Members of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the small Northern Irish town of Dungannon awoke Thursday to a disturbing sight: Graffiti reading “f--- Gaza” and several swastikas scrawled in bright green paint on the house of worship, the Belfast Telegraph reported. To make matters worse, a couple had a wedding set at St. Patrick’s later in the day. Workers quickly washed off the offensive tags, which bore the phrase "UVF14," referring to the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant paramilitary group, and to a white nationalist phrase with 14 letters in it, according to The Telegraph. The wedding went ahead as planned. “Parishioners are disgusted by this,” the local member of parliament, Michelle Gildernew, a member of the mostly Catholic Sinn Fein party, told The Telegraph. "There was a wedding this morning, and I spoke to the groom and guests, and they couldn't believe it,” said Gildernew. “I hope those responsible are punished, because this has to stop. These kind of attacks tend to lead on to others and could end in someone being seriously injured or killed." Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

‘A lot of madness’

Such slogans might seem out of place 3,500 miles away from the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip, but for many in Northern Ireland, the causes of the Palestinians and Israelis rouse allegiances when tensions flare in the Middle East. “Ultimately, Northern Ireland is a very small place, with a lot of madness, and in this sense it is also very similar to Israel,” Ithamar Handelman Smith, an Israeli documentary filmmaker who directed a film about the phenomenon called “Shalom Belfast?” told Haaretz. Catholics tend to imagine themselves in Palestinian shoes — ruled for hundreds of years by a foreign force, the Protestant English monarchy. Protestants, many descendants of Scottish and English settlers, see themselves in the Israelis’ position — staking a righteous, ancient claim to territory in defiance of a force they view as bloodthirsty insurgents, the Irish Republican Army. Among the loyalists, i.e., those loyal to the crown, some on the far right openly profess xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments. According to Handelman Smith, they might see Israel as a bulwark against Muslims they feel pose a threat, but they do not bear heartfelt affection for the Jewish people. This, perhaps, explains the inclusion of swastikas, a Nazi symbol, in the graffiti on St. Patrick’s. “They hate blacks and Muslims and admire Israel because they see in it anti-Muslim might,” Handelman Smith told the paper. “At all those pubs, they asked me whether I had been in the army and had killed Arabs, and I admit I sometimes had to lie.” During the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, from the late 1960s until the Good Friday agreement in 1998, paramilitary groups from both sides carried out deadly attacks against each other, British troops and innocent civilians. The conflict brought with it bombings, murders, torture and cruel punishments. Ed Moloney, a journalist and scholar of Irish history, says that while the conflict in Northern Ireland and the one between Israelis and Palestinians share many deep similarities, there are differences that make the latter much harder to resolve. “The Northern Irish conflict is not a religious conflict,” Moloney said. “People are identified by religion, but it’s a dispute over land, and it’s about unequal distribution of political power.” “It’s not about fighting over versions of the Bible. It’s about Protestants who were brought over in the 17th century to take land from local Irish people,” he said. “One could argue there are similarities with the Palestinians because the Palestinians also had their lands taken away from them by people from outside.” Here Moloney refers to the start of what was known as the Ulster Plantation. Oliver Cromwell, a hard-line Protestant English warlord who commanded a fiercely loyal army of soldiers opposed to the Catholic Church, conquered the whole of Ireland in the 1650s, defeating both Catholics and moderate Protestants who opposed him. Responding to Catholic attacks on Protestant settlers, Cromwell’s campaign killed one-fifth of the indigenous population by sword, musket, disease and starvation. After his victory, Cromwell interned survivors into the western part of the island or sent them to work against their will in the West Indies. Many of the Irish natives, who often spoke Irish Gaelic, a language distinct from English, were left to work as serfs for Protestant landowners on plantations. These would become models for farms in the American South and the West Indies. The experience left deep resentments among the Catholic population of Ireland against English rule — animosity that remains. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, which sent a surge of Irish to the United States and Canada and killed upward of a million people in a population of about 9 million, did not help the relationship.

‘An unhappy peace’