PALESTINE

Does it look like there is a street here?
(An tSráid = the Street).

I made Sunday dinner for some of the people staying up at the campus house. Even though I’m not actually staying there the people who are there are a little more interesting than the people staying at Roarty’s where everyone is making do for themselves.
I spent the day baking and cooking. I made a nectarine crumble (God-be-with-the-days when turnips were the most exotic fruit you could get in the little shop in the village) and some soda bread. In the afternoon I made a very French chicken dinner, but without the lentils (still not readily available despite the nectarines).
Mary came down to pick me up. She had already made boiled potatoes and steamed vegetables to go with the chicken. Yvonne from London joined us and Sandy from Milwaukee was also there.
Right after dinner while we were eating the crumble and whipped cream we began to talk politics. Somehow, Sandy said exactly the same thing that Leslie had said about the Palestinians. She said that they had sold their land to the Jewish settlers. This is exactly how Leslie started her Zionist diatribe. But Ireland is not France. Everybody jumped on Sandy. What was amazing though was that she followed the same script that Leslie had expounded: the Palestinians freely sold their land; the Arab leaders convinced the Palestinians to get out of the way of the fighting in 1948 and 1967 (no, they are not refugees since they left freely); there is already a Palestinian homeland in Jordan where the Palestinians are a majority of the population; the Palestinians have used the Gaza strip as their launching pad for rockets that have sown terror among the Israelis (just like Leslie she had never heard of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza); Hamas prevents economic development of Gaza so that they can better control the population; and Israel is not a right-wing terror state but simply being led by bad extremists who are trying to pervert a very good democracy (the only democracy in the area, mar ea).
Yvonne gave it back to Sandy in spades. She suggested that she read Edward Saïd, a writer Sandy and most Americans, had never heard of. It was a lively discussion but what struck me most was the sense that Jewish people are following a script when they think Israel is being attacked. I wonder how that happens – how that coordination of thought takes place. And I wonder if it is strictly an American thing or do all Jewish people respond in this way to the threat they perceive when anyone expresses sympathy for the horrors that the Palestinians have experienced?