Kathriona Devereux: Brave Cork gran, 70, taking the fight for justice into Palestine
What would you do if you were a farmer and strangers released sheep into your fields to eat your crops, or cut down your fruit trees? What if your children were harassed on their way to school by armed strangers?
Would you call the gardaí? The army? Would you call your local TD? Would you ring a local radio station? What if no-one turned up. No-one responded to your pleas for safety and your calls for justice.
Would you have the energy or resources to stay put and rebuild, knowing that the violence and destruction will happen again? Or would you leave? Allowing the strangers to steal your land to build their own homes filled with their families and their possessions.
It is hard to fathom how families in the West Bank in Palestine endure the unending harassment of Israeli settlers intent on stealing Palestinian land. Flying in the face of international law, Israel is planning 22 more settlements on Palestinian-owned land.
In the face of this infuriatingly unfair situation, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organisation, appealed to international citizens to come, bear witness, and document the slow-motion version of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Israel.
Since 2001, ordinary citizens from around the world, so-called ‘internationals’, have ed Palestinian resistance by providing ‘a protective presence’.
The thinking being that Israeli settlers, army, and police won’t misbehave with the eyes, and camera phones, of an international visitor upon them.
Volunteers help with work in olive groves, on school runs, and at demonstrations. They stand with their Palestinian hosts when villages are attacked and in the face of numerous other harassments and abuse.
Speaking with internationals who have volunteered in the past, one woman’s role was to accompany Palestinian children to school in the morning so that they wouldn’t be tear-gassed.
Cork-born grandmother Máire Ní Mhurchú, who goes by the name of D Murphy, is one of those ‘internationals’. The 70-year-old is a concerned citizen who answered the Palestinian plea to travel and stay with communities to offer some resistance against what Israel is doing.
Since 2004, she has visited the West Bank more than ten times.
‘Internationals’ are not human shields; they document and witness, offering an outsider perspective on human rights violations. They form deep connections and friendships with their host Palestinian families.
D Murphy is currently sitting in Givon Prison in the Israeli city of Ramla after challenging the deportation order made against her following her recent arrest in the West Bank.
She is fighting the deportation order because it is claimed she was doing nothing illegal. She was standing in solidarity with Palestinian communities who are facing the ongoing, escalating threat of ethnic cleansing through the Israeli forces’ agenda to expel Palestinians from the West Bank.
D Murphy was accused of being in a military area and was arrested and removed.
It is claimed that at her latest court hearing, she was not given legal representation. Her next hearing is not scheduled until July.
Speaking on 96FM last week, her son, Dale, explained how, despite the fact that he wants her back home safely, he understands why his mother is fighting the deportation order.
She wants to bring attention to the injustices faced by the Palestinian families she has come to know in almost 20 years of visiting the country.
These Palestinian families clinging to their homes and land are not faceless people. They are people like Jaber Dababseh, a father of five young children whose house has been demolished six times. After the fifth time, the family excavated nearby caves and turned them into a home with whitewashed walls and flowerpots at the entrance.
His family live in Khalet al-Dabe, a hamlet in the countryside that Israeli forces are intent on seizing.
Dale said his mother is an “amazing person” with a strong sense of justice. He said his family’s worry and concern about their mother sitting in an Israeli prison is very mild anxiety compared to the suffering of families living in Gaza and the West Bank.
But standing in solidarity is not without danger.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a US-Turkish citizen and ISM volunteer, was shot in the head in 2023 during a peaceful protest.
Lately, border control has tightened, and volunteers suspected of pro-Palestinian sympathies are increasingly denied entry to Israel.
Still, brave volunteers travel to act where governments have failed. However, international inaction over the genocide in Gaza emboldens further aggression in the West Bank; if mass civilian deaths don’t trigger ability, home demolitions certainly won’t.
The cruel logic - they’re ignoring genocide, they’ll ignore bulldozers.
Political powers in the West continue to wring their hands and make stronger political statements about the genocide in Gaza and the situation in the West Bank, but concrete consequences - economic sanctions, a ban on arms sales, humanitarian interventions - are desperately needed.
While global politicians dither and defer, courageous activists like D Murphy and Aysenur Ezgi Eygi act. D is paying with her freedom; Aysenur paid with her life.
The author Margaret Mead once wrote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Let’s hope she’s right.
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