Tarach Ó Snodaigh on Palestine: "You could see how the occupation is strangling communities"

The atrocities in Gaza are so blatantly in your face as to beggar belief. We see people starving and being murdered by the Israeli army on our phones every day. That we have to do everything possible to end that genocidal campaign is clear and Irish people have been leading that call. But less widely reported is what is happening in the West Bank. There too, the forces of Israeli oppression are about their brutal business.

“I knew there was a possibility of going over to the West Bank because of my friend, Ainle,” Tarach Ó Snodaigh of the Irish band Grooveline explains. “He runs a gym called Aclaí Palestine in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. It’s in a place called the Lajee Center, which is a community center for the Aida refugee camp. They were running this international summer camp. I applied and was accepted.

“You volunteer with the community. That means helping the kids out for a few days during activities, and doing volunteer work around the camp. But you’re also heavily involved in learning about what’s happening in the West Bank.”

And what’s happening is deeply shocking.

“We visited all the cities. We went to Tulkarem, Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron – which is one of the most locked-down cities on Earth. We visited lawyers, ex-prisoners and human rights organisations, learning at every step, and really getting to grips with how Israel has managed to trick the world into overlooking the West Bank.

“We saw first-hand the violence aimed at the Aida refugee camp. For around eight days straight, the Israeli authorities cut the water off for no reason – citing shortages that don’t actually exist. The camp is surrounded by a military base with sniper towers everywhere – the front door of the community centre was just 50 metres away from an IDF base.

“Right outside the Lajee center, there’s a plaque for a 13-year-old who got sniped in the head. There’s just so many stories like that. Most of the men in these camps, and a lot in the West Bank, have been to prison, because a rock-throwing offence gets you two years. They have almost 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, at the moment, and half of them are held under what they call ‘administrative detention’, where no case has to be proven.”

The Israeli authorities are also engaged in a massive re-engineering of the whole territory, to destroy social integration and break up communities.

“You could see how the occupation is strangling communities,” Tarach says. “We went up to Tulkarem, a city up north, of 10,000 people, and that has been completely levelled. They’re building these massive military roads, which they say are for security reasons. They just come into communities and bulldoze them in their entirety, shoot anyone who wants to resist.

“So you have a 10,000-strong neighborhood, all abandoned, and massive bulldozed roads going straight through the camp. Basically, these 10,000 people are left homeless. They have to live inside mosques. When you hear their side of the story, you think: ‘This is truly evil’.

“And if you try to go back to your home – if it hasn’t been demolished – you get shot. It’s shoot to kill.”

The Israeli army are gradually tightening their grip on the West Bank. Plans have just been announced – and widely denounced internationally – that will add hugely to the number of ‘settlers’. But the Israelis will proceed, because that is what a brutal occupying force does.

“They’re basically completely annexing the West Bank, cutting people off from each other, so they can’t unite because it’s a lot harder to form a resistance,” Tarach says. “And these people are the nicest, most steadfast, kindest people I ever met in my life. If you say you’re Irish, they’re just like, ‘Your people stand with our people like no other in the world, we really respect it’.”

Despite the shocking conditions, there were moments of light in the refugee camp.

“We had dinner with Palestinian families,” he recalls. “They were able to tell us, from a family point of view, what it is like to live under Israeli occupation. But we were able to have great craíc with them. I went to a house with a grandmother, a mother and the two kids. Their son is currently in administrative detention – where they arrest you with no charge, and every six months, they renew it or you’re released. That was the day his six months was up, and the grandmother made an extra dinner for the son to come back to.”

There was no happy ending.

“At dinner, they got a text saying that he got another six months. Her reaction was just like, ‘That’s it, what can you do?’

“The family night was beautiful. We were playing with the kids all night, up on the roof, smoking cigarettes, listening to Palestinian music and sharing Irish music.

“We taught the kids Irish tunes at the Aida refugee camp too. They were coming from loads of different refugee camps from all over Bethlehem. It was a really special, powerful moment to have all of these kids singing together so passionately. It was so beautiful to see all of them in the present moment, singing about their country and about love, and especially in Irish.

“They’re so full of energy now – but they are going to grow up to live a life that nobody should be living.”

And just a short distance away, life goes on, more or less as normal, for Israeli people.

“In central Jerusalem, there was a massive flag, with the people of Jerusalem walking under it, drinking their iced coffee with their kids in tow. It said ‘Make Gaza Jewish Again’. And everyone was out drinking their Starbucks, thinking that’s acceptable.”

The contrast is extremely disturbing.

“Arriving back from Jerusalem, I was going into the community centre and looking at the Israeli base – and this kid came up, and started singing the song I taught them back to me, under the shadow of an apartheid wall. Seven kilometers across that wall is Jerusalem, where the children are living normally.”

It is hard to take in.

“My view is that there is an absolutely fundamental right for Palestinians to resist,” Tarach says. “It is their absolute right to strike back at Israel’s occupation. We fought the British for 800 years in Ireland. It’s celebrated here, but the Palestinians, in the last hundred years, have had to put up with so much worse than we could have ever imagined.

“So I don’t think we should be shying away from the inevitability of armed resistance. Right now the occupation is tightening its grip. So it’s basically the West Bank either takes being colonised, being brutalised, being oppressed on every single level – or they do what any other normal human would do and fight back. It’s what we did. And it’s why I’m standing here as a free Irishman.

“If people have the time and the money, I’d encourage them to think about taking this step of going to the West Bank to educate themselves,” he adds. “It is potentially dangerous. You have to keep your head about you and not take any unnecessary risks. But if you are outspoken about something, then going over and educating yourself is something to seriously consider. For me, it was certainly worthwhile.”

 

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