‘There was no one left to speak out for me’

This week’s column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

There are lasting images that leave an indelible mark on our souls. An example is the 1972 picture of the little girl running away from the bomb with her back on fire. That iconic picture helped end the war in Vietnam.

Last week on the RTE 1 evening news I saw a picture of a starving Palestinian child in its father’s arms. The following day on Morning Ireland the United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese described the conditions in Gaza; she spoke eloquently and clearly about the hell the people are experiencing at the hands of the Israelis.

The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has strongly criticised the current behaviour of the Israeli government.

Every day doctors are pleading for help, explaining that the situation is hell on earth, people, tiny children dying in front of their eyes from starvation.

The doctors, the aid agency workers, António Guterres, Francesca Albanese are all respected people, who are genuinely interested in the plight of innocent suffering civilians.

Look at the total destruction that has been meted out on the Palestinian people and their properties.

Of course, it is a complicated history, the colonisers have much to answer. But this slaughter has to stop now.

What Hamas did on October 7, 2023 was a horrendous crime against innocent people and the Israelis have of course a right to self- defence.

T

he European Union has evolved with the aim of never again allowing the catastrophe of the Holocaust and WW II to happen.

I cannot understand if someone criticises the behaviour of the Israeli government they are automatically called an anti-Semite. I’ve lived in Germany. I have been to Büchenwald, Auschwitz-Birekneau, Sachenhausen. 

I have some knowledge of what the Germans did to the Jewish community. I never like to call them Nazis because by doing that we are turning the perpetrators into non-human monsters. It was the German government led by Hitler and supported by millions of German people, who committed monstrous crimes against the Jewish people, crimes that must not and cannot be forgotten. 

The criminals included teachers, train drivers, academics, tradespeople, doctors, they came from all walks of life. There were clergy, who supported the government, churches that turned a blind eye to the barbarity, Mercedes, Krupp, the pharmaceutical industry, industrialists and aristocrats knowingly supported the crimes of the German government.

I am lost for words to understand how someone who is opposed to the barbarity that is today being inflicted on the Palestinian people can be called an anti-Semite.

The German theologian and Lutheran priest Martin Niemöller’s poem is prescient today. He was an opponent of the then German government for which he spent time in a concentration camp.

First they came for the Communists/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Communist/Then they came for the Socialists/ And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Socialist/Then they came for the trade unionists/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a trade unionist/Then they came for the Jews/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Jew/Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.

How would Niemöller react to the image of the starving children in Palestine?