My Irish Palestinian Family

A story of love and history

HISTORY NEVER BEGINS, it only continues.

We find a starting point, because we must, and tell the tale. One could say this story begins in 1975, when I was seventeen years old and my sister Mary married a Palestinian man. Their four children, who I love to my soul’s core, each now have their own kids, and much of our family is half Irish, half Palestinian. Thus I carry the story of the Irish people alongside that of the Palestinian people as my own.

These two stories, as it turns out, share an essential DNA: that of a people losing their ancestral lands, of a country partitioned, of famine and hunger.

Hunger. Given the catastrophic impact of Ireland’s Great Famine from 1845-1852, for the Irish to witness the Palestinian people of Gaza on the verge of mass starvation holds its own excruciating pain.

Many generations of the Irish are still grappling with the long tendrils of trauma due to Ireland’s famine. We know in our Irish bones what it is to starve and die, to flee for one’s life, to have one’s land occupied, to have the world look away from your pain, to vow that your people will never be so vulnerable again.

In 1845, Ireland was an occupied territory within the British Empire. The occupation had begun with the British invasion in 1169 AD and had lasted for seven centuries, with much of the indigenous Irish population forced by the British over time into landlessness, poverty, and subjugation. Like colonizers all over the world, the British tried to eradicate the Irish language, the people’s ancient teachings and literature, and, perhaps most virulently, Irish Catholicism with its rich blend of Roman catechism and older traditional practices.

But the native Irish people had lived on that island surrounded by the sea for thousands of years. They had long memories of epochs of rich innovation and powerful Gaelic kingdoms. They never stopped fighting their occupiers. Ever.

Despite repeated military defeats against the world’s most powerful army at the time, every several decades a serious armed uprising would gather among the Irish people against Britain. Their punishment was increasing disinheritance and steady impoverishment by the British Protestant gentry living in grand estates in Ireland, surrounded by the destitute Catholic peasantry.

It was the perfect circumstance for the spread of the potato as a subsistence crop. When the potato plant (which is not indigenous to Ireland) spread from South America to Europe in the 1600s, the Irish adopted it as a ready-made source of calories. It grew easily, almost anywhere, and had enough nutrition to keep a body healthy. Estate owners and farmers would provide a small bit of land to peasants to live on and grow potatoes in exchange for their labor. With the potato as the only source of food for the majority of people, by 1845 the Irish island had grown to 8 million inhabitants.

For a long time no one understood why the potato crop failed, entirely, seemingly overnight, for six years in a row beginning in 1845. Such things as a plant fungus were not known to exist. But the outcome was immediate, and increasingly dire. When the potatoes did not grow, the people, simply, had no other food. They starved and died by the hundreds of thousands, while the British government, the richest empire in the world, did nothing that would adequately feed the people. The notorious English Poor House system set up in Ireland was utterly unable to meet the need—and thus many times were simply closed.

In January 1847, Poor Houses not only closed their doors to starving and ill people, but also outlawed even giving “a small portion of Bread to disappointed applicants.” (Ciarán Reilly, Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine,1984, p. 43)

The Irish themselves called this time An Gorta Mor, or The Great Hunger. The name is profoundly accurate to their experience, and also historically accurate, for in truth, technically it was not a famine, which is defined as a complete lack of food, usually due to a drought. There was plenty of food in Ireland during this period, and no other crop, such as wheat or barley, failed. But those crops had to be sold in order to keep farms afloat, and the Irish peasantry did not have cash to buy food. Thus, cruelly, due to the imperial economic system, the food grown in Ireland was transported to cities or shipped to England for sale.

Ultimately, one million Irish people died in just seven years from 1845-1852, due to starvation from famine and its related illnesses. Another one million starving Irish people left Ireland in the hope of finding any kind of future.

That was one-quarter of the Irish population at the time—a stunning loss. Yet the loss was disproportionate; in some areas of the west and south, three-quarters of the ancient Irish-speaking peoples were buried or forced to flee the island under desperate circumstances.

People died in their homes, along the roads and in Work Houses. One historian wrote that the ultimate impact of the famine in Ireland was akin to a “low-level nuclear attack.” (Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995, p. 23.)

An Irishwoman in County Fermanagh, November 1899, in one of the earliest photographs of a starving Irish peasant. (James Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, p. 75)

It would take several decades for the Irish people to revolt again against their occupiers— in the famous Dublin Easter Rising of 1916. That rising would ultimately lead to the Irish nation we know today. The horrors of the Great Famine and its memory only strengthened the people’s anger and resolve to be free.

In 1963, President John Kennedy said in his Dublin speech to the Irish Parliament, at a time when the new Irish nation was still beset with poverty and hardship, that the Irish should be “the protector of the weak and of the small, from Cork to the Congo, from Galway to the Gaza Strip.”

The Irish people, so often on the side of the underdog, have taken up that call again and again.

MY SISTER MARY WAS always the quiet, tall, bookish one among us. She was also beautiful, and slyly funny. As a teenager in our brood of six Irish Catholic children—part of the great worldwide Irish diaspora caused by the Great Famine and its long aftermath—it seemed that Mary was often reading a book in some quiet corner of our Washington, DC home.

My sister Mary circa 1967, a teenager

Mary was the first to read poetry aloud to me for the pure love of it when I was fourteen and she twenty. Until then I didn’t know that anyone read poetry like that, or for that matter, that poetry could have such spirit. The book was The Prophet by the Persian poet Kahlil Gibran. Mary was in college and living at home, and was so moved that she suddenly read to me,

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. 
And how else can it be? 
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain... 

(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1924)

As she read, the world stilled and quieted, the words shimmered in the air, and things felt utterly true. That moment changed me; it stays with me still. Over the years Mary has done or said many things that changed me, and a few times have saved me. Once, when she could see my anguish as my father railed against my love for another girl in high school, I wept beside her in the car at the impossibility of being true to myself and also pleasing my father. Mary said quietly,”You know the Kahlil Gibran poem ‘On Children?’ It says that the child’s soul dwells in the place of tomorrow, which the parents cannot visit.”

It was 1975, and though Mary herself struggled to understand my choices, she knew from her own life that ultimately a person must be true to themselves—and bring that whole self to their family—rather than cut out one’s soul in order to fit in.

She knew this because she had fallen in love with a Palestinian man. My parents didn’t really mind that he wasn’t U.S.-born; they had traveled the world and were open to other cultures. But, being devoutly Catholic, they had trouble accepting that he was Muslim.

Although Mary and her future husband put together a lovely inter-faith ceremony that took place at her Catholic church and his Islamic mosque—with both priest and the imam present—my father insisted to the last minute that he wouldn’t attend. In the end he did attend, convinced by their local pastor that if my sister had to marry outside the Catholic faith, Islam was the religion within the Abrahamic tradition closest to Catholicism. At the ceremony the priest spoke eloquently of the joining of two great faiths. The long day ended with fantastic Palestinian music and food, and circles of men showing off their dancing—my father along with them.

A few years before, Mary had been the one to tell us not to buy grapes and to explain the California farmworker boycott. She was against the Vietnam War and joined Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign in 1968 in the hope that he would end it. One day in 1973 she came home with a large button declaring “Palestine Is!” pinnned to her backpack. I came to understand that this stood for some sort of freedom struggle, like the farmworkers or the civil rights movement. But this one was personal, as she had learned about it from the real life of the young Palestinian man whom she met and later married.

He had grown up in a small village in Palestine known as Eizaria (the biblical village of Bethany), just outside of Jerusalem. Over the years I learned from Mary that many Palestinians had lost their land and their homes when the state of Israel was formed in 1948. He told Mary that he didn't understand why they couldn't all live there together, as Jews and Muslims had before 1948, mostly in peace, as he put it, “as brothers.”

My brother-in-law’s family home in Eizaria was just over the line that the Israeli state had drawn for itself in historic Palestine in 1948. Across the newly established border, his parents witnessed streams of Palestinians—ultimately 750,000 people—forced by the Israeli militia from their homes and their ancient lands and removed to refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, the two parts of historic Palestine that had been set aside for the Palestinian people. Many people fled to Kuwait, Lebanon or Jordan. Palestinians call this mass displacement and loss of their ancestral homeland the Nakba, or “the Catastrophe.”

Palestinian refugees near Haifa forced to walk to the West Bank in 1948. More than 750,000 Palestinian were expelled from their homeland by Israeli militia in the Nakba. (Time Magazine, May 2024)

Mary’s husband was born in 1945, a few years before the Nabka. He came to the United States as a college student, met my sister, and in 1982 he and Mary returned to his village of Eizaria for two years, living in the West Bank occupied by Israel. It was a lovely village, and Mary, who had lived her whole life in urban Washington DC, experienced the joy of inhabiting a beloved landscape of hills and olive groves which her husband knew as home. Her first son was born there on the Mount of Olives.

Another vital thing happened during that time. Mary met an Irishwoman who was studying Islam with a gifted Sufi teacher. In the spiritual awakening of my sister’s life, she discovered the mystical core at the heart of Islam. She and her family could take a short bus ride to visit the ancient Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. She remembers walking through the old city markets and picking up fresh figs or a falafel sandwich. She continued to fall in love with the beautiful Palestinian land, its people, and their language.

Ultimately the Israeli government forced Mary and her husband to return to the U.S. They were shocked by this, and they tried to fight it legally, but to no avail. They were told that Mary’s husband, who had been born in Palestine, had no right to live there. The official excuse was that he had been away studying in Egypt in 1967 during the Six Day War when Israel gained control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. My brother-in-law, like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, was exiled from his home village where all his family and kin lived.

In the years after returning to the U.S., Mary became a teacher, community leader and environmentalist, and later formed an Islamic Montessori school in Northern Virginia. She continues to be bookish, gifted, thoughtful, and funny, and has become one of the most deeply spiritual people I know. Her four children, my beloved nieces and nephews, were raised within their Muslim faith and their shared Palestinian and Irish heritage.

Mary and her husband brought their kids to his ancestral village of Eizaria many summers when they were young, so that they could meet their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, to play and run free in the lovely village. They still have family there, though most of the young people have left to find work in other countries.

Me and my Palestinian-Irish American niece Karima in 1995.

Because of Mary, I have seen up close the beauty of Islamic traditions, the daily repetition of prayers, the kneeling, the washing of feet and hands. I have experienced the generosity and welcome of Muslim people at events in Mary’s community.

Recently Mary told me that she would wish to be buried in the village of Eizaria. This, though, would be impossible. The small Palestinian village Mary encountered in the 1980s is unrecognizable today. It is surrounded by tall fencing and an ugly wall has been built through the middle of the village blocking the road to Jerusalem. The village inhabitants have to show a visa at an Israeli border checkpoint in order to travel to the Al-Aqsa Mosque or anywhere in Jersusalem. My brother-in-law is not allowed by Israel to return to his home village of Eizaria except as a tourist.

These are my people. This is my family. I hold their joy and their suffering as my own.

IN THE EARLY 1970s when my sister Mary was getting to know her Palestinian husband-to-be, the rest of the world was upside down in many ways. At the center of it all was the Vietnam War. Recently the U.S. honored the 50th anniversary of the end of that war, and I was reminded of the vehemence with which the students who protested the war were reviled by the dominant American institutions and culture. Now in hindsight, it is clear that the students were right to protest the US bombing of millions of Vietnamese civilians over two decades, alongside the death of 60,000 young American soldiers, and the untold numbers and wreckage of lives ruined and bodies maimed in that war.

It was horrific. And the young couldn’t not see it. They couldn’t stop speaking out. Even after they were threatened, even after repeatedly facing rows of armed soldiers, even after “Four dead in Ohio” when the National Guard opened fire on a student demonstration at Kent State University, they continued to protest. The students stood in the streets, they held up signs, they sang their songs, and they occupied buildings on campus. They helped to build the larger U.S. peace movement and told the world what they saw, that the war their government was waging was unspeakably wrong, and they wouldn't stop until the war stopped.

Soon after that 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, university graduations began in the U.S. A student at George Washington University—my alma mater as well as my sister Mary's—spoke out against the war in the occupied territory of Gaza in her commencement speech: “I cannot celebrate my own graduation without a heavy heart, knowing how many students in Palestine have been forced to stop their studies, expelled from their homes, and killed for simply remaining in the country of their ancestors.” She called for university transparency with investments in funding the war. I was struck by the students’ loud applause and standing ovation for her speech. Students speaking at New York University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduations also protested the war in Gaza, and received similar responses. The president of Columbia University was loudly booed by students at graduation for the ways that the university has capitulated to the Trump administration, including allowing the arrest of Mahmoud Kahlil, a student accused of no crimes at all, and who spoke out against the Gaza War.

Like Vietnam fifty years ago, the issue that defines this generation of college students is the war in Gaza. Students in the U.S. and all over the world have taken a lead role in protesting the war and its enormous cost in civilian lives. The students—alongside protesters of all ages—are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, of mixed faiths and no faith. And once again they are harshly vilified, threatened, arrested, expelled or deported for speaking out. They are telling our country a hard, unyielding truth.

There are certain facts about the war in Gaza that are not in dispute. In the decades after the Nakba, the occupied territory of Gaza became a densely populated Palestinian enclave of two million people. During the past twenty months of incessant bombing and all-out war by Israel’s far right government, 92% of Gaza housing units and about 70% of all Gaza structures (schools, hospitals, mosques, markets) have been destroyed or seriously damaged. Again, this is not in dispute, and it is worth pausing to absorb.

That is: 92% of all housing and 70% of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged.

We are all far too used to this image. Destruction in Gaza following Israeli forces' invasion, photographed on January 21, 2025. | Palestine 2025 © MSF

This too is not in dispute: 1.9 million Gazans—more than 90% of the population—have been displaced from their homes. They have been forced to relocate multiple times over the past twenty months. Gaza has been pulverized; the enormity of the suffering is unspeakable. I carry it, of course. But it is nothing compared to the daily, ongoing anguish of Mary and her husband, and my wonderful nieces and nephews, who have children of their own. They continue on, for that is what humans and parents do. Still, they are traumatized and weeping inside.

Another fact that is not in dispute: the U.S. is funding the war on Gaza and provides much of Israel’s military assistance. That is: we ourselves are supplying the weapons and paying for the carnage.

In the future, as historians research this war, certain other facts will not be in dispute. After 20 months of bombings and the withholding of aid, a growing consensus has emerged among scholars and leading international agencies that what is happening in Gaza meets the definition of genocide. The Dutch newspaper NRC recently interviewed prominent genocide and Holocaust researchers from six countries—including Israel—all of whom described the Israeli campaign in Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. Even leading Israeli scholars have shifted their position in the face of mounting evidence. As one professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, Raz Segal, put it: “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t think it’s genocide? No.”

Last week Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel from 2006-2009, wrote in a scathing op-ed originally published in Hebrew, “It’s time for Israel to halt its war of devastation in Gaza. The indiscriminate, cruel and criminal killing of civilians may see us be banished from the family of nations and summoned to the International Criminal Court for war crimes, with no good defense.” He notes that previous allies of Israel such as the UK, Canada France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy are now seriously proposing that the EU withdraw from all trade deals with Israel.

Indeed, history will show that there was only one country in the EU that spoke out early and publicly about the devastation of Gaza—and that is Ireland.

In March 2024, six months into the war, Leo Varadkar, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, said in his St. Patrick’s Day speech in Washington DC:

“The Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have so much empathy for the Palestinian people.

“The answer is simple: we see our history in their eyes. A story of displacement and dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger… The people of Gaza desperately need food, medicine and shelter. Most especially they need the bombs to stop.”

Varadkar hoped then that the U.S. could play a role in bringing peace to the Middle East and a two-state solution, just as the US had played a vital role in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Yet fifteen months later, the bombs have not stopped. There are more than 55,000 Palestinians dead and hundreds of thousands maimed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

And—hunger in Gaza has come to a cataclysmic point of true outright famine—a complete lack of food. So we return to where we began, with the starvation and hunger of poor and disenfranchised people wanting only to stay on their ancestral lands. It is now known all over the world that due to the blockade by Israel of humanitarian aid and food into Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are in imminent risk of mass starvation.

The Israeli government continues to block the United Nations from providing food and medical assistance in Gaza. Instead, while the people starve, Israel has set up a new food delivery system run by the Israeli military and the U.S. This puts the provision of aid in the hands of armed actors. Recent reporting on the vastly insufficient food provisions and military shootings of powerless and famished families walking many miles to food distribution points trying to feed their children is beyond shattering.

It was perhaps prescient when President Kennedy said in 1963 that the Irish nation should be “the protector of the weak and of the small, from Cork to the Congo, from Galway to the Gaza Strip.”

The Irish people have taken up that call.

Demonstrators gathered in Dublin in solidarity with the Palestinians in November 2023 (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)

A mural in Dublin, November 2023. Ireland’s support for Palestinian civilians is rooted in what many see as a shared history of colonialism. There are similiar murals all over Ireland. (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)

As the world wakes up to yet another increase in bombings in Gaza and only a tiny trickle of food allowed in, the stated outcome of the right wing Israeli government is now to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its native people and to take over the land entirely, which President Trump himself proposed. Thus—this is on all of our shoulders. We cannot let the mass starvation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people happen using our US tax dollars and with the support of our government.

We cannot let only the young truly see and take action about our collective failures.

Let's all support the tide of history, and not look away. Let’s feed the Palestinian people and stop the carnage and bloodshed of genocide. Let’s insist upon justice. In the decades to come, like the Irish after their long, long history of oppression, may we celebrate a vibrant Palestinian state, and a free people in their own land.

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If you feel called, I have included below a short list of resources and organizations, and ways to make your voice heard. Once you start looking around, you will find many, many more.

1. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers) is focusing this year on Gaza.

2. Code Pink: Women for Peace is very involved in activism and legislative work about Palestine and Gaza.

3. Jewish Voice for Peace is the world's largest Jewish organization standing in solidarity with Palestine.

4. Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund provides free medical care to injured and ill Palestinian children. Their current campaign provides urgent aid and supports long-term recovery in Gaza.

5. Combatants for Peace is a grassroots movement of Israelis & Palestinians
   who believe in nonviolence, co-resistance, and peace rooted in justice & equality. US and international supporters: American Friends of Combatants for Peace.

6. ALLMEP is a coalition of over 170 organizations, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis, building cooperation, justice, equality, shared society, mutual understanding, and peace among their communities.

7. There are many books. Here are two recommendations The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and The Question of Palestine (and any other writing) by Edward Said.

8. Zeteo: The independent news organization founded by journalist Mehdi Hasan.

9. +972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.