My Blog (Eugene Ward)

 Today the Israeli naional team take on Norway in Oslo. Against the wishes of the majority of UEFA members, Israel is still present in UEFA competitions despite its war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, Why FIFA won’t ban Israel despite Gaza genocide  THE TRUCE The news this week of the ceasefire in Gaza is definitely welcome. Norway is not happy about hosting today's fixture but the fact that the genocide is at an end, at least for now, makes hosting the fixture more palatable SPORTING SANCTIONS Even if the genocide is over, the occupation, the blockade and the apartheid system is not. The threat of expulsion from Eurovision and international football showed the Zionist regime that the world is not on their side.  Sporting sanctions were important in bringing down the South African apartheid system. Exlusion from international rugby in particular hit tye South African hard. The same strategy needs to be used with Israel Many countries are calling for Israel to be banned ...

  The UN has now confirmed what we already knew, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Over the last two years I have been taken aback by how low the Zionist state will stoop and to the extent they are being defended by their allies. First, when they bombed a hospital we heard that they would never do such a thing. Biden said "it was done by the other team" trying to foster a simple them and us mentality. Now they have bombed every hospital in Gaza, murdered, tortured and raped medical staff, buried them in mass graves and committed various other depraved crimes. They have bombed men women and children from the sky, burned them alive in tents, shot them from point-blank range and murdered people while they were queuing for food. They have closed Gaza off so the UN and other relief agencies cannot function. People in their desperation are trying to bring food by sea but the Israeli government are threatening them Yet the Israelis always play the victim. Any criticism of the...

 Some people may ask, why am I still writing about it, talking about it?   I wish I didn't have to. I wish we were not witnessing an ongoing genocide. I am so consumed with a mix of feelings, anger, despair, digust. How can Israel get away with their crimes in Gaza and the West Bank? Why haven't they been reigned in? Is the international community so toothless? So afraid of the United States and Trump's tarrifs? Afraid of big business?  There is a conserted effort to silence any opposition, any criticism of Israel's genocide, in the USA, the UK and elsewhere, I am proud that my country, Ireland,  is taking some kind of a stand but it is not enough. Restrcting trade with and arms sales to Israel should have happened years ago. Israeli diplomats should be expelled from every country on he planet. A genocide is ongoing, people are being deliberately starved, shot while they queue for food, and the world watched on. DON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE

They drop bombs on civilians They burn people in tents They bomb hospitals/schools/ places of worship They make babies die in incubators There are kids walking around, without limbs, without family. They block food/aid so a poulation starve with hunger They lure a starving population to their deaths by offering aid then shooting at them when they go to collect it. They block aid trucks. They kill aid workers, doctors and journalists They have barbeques beside the border fence so a starving population can smell the meat being cooked and hear the laughter while they are in despair. Their own media and politicians spout genocidal rhetoric This is the Zionist Apartheid state  This is Israel. Future generations will look back on this  thinking, how could they have let this happen? It is not like the 1930s. This genocide is being live streamed on social media. STOP!

People ask me why I feel strongly about the Palestinian issue. It have followed it since I watched the Rabin and Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, in the presence of Bill Clinton. Rabin was murdered by a supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1995. AFFINITY I think my affinity with the Palestinians comes from Ireland’s colonial past. Ireland may be a mostly white European country, but many Irish people say they identify more with the Global South's experience of imperialism and colonialism. ONE ATTROCITY AFTER ANOTHER Cast your mind back to mid October 2023 when Israel bombed Al Shifa hospital. Joe Biden, at that time, said it was done by the other team as Israel would never bomb a hospital. Looking at the Gaza Strip now 16 months later and every hospital has been destroyed, along with most of Gaza’s infrastructure.  They just commit atrocity after atrocity and move on. Any criticism, from human rights groups or respected international institutions like the ...

So Israel is bombing Gaza again. Gazans were told to move South when the bombed the North, now Israel plan to bomb South Gaza and have told the residents to evacuate. But where to? They will be shot if they try and go north so there is nowhere to go. This is a textbook case of ethnic cleansing and genocide.  Apparently Hamas are in the South now. This has nothing to do with Hamas but is the execution of a plan to drive the Palestinians from their land that started before Israel became a state in 1948 Gazans are effectively in an open air prison with no means of escape and are facing arial bombardment and a ground invasion.  It may not be gas chambers, but it’s the wiping out of a civilian population. The same end result as what the Nazis tried to do to the Jews 80 years ago. And what about 7th October, as some journalists often ask?  The New York Times by no means a pro-Palestinian publication has reported that Israel knew about this in advance. Israeli eye-wi...

I can't believe some of media reporting at the moment. Palestinians being slaughtered.  How many now, 11000 12. When will it end? All the mainstream media can ask is do you condemn Hamas? What everyone is failing to point out is that Hamas was actually backed by the Israeli regime when more moderate Palestinian groups were attempting to negotiate a settlement. The more extreme Israelis realised that they needed a terrorist group in control of Gaza and on their borders in order to justify a military solution. In this sense the right-wing regime in Israel is at least partly responsible for the death of those innocent Israelis that it is now using to justify the killings of thousands of innocent Palestinians. The Israelis have been using genocidal language for a long time but now they are talking about the Gaza Nakba, a final solution. It’s insane that we have got to this point, that the Israeli government haven’t been reigned in. And some of the revisions of history that I have heard...

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complex one. It's origins lie in a British government declaration in 1917 to set-up a Jewish state in Palestine    Key words for me in the text are these: "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine",   After the First World War the British controlled Palestine and from then, but particularly from the the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian have been losing land. Israel didn't just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding ...

I can't comprehend what's happening in the Middle East at the moment. Those who opppsed a ceasefire, what lack of humanity? Palestine is being cut off from the world so that a mass slaughter can take place  In the first half of the 20th century we had a pandemic, a major economic crash and a genocide. We've already had a pandemic and an economic crash, now it seems that genocide is taking place. I always remember former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 "enough of blood and tears" enough. He was murdered by an Israeli settler in 1995, a Netenyahu supporter. In the last few years these settlers have been running amok in the West Bank, murdering Palestinians and taking their land. So what about Hamas, a lot people would be surprised to know that Natenyahu's political party funnels a lot of money to Hamas, via Qatar. Why? Because Netenyahu and his party don't want peace. I remember in the 1990s he was seen as a paraih, a right-wing zealot. It was v...