The Loyalist Zionists Who are Keeping Theresa May on Life Support
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| a marriage made in hell - Loyalism and Conservatism |
The links between Ulster Unionism
and Zionism have always been close. The
British Mandate in Palestine began in 1920 and it was ratified by the League of
Nations in 1922. The Partition of
Ireland began in 1921 and Southern Ireland became independent in 1922.
Both Ulster and Palestine involved
British imperialism using a settler population in order to maintain its
presence in another peoples’ land. Ulster
had been the subject of the Plantation of Protestant settlers in the 17th
century. Palestine was the subject of Jewish
settlement in the 20th century.
As the first Military Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald
Storrs(1920-1926), wrote in his autobiography Orientations:
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| Jackie McDonald - S Belfast UDA Brigade Commander - Arlene Foster met him a few days after a UDA killing |
“Enough [Jews] could return, if
not to form a Jewish state ... at least to prove that the enterprise was one
which blessed him that gave as well as him that took, by forming for England ‘a
little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
The agreement by the British to
support the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was symbolised in the Balfour
Declaration whereby the Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balour wrote a letter of
November 2nd 1917 to Lord Rothschild in which Britain promised the
land of the Palestinians to the Zionists.
Promises made in the Declaration that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious
rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ was honoured in
the breach.
Zionist settlers in Palestine
based their claim on the Biblical ‘return’ of the Jews to Palestine just as the
Protestant settlers of Ulster believed that in settling the north of Ireland
they too were fulfilling god’s mission.
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| Arlene Foster - DUP leader, blamed for loss of hundreds of millions on energy scheme |
It is no accident that when an
Israeli propaganda group,
Stand by
Israel, sent out a
Pledge
for Israel to candidates in the general election, 5 of the DUP’s candidates
-
Jeffrey Donaldson, Paul Girvan, Gary Middleton, Ian
Paisley, Jim Shannon – signed. Although
the founder of the DUP, Ian Paisley was in habit of making anti-Semitic jokes,
he was nonetheless fully signed up to the idea that Israel represented the
‘return’ of the Jews as a precursor of the second coming of Christ.
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| Theresa May addresses journalists after she returned from the Palace - she managed not to mention the election outcome |
Both
Israel and Ulster were set up as settler colonial states and both indulged in
ethnic cleansing – in Israel’s case of Palestinians and in Ulster it was
Catholics who were forced to flee from pogroms in 1921.
Just
as Israel is a Jewish supremacist state, Ulster was set up as a Protestant
Supremacist state. In the words
of James Craig, the Viscount Craigavon, Ulster’s first Prime Minister, ‘we
are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State’ which became popularly
known as a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people.’
The Democratic Unionist Party was
formed by Ian Paisley in 1971. Paisley
was the founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ireland and an anti-Catholic
agitator. From the very start the party
was linked with loyalist terror gangs such as the Ulster Defence
Association. This tradition has
continued to the present. Arlene Foster,
the present leader of the DUP,
met
with the leader of the UDA, Jackie MacDonald, just three days after their
Southern Antrim brigade murdered a fellow paramilitary.
It is no surprise that Theresa
May, whose party has vigorously attacked Jeremy Corbyn for his links with Sinn
Fein and the IRA, has no problem with forming an electoral alliance with a
party with close links to Protestant death squads. People forget that whereas the IRA attacked
the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (renamed PSNI), all of them
armed, the Loyalist death squads of the UDA and the Ulster Volunteer Force
attacked Catholic civilians at random.
As was proven by the 1990’s
Stevens Inquiries, intelligence information was supplied to these Loyalist death
squads by British agents inside these groups.
The army’s
Force Research Unit, a military intelligence
unit, ran an agent Brian Nelson inside the UDA and the FRU helped the UDA kill
hundreds of innocent Catholics. Indeed
they agreed restriction orders with the RUC in order that these killers wouldn’t
be apprehended by the Police. One
particularly notorious murder was that of the Belfast solicitor Patrick
Finucane, whose crime in their eyes was defending Republican soldiers.
Former Tory Prime Minister John
Major has spoken out against any alliance with the DUP, following on from Ruth
Davidson. Given the present impasse in
Belfast between the DUP and Sinn Fein, which has meant that Stormont, the local
Assembly hasn’t met for months, the British government going into an effective
coalition with the DUP removes any pretence that it is an honest broker.
It is a measure of the
desperation of the Witch of Westminster that she should ally with these
creatures. Not only are they anti-gay
and anti-abortion but they are also sectarian racists. Fitting allies for a discredited Prime
Minister May. May has demonstrated that in order to hold
onto power she will literally ally with
the devil. However I suspect that this
alliance, made as it is in hell, will have a rather short lifespan.
Tony Greenstein
London
Review of Books
As Britain woke on Friday morning to discover that Theresa May had
flushed her Commons majority down the drain, people found themselves having to
learn about an unfamiliar party on which May (or her successor) would be
relying to get anything done. The titles of the hastily commissioned primers –
‘So,
Who Are The DUP?’;
‘Who are the Democratic Unionists and what do they want?’ – told
their own story. The Democratic Unionist Party is Northern Ireland’s largest
political force and was until recently the principal coalition partner in one
of the UK’s devolved governments. But most of the time, what happens in Belfast
or Derry is deemed irrelevant to political life on the other side of the Irish
Sea.
Superficially, this year’s election campaign was an exception, with
events in Northern Ireland discussed more widely than at any time since the
Good Friday Agreement. But that was because the Conservatives thought they
could damage Jeremy Corbyn by highlighting his relationship with Sinn Féin in
the 1980s. The fact that Northern Ireland’s government had collapsed just a few
months earlier, however, was barely mentioned; neither Corbyn nor May was asked
to spell out in detail what they planned to do about it.
The Westminster arithmetic makes any speedy resolution of the Stormont
crisis unlikely. Problems had been accumulating from the first day of the
power-sharing arrangement back in 2007, as Ian Paisley, the DUP’s leader since
its founding in 1971, had done little to prepare his supporters for a deal with
their republican enemies. Paisley’s apparent bonhomie with Sinn Féin’s Martin
McGuinness infuriated many DUP activists, and it wasn’t long before Paisley’s
deputy Peter Robinson had eased him into early retirement. Robinson was more
intransigent than Paisley in his dealings with Sinn Féin, and Robinson’s
successor Arlene Foster more intransigent still; the DUP used the requirement
for cross-community consent in the Northern Ireland Assembly to block reforms
that had already been agreed on in peace talks.
Brexit added another fault line: the DUP campaigned to leave the EU,
while the other main parties all plumped for Remain, as did 56 per cent of
voters in the region. The referendum exposed a light-minded attitude towards
the Good Friday Agreement among Leave-supporting politicians in both London and
Belfast: mixed messages about the likelihood of a ‘hard border’ in Ireland
betrayed the fact that most Brexiteers hadn’t thought about the question at all
before taking the plunge.
The
text of the Good Friday Agreement explicitly referred to the
Irish and British states as ‘partners in the European Union’, and tacitly
assumed that questions of sovereignty would get hazier as European integration
progressed; anyone born in Northern Ireland is entitled to an Irish passport,
and the only sign of the border in recent years has been the text message from
your mobile phone company when the train goes past Dundalk. The prospect of a
harder-edged approach to national identity after Brexit seemed to delight the
DUP leadership. The party is adamantly opposed to any special status for
Northern Ireland when its departure from the EU is finalised – although with an
eye to farming interests, it also wants to keep trade flowing across the border.
Squaring that circle will be a key issue in the negotiations to come.
The Stormont government collapsed when Arlene Foster refused to take
responsibility for mismanaging a renewable heating scheme that may end up
costing Northern Ireland half a billion pounds, and Sinn Féin
pulled the plug. A snap regional election at the start of this
year saw the DUP come perilously close to being overtaken by Sinn Féin, but its
performance in the Westminster poll last week was much more assured, adding two
seats for a total of 10; Sinn Féin and an independent unionist accounted for
the rest of Northern Ireland’s 18 constituencies.
The idea that Theresa May – or any Tory politician – can serve as an
impartial mediator while relying on DUP votes at Westminster is a joke in very
poor taste. A parliamentary alliance between the Tories and the DUP will
reinforce an ideological convergence between the parties. ‘The immense contribution
of the security forces during the Troubles,’ the
Conservative
manifesto said, ‘should never be forgotten. We will reject any attempts to
rewrite history which seek to justify or legitimise terrorism.’
Official inquiries have exposed a long record of collusion between state
forces and the loyalist paramilitaries who waged a ruthless war on nationalist
civilians. The DUP wants to shut down all investigations that bring its
fictitious narrative of the ‘Troubles’ into question. DUP leaders always saw
the loyalist paramilitaries as allies in the struggle against Irish
nationalism, refusing to take responsibility for their actions in public, but
privately urging them to keep on killing when the IRA called a ceasefire. Now
the party wants the IRA to be held exclusively responsible for the conflict,
the state forces exalted, and the loyalists forgotten: anything else would be
‘legitimising terrorism’. The Tories agree (there was hysteria when Corbyn
insisted on condemning loyalist bombings as well as IRA ones). And Michael
Gove, now back in May’s cabinet, in 2000 denounced the Good Friday Agreement as
a ‘moral stain’, a ‘capitulation to violence’ and a ‘denial of our national
integrity’. He defended the comments last year.
The DUP may be out of step with Britain’s political mainstream in many
respects, but as far as security policy is concerned, it marches in tight
formation with some very powerful interests. For those who value civil
liberties in both Britain and Northern Ireland, that will pose a grave problem,
however long the current arrangement at Westminster lasts.
In a
stunning upset, the British electorate moved sharply to the left in Thursday’s
general election. The Labour Party, led by
Jeremy Corbyn,
gained dozens of seats, while
Theresa May’s
governing Conservatives lost their majority.
But Corbyn’s ebullient grassroots campaign, built on policies of free
university tuition, social justice and more investment in public services,
generated enthusiasm that defied
virtually
all expectations.
May moves right
Diminished and humiliated, May will hang on as prime minister for now.
But unable to command a majority in the House of Commons on their own, the
Conservatives will
rely
for support on the 10 lawmakers from the Democratic Unionist Party, a
Christian Zionist group in Northern Ireland which pushes extreme pro-Israel
policies.
This means that while the British electorate embraces more progressive
policies, May is likely to hunker down and move even further to the right in
defiance of public opinion, including the
growing
support for Palestinian rights.
Who are the DUP
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was founded in the early 1970s by the
late Ian Paisley, a Protestant cleric notorious for his
anti-Catholic
bigotry.
Paisley’s DUP opposed any change in the status quo of Northern Ireland,
an entity created by the British in 1921. As Ireland struggled for its
independence, the British imposed partition in order to give Protestants,
largely descended from Scottish and English settlers, an artificial majority.
This “Protestant state for a Protestant people” ruled over Irish
Catholics with bigotry and an iron fist.
Unionists’ violent rejection of Irish nationalist demands for equality
in the late 1960s inaugurated the three-decade low-level civil war known as
“The Troubles” in which more than 3,500 people were killed and 50,000 injured –
nearly two percent of the Northern Ireland population.
Paisley’s demagoguery and incitement
has been blamed
for at least some of the deaths in the conflict.
But after almost a lifetime spent opposing accommodation, in 2007
Paisley
led
the DUP into a power-sharing government with the leaders of Sinn Féin – the
party he had just a few years earlier
denounced as a
“filthy nest of murderous Irish nationalism.”
Islamophobia
Loyalist paramilitaries
endorsed DUP
candidates in Thursday’s election.
After Ireland’s 1998 peace deal, the
Good Friday
Agreement, politicians can no longer utter open expressions of
anti-Catholic bigotry of the kind in which Paisley routinely indulged.
But some of that bigotry appears to have
morphed
into Islamophobia. In 2014, an evangelical pastor attacked Muslims as
“satanic.” The DUP’s Peter Robinson, first minister of Northern Ireland at the
time,
defended
the comments, before eventually apologizing amid public outrage.
Friends of Israel
The DUP is a staunchly pro-Israel party – Ian Paisley himself
launched
the group Northern Ireland Friends of Israel in 2009.
Before this election, members of the DUP joined dozens of candidates
from other parties signing a so-called “
Pledge
for Israel.”
The party also has its own DUP Friends of Israel lobby group in the
Northern Ireland legislature.
Northern Ireland Friends of Israel co-chair Steven Jaffe explained that
the party’s strong support for Israel stems in part from religious beliefs.
“Many DUP [members of Parliament] come from a Bible-believing Protestant
background,” he
told The
Times of Israel in 2014. “They have a very sincere and positive
attitude to the biblical roots of the Jewish people’s connection to the land.”
Since 2015, CUFI also has a UK branch. The group had been due to
celebrate in London 50 years of violent Israeli occupation in the West Bank at
a “Night to Honor Israel,” before it was
canceled amid
what it claimed were security threats.
The “Pledge for Israel” was also emailed by CUFI UK to its supporters
just before the election.
Settler-colonialism
The identification also stems from the shared history that Northern
Ireland was created through imposed partition, for the benefit of a
settler-colonial group, against the wishes and rights of the indigenous
population, just like Israel’s 1948 creation in Palestine.
The DUP “identify with Israel fighting for its survival, and they feel
the international media is unfairly hostile to Israel just as they believe it
was hostile to their own cause,” Jaffe explained.
Veteran Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn shed light on this sense of a
common cause between Zionists and pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland,
during Israel’s December 2008 to January 2009 invasion of the Gaza Strip, which
killed more than 1,400 Palestinians.
Israeli society “reminds me more than ever of the unionists in Northern
Ireland in the late 1960s,” he
observed.
Like Israelis, unionists were a community “with a highly developed siege
mentality which led them always to see themselves as victims even when they
were killing other people. There were no regrets or even knowledge of what they
inflicted on others and therefore any retaliation by the other side appeared as
unprovoked aggression inspired by unreasoning hate.”
As The Electronic Intifada’s David Cronin has
observed,
“the racist discourse of the Protestant establishment in the north of Ireland”
is “almost identical to what Israeli politicians say about Arabs.”
Israel’s justice minister
Ayelet Shaked, for
instance,
called
Palestinian babies “little snakes.” Paisley once
claimed
that Catholics “multiply like vermin.”
Exporting repression to Palestine
The overall responsibility for the violence lay with the British state,
which propped up the bigoted Northern Ireland regime for decades.
But while the peace process ended the most violent manifestations of
British repression, that apparatus of state violence has been rebranded for
export
to Palestine.
The morning after the vote, it is no wonder that many are describing
May’s desperate deal with the DUP to stay in power as the “
Bad Friday
Agreement.”
In a stunning upset, the British electorate moved sharply to the left in
Thursday’s general election. The Labour Party, led by
Jeremy Corbyn,
gained dozens of seats, while
Theresa May’s
governing Conservatives lost their majority.
But Corbyn’s ebullient grassroots campaign, built on policies of free
university tuition, social justice and more investment in public services,
generated enthusiasm that defied
virtually
all expectations.
May moves right
Diminished and humiliated, May will hang on as prime minister for now.
But unable to command a majority in the House of Commons on their own, the
Conservatives will
rely
for support on the 10 lawmakers from the Democratic Unionist Party, a
Christian Zionist group in Northern Ireland which pushes extreme pro-Israel
policies.
This means that while the British electorate embraces more progressive
policies, May is likely to hunker down and move even further to the right in
defiance of public opinion, including the
growing
support for Palestinian rights.
Who are the DUP
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was founded in the early 1970s by
the late Ian Paisley, a Protestant cleric notorious for his
anti-Catholic
bigotry.
Paisley’s DUP opposed any change in the status quo of Northern Ireland,
an entity created by the British in 1921. As Ireland struggled for its
independence, the British imposed partition in order to give Protestants,
largely descended from Scottish and English settlers, an artificial majority.
This “Protestant state for a Protestant people” ruled over Irish
Catholics with bigotry and an iron fist.
Unionists’ violent rejection of Irish nationalist demands for equality
in the late 1960s inaugurated the three-decade low-level civil war known as
“The Troubles” in which more than 3,500 people were killed and 50,000 injured –
nearly two percent of the Northern Ireland population.
Paisley’s demagoguery and incitement
has been blamed
for at least some of the deaths in the conflict.
But after almost a lifetime spent opposing accommodation, in 2007
Paisley
led
the DUP into a power-sharing government with the leaders of Sinn Féin – the
party he had just a few years earlier
denounced as a
“filthy nest of murderous Irish nationalism.”
Islamophobia
Loyalist paramilitaries
endorsed DUP
candidates in Thursday’s election.
After Ireland’s 1998 peace deal, the
Good Friday
Agreement, politicians can no longer utter open expressions of anti-Catholic
bigotry of the kind in which Paisley routinely indulged.
But some of that bigotry appears to have
morphed
into Islamophobia. In 2014, an evangelical pastor attacked Muslims as
“satanic.” The DUP’s Peter Robinson, first minister of Northern Ireland at the
time,
defended
the comments, before eventually apologizing amid public outrage.
Friends of Israel
The DUP is a staunchly pro-Israel party – Ian Paisley himself
launched
the group Northern Ireland Friends of Israel in 2009.
Before this election, members of the DUP joined dozens of candidates
from other parties signing a so-called “
Pledge
for Israel.”
The party also has its own DUP Friends of Israel lobby group in the
Northern Ireland legislature.
Northern Ireland Friends of Israel co-chair Steven Jaffe explained that
the party’s strong support for Israel stems in part from religious beliefs.
“Many DUP [members of Parliament] come from a Bible-believing Protestant
background,” he
told The
Times of Israel in 2014. “They have a very sincere and positive
attitude to the biblical roots of the Jewish people’s connection to the land.”
Since 2015, CUFI also has a UK branch. The group had been due to
celebrate in London 50 years of violent Israeli occupation in the West Bank at
a “Night to Honor Israel,” before it was
canceled amid
what it claimed were security threats.
The “Pledge for Israel” was also emailed by CUFI UK to its supporters just
before the election.
Settler-colonialism
The identification also stems from the shared history that Northern
Ireland was created through imposed partition, for the benefit of a
settler-colonial group, against the wishes and rights of the indigenous population,
just like Israel’s 1948 creation in Palestine.
The DUP “identify with Israel fighting for its survival, and they feel
the international media is unfairly hostile to Israel just as they believe it
was hostile to their own cause,” Jaffe explained.
Veteran Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn shed light on this sense of a
common cause between Zionists and pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland,
during Israel’s December 2008 to January 2009 invasion of the Gaza Strip, which
killed more than 1,400 Palestinians.
Israeli society “reminds me more than ever of the unionists in Northern
Ireland in the late 1960s,” he
observed.
Like Israelis, unionists were a community “with a highly developed siege
mentality which led them always to see themselves as victims even when they
were killing other people. There were no regrets or even knowledge of what they
inflicted on others and therefore any retaliation by the other side appeared as
unprovoked aggression inspired by unreasoning hate.”
As The Electronic Intifada’s David Cronin has
observed,
“the racist discourse of the Protestant establishment in the north of Ireland”
is “almost identical to what Israeli politicians say about Arabs.”
Israel’s justice minister
Ayelet Shaked, for
instance,
called
Palestinian babies “little snakes.” Paisley once
claimed
that Catholics “multiply like vermin.”
Exporting repression to Palestine
The overall responsibility for the violence lay with the British state,
which propped up the bigoted Northern Ireland regime for decades.
But while the peace process ended the most violent manifestations of
British repression, that apparatus of state violence has been rebranded for
export
to Palestine.
The morning after the vote, it is no wonder that many are describing
May’s desperate deal with the DUP to stay in power as the “
Bad Friday
Agreement.”
