Clare historian, Tomás Mac Conmara explores the foundation of the Israeli state and its long history of conflict

The oldest member elected to the new Dail, Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher, was born in March 1948 in County Donegal. Now seventy-six, the self-described workaholic is energetic and ready to represent the people of his county as another year dawns.
The state of Israel had not yet been created when Gallagher was born and, for the most part, Arabs, Jews and Christians peacefully co-existed in the region.
As he was taking his first breaths however, Zionist terrorists, both the Irgun and Haganah were referred to as such by the British Government, were driving more than 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes.
The Nakba, the Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, for the Palestinian people had begun and a further 13,000 to 15,000 Palestinians were murdered in the process. This violent land-grab and ethnic cleansing has continued for the entire length of Pat Gallagher’s life to date, culminating in the current escalation.
In relative terms, this is a recent conflict and yet the Palestinians have been under occupation for a lifetime. In fact, within a short number of years, the last Palestinian born before 1948 will be dead. Then, there will be no Palestinian left on earth that will have lived even one day of their lives, free of Israeli occupation.
Palestine is geographically a long way away from Ireland, but the two cultures are intimately linked by Jesus of Nazareth.
As a traditionally Christian country most of us are familiar, if in name only, with the geography of Palestine.
As we come to the end of the Christmas season it is profoundly ironic to celebrate the birth of a man who preached peace, compassion and love for one’s neighbour whilst the native people of his homeland are under such relentless attack.
Modern political commentary often presents the current troubles in Palestine as just another iteration of an ancient conflict – beyond resolution and destined to perpetually continue.
Whilst it is true that the middle east has seen centuries of tension and conflict, it is a mistake to extend that history to shroud the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine under centuries of such largely unrelated events.
In fact, the roots of organized Zionism reach back only to the late 1890s when the Austro-Hungarian lawyer and journalist Theodore Herzl promulgated his philosophy that the safety of the Jewish people depended upon a homeland with a majority Jewish population.
Ironically, for an expressed atheist, he used the will of God to justify this claim. Zionist agitation and a shifting geopolitical landscape led to several territories being considered.
Issues came to somewhat of a head at the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved, and Palestine came into the possession of the British Empire.
The then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, released a statement addressed to Lord Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish Community, in what has become known as the Balfour declaration. It stated:
‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’
At the time of the British occupation of Palestine, Jews made up less than 10% of the population. Not for the first time, nor the last, an imperial power was charting out new territories in violation of native inhabitants.
It soon became obvious that commitments regarding the rights of the non-Jewish population would not be upheld. Zionism continued to spread throughout the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in America, and gained traction after the atrocities inflicted on the Jewish people during World War II.
Between 1917 and 1948 in Palestine, tension increased between previously friendly Jewish and Arab neighbours. The former peace transformed in direct correlation to the influx of Zionist groups from across the world, who arrived with increasing aggression towards the native inhabitants.
By 1935 the preconditions were being put in place for the establishment of a Jewish State, despite the obvious protestations of the native Arab population, upon whose land that new state would be built.
In 1937, David Ben Gurion, the future first Prime Minister of Israel articulated the Zionist position explicitly, declaring; ‘We must expel Arabs and take their places’. A sentiment that played out as events of 1948 unfolded.
In America, the New York Times described to its readers the experience in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in April of that year. It reported how Zionist terrorists ‘attacked this peaceful village, killed most of its inhabitants, 240 men, women, and children and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem’.
Those involved, many who would go on to take leading positions in the new Israeli state, were proud of this massacre and publicized it widely. The attitudes of early Zionists were powerfully revealed in the 1990s by Jewish historian Teddy Katz who produced evidence of further atrocities in Tantura, the 2022 documentary of the same name, is uneasy but essential viewing, in May, where the murder and mass burial of over 250 Palestinians took place.
Katz later suffered greatly when his evidence was published, showcasing the systematic attempts to bury the foundational crimes at the heart of the Israeli state. Within that erasure are not only the deaths of countless Palestinians, but the systematic destruction of Palestinian culture and identity. A 2002 Israel Studies report showed that at least 2,780 historical locations had their names Hebraized, de-Arabized or made to sound Hebrew.
That this included almost 350 villages and towns, 1,000 historic ruins, 560 rivers, 198 mountains and fifty caves, is demonstration of the expanse of the Israeli occupation. Not dissimilar to how place names were anglicized here. The most recent record (2024) names 144 illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and twelve in East Jerusalem, all of which underscore the ongoing colonial intentions of the Israeli state.
It should not be necessary to explicitly point out that the above makes no charge against the Jewish people, neither in 1948 nor in January 2025. Instead, it should be evident that the supremacist and racist core of Zionism as a philosophy and belief system, is placed at the heart of the wrongdoing.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK exhibited in 2024 the morally corrosive nature of that philosophy, when it reported on Zionist settlers sitting on Israeli hill tops, drinking beer and cheering as bombs dropped on Gaza.
Adding more depth to this deplorable image is the reality, that these settlers sit atop formerly Palestinian villages, such as al-Majdal Asqalan, from which many contemporary Gazans descend.
In 1948, the Jewish Agency and many other groups representing Judaism were appalled at Deir Yassin and Tantura, as they were later with the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, or indeed the most recent genocidal bombardments.
However, sadly, it is the ideological heirs of the original Zionist terrorists who now rule Israel, both politically and increasingly it would seem, culturally.
Analysis of the occupation in Palestine is not difficult. Finding a resolution or at least bringing about a resolution, seems extremely challenging. The basic, undeniable and critically important point of awareness is that Palestine was occupied in order to bring about the State of Israel.
It is the Palestinians who have lived under an increasingly brutal occupation, explicitly apartheid in its nature and who have suffered incessant campaigns of what can only be characterized as ethnic cleansing and latterly, genocide. Increasingly, this has been justified within the international community through a determined and aggressive conflation of Zionism and Judaism.

Such a conflation enables those who wish, to charge antisemitism against those who arrive at very obvious, objective conclusions. Such a conflation only serves to illustrate the lack of any justification for Israeli aggression and demeans the very real historic suffering of Jews around the world.
Contemporary understanding requires historical comprehension. The violence of recent times cannot be disconnected from the occupation of 1948, nor can it be separated from every day of oppression across the intervening years.
Equally, the events of October 7, 2023, did not emerge from within a vacuum. It is not for the writer to morally justify such violence. It is, however, entirely possible to explain such violence as the inevitable and unfortunate consequence to occupation, manifested across history over countless centuries and lands where occupation has met resistance.
Some patterns are inescapable across the observed contours of our human histories. One such reality is that all empires and colonies eventually fall. Another is the seemingly hardwired proclivity for those under occupation to fight against it and to use physical force to do so.
A further recurrence is the need for the coloniser to at some point, contend with those they occupy as human beings with the same rights to dignity and freedom as themselves. The rhetoric emerging from Israel and bolstered by US support and western complicity, offers a bleak landscape in this regard. The lack of any punitive measure against Israel by the international community offers a striking revelation about the nature of global politics in our time. Beyond the brutality inflicted in Gaza, it is the stark illumination of a moral emptiness in the global politic that will ultimately find the harsh judgements of future historians.
The impotence of international bodies against Israeli aggression is not exclusive to recent times, however. On 13th March 1948, the Dublin Leader newspaper reported that the ‘tragic failure of
UNO [United Nations] as an effective instrument for peace is to be seen in its inability to come to a courageous decision and enforce it’ and that as an ‘international force against aggression and war is virtually powerless when prompt action is necessary’. Judging the UN now on its failings in 1948 is of as much utility as future judgements will be of contemporary failures. Such judgments will be far too late. That lateness will not be the result of any lack of access to information or paucity of sources. The genocide in Gaza has played out in front of our eyes. The Irish government will not be immune to such criticism.
Despite the predicable charges of Israel that the Irish government has been stoking antisemitism, the measures taken by the former have in fact been quite minimal. While recognising the State of Palestine was a comparably important step, it is worth noting that the State and people it recognised have received no further support or intervention from the Irish Government.
No implementation of the Occupied Territories Bill. No change to the preferential treatment of Israel. No boycott. No sanction. No divestment. All this is in stark contrast to the political reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Given how the serial violations of international law by Israel for almost eight decades now, have never resulted in punitive measures, one, whether they are a historian or not, must only conclude that the so-called international community is morally bankrupt and operating from a patently double standard.
With Ukraine, historians of the future will document how western nations instantly rallied to condemn Russia, delivered military aid and imposed severe sanctions. Western media outlets including those in Ireland, stressed the human cost, and refugees were welcomed with open arms in many countries. All the above might be well viewed as a positive reflection of western morals. That is, if there never was a Palestine. That is, if there never was an Israel. In time, historians will easily discern the muted criticism of the plight of Palestinians, or worse the justification of their suffering by American and western leaders.
The vociferous rejection of even the suggestion of a ceasefire for so long, by almost all western political leaders, will be noted as a particular stain on the human story. Despite the repeated bombardments, thousands of targeted civilian casualties, systematic destruction of educational and health infrastructure, children burned alive, displacement, and humanitarian crises, Israel remains as immune now has it has been for almost eighty years.
However, despite all the reasons to be despondent, which any observation of the contemporary political landscape would encourage, the day of Palestinian liberation must come. Its universally backed recognition under the 1967 borders, or some variation of that, must come precisely because it is only this, that will offer Israel the peace it claims to desire. In the meantime, only hope rises with the dust of Gaza and is carried on the guttural cries of the grieving. Those laments do not carry resignation but the same sound of defiance it always has since first Zionist forces began to occupy Palestine in 1948, back when Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher was just a baby.