Shattered Windows

Anthony McIntyre ☠ It is just approaching 0830 in the morning.

The rain is audible on the roof above my head. I look out the window to see how heavy it is, wondering if I will need to bring an umbrella to the West Street weekly vigil for Gaza in just under four hours time. Now I am struck by the thought that the sound dreaded in Gaza is not rain drops on roofs but bombs hurtling through them.

Nor are many looking out windows there either. Where bombs have not already destroyed the buildings the detonation bang from their explosion will have shattered the windows anyway. It was a familiar occurrence for anybody who lived in Belfast during the early years of the North's violent political conflict, as frequent as the sight of plywood boards covering the gaps where windows had once been, but had since been reduced to smithereens and shards.

I intend to make today's vigil although I will most likely not be able to stay until the end. I want to catch either a train or a bus to Dublin in time for another event. The thought again intrudes that like windows there will be neither trains nor buses in Gaza. The mundane and not so trite everyday things we take for granted like public transport, coffee, concerts, soccer matches, films are a distant memory there. Even banal thoughts must find it hard to coexist with the constant dread of being bombed while asleep or shot while desperately seeking food. My reason for going to Dublin is that a commemoration is taking place to honour the memory of the ten republican hunger strikers who lost their lives proclaiming to the world that armed resistance to state terrorism, whatever its strategic wisdom or use value, could not be explained away by the state as an aggravated crime wave.

Dixie Elliot, a former blanket protester and cell mate of both Bobby Sands and Tom McElwee will be giving the oration. No stranger to prison staff brutality off the streets and British military or police violence on them, he is a vociferous critic of what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people, and would quickly spot common traits in the treatment of political prisoners both in Israeli and British jails.

Unfortunately he was about to take to the road from Derry by the time I reached him on the phone around 0800. His speech was already written and typed out so I had left it too late to make a suggested addendum about the imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti. Nevertheless, the treatment of Israel’s most iconic political prisoner at the hands of a far right religious settler and Zionist minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, will not be far from his mind.

While Bobby Sands was approaching the end of his life the quietude of his prison hospital ward was punctured by the unwanted presence of a vile interloper. He was Don Concannon, a British MP, a former Northern Ireland Office Minister, and authentic turd. His reason for the intrusion was to berate Bobby for continuing his hunger strike, telling him that he would not win. Essentially, he was taunting him. Bobby was very weak physically but remained as mentally solid as granite. So he told Concannon where to go and take his rather large but empty head with him.

Watching the thirteen second footage released by the Israeli fascist where he sought to inflict the same indignity on Marwan Barghouti as Don Concannon had attempted with Bobby, I was struck and stung by the image of an emaciated and starving political prisoner being lectured by some well-fed smarmy self-righteous thug. In the historical archives there are pictures of SS Reichsführer Henireich Himmler, taken in 1936 and 1942, looking down on prisoners his regime had incarcerated. The images are remarkably similar to Itamar Ben-Gvir's confrontation with Marwan Barghouti; the same racist hatred of people regarded as Untermensch. So, today while standing in memory of those who died during the 1981 hunger strikes, I shall also be standing alongside Dixie Elliot in solidarity with Marwan Barghouti and his imprisoned comrades.

Heinrich Himmler, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Don Concannon despite many differences and varying degrees of culpability, all share one characteristic so typical of the repressive mind: a haughty disdain and hateful animus for those they have imprisoned and whom they would rather see dead than released. In the words of Israeli writer Gideon Levy it is how a master speaks to his slave:

They stood facing each other – the fat man and the thin man, the strong and the weak, the oppressor and the oppressed, the conqueror and the conquered, the perpetrator of injustice facing his victim, the wicked against the righteous, in an image that said it all.

Levy makes the point that Israel treated the Nazi implementer of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, better than it treated Marwan Barghouti:

How proud Israel was then that it humanely incarcerated the despot, did not humiliate him, nor starve him with such cruelty. How much we have changed since then.

In the end, as a cousin of the imprisoned Palestinian leader stated the far-right supremacist minister “didn’t humiliate Marwan – he humiliated himself.”

Bobby Sands has been credited with the phrase that republican revenge will be the laughter of our children, although his family have been unable to trace the provenance of that particular statement in his writings or correspondence. Whether he said it or not, it is a comment that expresses a vision of what the post-resistance world should look like, where vengeance does not manifest itself in killing but in the sound of children laughing. Marwan Barghouti, I assume, hopes the same for the Palestinian children. But to quote the poet Ahmed Arif, in a land where even butterflies live longer than children my abiding fear is what if there are no children left alive to laugh? That is what the genocide is about, silencing the sound of every child who might later laugh.

One thing Bobby Sands definitely did say was that every person has their part to play, no matter how big or how small, in the struggle against repression. Everybody who assembles later at midday in West Street is playing their part in trying to ensure that the children of Gaza will survive the genocide to one day laugh again.

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