On July 27, members of Philadelphia’s Irish community gathered at the City’s Irish Famine memorial in a demonstration of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
“We come from a country that is extremely pro-Palestinian,” said Áine Fox, a lead organizer of the rally, “we know what an oppressive regime looks like.” She drew connections between the oppressive, Zionist state of Israel and the hundreds of years of British occupation and political control in Ireland.
Protesters marched from the memorial through the city’s Old City district waving Palestinian and Irish flags and chanting “From Gaza to North Ireland, End the Occupation!”
Fox and others Irish immigrants gathered at the rally identify with Palestinian’s experience of colonial oppression and support their right to resist which is also established under international law.
“Resistance is necessary,” she said, “when you’ve got nothing left and nowhere else to go, it’s resist or die.”
As the death toll in Gaza rises to over 1,000 Palestinian lives lost, Israel, like all historic oppressor regimes, persists a rhetoric of self-defense as justification for its use of massive violence and collective punishment, but the will of the Palestinian people and their supporters remains unbroken.
From the West Bank, to Tel Aviv, from South Africa to France to Philadelphia people all over the world have mobilized in the tens of thousands to condemn the war crimes being committed by the Israeli government and to show support for the Palestinian people.
In the United States, which sends over $3 billion in military aid every year to Israel, Fox sees it as especially important to organize and join Palestinian solidarity protests. “It’s [about] challenging the doctrine here that Israel is a victim and that the Palestinians are terrorists.”
She and others gathered at the protest will be joining buses leaving from Philadelphia to attend the mass rally called for August 2 in front of the White House.
