (or really bondage), beginning with the concession of Dominion Status to the recalcitrant Irish in 1921, and threatening the ‘Jewel in the Crown’, India, which finally gained independence in 1946.

    A Community to End all Wars

    By 1945 World War II had stained the continent with the blood of almost fifty million. Nazi, and to a lesser extent Soviet and other states’, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide introduced greater ‘national’ homogeneity, with Jews the main victims, but also most of the volksdeutsche were often brutally corralled into the two German states that emerged in the wake of the thirty year conflagration.

    As Europeans drew breath many – including Winston Churchill who coined the term a ‘United States of Europe’[iv] – identified the need for a political entity to safeguard what would have seemed a fragile peace, and confront the encroachment of the Soviet Union – and even the United States. The experience of total war brought by nationalist excesses proved cathartic.

    The European Community, proceeding from the European Coal and Steel Pact of 1951, and culminating in the Treaty of Rome in 1957, might reasonably be held up as the most successful peace process in history, coinciding with, if not incubating, an epoch of unprecedented stability and prosperity for Western Europe at least. Establishing close economic ties could, in the words of French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, ‘make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.’[v]

    Seemingly irreconcilable French and Germans, especially, found common cause in rebuilding their countries and raising the standard of living – with the assistance from the United States through the Marshall Plan. A nascent supranational identity eroded the dominant idea of the nation – along with its implicit racial ideas of a distinctive volk – although any pan-European identity relied more on rational construction than emotional identification.

    Vitally, a hybrid ‘social market’ – an accommodation between capitalism and socialism that emerged across post-war Europe – brought, or coincided with, the so-called ‘Miracle on the Rhine’, or Wirtschaftswunder (‘post-war economic miracle’) in Germany, Les Trente Glorieuses (1946-75) in France and Il Miracolo Economico to Italy. Affection for the European project was nourished by the rising living standards of a substantial majority across Western Europe.

    Under conditions where individual states, in general, sheltered citizens from ‘cradle to grave’ from naked market forces, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour, a Common Market – the defining feature of European Law – worked to the benefit of the majority; at least until the oil shocks of the mid-1970s brought that sustained period of broad-based development to a close, jeopardising an unspoken European social contract.

    The one notable Western European democracy that declined to sign the Treaty of Rome was the U.K.. This ensured the organisation’s legal system was based on the Civil Law tradition of France rather than British Common Law, or a hybrid of both. Importantly also, Charles de Gaulle’s ‘non’ to British membership in 1967, reinforced British exceptionalism: a sense that they were of Europe but not from Europe – an island apart from the continent belonging to an Anglo- or Atlantic- sphere. Thus, when Britain (and Ireland) finally acceded to membership in 1973 it joined an institution whose still recognisable form had already crystallized, and at a less economically dynamic stage in European history.

    Left and Right Opposition

    It is commonly assumed that, from the outset and beyond, it has been the U.K.’s idea of itself as a global Empire that brought aloofness from the European Community.[vi] In fact, a succession of post-war Tory leaders including Winston Churchill, Harold MacMillan, Edward Health, John Major – if not Anthony Eden and Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron and Theresa May to the same extent – have been decidedly pro-European, viewing what became the European Union in 1992 as a guarantor of free trade on the continent. Even the current Tory Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, famously vacillated before urging a ‘leave’ vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum.[vii]

    On the other hand, the Community was initially identified by many on the left in Britain as a Capitalist club, working to the detriment of workers, in cahoots with Uncle Sam. Thus the U.K.’s Post-War Labour government declined an invitation to join the European Coal and Steel Pact in 1951. In response Churchill, then still Tory leader, inveighed against the decision in front of the House of Commons, maintaining that ‘The whole movement of the world is towards an interdependence of nations.’[viii]

    Indeed, from the outset, across Europe, the main opposition to the Community emanated from the radical left, Communist Party and others. But as long as states provided adequately for needy citizens agitation against the Community remained marginal. In the U.K.’s case, the ‘Bennite’[ix] wing of the Labour Party led opposition to membership in 1973, an enduring standpoint in the Party – albeit prominent ‘Bennites’ such as Shadow Chancellor John McDonald now advocate another referendum and a ‘remain’ vote.

    Importantly, the Community’s defining liberalism does not extend to the treatment of the agricultural sector, long protected through trade tariffs and embargos from cheaper exports imports from beyond the continent. To an extent this contradiction was the basis of the Community itself – offering French farmers German prices for their produce brought (or bought) necessary electoral support, as well as guarding against dependence on imports from beyond the continent in the event of another world war.

    The effect has been to preserve millions of small- and medium-sized farms that would otherwise have become commercially unviable. Controversially, however, the Common Agricultural Policy used to suck up to two-thirds of the Community’s budget, and still accounted for almost forty percent in 2018.[x] Moreover, the subsidy regime has proved regressive, rewarding wealthy, including super-wealthy, landowners,[xi] and is insufficiently attentive to the environmental damage of farming systems, including traditional pastoralism that prevents necessary re-afforestation and re-wilding.

    In contrast, the populations of post-industrial regions – ‘rust belts’ – such as the North and Midlands of England, north-east France and elsewhere, have been given little European assistance since much heavy industry has pulled out. Historically these areas offered staunch support for left-wing parties, but loyalties have shifted in recent times, with UKIP and the Brexit Party, as well as the French National Front in particular, gaining traction among working class voters.

    The expansion of the Union into Eastern and Central Europe in the 1990s has also worked to the detriment of these regions, with increased competition for employment in Western Europe, and re-location of multinationals to low-wage Central and Eastern European economies.

    Indeed, the demise of the Soviet Union crippled the ‘hard’ left across the continent, with Communist Parties losing both an important patron, and exemplar. By the 1990s most European socialist parties, including the U.K.’s ‘New’ Labour Party had shifted to a broadly pro-European, and even neo-liberal, outlook.

    An ensuing vacuum has been opportunistically filled by a range of Far Right or nationalist parties, opposed to the supranational Europe project. Populist parties have gained support in economically depressed post-industrial regions, where atavistic appeals are often made to the nation or volk, targeting constituents ill-served by the Common Market.

    Furthermore, since the 1960s most European countries have experienced an influx of overseas migrants, mainly drawn from former colonies. That the Union guarantees the free movement of labour has brought a misleading association with an ensuing multiculturalism. This is despite immigration from beyond Europe being subject to the laws of individuals states, a point affirmed in the Dublin Regulation of 2013 on refugees.[xii] This requires, in most cases, that an asylum seeker’s application is processed in the first EU member state he or she sets foot in.

    Explaining the Referendum Result

    Ironically, it has been elements within the Tory party, the long-standing champion of the free trade the Community brought to the continent, which came to the fore in opposing the Union. The opposition of ‘Shire Tories’ may have come as no surprise, but the referendum also revealed deep antipathy towards the Europe Union in the economically depressed regions of the Midlands and North.[xiii]

    This should have come as no surprise. Since Britain’s entry into the Community heavy industry has continued to depart these regions, helped along by Thatcherite privatisations throughout the 1980s that worked to the benefit of speculators in the City of London. Crucially, the British media focused working class malcontents on the European Union, with constant emphasis on Britain’s heroic role in World War II, and enduring stereotypes of Nazi Germans and cowardly French.

    British working class antipathy towards Europe can also be explained by a lingering – not altogether without foundation – left-wing view that indigenous industry cannot recover under free trade conditions, and without state-aid grants, currently prohibited under European law.

    Moreover, as indicated, the U.K. entered the Community at a stage of economic decline across the continent, and with a sense of unbelonging. Importantly, unlike within the founding states, there is no collective memory to draw on of thirty glorious years of growth and development under European suzerainty.

    Also, the U.K. lay at a remove from the extremes of cathartic bloodletting during World War II. Notwithstanding the experience of the Blitz, and the loss of hundreds-of-thousands of men-under-arms, the country was spared Nazi occupation – the apotheosis of state-sponsored racism.

    Increasingly strident national identities within the U.K. itself now also shape attitudes towards the supra-national institution; on the basis that ‘my enemies enemy is my friend’ Scottish nationalism is identified with a European affiliation, while Northern Ireland Unionism is antipathetic. Thus Brexit signifies, and fuels, a fissuring of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

    Also, strikingly, a majority of English Brexiteers are more concerned with leaving Europe than preserving the Union.[xiv] A willingness to shrink one’s state hardly equates to residual imperialist ambitions.

    Brexit Effect

    It seems Brexit cannot be avoided, and Europe (including the Irish government) should refrain from counter-productive meddling in U.K. politics. Its electorate cast the dye, and recent election results for the European Parliament indicate there are no regrets.[xv] A face-saving resolution can surely be found to the so-called ‘Backstop,’ especially given the U.K. has undertaken to respect the terms of the Common Travel Area,[xvi] allowing for unhindered movement and reciprocal employment opportunities for Irish and U.K. nationals.

    It now appears that both Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have softened their stances on preserving all aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement[xvii], putting it up to the Irish government to offer alternatives. But the uncompromising, and occasionally nationalistic,[xviii] rhetoric of Taoiseach Varadkar and Foreign Minister Coveney leave the minority Irish government vulnerable to attack from current partners Fianna Fáil, and opponents Sinn Féin.

    The total volume of trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic amounted to just over £5 billion in 2016,[xix] suggesting the challenge of equipping the border to check in-coming container traffic is not insurmountable. The key to preventing further Troubles surely lies in addressing the impoverishment and ghettoization of areas such as the Creggan in Derry.

    Of far greater concern for the Republic should be the extent to which trade flows are dependent on the Holyhead ‘land bridge’, rather than through direct links to the continent. Previously, this led to the boorish comment from the new Home Secretary Priti Patel that the threat of food shortages could be used as a weapon in negotiations over the Backstop.[xx]

    Clearly the current Tory leadership, and membership, is hell-bent on ‘delivering’ on Brexit. But their preferred outcome is presumably a compromise deal, but they are at least courting the possibility of crashing out.

    A period beyond the Union would acquaint dyed-in-the-wool Brexiteers – especially those Prosecco-quaffing ‘Shire Tories’ – with a salutary lesson in the perils of life outside a substantial free-trade block. For starters, the prices of many foodstuffs, and beverages, will rise through the weakness of the pound and potential retaliatory tariffs. The Cabinet Office’s leaked Operation Yellowhammer document even anticipates food shortages.[xxi]

    A period of stagflation is on the horizon with many multinational companies poised to pull out. But if a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government were to come to power, it would surely introduce state aids to assist fledgling industries, which might flourish under protectionist conditions, with a weak pound conducive to exports. Whether such a regime could resist a tendency towards over-bureaucratization, historically evident in command economies, remains to be seen. But the alternative of business-as-usual in many regions under E.U. is just as unpalatable to many living there.

    Politically, Brexit may finally prompt the U.K. to settle on a written constitution, the absence of which has brewed such confusion, including the latest prorogation of Parliament. Much of the uncertainty around the Brexit referendum, and beyond, is linked to the absence of a clear text explaining the powers of the various arms of government. Ultimately, it seems likely that a majority in the U.K. will wish to return, but for this to happen undue punishment should be avoided.

    How to Save Europe

    If a ‘take it or leave it’ ‘in/out’ vote had been placed before other European electorates in all likelihood some would have chosen to push the exit button too. Even in Ireland – the beneficiary of disproportionate financial supports due to a substantial agricultural sector – two recent referendums on extending the European treaty have yielded negative votes, only reversed after clamorous support from the main political parties and mainstream media.

    Likewise, the French and Dutch electorates rejected the European Constitution in 2005,[xxii] but were ignored, while the populations of both Switzerland and Norway have repeatedly chosen to remain outside.

    As the poet Micheal O’Siadhail put it: ‘Starred blue flag so dutifully raised, / Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts’[xxiii]: Lacking symbols such as a football team to support, or other singular cultural representations, the European Union has not invented a lasting idea of itself beyond its liberal freedoms. These are now associated with a permissive Globalisation benefiting rapacious and tax-avoiding multinational corporations, and often working to the detriment of working people. Moreover, an extensive and exceedingly well-remunerated[xxiv] E.U. bureaucracy is associated with unnecessary red tape – and not only in the U.K..

    The Brexit vote should give rise to profound questioning of the laws and institutions of the E.U.. Lest we forget, European leaders displayed palpable disregard for the welfare of the Greek and Irish populations during their economic crises; as Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole put it in response to Ireland’s EU/IMF Bailout in 2010:

    There is no European solidarity. And there is not even a genuine sense of self-interest. The sadistic pleasures of punishment have trumped the sensible calculation that an Ireland enslaved by debt is not much use to anyone.[xxv]

    A worldwide economic crisis impoverished many parts of the continent, and the E.U. became an agent of a doctrinaire austerity, often to the benefit of speculators.

    What it means to be ‘European’

    For the European Union to develop lasting legitimacy among a new generation – increasingly removed from the bloodletting if the first half of the twentieth century – it needs to be seen to do more than maintain the liberty to move goods, services, capital and labour. It should inspire loyalty by guaranteeing basic socio-economic rights, including inter alia basic sustenance, a dwelling, health and education, and defend human rights violations in countries such as Spain – where draconian measures curb freedom of expression, and have led to outrageous prison sentences being handed down to Catalan separatists for having the temerity to hold a referendum.

    This requires a re-negotiation of the Treaty, along with abandonment of grandiose notions of a European super-state, and army. It could involve the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into E.U. law. We also need to see far greater institutional accountability, with all forms of lobbying being completely transparent, and outlandish salary scales re-assessed. The Commission ought to be democratised, with Commissioners perhaps being elected from a Europe-wide list, instead of positions being in the gift of national governments – resulting in political ‘fixers’ such as our own Commissioner Phil Hogan being promoted without democratic oversight.

    Far greater burden- (and benefit-) sharing of refugees is also required – meaning the Dublin Regulation should be scrapped. This would take pressure of states such as Italy and Greece that have had to accommodate a disproportionate share.

    Our ‘European’ identity should be disentangled from blood and a Judeo-Christian heritage; instead being a European should be equated with taking pride in one’s region’s culture and history, while holding a curiosity for others, available to visit via a continental rail network that is a unifying-symbol of progress. To this end, legislation offering all eighteen-year-old-Europeans a free Inter-rail pass is to be lauded.[xxvi]

    A European identity should become modern in the sense of understanding global environmental responsibilities; along with recognising that a certain income threshold is required for human flourishing, beyond which gains are marginal.

    A failure to reform is likely to result in a ‘Brexit Domino Effect’, with states such as Italy, Hungary and Poland succumbing to Populist, anti-EU political parties. A progressive supra-national alternative to inward-looking nationalism must be offered, but if states are unwilling to accede to a greater focus on environmental protection, human rights, income support and inclusivity then these should be permitted to leave, or be shown the door, and face the harsh realities of life outside the Union, just like the U.K..

    There is much worth saving about the European ideal. In particular, as we stare down the barrel of an environmental crisis threatening humanity’s very survival, we require an E.U.-led Green New Deal, including reform to the CAP so as to make it more equitable and focused on environmental protection.

    Europe can be a beacon to the rest of the world, and the development of a symbiotic relationship with nature can inspire a new generation, countering obsolete nationalist ideas of racial belonging.

    Let us leave the light on also, and the door ajar, to allow the U.K. to return, whether United or not.

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    [i] [/efn_note]Viscount Grey of Fallodon: Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, New York, 1925, p. 20[/efn_note]

    [ii] At least in name. There were also German, Ruthenian (Ukrainian) and Hungarian minorities, as well as Jews drawn from different nationalities, along with a substantial partially nomadic Romany community.

    [iii] Benedict Anderson Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London, Verso, 1983, pp.6-7.

    [iv] Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Made History, Hodder, London, 2015, p.301

    [v] ‘The Schuman Declaration’ May 9th, 1950, https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day/schuman-declaration_en.

    [vi] Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Britain clings to imperial nostalgia as Brexit looms’, Washington Post, January 4th, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/04/britain-clings-imperial-nostalgia-brexit-looms/.

    [vii] ‘Jessica Elgtot, Secret Boris Johnson column favoured UK remaining in EU’, The Guardian, October 16th, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/16/secret-boris-johnson-column-favoured-uk-remaining-in-eu

    [viii] Ibid, Johnson, p.300.

    [ix] Followers of the Labour politician Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn 1925-2014.

    [x] ‘Common Agricultural Policy: Key graphs & figures’ https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/sites/agriculture/files/cap-post-2013/graphs/graph1_en.pdf, European Commission, July, 2019.

    [xi] George Monbiot, ‘The one good thing about Brexit? Leaving the EU’s disgraceful farming system’, The Guardian, October 10th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/10/brexit-leaving-eu-farming-agriculture.

    [xii] Regulation (EU) No 604/2013, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32013R0604

    [xiii] Untitled, ‘EU Referendum Results’, Financial Times, 2016, https://ig.ft.com/sites/elections/2016/uk/eu-referendum/

    [xiv] Frank Armstrong ‘An Irish Poet Attains Greatness’, Cassandra Voices, August 31st, 2018, http://cassandravoices.com/history/an-irish-poet-attains-greatness/.

    [xv] Ashley Kirk and Josh Wilson, ‘EU election UK results and maps: Brexit Party wins nine of 12 regions, Lib Dems triumph in London’, The Telegraph, May 28th, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/28/european-eu-election-results-2019-uk-maps-brexit-party/

    [xvi] Untitled, ‘Johnson tells Varadkar that Common Travel Area will remain after Brexit’, August 20th, 2019, RTÉ, https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0819/1069694-varadkar-johnson/.

    [xvii] Katya Adler, ‘Brexit: Is EU softening over Withdrawal Agreement?’, BBC August 27th, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49475117.

    [xviii] Juno McEnroe, ‘Varadkar: United Ireland possible in hard Brexit’, Irish Examiner, July 27th, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/varadkar-united-ireland-possible-in-hard-brexit-939785.html.

    [xix] Untitled, ‘Trade across the Irish border’, February 26th, 2018, Fullfact, https://fullfact.org/europe/irish-border-trade/

    [xx] Untitled, ‘Patel comments on no-deal Brexit in Ireland criticised’, BBC, December 7th, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europe-46488479.

    [xxi] Rowena Mason, ‘No-deal Brexit: key points of Operation Yellowhammer report’, The Guardian, August 18th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/18/no-deal-brexit-key-points-of-operation-yellowhammer-report.

    [xxii] Untitled, ‘Dutch say ‘devastating no’ to EU constitution’, The Guardian, June 2nd, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/02/eu.politics

    [xxiii] Frank Armstrong ‘An Irish Poet Attains Greatness’, Cassandra Voices, August 31st, 2018, http://cassandravoices.com/history/an-irish-poet-attains-greatness/

    [xxiv] Bruno Waterfield, ‘10,000 European Union officials better paid than David Cameron’ The Telegraph, 21 May, 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10847979/10000-European-Union-officials-better-paid-than-David-Cameron.html

    [xxv] Fintan O’Toole, ‘Abysmal deal ransoms us and disgraces Europe’, Irish Times, 29th of November, 2010, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/abysmal-deal-ransoms-us-and-disgraces-europe-1.683289

    [xxvi] Alexander Sims, ‘EU plans to give free Interrail pass to every 18-year-old in Europe on their birthday’, The Independent, September 30th, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/interrail-passes-free-eu-parliament-debate-europe-train-tickets-a7339466.html.

  • Occupied Territories Bill: Government Defies Dáil Majority Leaving the Jaber Family to their Fate

    On a crisp, sunny morning in Hebron in January of this year my friend Atta Jaber tells me: ‘The settlers have what they wanted and Randina sits on a chair.’

    Atta resembles a Kerry farmer, one in particular comes to mind: the late Sam Brown from Maharees in West Kerry. He is sinewy, with a mahogany-coloured face, and a mischievous twinkle in dark Arabic eyes, revealing a profound gentleness of soul.

    Atta is also a farmer, whose family land of fifty-eight dunums (one acre is the equivalent of four dunam) spans both sides of Route 60, outside Hebron in the West Bank. This land is his vocation and passion, and the overwhelming source of the family’s food.

    His wife Randina used to work on the land from 5am every morning. He confides: ‘Randina has green fingers and made everything grow!’

    Today, Atta’s farm house has only four metres of land surrounding it and some eight dunums at the bottom of a steep hill. The white plastic chairs outside the back door are still there for chat, tea and cigarettes in the sun. But the soul of the Jabers has been uprooted. Randina sits on a chair now for long periods of time. The state of Israel has confiscated forty-eight of the fifty-six dunums of which they own the title deeds.

    I first met Atta in early January, 2010, while volunteering with EAPPI in Hebron. We received a call from him saying settlers had arrived in three large buses, and were on his land with picks and shovels, guns slung over their shoulders.

    As ever with settler incursions and attacks, they were accompanied by heavily armed Israeli military personnel. In randomly banging their picks and shovels into the ground, they were making a statement: Atta’s land was now their land. One teenage settler shouted out to say I was a Nazi.

    Later, while discussing what happened, Atta rhetorically asked: ‘Why did Randina marry me? What kind of a life does she have here with me?’

    The family home had been occupied by either settlers or the Israeli army on three separate occasions by 2010. During one period, the family was permitted to remain in a part of their home, while the military occupied the rest.

    In the intervening years the settlers continued to display a sense of entitlement over the land, which they claim Abraham gave to the Jewish people. Year after year they ripped out the Jaber family’s irrigation pipes; then they trampled on the crops.

    Atta and Randina would repair and re-plant, again and again and again. The land was the source of their food after all.

    In the last two years three members of Jaber’s family have seen their homes on the land bulldozed and demolished. One of Atta’s brothers now rents an apartment in Hebron city. His food and income has disappeared.

    Forty-eight of the original fifty-six dunams have been seized by the state of Israel. Parts of the remaining Jaber land can only be accessed with an Israeli permit. The last time they worked that part they required a permit for access. They went ahead and planted the ground, and continued to water it, but were then denied a permit when it came to the harvest. The produce was seized by settlers, which could have easily found its way onto an Irish dinner plate.

    The remaining eight dunams accessible to the Jabers lies at the bottom of a hill. Randina has developed asthma and is unable to walk the route. That illness also means she cannot be prescribed other medication to ease a damaged soul. Randina sits silently and for long periods now, and as Atta says goodbye he adds: ‘I stand beside her.’

    As I am leaving, Atta then tells me he is returning home to tend to his newly planted cauliflower crop on the remaining eight dunums. I said I hoped they would become really, really big cauliflowers. What more could I say? I wish I could help him get his land back, but only the combined will of the governments of the world have the power to bring that about.

    Atta and Randina have a deep and enduring love for one another, but the land sustaining their bodies and souls has been brutally seized by the state of Israel.

    This is the human impact of illegal settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, and not an isolated case. Since the U.N. Declaration in 1949 establishing the state of Israel, dividing Palestine in half, Palestinians were left with 22% of their former land.[i] That proportion of historic Palestine was allocated by the U.N. to other Arab states, Jordan and Egypt – the areas of Gaza and the West Bank. These lands, and more, were conquered by Israel during the Six-Day-War of 1967, but were not incorporated into Israel proper.

    Under the Oslo Accords of 1993, Palestinian land was further divided into Areas A, B and C. A part of the West Bank, known as Area C, is now under full Israeli military and civil control. This comprises 60% of the original 22% of land allocated to the indigenous population. Area B is under Palestinian administrative control, but Israeli military occupation.

    Accordingly, advocating for a ‘Two-State Solution’ is now empty rhetoric. The land is being taken, inch-by-inch, and the governments of the world do nothing to prevent Israel’s ongoing violation of international law and human rights.

    Yet according to the Geneva Convention an occupying state cannot move its citizens into the land it occupies. [ii] There are now over six-hundred thousand Israeli citizens living on the Palestinian West Bank.[iii] Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to annex settlements in the West Bank into the state of Israel.[iv]

    An effective non-violent response is urgently needed.

    The Seanad and Dáil recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018.[v] Despite a resounding 75 to 45 majority, with all Opposition Parties voting in favour, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the controversial ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.

    This procedure has been employed in recent times to block a number of Private Member’s Bills. It is clearly undemocratic and potentially unconstitutional.

    Its use also exposes tacit support for Israel’s breach of International Law and human rights. This is consistent with the Irish State’s failure to exchange diplomatic accreditation with the State of Palestine, despite the Dáil and Seanad voting unanimously for recognition in 2014.

    Yet this failure of democracy in Ireland pales in comparison with the tyrannical treatment meted out to Atta Jaber and his family.

     

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    Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.

    [i] See: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/the_west_bank_including_east_jerusalem_and_the_gaza_strip_jan_2019.pdf

    [ii] GENEVA CONVENTION (IV) RELATIVE TO THE PROTECTION OF CIVILIAN PERSONS IN TIME OF WAR (GENEVA CONVENTION IV) Article 49, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/COM/380-600056?OpenDocument or

    https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/Geneva%20Convention%20IV.pdf

    [iii] ‘Btselem’, ‘Statistics on Settlements and Settler Population’, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Updated January 19th, 2019, https://www.btselem.org/settlements/statistics

    [iv] Oliver Holmes, ‘Netanyahu vows to annex Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank’, April 19th, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/07/netanyahu-vows-to-annexe-jewish-settlements-in-occupied-west-bank,

    [v] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2018/6/

  • Bull Moose: Talking to the Person Seated Next to You

    Alternative Realities…

    Among the least discussed, but perhaps most important influence of the Digital Age is our tendency to live in bubbles. We no longer have to be rich to live in the equivalent of gated communities.

    TV, radio, and the internet provide echo chambers for our beliefs. Sophisticated algorithms deployed by Facebook and Google generally only exposes us to what we agree with. Friends with different opinions? Don’t worry, Facebook has it figured out. You won’t find them on your feed any longer. An article in Google News about Sudan? Not a chance. Google determined that based on my geography and preference for inane sports news this is unlikely to appeal to me.

    This is important, not least because we spend hours each day glued to our smartphones. What we see is curated for us and controlled by a handful of corporations.

    I was reminded of this recently on a flight to Atlanta from Chicago, when I struck up a conversation with a man sitting next to me, a doctor, who, despite holding very different world views to my own, made for a great travel companion.

    We shared stories, asked questions and even argued about the nature of America’s divided politics. It was entirely refreshing. As we left the plane, he thanked me, noting he hadn’t had such a meaningful chat with a stranger in years, despite being a regular traveller. Why? Because most of us hardly look up from our smartphones, even to say hello.

    Politics today is an extension of these echo chambers. We hear what we want to hear. That is nothing new – we have long preferred to block out whatever hurts us, or flies in the face of our world view. What is new is that we no longer need to block out anything ourselves.

    Were I to listen to talk show radio, turn my TV to Fox News and read articles on Breitbart, supplemented by Google or Facebook curation, I am likely to agree with Trump’s reality. There, immigrants are invading our Southern border and taking our jobs; liberals are down with killing third trimester babies; global warming is a hoax; the economy has never been better; and we’re making America great again.   Who is to say I am wrong? It is my reality.

    If I listen to NPR, switch to CNBC/CNN and read the Washington Post or the New York Times, with a little help from social media, I am likely to see Trump as a mean-spirited bully, who is out of touch with reality, my reality. There immigrant children are needlessly torn from their families; conservative men are taking rights away from women; the environment is being destroyed; the economy is pumped up on steroids by virtue of a tax cut for corporations; and only the next election can save America. Who is to say I am wrong? It is my reality.

    These alternative realities are borne out in poll numbers, which have been remarkably consistent over the last few years. Trump’s approval rating hovers around forty-percent, no matter what he does. Why?  Mainly because in this ‘alternative reality’, the truth is hard to distinguish.

    Fake news does exist – except its not fake. It is real news written from a point of view that serves the interest of their owners/advertisers, and, yes, the consumers of news. It is only fake because it is not unbiased, objective news. Instead of fake news we ought to call it biased, lazy news.

    I include lazy as well as biased, because news such as a natural disaster occurring doesn’t have an agenda, nor is it always mean-spirited. Often what we get is simply lazy journalism, jumping on immediately apparent realities that gets more eyeballs today, even if it will not stand the test of time.

    A case in point. For those who read the previous edition of Bull Moose, what about this for an attention-grabbing headline ‘GOP Equates Abortion to Holocaust,’ which, for anyone who took the time to read the Bill, is what they did. Except journalists rarely read a Bill, they merely see its news value, and talk about how restrictive it is.

    By being constantly in the news, Trump has attained mastery over media in today’s America. Rather than blame him, however, journalists, and the public, should look themselves in the mirror. Being informed is a choice we make, no matter how difficult it is. This requires us to be citizen journalists, on a continuous quest for truth, and discerning about who and what we believe.

    It should also involve talking to our neighbors. Engaging in free and open dialogue is a hard-earned democratic entitlement. Let’s step out of comfort zones and try talking to the person sitting next to us.

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  • The New Experiment in Gaeltacht Education

    In 2016 the Department of Education and Skill’s outlined its latest scheme for Gaeltacht (designated Irish-language) districts: ‘Policy on Gaeltacht Education 2017 – 2022’. It aims to reverse the adoption  of English as the primary language of these areas, a process which is pretty well complete.

    Irish speakers are now in a minority in twenty out of the twenty-six ‘Gaeltacht Language Planning Areas’, often with numbers which are quite miniscule.[i]

    The new education scheme is, nonetheless, being implemented throughout the defined districts. Each school’s Management Committee was offered the choice of becoming a designated ‘Gaeltacht School’, and 106 out of 133 primary schools agreed, as did 27 of the 28 secondary schools at that time, with the last one joining in subsequently. [ii]

    Their participation is entirely unsurprising, however, given it qualifies any school for extra teaching staff and other resources to implement an enhanced Irish-language curriculum, as well as to teach the general curriculum through Irish. Remarkably, no English at all is taught to any children for the first two years of their primary schooling.

    This plan will fail as all such Revival of Irish plans have done, and for the same reason. They derive from a defective belief that official action can reverse the people’s choice to speak English. It is simply impossible to sustain a separate language community as a relic of the past among an overwhelmingly English-speaking nation, even assuming the parents of the children concerned are actually seeking this.

    Is this a new insight? Hardly! In 1963 ‘The Final Report of The Commission on the Restoration of the Irish Language’ was clear:

    The preservation and strengthening of the Gaeltacht, therefore, must not be approached as if it were an attempt to preserve in one corner of the country an aboriginal reservation to remind us of the past…

    In any case, the new Gaeltacht Education Policy is not a scheme to preserve a Gaeltacht, but to re-invent one. It is a sort of linguistic Jurassic Park experiment, where the captive school children are expected to mutate into an Irish-speaking tribe after a spell inside the Department of Education’s fantasy laboratory.

    Of course it won’t happen. Today’s infants will emerge in due course from their Irish-medium ‘Gaeltacht’ designated schools as native English-speakers. As adults they will live their lives in the English-speaking world, of which they are already a part.

    In 1990 Reg Hindley the author of The Death of the Irish Language painted a revealing picture of children in Gaeltacht areas:

    the problem is not usually one of downright mendacity, much as it feels it when being assured by respectable people in positions of considerable trust that the children in their area all speak Irish excellently and are devoted to it, whereas the infants in the playground are playing loudly in English and the teenagers of whom one enquired directions where chatting in English when interrupted. [iii]

    But the account of a deviant Sassenach was denounced by Irish language enthusiasts, and his research dismissed with contumely.[iv]

    Nonetheless, in 2017 a Department of Education report on an Achill Island school bluntly stated that ‘the pupils speak only English.’[v]

    In 2018 another Department report on the new Gaeltacht Education scheme itself said: ‘There are significant challenges in encouraging teenagers to speak Irish among themselves in social situations in the school environment.’[vi]

    Thus, it seems the schoolchildren chat in their home language as soon as they can get away from their teachers. What a surprise!

    In 2004 a ‘Study of Gaeltacht Schools’ carried out for COGG (the ‘Council for Gaeltacht and Gaelscoil Education’) said that ‘English is the main language used by pupils in normal conversational interactions in the vast majority of Gaeltacht schools.’

    Subsequently, in 2014, a report by NUIG ‘Analysis of Bilingual Competence – language acquisition among young people in the Gaeltacht” revealed:

    Unbalanced bilingualism or dominant bilingualism is the norm. English is the dominant language since it is the language in which they exhibit greater ability. Irish is the weaker language or it is the weaker language for the majority of pupils … From the point of view of formal linguistics, the majority of pupils function better in English, since it is the language in which they have the greater ability.

    These facts about Irish-language use in Gaeltacht areas is of course well-known to State officials, considering that altering them is the stated purpose of their grand experiment.

    A moral question arises here around using pupils as guinea pigs. On this point, Joe Mac Donncha in the Dublin Review of Books opined:

    One might well ask, at this stage, if it is morally tenable for the state to continue to encourage parents in Gaeltacht communities to raise their children through the medium of Irish when the state itself is aware, or should be aware, that those children will struggle to acquire native-speaker competence in their first language, given the linguistic dynamics of the current Gaeltacht.[vii]

    So why is this still happening? The answer is that it is a matter of a fixed political ideology, and it is in the nature of ideologues that they are immune to external influence, moral or otherwise. And as we know, when social engineers have the power to carry out their schemes, they often acquire a sense of absolute entitlement to do so.

    Spare a thought for the school children concerned who choose to speak English whenever they are able. We may ask what entitles the Department to impose such ‘revivalist’ policies on them especially in many districts that have long since abandoned Irish.

    ‘Saving’ the Irish language may serve the interests of a coterie of enthusiasts, but does anyone care whether or not it benefits the children concerned?

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    [i] Untitled, ‘Cainteoirí laethúla ina mionlach i 20 den 26 ceantar pleanála teanga sa Ghaeltacht – figiúirí nua daonáirimh’, July 20th, 2017, www.tuairisc.ie. https://tuairisc.ie/cainteoiri-laethula-ina-mionlach-i-21-den-26-ceantar-pleanala-teanga-sa-ghaeltacht-figiuiri-nua-daonairimh/

    [ii] Untitled, ‘Na cúiseanna nach dteastaíonn stádas ‘Gaeltachta’ ó 27 scoil sa Ghaeltacht’, May 14th, 2019, www.tuairisc.ie. https://tuairisc.ie/na-cuiseanna-nach-dteastaionn-stadas-gaeltachta-o-27-scoil-sa-ghaeltacht/

    [iii] Reg Hindley, The Death of the Irish Language, Routledge, London, 1990, p.59

    [iv] For example: ‘Buried Alive – A Reply to Reg Hindley’s The Death of the Irish Language’. Dáil Uí Chadhain, 1991

    [v] Unknown, ‘Achill Island pupils ‘speak only English’ The Sunday Times, December 10th, 2017.

    [vi] ‘Schools participating in the Gaeltacht School Recognition Scheme’ September-December 2018, Department of Education and Skills.

    [vii] Joe Mac Donncha, ‘The Death of a language’, Dublin Review of Books, April, 2015

  • The Shadow of Italian Justice

    Nowhere that I have visited has quite the charm of Umbria, Italy’s throbbing green heart, and only land-locked province apart from the Alpine region. Along its horizon, verdant hills culminate in fortified settlements that act as sentinels over fecund valleys, where wheat fields and vineyards have long sustained a saturnine populace. The lumbering waters of the Tiber snaking through the countryside bestow lush fertility, while in the distance the spine of mountains that form the Apennine range cleaves into view.

    The region has strong spiritual traditions: Saint Benedict, who developed the communal model of Western monasticism, hailed from Norcia; while around Assisi Saint Francis saw the divine in all living beings. But inward contemplation has often intertwined with outward savagery, the charming cities bearing the stain of bloodshed from centuries of internecine conflict.

    Just as sweet birdsong contains fierce threats to competitors, so the form and grace of Umbria’s built environment belies the violence of perennial power struggles. Extravagant civic architecture was a form of competitive display between the signorie that ruled those city states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

    First among equals is Perugia, Umbria’s capital and hub. At dusk, imbibing the rising chatter on Piazza IV Novembre, one may assume the light to be eternal, and that the dancing shadows will never give way to the enduring gloom of night.

    Into this setting in 2007 strode an insouciant Amanda Knox, then twenty years of age. Enrolling in Perugia’s Universitá per Stranieri, she realised a dream of studying the Italian language on a semester abroad from her native Seattle, a world apart on the distant west coast of America. A familiar student lifestyle followed in those first weeks of term: falling in love; alcohol and cannabis; the irritations of part-time work as a waitress; all this as she nursed the hope of a career as an interpreter.

    Universitá per Stranieri, Perugia. Image: Daniele Idini ©

    Video footage from the period reveals her as vivacious and quirky, a bundle of mischievous energy whose fair complexion might break a few hearts over the course of her stay. She seemed destined to skip back home to the relative anonymity of grad school, career and family, holding on to fond memories of an old Europe she would rarely, if ever, return to. What lay in store was an altogether different fate, a living nightmare. She retains the role of femme fatale in a film noir that was not of her choosing.

    On November 1st, 2007 British student Meredith Kercher was found dead in the apartment she shared with Knox and two other Italian students. Knox and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were accused of her rape and murder. The prosecution alleged that Kercher had been killed during a sex game gone wrong, with Knox orchestrating proceedings. Crucially, DNA evidence linked Knox to a knife the prosecution claimed could have been the murder weapon. But this evidence was found inadmissible when independent forensic experts found a strong likelihood of contamination of the DNA, leading to Knox and Sollecito’s successful appeal in 2011, ending their incarceration. They were definitively exonerated in 2015 by the Italian Supreme Court. In the meantime, a serial offender, Rudy Guede, was found guilty of the crime and is currently serving a reduced sentence after an early admission of guilt, based on incontrovertible DNA evidence and a confession after he had fled to Germany, from where he was extradited back to Italy.

    The circumstance of Meredith Kercher’s horrifying demise gave rise to a mystery play, in which the two main characters are removed from the scene of the awful attack. As the plot unfolds we encounter another articulation of evil no less sinister than that which prompted the fatal assault.

    It involved a battle of wills, and wits, between Amanda Knox and her prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, whose bizarre conjectures suggests perverse imaginings. He had been revealed as a fantasist before his attention was drawn to the pretty American student ‘inappropriately’ kissing her boyfriend outside the crime scene. In 2001, the same Mignini, as Perugia prosecutor, had ‘identified’ a satanic sect that supposedly killed women for black masses, which he linked to the unsolved ‘Monster of Florence’ serial murder case. To that he end, he arrested twenty people all of whom were, like Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, completely exonerated.

    In the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox we meet an unrepentant Mignini, who speaks of his fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The pipe he sports seems in homage to the Victorian sleuth. It is unsurprising to discover this taste for fantasy fiction, and characterisations of extreme evil. Did he cast himself as the English gentleman – the ‘dandy’ long revered in Italy – defending an idealised damsel? In such imagining Kercher had been killed at the instigation of the promiscuous and drug-addled Knox, who was portrayed as a sinister witch.

    We may speculate that Mignini developed a sordid fascination with both Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox. A devious and enduring campaign against Knox might suggest a Freudian sublimation.

    Mignini’s persecution of Knox and Sollecito could be dismissed as a sinister aberration of Italian justice, but for the extent to which his theories found favour among many Italians, stoked by an international tabloid media that latched on to every gruesome conjecture. The prosecution manipulated damaging evidence against Knox, in particular, before the court of international opinion, and a character of ‘Foxy Knoxy’, previously her MySpace handle, was invented. To this end, a policeman masquerading as a doctor lied to her saying she was HIV positive, and encouraged her to write a diary outlining her sexual history, which was then stolen and passed on to the media.

    In the documentary Mignini makes the startling boast that ‘normally people say that ‘Nobody is a prophet in his own country’, but that’s not what I experienced’. Casting himself as a Savonarola for our time, he sought to cast away the sins of the world, sins he believed were personified in Amanda. The backdrop to this was a widespread feeling of moral decline in Italy, especially identified with the then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s lewd antics. But Mignini’s self-righteousness recalls Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 94’: ‘Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds’.

    Mark Williams suggests that a mythology ‘furnishes a culture with a total worldview, interpreting and mirroring back everything that that culture finds significant’. Contemporary Italian culture is still steeped in mythology, whose living presence is emphasised by the ubiquity of ancient ruins. Perugia itself possesses an architectural legacy stretching back to the ancient Etruscans.

    The Etruscan Arch or Arch of Augustus, Perugia. Image: Daniele Idini

    Italy was only unified in 1861. The following day, the politician and intellectual Massimo d’Azeglio famously said: ‘We have made Italy and, now, we must make the Italians.’ The formidable culture of Ancient Rome was drawn on in particular. For example, the term ‘fascist’ derives from the Latin word ‘fascis’ meaning bundle. ‘Fasces’ is a bound bundle of rods, which had its origin in the Etruscan civilisation and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolised a magistrate’s power and jurisdiction.

    That Roman inheritance still exerts influence on the Italian collective unconscious, often importing an ideal of woman as objective beauty and passive agent. Laurens van der Post contrasts the Ancient Greek attitude to women, expressed in Homer’s Odyssey, with that of the Roman, expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘It is precisely because this journey of Odysseus and his reunion with the eternal feminine that is Penelope, is the blueprint of the Greek story that made Greece, I believe, more creative than Rome.’

    Van der Post contrasts Odysseus, who returns to his wife after twenty years of exile, with Aeneas – a Trojan who becomes the first hero of Rome – and symbolically rejects ‘the eternal feminine’, not once but twice. Firstly, in choosing to carry his father Anchises rather than his then wife Creusa, on his back out of a burning Troy; and afterwards, in his memorable rejection of Dido’s love in favour of patriarchal duty.

    After many trials Aeneas and his fellow surviving Trojan refugees land in Latium in Italy. There, he has learnt on a mystical Underworld journey, a (male) ancestor will establish the city of Rome. To bring this about, however, he must first subdue the local tribes. Defeating their champion Turnus in mortal combat he wins the hand of the virginal Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, king of the Latins. Critically, Virgil describes her as, ‘the cause of all this suffering, her lovely eyes downcast.’ The unashamed sensuality of Amanda Knox – kissing inappropriately outside a crime scene – was an insult to a Roman ideal of downcast loveliness.

    Knox and  Sollecito – he as collateral damage it seems – became the victim of Mignini, the latter-day Sherlock. In custody for days on end, and without access to lawyers, the young pair were made to sing. Confessions were extracted and subsequently recanted. In the grip of terror, bizarre fictions emerged.

    This is not unusual. Saul M. Kassin describes ‘coerced-internalized false confessions‘, as ‘statements made by an innocent but vulnerable person, who, as a result of exposure to highly suggestive and misleading interrogation tactics, comes to believe that he or she may have committed the crime – a belief that is sometimes supplemented by false memories.’ Kassin cites numerous US cases where innocent parties implicate themselves in crimes in which subsequent DNA evidence definitively reveals they had no involvement. One such instance was the notorious Central Park jogger case, in which a number of young men confessed to a crime and were found guilty, before the real perpetrator came forward and admitted to the crime, saying he acted alone, with DNA evidence corroborating his account.

    Amanda Knox is often criticised for implicating Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese boss of the bar she worked in at the time. But who among us knows the scenarios that would spill forth to end a long and tortuous interrogation, after probable trauma in the wake of a horrific murder? The important principle is that confessions extracted under duress are entirely unreliable as evidence, and unworthy of consideration. Any charge of conspiracy over the false accusation should never have been leveled against her.

    As far back as 1908 Hugo Munsterberg  wrote about a Salem witch confession involving ‘illusions of memory’ in which ‘a split-off second personality began to form itself with its own connected life story built up from the absurd superstitions which had been suggested to her through the hypnotising examination.’ A witch hunt will find “absurd superstitions”, just as a man with a hammer sees nails.

    Jung’s conception of evil is useful for examining the aftermath of Meredith Kercher’s murder and rape. His ideas diverge from the Catholic doctrine of Privatio Boni, which identifies evil simply with the absence of good and not as an independent and eternal phenomenon. In contrast, Jung argues: ‘Evil does not decrease by being hushed up as a non-reality or as mere negligence of man. It was there before him, when he could not possibly have had a hand in it.’ Furthermore, he warned:  ‘The future of mankind very much depends upon the recognition of the shadow’. The serpent may crawl into the most rarefied of environments.

    Shadows in Perugia. Image: Daniele Idini

    The evil evident in Rudy Guede’s offence is a sadly familiar story of a dislocated childhood, and a spiral of nefarious deeds, ending in a heinous crime. But Mignini’s actions appear to represent denial of the shadow. He comes across as virtuous – disciplined, abstemious, family-orientated –  but he may have failed to countenance an evil lurking within his own nature. This may have led him to build a narrative out of diabolical imaginings, which nearly destroyed the lives of two young people, who will never fully recover from the ordeal.

    Jung saw the mechanism of the shadow as accounting for the persecution of Jews through history. He argued that Christians scapegoated Jews in response to their own rejection of the real meaning of Christ. Mignini’s reign of terror fits into a wider phenomenon of targeting individuals for broader perceived failings in a society. The origin of contemporary racism is also located in the inability of communities to live up to standards some members expect, with contagion blamed on an internal enemy.

    The Meredith Kercher case became a cause celebre in early twenty-first century in Italy. Television channels featured nightly debates which voyeuristically picked apart the details, while the personalities of the protagonists were relentlessly scrutinised and their images placed on constant display. One may assume it suited Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which controlled most television channels, to saturate the public mind with the protracted case, distracting from the endemic corruption, which would ultimately bring down his government in 2011, the same year as Knox’s successful appeal.

    Moreover, it is commonly believed in Italy that official explanations cannot be relied on. The suspicion that there is always something going on behind, ‘dietro’, the surface, produces the common word ‘dietrologia‘, used to refer to a conspiracy. The bizarre details of the Knox-Sollecito case fed a veritable industry in competing interpretations. Besides, a liberal critique could be countered by the racial dimension: the black African languishing in jail, while the white American escapes, plus ca change.

    Many Italians are still unwilling to contemplate that the whole Knox-Sollecito prosecution was indeed a bizarre invention. After all, to do so casts grave doubts over the integrity of their entire legal system. This has parallels with the unwillingness of Lord Denning to countenance the ‘appalling vista’ of police criminality in the Birmingham Six, wrongfully found guilty of the Birmingham pub bombings, who spent sixteen years in prison before the Court of Appeal quashed their conviction in 1991. The ‘Umbrian vista’ of a serious miscarriage of justice is still questioned by many Italians.

    Douglas Preston argued that the answer for this denial of an unwillingness to recognise a manifest injustice lies in the Italian concept of face (‘la faccia‘) ‘whose deep and pervasive power most Anglo-Saxons who have not lived in a Mediterranean country have a hard time appreciating.’

    V

    Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson ‘selfie’, Dublin, February 2018

    I met Amanda Knox and her boyfriend the writer Christopher Robinson when they visited Dublin last month. They had arrived in advance of Amanda’s appearance on the Ray D’Arcy Show, her first television interview outside the United States since her exoneration in 2015.

    Like most people, I had taken a passing interest in what seemed a bizarre case, piqued more by the Umbrian backdrop to the crime scene than the lurid storylines. In truth, I had not given serious consideration to the guilt or innocence of the protagonist, and only engaged with the case when I met a person whose nature seemed entirely unfitted for the role of psychotic murderess. The more I read, the more my intuition was confirmed.

    The protagonists in high-profile cases seem unreal until you actually meet them, or not, as is the case with most of the self-anointed true-crime experts, who search Amanda Knox’s every gesture for ‘signs’ of guilt; bestowing credibility on evidence that was not only inadmissible, but may have been part of a sinister conspiracy.

    What is most striking about Amanda is an outgoing disposition, a West Coast woman with plenty of spunk. She and Christopher are a gregarious pair, at ease in the territory of literature, philosophy and languages, the last of which is her specialism. Surprisingly, she gives no impression of bitterness, even towards Italy. Perhaps it is still that failure to play the role of downcast Lavinia bemoaning her fate which evokes suspicion, but why should she restrain a natural joie de vivre?

    Nor does she shy away from recalling her experiences: casually dropping in a mention of the aubergine – or ‘egg plant’ – provided in prison; or how she earned the respect of illiterate inmates by writing letters on their behalf (in return at one point a Neapolitan gang pulled her out of a brawl that was getting nasty). Nonetheless, she has admitted to suicide ideation during four years behind bars. Sharing cells with hardened criminals for four years for a crime she did not commit provides a perspective few of us gain.

    On their trip I accompanied the couple on a hike along Howth Head, during which she revealed herself as an animal lover, greeting every pooch and kitty as if they were long lost friends. Travelling by train I became conscious of a few gawkers, mostly Italian tourists, but this did not interrupt her flow. She refuses to cower before unsubstantiated accusations. Understandably, between Amanda and Christopher humour has become a safety valve, though a lifetime of being the butt of cheap jokes cannot be an easy lot.

    Following her release she took a degree and then worked as a journalist for a local newspaper under a pseudonym. Now she uses her unchosen fame judiciously, advocating on behalf of the Innocence Project in the United States, and writing for Vice magazine, among others. Ideologically, she is left-liberal and opposes President Trump, despite his support for her cause. I can envisage her becoming a politician herself one day.

    The monster of Giuliano Mignini’s imagining is still at large in the obscure regions of virtual reality, and Amanda Knox seems likely to be pursued by vengeful furies all her life. She told me she receives death threats on a daily basis. In the anonymous chambers of social media she still evokes an outrage proving that mud, no matter how unearned, always sticks. A cursory search on Twitter for #AmandaKnox reveals an array of hateful commentaries. Yet she is free – free of guilt and free-spirited.

    From these exacting trials she bears wounds that will never heal, and a life sentence of having to defend herself against unsupported accusations. From a depth of suffering she emerges as a hero to anyone wrongfully accused; to women who are attacked for unashamed sensuality; for those who embrace life and do not succumb to despair. Like the rest of us, she has made mistakes, but her life experiences give her rare insights.

    The Knox-Sollecito case exposed wider failing in the Italian justice system – 4 million Italians since the Second World War have been falsely charged with criminal offences. That Giuliano Mignini and his jackbooted Squadra Mobile remain in positions of authority suggests the endurance of fascist attitudes in the administration of justice. Widespread corruption did not begin or end with Silvio Berlusconi, as Michael Day puts it: ‘Perhaps Italians should start looking in the mirror rather than blaming everything on one brilliant but unscrupulous entrepreneur.’ The octogenarian’s apparently impending return to power might be interpreted as a symptom rather than a cause.

    As part of that self-assessment embedded mythologies might be explored. Can the sympathetic vision of St. Francis displace the judgmental attitude of latter-day Savonarolas? Might the spirit of the exiled Roman poet Ovid return to metamorphose the relationship with the ‘eternal feminine’? His ‘Kind Earth Mother’ asks:

        Do I deserve this? Is this the reward
    for my unflagging truthfulness? For bearing
    year after year, the wounds of plough and mattock?
    And for providing flocks with pasturage,
    the human race with ripened grain to eat,
    the gods with incense burning on their altars?

    At least the many enlightened Italians I know can draw solace from Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s belated exoneration by the Italian Supreme Court. That court also upheld a prison sentence against Silvio Berlusconi in 2013, which is now preventing him from returning to the office of Prime Minister. Many observers consider the senior Italian judiciary as a crucial bulwark against erosion of democracy and the Rule of Law.

    Perhaps the bereft family of Meredith Kercher may some day come to believe Amanda Knox’s protestations of innocence. Their grief must have been considerably heightened by Giuliano Mignini’s handling of the case. One suspects that any process of coming to terms with their loss will include some form of reconciliation with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.

    RIP Meredith Kercher.

  • Bull Moose: Recalling Roe v. Wade in the face of Alabama’s ‘Human Protection Act’

    Earlier this month Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into law ‘The Alabama Human Protection Act’ passed by both the Alabama House and Senate entitled. This law, which does not take immediate effect, bans all abortions except:

    …activities if done with the intent to save the life or preserve the health of an unborn child, remove a dead unborn child, to deliver the unborn child prematurely to avoid a serious health risk to the unborn child’s mother, or to preserve the health of her unborn child. The term [abortion] does not include a procedure or act to terminate the pregnancy of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, nor does it include the procedure or act to terminate the pregnancy of a woman when the unborn child has a lethal anomaly.

    The law is now the most restrictive law outlawing abortion in the United States. But punishments for doctors performing procedures contrary to it could lead to a custodial sentence of up to ninety-nine years.

    It appears many have not actually taken the time to read the law. As is the case with most laws, hysteria makes more waves than actual discussion and it is no different in this case. It is worth taking a moment to check and see exactly what Alabama achieves.

    The law recognizes that a person is, ‘A human being, specifically including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.’  The law is designed to protect that human life because,

    In the United States Declaration of Independence, the principle of natural law that “all men are created equal” was articulated. The self-evident truth found in natural law, that all human beings are equal from creation, was at least one of the bases for the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the American civil rights movement. If those movements had not been able to appeal to the truth of universal human equality, they could not have been successful…

    It is estimated that 6,000,000 Jewish people were murdered in German concentration camps during World War II; 3,000,000 people were executed by Joseph Stalin’s regime in Soviet gulags; 2,500,000 people were murdered during the Chinese ‘Great Leap Forward.’ in 1958; 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970s; and approximately 1,000,000 people were murdered during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. All of these are widely acknowledged as Crimes Against Humanity. By comparison, more than fifty million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin’s gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined.

    What the Holocaust, or Pol Pot’s purges have to do with abortion or an unborn fetus is unclear. It is equally unclear where the number of fifty million abortions comes from – the mind boggles that Alabama is using a national statistic to justify a specifically Alabama law.

    It is really unclear why this law quotes from the Declaration of Independence, which is a statement of principles not an actual law or part of any American Jurisprudence. Indeed, Justice Anton Scalia, among the most conservatives judges to have served on the Supreme Court, was fond of heckling any student or lawyer who cited the Declaration as precedent.

    In short, this law was written by an individual or individuals who knows nothing about the laws that govern this nation, passed by lawmakers that seemingly didn’t read it – even though the legislation is actually only about four pages in length – and signed off by a Governor who wants to make a political statement.

    Now for some real law. Roe v Wade (and its counterpart Planned Parenthood v. Casey) established that the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental ‘right to privacy’ that protects a woman’s right to have an abortion.  This ‘right’ is not absolute however, and must be balanced by the government’s interest in protecting a woman’s health and protecting prenatal health. That’s the law as it stands: women have a fundamental right. This is the important part: her right may be balanced by interests of government or the health of the fetus but is the woman’s right not the government’s or the fetus’s.

    Alabama’s law takes away that right almost fully, and only recognizes the interests of the government and the fetus. For that reason alone the law cannot last.

    There has been much ink spilled over this law and many more tweets. The President and many Republicans have distanced themselves from the law stating, in effect, that it goes too far. Governor Ivey is also rumored to have said she does not expect the law to be upheld by the Supreme Court.

    This brings us to the twofold crux of the matter: first, we have a law that is being passed not for the sake of women but for the government’s interest in preventing abortion. This is a big leap for a Political Party that has at its base a philosophy of endeavouring to keep government out of people’s lives.

    Secondly, this law probably wasn’t even written by the people who passed it. It has been a long time since lawmakers in the US have taken the time to write laws. Laws are written by special interest groups and then copied wholesale onto State and Federal Letterhead where they are signed into law by Executives who have taken even less time to read what is in front of them.

    And it has to stop.  Alabama’s brainless and brazen effort to make headlines in their attempt to overturn forty-five years of American Jurisprudence makes a mockery of the process and the people they govern. It is shockingly insensitive to try and relate the Holocaust to the reproductive choices of many American women. This choice is intensely personal and excruciatingly difficult to make. If only this was an isolated event. In fact, this happens at all levels if State and Federal Government.

    It is time for American lawmakers to make at least a good faith effort to offer laws that they at least have a hand in crafting. Writing the laws is their job and they ought to start performing that role.

  • Palestine – To Exist is to Resist

    I have just returned from Hebron in the West Bank, a city where nearly sixty Palestinians have been extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces since the end of September 2015.

    On my last stint in Hebron, West Bank, while doing check point duty one morning one of my team mates overheard two very small children chatting:

    One said: ‘Will we throw some stones?’ To which the other child replied: ‘No, it’s the first day back at school.’

    That is how normal the fight for freedom from military occupation has become for Palestinian children, even if they are under age ten.

    We saw four small children, aged about ten, throwing stones at Qitoun checkpoint at 7.15 am, like 4 mice attacking an elephant. The response from the Israeli soldiers was to put on their gas masks, adjust their weapons and attack the children with sound bombs and canisters of tear gas.

    This new tear gas used by the Israeli forces pierces your eyes so badly you cannot open them. It scrapes across your throat so that you cough and cough. And all of this ensures that you cannot run away from it because you cannot see where you are going, and, even if you could see, you cannot breathe to move. Ten tear gas canisters landed in playgrounds of schools that morning. A little boy aged about four, with a Smurfs school bag on his back, and protected by his seven-year-old brother coughed and choked considerably longer than the other children. He was innocent, and the victim of the collective punishment that is systematically meted out to Palestinians by the Israeli state.

    That evening I arrived in Jaffa, Tel Aviv for a few days break, still coughing badly from the tear gas, and an Israeli man in a shop tells me that Israelis have had ‘enough’!

    And I’m thinking – you have no idea what ‘enough’ really means.

    ‘Enough’ is when you lock up seven hundred Palestinian children a year, from aged twelve to eighteen; when you arbitrarily arrest many of them at night from their beds.

    I have seen many children detained and arrested. The strongest memory I have is of one little boy, who looked about eleven, being detained. His little dark eyes locked hard on to my eyes. We looked at each other for a long time, he fearfully, pleading with hope in his eyes, and me with desperation and helplessness.

    ‘Enough’ is when you handcuff and blindfold children and abuse them while they lie on the floor of the military jeep, while you take them to prison. ‘Enough’ is when you ensure they will not see their parents until the day of military court, which can be four to eight days later.

    ‘Enough’ is when you beat them and put them in solitary confinement, you threaten that their family members will be arrested or that their home will be demolished or that you will sexually abuse them, if they do not confess. You force them to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language they do not understand, and this forms the basis on which the majority of Palestinian children are convicted in children’s court

    ‘Enough’ is when you ensure those children from twelve-years-of-age will not see a lawyer until a few minutes before their court case. You accuse the majority of throwing stones and you convict them in over 99% of cases with only 0.02% having a full evidentiary trial.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see that these children are brought into the military court in lines of four with chains on their feet joining them together.  I have heard the sounds of those chains clanking – twelve-year-olds with legs inn shackles in case they might escape from the fourth largest army in the world.

    The little child’s sad eyes pierce through the distraught eyes of their parents who have to sit in the back row of the military court, and who are not allowed to touch or hug their little ones. The public conversation that usually takes place between child and parent consists of: ‘Are you ok? Have you enough to eat?’; while he responds: ‘Are you all ok at home? What did the soldiers do after I left?’’

    And then the case is over in two minutes – cut and paste – same as all the other cases. Then the children are taken back to jail with their leg shackles clanking.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see from your child’s eyes that he has now completely lost his childhood.

    And none of this happens with Israeli settler children who are living in illegal settlements in the centre of Hebron.

    And you expect you will beat Palestinians into submission? Have you no idea that you are creating a university of learners who will react?

    This is life under Israeli military occupation in Hebron, West Bank. Enough.

    The Seanad and Dail recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018. 

    Despite the fact that it was passed by a 75 to 45 vote majority, and that all opposition parties voted for it in the Dail and in the Seanad, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.

    This is a little used procedure that Fine Gael have employed to block a number of Private Member’s Bills in the last months. This is undemocratic and a blatant political action to support Israel in its breach of International Law.  This move is in line with the non-recognition of the State of Palestine by Official Ireland, even though the elected members of the Dail and the Seanad voted unanimously to recognise the state of Palestine in 2014.

    Gerry O’Sullivan in Palestine with children.

    Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.

  • White American Pathology

    We don’t discuss white America’s common pathology. What we’ve begun, within limits, are discussions on racism, bigotry, white nationalism, and other disorders of the mind. Ever so guarded, these conversations are restricted to speculation about just who is a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist, and always in the mode of, ‘us and them,’ as if we’re not all infected. Never do we seriously address the root cause of our illness, and how it manifests itself in our foreign policies. This national pathology manifests heavily when countless illegal acts by our government go uncontested. But let us save that story for some other time.

    Our common pathology is universal, infecting every white American citizen living in the States. There are no exceptions. No one is immune and there is no vaccine. Lifelong exposure to this plague starts early and occurs often. Many are infected by parents or siblings suffering advanced symptoms. If, as infants, we manage to avoid contracting the contagion at home, soon enough we’ll be exposed during a lifetimes’ social relations.

    It’s a serious psychological disorder of the mind on a par with Schizophrenia, a diagnosis as cruel as Cancer. Unlike Cancer, this contagion is measured in a million stages, from middle class microaggressions to self-styled white supremacists so riddled they’ve lost all logic and ability to reason.

    Their ideologies also usually include anti-Semitic and homophobic components that are in line with Nazi dogma. In contrast, groups such as the League of the South and Identity Europa propagate their radical stances under the guise of white ethno-nationalism, which seeks to highlight the distinctiveness––rather than the superiority––of the white identity.

    Furthermore, it claims that the white identity is under threat from minorities or immigrants that seek to replace its culture. For example, Identity Europa’s chant, ‘You will not replace us,’ insinuates that growing minority populations threaten to overtake whites of European heritage in American society.

    Members of this new generation of white supremacists, such as former Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) leader Matthew Heimbach, have decried the traditional supremacist narrative of the inferiority of non-white races. Heimbach and his contemporaries have instead focused on racial separation rather than racial superiority, promoting the idea that all races are better served by remaining separate – take a look at www.counterextremism.com.

    More than two hundred hate-filled organizations have been documented in the United States. Their fear mongering membership find new recruits from every state. Growing in numbers as a percent of our population, these groups have local leadership within individual states, many directed by a centralized strategy, orchestrated from national level.

    Knowing their First Amendment rights, they dispatch speakers to every debate and gather. Bolder than before, the extreme right appears to be thriving in 2019’s chaotic political climate, where they barter with national leaders, buying legitimacy in exchange for base support. These are the chronic, if not terminal cases. But before you gloat, know that you are sick too.

    Our primary pathology is the myth of our own superiority. Its genesis lies in a set of genes designed for survival, which in turn, create a convincing cultural overlay leading us to believe  we are better in all respects. This evolutionary delusion comes from the back of our brains when we compare ourselves to people of color.

    Culturally, and on an individual emotional level, it always comes down to ‘us and them.’ We absolve ourselves, yet launch accusations of racism and bigotry at others. We cannot grant equal rights, respect or recognition because black people act as ‘benchmark’.

    What justifies the myth, if not our ‘benchmark?’ Part and parcel of our pathology is that we don’t know ourselves and we don’t want to. You and I share a built-in paranoia. It’s an inherited fear of loss in a zero sum game, forever exploited by the hard-right, most notably since the 1980s.

    This four-hundred-year old legacy of non-introspection is why I venture that a majority of descendants from slavery know us whites better than we know ourselves. I’ll also postulate that as they age, black people become infinitely wiser than old whites.

    They’ve had four hundred years to observe our faults and feel our cruelties. Meanwhile, we excuse ourselves a million more times. Some whites today say, ‘ah but that was years ago during slavery,’ as if cruelty no longer continues.

    Maybe black people are better positioned to see how systemically these values have been  embedded. One learns best by example, good or bad. And anyone watching our bad examples these last four hundred years has realized early in the game they don’t want to become anything like us. Minorities don’t envy whites, only the benefits we monopolize. As humans finding fault in other humans, these people might pity us, but harbor no desire to be white.

    If you want to explore and understand more about our illness, read some of James Baldwin’s essays. Try ‘Stranger in The Village,’ ‘In Search Of A Majority,’ ‘The Devil Finds Work,’ and many others in The Price of the Ticket his collection of nonfiction writing.

    Baldwin points out that before immigrants came to America they were simply Swedish, English, Irish, German, or perhaps Polish. People weren’t considered white until after they arrived. If we face the reality that our society is infected, we can proceed towards a human society populated by equals. Until then we’ll remain sickly and never truly civilized.

  • When Home is an Untouchable Beloved

    The cruellest aspect of protracted displacement is a descent into the realms of collective forgetfulness, in places where social injustice and political abandonment are normalised. Fresh from her fourth visit to Lebanon, author and activist Bruna Kadletz sees the Palestinian cause being relegated more and more to the margins of global concern.

    In the autumn of 2017 I met three Palestinian elders at the Shatila Refugee Camp, in Beirut, Lebanon. All are survivors of Al-Nakba, meaning ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’. The expression refers to the period during the violent birth pangs of the Israeli state in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their villages and forced into exile. Many of the survivors and their offspring still live as refugees in Lebanon without a right of return to their homeland in sight.

    To the elders, memory, oral history and tradition are essential pillars which sustain Palestinian identity. Otherwise, given the hardships of exile in refugee camps, the generations born expatriated are at risk of forgetting not only who they are, but also about the land of their ancestors.

    For millions of refugees around the world, home is an untouchable beloved, imagined in the sweetness and pain of memories, and only visited in the imageries of storytelling. Many Palestinians still carry the keys to their former homes in Palestine, symbolizing an unwavering desire to return. This dream of home is their life breath.

    Holding a misbaha in one of his hands, while moving prayer beads through his fingers, Abu Mahmoud and other elders talk about the Occupation’s deep wounds and transgenerational trauma, as well as community and ties to the land. In the old Palestinian villages, sharing and a sense of community were central values integrated into personal relationships and the economic system.

    To the villagers, the land held a deep meaning – involving devotion to the soil out of which figs, olives, wheat, among other crops, grew – and was not seen as a commodity, with a purely financial price. Before selling their produce, tradition demanded a share be reserved for the wider village community. This practice ensured all residents generally had access to sufficient nutritious food.

    This camp where the elders now reside lies far from those childhood memories. Shatila, along with another dozen camps in Lebanese territory, was set-up in 1949 in response to the Palestinian exodus. Today, there are approximately four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians registered in refugee camps in that country.[i] Since the beginning of the Syrian War in 2011 the camps have been swollen further by the arrival of Syrian refugees.

    Being Brazilian, when I first entered an urban refugee camp in Lebanon, I was reminded of our favelas. The structure and living conditions of favelas and urban refugee camps are very similar: overpopulation, cramped buildings, a lack of sanitation and extreme poverty are among the resemblances. Favelas and urban refugee camps are pockets of social and political abandonment, zones of exclusion and punishment, where fundamental human rights and dignified living conditions are, all too often, unattainable.

    I was accompanied by my cousin Marina on my most recent visit to Lebanon in April 2019. As it was her first visit, I advised against drinking from taps, or even touching the camp´s water. Unfortunately she forgot the warning and rinsed her mouth with tap water, which was extremely salty, leaving her feeling nauseous. Most residents use this same water to wash their faces and hands, brush their teeth and bathe. I previously found it so salty that it burned my eyes.

    A local told us that most of the water distributed in refugee camps in Lebanon is contaminated. Treatment plants inject high volumes of disinfectant chemicals to mask the pollution, amidst a water crisis.

    Some Palestinian camps have another singular characteristic: the water distribution system is not subterranean. Instead, water is circulated via pipes which intertwine with electric wires, forming a deadly roof, covering great swathes of the camps. Wherever a leak occurs residents are in danger of electrocution.

    Because Palestinians living in Lebanon are prohibited from acquiring property in that state, and denied entry to over seventy professions, most have bleak future.

    Since they cannot build beyond the camp’s walls and expand horizontally, the remaining option is to build vertically and take advantage of every square inch in the camp. As a result, there is now insufficient gaps between buildings and deficient ventilation. The sun does not shine on the narrow alleys connecting the camps.

    I am reminded of a popular Brazilian saying, ‘The sun rises for all’. Underpinning this optimistic view of life, is an understanding that everyone enjoys similar opportunities in life. But having witnessed the exclusion of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and the deprivations they endure in their daily lives, it seems to me that, for those living in alleys and ghettos, the sun does not rise at all. Alas, a growing number of displaced people around the world, like the Palestinians, inhabit this dark space of dispossession.

    In August 2018, the Trump administration announced it would cease funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for the protection and provision of aid to Palestinians in the Middle East.[ii] For many years, the U.S. had been contributing a quarter of UNRWA’s budget. This was part of a wider strategy of subjugating the Palestinian people by placing them in positions of greater economic vulnerability. The loss of funding is already harming projects supported by UNRWA, such as schools and medical clinics.

    Yet, in spite of adversity, Palestinians remain resilient. When I think of Palestinians, I see the olive trees they love so much. Olive trees are drought-resistant and grow in poor soil. This reflects Palestinian strength, resistance and endurance. The trees and the Palestinian people can teach us how to bear fruit, even in arid conditions.

    [i] United Nations relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East, ‘Where We Work’, https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/lebanon, accessed 29/4/19.

    [ii] Karen DeYoung and Ruth Eglash, ‘Trump administration to end U.S. funding to U.N. program for Palestinian refugees’, August 30th, 2018, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-to-end-us-funding-to-un-program-for-palestinian-refugees/2018/08/30/009d9bc6-ac64-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html?utm_term=.0798b05139ba, accessed 29/4/19.

  • The Wrong End of Gun Karma

    In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head.  I’d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad juju all around me.  Misreading the bleeps on my psychic radar, by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.

    A scant ten minutes earlier, I’d been in a meeting and now was pretending to listen to a Vietnam Vet turned lawyer who fancied himself a lady’s man.  Instead I was assessing each pedestrian on Napoleon Avenue.  It was a self-soothing technique used when on high alert.  Each person was quickly categorized as to safe or unsafe mostly based on their dress and posture.  This inner detection system had been honed on the New Orleans streets for over fifteen years and had never failed; but that was before I understood how easy it is for some to disguise evil as good.

    As I assured myself all was well, I felt a vibration much like the distortion in the audio when a speaker’s volume is turned up too high.  In the nanosecond it took for me to register consciously what was happening, the dapper dressed demon had already closed the space between us loaded and locked and was now shifting his gun from my head to the Vet/Lawyer’s face.  I knew they were both talking because their lips were moving but the information was lost in translation.

    That’s when I panicked.  Clutching my purse close to my chest, I started running away from the lighted street into the darkness of the poorer neighborhoods that exist behind all the old-world charm of uptown avenues.  Hiding behind a parked car, I watched and waited for him to come and find me.  When he did, he put me on my knees with the gun to my forehead so that I was looking up into dark blank eyes.  Smiling, he growled through clenched teeth, “give me your purse, you stupid bitch.”

    Two weeks later he killed a tourist who refused him his wallet.  Two weeks after that he was caught and later tried and convicted for murder and armed robbery.  I’ll never know why he killed the man and not me.  What I do understand is that in the time it would have taken to retrieve a gun from my purse, he would have shot me.  This was the catalyst for the slow and painful process of opening my heart and then changing my mind regarding gun ownership and gun control.

    I suffer no illusions about using guns.  My early life was wild and chaotic, filled with mean and nasty characters much like the ones found in any of Flannery O’Connor’s gothic depictions of the antebellum South.  As a Gulf Coast Navy brat born to poor circumstances, guns were the norm.  The maintenance of the big anti-aircraft guns mounted on the aircraft carriers used in WWII was my father’s responsibility.  Along with the 1950s baby sitter, the television set, those images shape shifted my baby boomer imagination.  My first heroes were President Eisenhower, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers – the good guys with guns.  Mounted firmly on my stick pony firing my toy guns, I passed days of creative play fighting the Russians and other bad guys.

    On my first hunting trip, we came across a mama raccoon and her babies hanging out on a limb.  Encouraged by the taunts of my teenage friends, I took aim and fired again and again and again.  Eight times.  Suddenly, I could hear the high-pitched squeal of a not quite dead rabbit as my grandfather slid a knife beneath its skin.  This Silence of the Bunnies memory mixed with my slaughter made death real and tangible leaving a metal taste in my mouth.  I never hunted again.

    As an adult, working my way through undergraduate school tending bar and waiting tables in 1970s New Orleans, I often found myself in the French Quarter after midnight mixing and mingling with the nightcrawlers and the tourists.  An uncle with mob connections had given me my first handgun, a hammerless, double-action derringer.  His only instructions were if you pull it, you better be ready to use it.

    A New Orleans cop gave me a better idea.  One evening as I stood outside the same Howard Johnson’s where just three years earlier Mark Essex, a dishonorably discharged Navy man had shot and killed seven people, two men approached trying to coax me to their car.  Hey there Baby, need a ride?  With my muff pistol safely hidden in a cheap purse with finger on the trigger, I pointed it toward the two men and firmly said GO AWAY!   As they slithered back into the dark night, they looked back at me saying, Hey now pretty girl.  We just wanted to party.   

    At twenty-six, I already knew killing someone would drive me over the edge.  The lingering guilt of having left that derringer loaded and unattended had been enough to make me rethink my fake bravado.  To be the cause of the fear in my son’s eyes as I watched his seven-year-old friend point it at him, shames me to this day.  As it should.  Just as ignorance is no defense under the law, neither is it with me when taking my own actions into account.

    My progun opinions didn’t change then nor when my cousin used a handgun to shoot herself in the heart after chain smoking crack cocaine for a week.  My uncle had given her a gun too.  I can still hear the hum and hollow whooshing sound of the ventilator in her ICU suite.  In real life, gunshot victims don’t look like they do in the movies.  There is no make-up, no weak smiles, no last confessions; just a physical body doing its best to stay alive with medical assistance.

    There were tubes coming in and out of every orifice plus one for feeding.  Barely conscious with the intubation tube pushing air into her lungs, she stared out of tear-filled slits for eyes.  Looking like she was about to crack wide open like a split tomato left on the vine too long, her body clung to life long enough to recover.  That’s how biological life is – it goes on pitted against death whether the consciousness inhabiting the form is up to the task or not.

    Several years later, I sold my last gun in 1995 after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  I still don’t know why this terrorist act got my attention when a Glock 19 held to my head failed to do so.   What I do know is that for me the differences between owning a handgun, a rifle or a military weapon like an AR-15 are painfully obvious:

    One is for protection.

    One is for hunting.

    One is for killing as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.