Published: 8 November 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THE BOGSIDE NEIGHBOURHOOD is where Northern Ireland’s brutal sectarian war began in the late 1960s. Visitors photographing the murals that glorify hooded paramilitaries, though, might be excused for thinking another conflict is preoccupying the Catholic residents of this shabby grey estate.
Here, the Irish tricolour jostles for space with that of another one: the Palestinian flag. Placards decry the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. “Solidarity with Palestine!” screams a freshly painted mural outside a local pub.
Maps nestled in the corners of pro-Palestinian murals inform the public that in Palestine, like in Ireland, there can be only one state.
Between 1969 and 1998, Northern Irish society was torn apart as rival paramilitaries — representing the Catholic Irish nationalists and Protestant British Unionists — fought over wanting the territory to be united with the Republic of Ireland or remain as part of the United Kingdom, as it had been since the island was partitioned in 1921.
FULL STORY A proxy Israeli-Palestinian conflict is playing out thousands of miles away (Haaretz)
Photo: Palestinian and Irish flags flying from lampposts in the Bogside neigbourhood of Derry, left, and an Israeli flag in a unionist district of West Belfast (Jacob Judah)
