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Ireland as Israel?

This is a controversial topic, so discussion should be focused on the scenario and not on OTL Israel or Irish Republicanism.

Basically my scenario is what if a kind of Irish Zionism developed in the 19th Century. They have a big enough diaspora for it and say Nativists come to power in the US while Gladstone gets Home Rule through an Ireland is doing pretty well. You could definitely get some nostalgia for the old country and people wanting to return to Ireland.

Say some wealthy Irish-Americans began funding boats from Boston to New York to a new port established on the Shannon called Hibernia, which will be our Tel Aviv. This happens and leads to increased tensions between the Protestants and Catholics. After a long conflict, a deal is made where that the UK will keep Ulster (all of it), a strip down the east coast and Dublin, while the State of Eire gets the rest.

The Zirishists (yes I know that word is an abomination) import millions of Irish-Americans like the Zionists did in the late 40s and a version of the 1948 War happens, with Ireland taking the coastal strip, half of Dublin and large parts of Ulster. Lot's of Protestants flee to Glasgow and Liverpool where they form a diaspora.

In the 60s, the Ulster Liberation Organisation (original I know) with Ian Paisley (our Arafat) as the boss. They manage to provoke a version of the Six Day War which is a lot smaller in scale and probably fought mainly with paras, with the UK providing air and naval support (or not if we're going full Bay of Pigs). Ireland wins and occupies the entire island, with more Protestants fleeing.

An expy of Lebanon doesn't really make much sense so we'll skip it. Ireland here is more theocratic than Israel was, as the Catholic Church is a lot more established and important. They oppress the Protestants, while the ULO begin a quite IRAlike terrorist campaign. Sectarian tensions in Glasgow and Liverpool flare. Insert an Entebbe expy here.

International pressure on Ireland grows, helped by a lot more anti-Irish America, with Noraid being something quite different here. Eventually RFK, our Yitzakh Rabin expy, decides to make peace and meets *insert British PM here* and Paisley in Oslo. This alternate Oslo Accords ends in the Protestants granted control over a bit of Ulster and half of Dublin, but ends in Kennedy's assassination.

After that, there is several invasions of Ulster and Gerry Adams emerges as our Bibi expy.

I'm no expert on Ireland so is this at all plausible? I'm also applying a heavy butterfly net to births. Am I using too many expies?
 
I think the problem you would run into with the scenario is that, in real life, the Palestinians and Israelis both want to have their own country (and in most cases, they don't want the other group to have their own country), whereas in Northern/Ireland, the division is between two communities who each want to be part of another country. I don't know if some sort of Norn Iron self-determination movement wouldn't be more of a "get back into the UK" movement rather than an independence movement. However, I think the dynamics and perceptions of such a movement interntionally would be interesting to speculate about.
 
Depends what you're trying to do.

As a wikibox, where it's just a sketch of the situation. Pretty neat throwaway idea.

As a list of leaders, where in the point is a thought exercise about which politicians can fill the roles of their equivalents in other countries in a different political culture it's a fantastic idea. I've done Liberia as Israel, myself. And yeah, it'd be fun to pick our various irish politicians to fill various spots and continue the translation process you're doing here.

As a vignette focusing on either someone living in this island or arguments/protests elsewhere, I think you could do something really interesting with the transposing of one conflict onto another to make political points. I could see a genuinely thought provoking short story with that.

As a timeline where in you sketch out each beat, no. It'd be utterly pointless. Something like that relies on plausible working out and strict parallelism doesn't fit it's strengths.
 
Depends what you're trying to do.

As a wikibox, where it's just a sketch of the situation. Pretty neat throwaway idea.

As a list of leaders, where in the point is a thought exercise about which politicians can fill the roles of their equivalents in other countries in a different political culture it's a fantastic idea. I've done Liberia as Israel, myself. And yeah, it'd be fun to pick our various irish politicians to fill various spots and continue the translation process you're doing here.

As a vignette focusing on either someone living in this island or arguments/protests elsewhere, I think you could do something really interesting with the transposing of one conflict onto another to make political points. I could see a genuinely thought provoking short story with that.

As a timeline where in you sketch out each beat, no. It'd be utterly pointless. Something like that relies on plausible working out and strict parallelism doesn't fit it's strengths.

I was thinking of a series of wikiboxes which could be interesting.
 
I think it's far easier to imagine an independent Ulster as Israel, with the Northern Irish Catholics as Palestinians. Certainly how a lot of people see it already IOTL.
 
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As Gary says, it's not plausible & wouldn't work as a stoic timeline, but could work as a what-if-this-happened-here vignette or wikiboxes.

Though one thought occurs, which is: the native Irish are going to find themselves outnumbered by diaspora and their children. How does that work? (For Israel allusions, probably you'd want to compare it to what happens if the 'wrong sort' of Jews - Russian ones get a raw deal IIRC, Arabic ones sometimes, African ones definitely - come over. "Irish-Americans-from-New-York are good but not those 'orrible lot from Georgia")
 
Sort of ironic considering it's the loyalists who are more likely to support death by stoning for gay people, honestly.

Far be it from me to defend loyalists but is it not more the Free Ps that are anti-gay but actual working class loyalists are a bit more nuanced when it comes to social views?
 
Hm, what could be interesting is a project to encourage the Irish diaspora to return to a Home Rule or earlier independent Ireland.
 
As Gary says, it's not plausible & wouldn't work as a stoic timeline, but could work as a what-if-this-happened-here vignette or wikiboxes.

Though one thought occurs, which is: the native Irish are going to find themselves outnumbered by diaspora and their children. How does that work? (For Israel allusions, probably you'd want to compare it to what happens if the 'wrong sort' of Jews - Russian ones get a raw deal IIRC, Arabic ones sometimes, African ones definitely - come over. "Irish-Americans-from-New-York are good but not those 'orrible lot from Georgia")
My immediate thought is that Irish-Americans (perhaps specifically those from the Northeast but I'm not sure about that) would parallel, perhaps, the Ashkenazim in Israel, who have had a large chunk of the wealth and political power in that country since the beginning of Zionist settlement in the Holy Land. It's not a perfect correspondence, but they have the numbers and enough rich people for it to be similar.
 
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