Criminalising Solidarity: Irish Identity, Palestine, and the Legacy of Colonial Repression

Níamh Burns, ESRC SCDTP-funded PhD researcher, University of Brighton

Keywords: Palestine, Solidarity, Ireland, Colonialism, Resistance, Counter-Terrorism, Censorship

[Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]

In recent years, expressions of solidarity with Palestine have increasingly come under legal and political scrutiny. The criminalisation of solidarity gestures, whether through public demonstrations, artistic expression, or political speech, reflects not only contemporary geopolitical tensions but also deep-rooted historical dynamics. For Ireland, Pro-Palestinian activism is inextricably linked to its own colonial past and present, as well as to ongoing struggles over identity, language, and political sovereignty. It is a part of Irish culture.

Resistance, Art, and Power

The recent attempt to criminalise Kneecap, a Belfast-based Irish-language rap group, should not be viewed in isolation. Rather, it reflects a broader pattern of state repression targeting artists, activists, and public figures who express solidarity with Palestine. It is part of a larger struggle over who is permitted to speak, which histories are allowed public expression, and what forms of resistance are deemed acceptable. Kneecap’s pro-Palestinian stance, articulated through music, language, and protest, challenges these boundaries. Their art becomes political not only in its content but also in the histories and contemporary connections it invokes, both Irish and Palestinian. Kneecap has, in a way, shone a light on the contemporary colonial occupation of the North of Ireland, often left behind in Irish independence and colonial legacy discussions, whilst simultaneously calling attention to the atrocities in Palestine.

Cultural resistance plays a central role in this solidarity. Murals in Belfast commemorate Palestinian martyrs, while Palestinian murals honour Irish hunger strikers, illustrating how art and visual culture sustain political memory and reinforce shared narratives of defiance (Gilliland, 2015; Khalidi, 2007). These acts of remembrance reject colonial erasure and assert a collective history of struggle. Figures such as Bobby Sands and Ghassan Kanafani, revolutionary writers and activists, are invoked across both Irish and Palestinian struggles, highlighting a transnational anti-colonial kinship.

Kneecap’s music occupies a highly charged space where cultural expression intersects with political resistance. Their explicit pro-Palestinian stance is a deliberate act of solidarity that disrupts prevailing frameworks, particularly those shaped by Western state power and media. Supporting Palestine, for many state actors, has become a marker of political ‘radicalism’ or even ‘extremism,’ and this framing serves to delegitimise and isolate voices like Kneecap’s. Yet this suppression is not merely about silencing a foreign solidarity cause; it also echoes historical efforts to erase and undermine Irish identity itself.

Why Palestine? Why Ireland? Shared Histories of Resistance

Irish solidarity with Palestine is grounded in shared experiences of colonialism, partition, military occupation, and resistance. As Browne (2021) argues, this solidarity reflects an “unfinished revolution,” wherein British imperial legacies still shape Ireland’s political landscape, particularly in the North. The connection is not simply symbolic; it is rooted in a shared history of violence and domination. A striking example is the history of the Black and Tans, a British paramilitary force notorious for brutal tactics during the Irish War of Independence. After their disbandment, many were redeployed to Palestine under the British Mandate to suppress Arab resistance (Cahill, 2009). 

The colonial man-made famines across both lands also reflect similarities, the Irish famine, triggered by potato blight, was catastrophically intensified by British imperial policies that prioritised market principles and export profits over subsistence relief (Scanlan, 2025). Israeli military operations and an extensive blockade have led to a man-made famine, a starvation of the Palestinian people. In Gaza, the deliberate obstruction of aid flows and destruction of food systems underscore the extent to which hunger has been wielded as a mechanism of control. Israeli forces have also opened fire on Palestinians waiting for food at two sites in Gaza (Rowlands et al., 2025).

The structural similarities between Ireland and Palestine extend beyond military repression. Both have experienced legal frameworks designed to curtail political rights and civil liberties. Emergency Powers Acts in Northern Ireland mirror the Military Orders imposed in Palestine, facilitating arbitrary arrests, curfews, and suppressions of dissent. Such laws entrench systems of occupation and marginalisation, fostering parallel experiences of state violence that underpin shared struggles.

Understanding Irish solidarity with Palestine thus requires viewing these struggles not as parallel or isolated but as historically and materially entangled. Both face ongoing colonial structures, whether in Ireland’s partition or Palestine’s occupation, revealing colonialism not as a past event but an enduring system shaping identities, politics, and resistance worldwide. This shared history fuels a powerful, transnational anti-colonial kinship that Kneecap’s music and activism vividly embody today.

The Role of Counter-Terrorism Legislation

The UK’s counter-terrorism framework employs broad and often ambiguous definitions of terrorism, enabling the conflation of political dissent with threats to national security.

This counter-terrorism regime is shaped by a long history of colonial governance with a colonial logic that is not just a matter of historical record; it is reinscribed and extended in the UK’s contemporary counter-terrorism legislation. It operates as a legal infrastructure that extends far beyond the prevention of violence, it functions as a disciplinary mechanism that surveils, censors, and selectively criminalises political dissent, particularly that which emerges from colonial contexts or challenges dominant national narratives. This disproportionately targets marginalised communities and cultural actors like Kneecap, who articulate Republican or anti-colonial positions, challenging the imperial status quo. Cultural expressions, murals, music, and language remain sites of state suspicion, particularly when they convey Irish Republican identity, which is inclusive of anti-colonial solidarity with places like Palestine. The boundary between dissent and extremism is increasingly blurred, allowing the state to police not only political activity but cultural identity itself.

Crucially, all of this takes place within a legal framework where the definition of terrorism remains intentionally vague, allowing the state to interpret and apply the law according to political expediency. As Amnesty International has noted, this broadness facilitates human rights abuses, particularly when dissenting voices are racialised, minoritised, or situated within anti-colonial struggles.

The Political Economy of Empire and Resistance

Britain’s role in the occupation of Palestine isn’t symbolic, its material, ongoing, and deeply entrenched. From supplying arms and surveillance tech used in Gaza, to training Israeli police in counterinsurgency tactics, the UK is a key player in the machinery of apartheid (War on Want, 2017). This is part of a broader military-industrial alliance, built on shared doctrines of security, counterterrorism, and control. These logics don’t stop at the border, they come home, shaping Britain’s own surveillance systems, immigration policies, and policing. To speak of ‘complicity’ is too soft; the UK is a sponsor, stakeholder, and active architect of repression.

This same logic of repression extends into the cultural sphere. Kneecap’s exclusion from platforms like the BBC isn’t just a matter of taste or marketability, it’s political. Their unapologetic embrace of the Irish language, support for Palestine, and defiant nods to Republican history challenge the sanitised, post-conflict narratives British media perpetuate. Far from neutral, institutions like the BBC function as gatekeepers of ‘acceptable’ identity, reinforcing state-friendly narratives while sidelining voices that disrupt them. This isn’t new, during the Troubles, direct broadcasts of Sinn Féin were banned (Moloney, 1991), and that logic evidently persists today. Kneecap represent a working-class, decolonial Irishness that refuses to be folklorised or silenced. Their media marginalisation is less about music and more about control, about who gets to speak, whose histories are remembered, and which identities are allowed into the spotlight. It’s not just censorship; it’s colonial governance by other means. In addition, whilst writing this blog, another Irish artist, CMAT, released a song in which the use of the Irish language was censored by BBC Radio 1, something they have since denied.  

Reclaiming the Right to Solidarity

In a world increasingly hostile to dissent, the act of solidarity has been redefined, not as a gesture of internationalism or mutual liberation, but as something dangerous and proximate to criminality. Globally, displays of solidarity with Palestine are being systematically policed, censored, and criminalised. At the time of writing this blog, the death toll in Gaza is over 45,000, over 109,000 people have been injured in Gaza and over 15,000 in the West Bank, and 90% of Gaza’s population have been displaced from their homes (Redcross, 2025). Solidarity is therefore not merely symbolic. It is insurgent and necessary. It is dangerous only to those who rely on the silence of the colonised and the complicity of the comfortable. We must therefore reclaim solidarity, as a fundamental political right and a decolonial imperative.

Crucially, Kneecap are not the story, the Genocide in Gaza is and Israel must be held accountable for its atrocities.

“Gach focal a labhraítear i nGaeilge, is é piléar scaoilte ar son saoirse na hÉireann” (Kneecap film, quoted in Bickerton, 2025) and for Palestine.

Saoirse don Phalaistín.