Free Derry – Free Palestine

It’s 53 years since the death storm erupted at the bottom of Rossville St.

It has blighted the Bogside down through the decades since. Bloody Sunday marches and anniversary activities of one sort and another now include children and even the grandchildren of those who fell under the fusillade of bullets from the parachute regiment. It’s been a long time. Every year we are asked – Why drag the agony out? Isn’t it time to forgive and forget? Some who are generous of heart may find it within themselves to forgive. But none of us should ever forget.

As for the question of why we keep marching, the answer is simple. We haven’t reached our destination yet. So we’ll keep right on to the end of the road. What shining prize will we find there? Nothing material – but the greatest gift any of us can pass on to our children, and our grandchildren. The glittering truth, and the joy of justice, and the hard lessons we have learned. We cannot hug our grief to ourselves and in the meantime cast a cold eye on the agonies inflicted on much of the world around us.

It was said from the Bloody Sunday platform a year ago that, “Palestine is the front line of the world.” And so it was and still is. Back in the 1950s, an Irish journalist working for the BBC, Erskine Childers, son of the Irish president of the same name, reported from Palestine, “If you go among them today, on the hills above Judea, they will point through the barbed wire and tell you, “Look over there, that house beside those olive trees, that is my home.”

And so it was, and still is. And it is a shame in the face of the world all these years later that the Palestinian people must feel as far from home as ever. Childers was writing in the aftermath of what Palestinians call the Nabka, the disaster, when Zionist thugs, made from the same cloth as the Parachute Regiment, drove three quarters of a million Palestinian farmers and their families off their land and into limbo. Let’s be clear: the oppression endured here cannot be likened to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

It is right and necessary that we should assemble every year to renew our pledge not to stop until the full truth about Bloody Sunday and the identities of those who procured it is brought into the open, to be presented to future generations. But we must never forget that in Palestine there’s a Bloody Sunday every day of the week. As we shout for truth and freedom, we must shout out also free free Palestine

It is for these reasons that the banner of the Bloody Sunday March Committee is raised at every show of solidarity with Palestine. It’s for the same reason that the issue of Palestine will again be front-and-centre at the annual Bloody Sunday march on February 2nd.

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