![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Gaza.png\" "\\"Gaza\\"")
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The Short Strand housing estate is a fiercely republican enclave in predominantly loyalist east Belfast<\/span><\/a>. In these tightly packed streets, several thousand Catholics hunker down in an area of tens of thousands of Protestants. Close by one of the major routes of Orange Order marches, the Short Strand has long been a flashpoint. It was here that the IRA fought one of the first battles of the Troubles<\/span><\/a>, resulting in three dead and 26 wounded. And there are still problems, with what some rather stupidly call \u201crecreational rioting\u201d. Stones and worse are regularly thrown over the peace wall separating the communities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On a good day, the estate seems unremarkable \u2013 except for a huge mural that runs alongside a strip of wasteland next to the shops. \u201cShort Strand supports Gaza,\u201d it reads. Beside it the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, sits in a Gaza-shaped bath of blood, wielding a meat cleaver at drowning Palestinians as Barack Obama tries to avert Ban Ki-moon\u2019s attention away from the massacre.<\/p>\n Over on Northumberland Street, a very different mural has been erected by Protestant loyalists, celebrating the memory of Lieutenant-colonel John Henry Patterson, a Christian Zionist, and sometimes described as the inspiration behind the Israeli Defence Forces. A large star of David is underwritten with words from Netanyahu: \u201cIn all of Jewish history we have never had a Christian friend as understanding and devoted.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of course, Belfast is a city that knows its Bible. Presiding over the skyline are Samson and Goliath, two massive cranes from the Harland and Wolff shipyard, still the largest in the world, and named after two biblical giants. But this appropriation of the Israel-Palestine conflict by different sides of the sectarian divide has little to do with religious belief. Like many places in the UK, the God business is in decline. And for sale signs are going up outside many a former chapel. Yet all over Belfast<\/span><\/a>, Palestinian and Israeli flags still mark out the boundaries of sectarian geography.<\/p>\n According to the 2011 census, there were only 274 people who self-described as Arabs in Northern Ireland<\/span><\/a> and only 335 who self described as Jews \u2013 out of a population of 1.8 million. I know this is not the same as Palestinian and Israeli, but it\u2019s still some indication that interest in the Israeli-Arab conflict is not coming from those who have family links with that region. Despite this, and since the second intifada in particular, Catholics have tended to imagine themselves as the downtrodden Palestinians, still suffering under partition and foreign occupation. And Protestants, in response, have aligned with Israel, imagining themselves as having an ancient claim to the land that is being denied by the activity of murderous terrorists.<\/p>\n Thus the Gaza mural speaks of British colonialism and the Patterson one\u00a0of state security. So Belfast becomes Bethlehem with rain.<\/p>\n Not that this sort of dodgy appropriation is restricted to Belfast. For the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continually suffers from the way many countries play out their own domestic agendas through their chosen narratives of Israel<\/span><\/a> and Palestine. Take the US election or a UK student demo. It\u2019s almost as if we have come to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as some sort of universal archetype to which all other conflicts are related. This is rubbish. By seeing one set of troubles though the lens of another, we create an intractable confusion that does nothing to further the cause of peace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n