The man has the audacity, the brass neck, to turn up at the United Nations and wail about October 7th as if history started the moment his narrative required it
Not a whisper of Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatila, Jenin, Shuja’iyya. Not a mutter about the white phosphorus lighting up Gaza’s skies like some obscene fireworks display for empire. And no mention of those “meaningless lines” his own backers brag about erasing—the borders drawn by Sykes-Picot a century ago, lines which Israel now bulldozes at will to carve up the region like a butcher hacking apart a carcass.
And this gobshite has the gall to lecture the world about good and evil. The only evil in that hall was dripping from his podium, the voice of a man selling genocide as self-defence, apartheid as democracy, and colonial plunder as divine destiny.
He talks of “a bright age of peace,” but what he means is Greater Israel, the Zionist dream of dominion from the river to the sea, and beyond. He crows about Operation Rising Lion as though it were the stuff of epic poetry, when in truth it’s the mechanised slaughter of children, journalists, medics, and entire families. He waves around maps like some two-bit huckster in a travelling circus, pointing to “blessings” and “curses,” while entire cities in Gaza are reduced to rubble, and bodies are pulled from the ruins like potatoes from the soil after a famine blight.
This is the old imperial game, lads. Divide and conquer. Oded Yinon mapped it out in the ‘80s, Bernard Lewis polished it for the Yanks in the ‘90s, and now Netanyahu plays the tune while Washington foots the bill. Break the Arabs into sects, carve up Syria, Lebanon, Iraq; pit neighbour against neighbour, and all the while entrench Israel as the regional garrison of empire.
And don’t we Irish know the script? The British Empire once painted itself as the bringers of light to our “backward” isle while starving us, burning our homes, and hanging our comrades. Now Netanyahu uses the same rotten trick: frame your enemy as barbaric, deny them nationhood, and call every act of resistance “terrorism.”
But here’s the truth, and it’s as bitter as the stout in my glass: Israel is no victim. It is the armed fist of US imperialism, a settler-colonial outpost built on the bones of Palestinians, expanded by wars of aggression across the region. It’s no democracy, it’s apartheid, and the whole world knows it.
Netanyahu sneers at the UN for condemning his crimes, calling it an “anti-Semitic swamp.” But let’s be clear: the swamp is not the assembly of nations, it’s the blood-soaked alliance between Washington and Tel Aviv, one shovelling weapons, the other committing massacres, and both lying through their teeth about “peace.”
He says Israel is defending “civilisation.” No. Israel is defending apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the profit margins of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The only “dark age” is the one he’s dragging the region into, cities reduced to rubble, borders shredded, whole peoples scattered into exile.
And we, the working people of Ireland, who buried our dead after Bloody Sunday, who saw our hunger strikers perish in Long Kesh, who know the sting of empire, say clearly: the Palestinians are not alone. Their struggle is our struggle. Their martyrs are our martyrs.
So take your maps, Bibi, your biblical justifications and your crocodile tears, and shove them. The world sees through the act. From Dublin to Damascus, from Belfast to Beirut, we know what you are: a war criminal dressed up as a statesman.
History will not absolve you. Palestine will be free, and no speech at the United Nations, no drone strike or buffer zone, will change that.
⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.
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