The Global Sumud Flotilla arriving in Sidi Bou Said near Tunis, Tunisia in September 2025. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Brahim Guedich. Dr Margaret Connolly’s remarks following her detention by Israeli forces after participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla were widely reported. It is not difficult to understand how anger and fear may have shaped her language. She endured what was undoubtedly an extremely distressing experience. But while this may explain the tone of her rhetoric it doesn’t exempt its content from scrutiny.
Her statement that “This barbaric, cruel regime [Israel] must be disbanded … The United States and Germany are funding it 100% with the backing of England, France and all Western Governments, who are a white menace spreading pestilence and violence wherever they go” demands a rebuttal because it compresses centuries of history into a single moral claim while overlooking the multitudinous and complex events that shaped the Western world and the Middle East.
Understanding the geopolitics of any region requires deep historical knowledge and a commitment to pay attention to the particular and the general. An examination of events at both high and low resolution is required. History asks not merely ‘what happened’, but ‘why people acted as they did within the worlds they inhabited’.
History is a banquet. It cannot be properly understood through what might be called “historical McNuggets”, isolated morsels cherry-picked to confirm an existing worldview. Such fragments may nourish outrage but do little to satisfy a hunger for understanding.
The point is captured beautifully in the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which anti-Roman rebels denounce imperial oppression before reluctantly acknowledging what Roman rule also brought. “All right,” an exasperated rebel exclaims, “but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health … what have the Romans ever done for us?” The scene is not an argument for empire, nor does it erase exploitation or domination. Rather, it dramatises a habit of mind: our tendency to be reductive to avoid engaging with contradiction or incongruence. A serious engagement with history demands that we hold competing realities simultaneously: exploitation and development, coercion and institution-building, suffering and reform.
Mature historical understanding resists the temptation to turn civilisations, nations or races into caricatures”
Dr Connolly’s remarks illustrate why this comfort with contradiction is important.
The claim that Western societies spread pestilence and violence “wherever they go” is not just a moral claim; it is historically one dimensional. Britain, France, and the United States participated in empire, exploitation and slavery, but also generated abolitionist movements, constitutional innovation, scientific advances, legal traditions and enduring cultural artefacts. German lands experienced devastating religious conflict and later genocidal catastrophe, yet also produced theological reform, philosophy and extraordinary cultural achievements.
To acknowledge such complexity is not to excuse injustice. It is to insist we address history seriously. Mature historical understanding resists the temptation to turn civilisations, nations or races into caricatures.
This debate is not abstract. Closer to home, the public discussion surrounding the proposed revision of the Leaving Certificate history curriculum demonstrates that the teaching of history must work hard to remain ideologically neutral.
Clarity
Concern has focused on references in the proposed curriculum, and the research that informed it, to themes such as social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. Critics argue that such framing encourages students to approach history primarily through lenses of power and identity rather than through chronology and historical evidence. Similar anxieties have been raised about terms such as “hidden voices” “lived experiences,” “multiple identities” and “critical inquiry,” with calls for clearer definitions to ensure these concepts are explored through rigorous historical method rather than purely subjective frameworks.
How do concepts such as “lived experiences” co-exist with “evidence-based inquiry”? This is not an argument against the inclusion of personal testimony and everyday experience in the study of history; they are legitimate source materials. The concern is this: what standards determine when lived experience becomes historical evidence? For the disciplined historian personal testimony is rarely treated as self-authenticating. Historians ordinarily ask who produced an account, in what context, for what audience, with what limitations, and can it be corroborated.
The Global Sumud Flotilla episode does not fall within the scope of the Leaving Certificate history curriculum but perhaps years from now this complex event might be flattened by ideological interpretation. A narrow reading of events might frame the incident through categories of power, oppression, victimhood and resistance, assigning actors to fixed moral positions of dominant and dominated.
Teaching history must cultivate more than the ability to criticise; it must cultivate judgement”
A historically rigorous approach would ask why the protagonists in the same events interpreted them so differently? To understand the perspective of flotilla activists and many Gazans, one might examine displacement, disputed sovereignty, regional politics, humanitarian concerns, and the psychological consequences of repeated insecurity, loss and political frustration. Yet equal seriousness would require engagement with Israeli historical perspectives: centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, Zionism, the Holocaust, wars fought under perceived existential threat, terrorism, the legacy of the Second Intifada and collective memories shaped by abandonment and betrayal. None of this requires moral equivalence, nor does it preclude criticism of actions taken by any party. It does, however, resist turning history into a cartoon.
Teaching history must cultivate more than the ability to criticise; it must cultivate judgement. When taught well history does not tell students what to think. It teaches them how difficult and sometimes uncomfortably serious thinking really is.