On my very first date with my now husband, we went to see “Raid on Entebbe”, the story of a daring Israeli military operation to free hostages from a hijacking at Entebbe airport in Uganda.
Four members of a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Front had earlier boarded an Air France flight in Athens and diverted it to Uganda, with the permission of the country’s President, Idi Amin.
Non-Jewish passengers on the plane were released, leaving 102 on board, while the gang demanded the release of 40 Palestinian militants.
With a star-studded cast, it was a ripping yarn of courage and clever military tactics by the Israeli commandos, and like subsequent movies, including Munich – about the revenge operation to hunt down and kill those responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics in 1972 - it helped cement Israel’s reputation as a plucky warrior, surrounded by hostile and undemocratic Muslim countries.
It’s an image that seems to remain true for many unionists in Northern Ireland, who see “Ulster” as a similar case, terrorised by republicans, with a hostile state on its border.
Many looked with envy on the IDF’s swift and brutal response to any attack on its people, wishing fervently that similar tactics had been employed against the IRA.
And like too many in Israel, they thought all the evil emanated solely from themmuns.
It’s perhaps this gut feeling of support for Israel that inspires the sort of unthinking criticism directed at President Higgins for expressing concern for the plight of Gazans.
That he chose to make those remarks at a Holocaust memorial an event drew a storm of protest and a patronisingly snide editorial in The Times newspaper.
Far worse, though, was the criticism in The Irish Times, where one columnist lamented having to constantly apologise to her English friends for things the president has said.
For the record, Higgins’s full speech rightly addressed the horrific attacks on October 7 but also referenced the suffering of the Palestinians, and pleaded for the lessons of the Holocaust to be properly learned.
“The Holocaust was enabled by a regime of systematic murder that began by the manipulation of language and the spreading of fear. We, in our times, must be alert to the identification and confrontation of hate speech in any of its many guises.”
At several Holocaust memorials I’ve attended in recent years, survivors spoke of the necessity for it to never happen again.
But they cited examples from Rwanda and Srebrenice as proof that it has happened again in other contexts, where people have dehumanised others to make them easier to slaughter.
Both the Israeli regime and Hamas have demonised each other as less than human.
Nothing will change there until that hatred is overcome.
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I wonder how Lord Peter Mandelson felt when he looked at himself in the mirror after Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping reaction to the horrific crash that claimed 67 lives in Washington.
Did he have a moment’s indigestion after he ate his original words when he condemned the orange emperor as a “danger to the world” and a “reckless bully”, replacing them with praise for Trump as a “nice” and “fair-minded person”, just to keep his ambassadorial appointment safe?
Was it fair-minded for the President, while bodies were still being rescued from the Potomac, to instantly blame diversity programmes at air traffic control for the deadly accident?
He went on to query the helicopter pilot’s actions, because he has helicopters himself, so he knows about them.
But the cherry on the cake was when he said “only the most outstanding and capable people” should be hired for the most important jobs.
This is the country that elected a reality TV star as president, that now has two ex-Fox News hosts as Secretary for Defense and Transportation, a vaccine sceptic in charge of the nation’s health and the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment heading the Department of Education.