💭 Britain has learned nothing from Palestine

Politics

When I walk to my local supermarket in north Belfast, the journey takes me through a Catholic, Nationalist area, marked by Palestinian flags, to the edge of a Protestant, Loyalist area, where Israeli flags flutter, alongside Union flags, from the terraced houses. The 10-minute walk takes me from an area where the British state is an alien imposition to one where it is the wellspring of ethnic self-definition: for both communities, the Israel-Palestine conflict serves as a useful symbolic proxy for this suppressed ethnic rivalry. The supermarket itself is on neutral ground: it sits on what was once Victorian terraced housing, whose rezoning as a retail park “definitively separated and segregated [the] two areas whilst also decisively ...

Unherd     Oct 04, 2024