In the Aida refugee camp, just outside Bethlehem, murals on the walls make reference to the daily reality for local residents.
“Here, only [a] tiger can survive,” reads text beside a painted tiger, its mouth open in a roar. “Here, only butterflies and birds are free,” says another.
One mural lists the 22 villages from which the camp’s residents were originally displaced during what is known to Palestinians as the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
The Irish Tricolour also appears in multiple locations, including a heart-shaped version beside a Palestinian flag heart. A recent addition to the walls is a mural to Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap, who have been consistently vocal in their support for Palestine. Kneecap have also helped over the years in other ways, including through their fundraising for the ACLAÍ Palestine gym, which opened here in 2020. Its founder is Ainle Ó Cairealláin (40) – the brother of Kneecap member Naoise, also known as Móglaí Bap.
RM Block
Ó Cairealláin’s first trip to the occupied West Bank was in 2018, when he took part in the annual summer camp which the Lajee community centre holds for international visitors interested in volunteering and learning more about the conditions that Palestinians live under.
He says he felt an immediate “familiarity” upon arrival, which he believes came from growing up in west Belfast. One thing he recognised was seeing a community take charge and set things up for themselves “out of necessity”, he says.
In Belfast, “the school I went to, the cultural centre, the theatre, the sports club, were set up by the community because the help wasn’t coming from outside. There was a big emphasis on education ... educating kids in terms of their culture and their identity, giving kids opportunities that they might not have otherwise”.
Over the next two years, Ó Cairealláin – who ran a gym in Cork for a decade – fundraised and organised logistics. The ACLAÍ gym opened in 2020, in the same building as the Lajee Centre. One coach became six, and the gym is now open from 7am until midnight six days a week. Everything is free of charge, Ó Cairealláin says, and they cater to many different groups, including women, children, and people with specific health problems, like back pain. A circus school uses the gym too.
Ó Cairealláin sees it as “a bridge between Ireland and Palestine”. Fundraisers have continued in Ireland. “People have done marathons for us, walked up hills, jumped in the sea,” he said. Conradh na Gaeilge held a fundraising swim for ACLAÍ in May. One-third of the money raised from the historic May 2024 soccer match between Bohemian FC’s women’s team and the Palestinian national team went to the gym (Daniel Lambert, Bohemian’s chief operating officer, is also Kneecap’s manager).
About 10 Irish coaches have come to volunteer in ACLAÍ Palestine, including Northern Irish boxer Tyrone McKenna, who ran a boxing training camp this year. It was an “unbelievable experience, seeing the kids that have been through so much and still come to boxing every single day with a smile on their face”, McKenna said afterwards. On September 13th, Palestinian men cheered in the gym watching as McKenna won a televised fight in Belfast wearing keffiyeh-patterned shorts with “AIDA” written on them.
International links are vital at a time when Palestinians face an existential threat, supporters say. In the Gaza Strip, an ever-growing number of international bodies and experts conclude that Israel has carried out a genocide – charges Israeli officials deny. The enclave, East Jerusalem and the West Bank make up the territory that many Palestinians hope will make up a future Palestinian state. The West Bank’s roughly 3 million Palestinian residents live under a gruelling Israeli military occupation. Increasing numbers are being displaced from their homes, particularly in rural areas, while the number of Israeli settlers is growing. Though the first phase of a ceasefire deal in Gaza was agreed this week, whether it will last - as well as broader questions around the future of Palestine and Palestinians - remain unanswered.
In Aida refugee camp, visual reminders of the Israeli military are inescapable. The 75-year-old camp is set on an area of about 17.5 acres, the UN agency for Palestinians refugees Unrwa says, with its population soaring from 2,000 in the 1960s to more than 7,200 today, and its buildings extending upwards because they cannot spread out.
Right in front of the ACLAÍ Palestine gym is the Israeli-built West Bank separation barrier, known to locals as the “apartheid wall”. It wraps around much of the camp, and is flecked with Israeli watchtowers and security cameras. Drones sometimes fly overhead. Nearby there is also a huge black key on top of an arch, a symbol of the Palestinian belief in the right to return to their families’ former homes and land.
“In the West Bank, one of the biggest problems is how much movement is controlled by the occupation. That [affects] everything from going to the shop to going travelling: from the smallest thing to the biggest thing is difficult,” says Ó Cairealláin. “Taking a small space and developing it into a community resource is a collective effort in exercising our independence.”
Inside the gym, women were warming up in advance of a training session. Due to how confined the camp is, Ó Cairealláin says, it is very important to provide a safe and comfortable area for women to exercise, because there are few “opportunities for women to be physically active and less space to do so”.
Ó Cairealláin – who lives in Belfast – visits each year. In Aida camp, “the living conditions are way below what we would take for granted at home in terms of access to water and electricity and space ... community amenities like medical care and education. And something that stands out is how much people endure but yet carry on,” he notes.
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The Israeli military carries out raids, including at least three on the camp last January. I spoke to a mother whose three sons were detained during previous raids – she says soldiers came into the house, “broke everything”, and traumatised her young daughter.
In November 2023, teenager Mohammed Ali Ezia – whom Lajee Centre staff say had taken part in their activities – was killed by an Israeli sniper in one of the watchtowers while standing on the roof of his family’s building during another raid. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Israeli military accused the teenager of attempting to “open fire” at security forces – claims that residents of the camp strongly deny. The spokesperson said the military only operates in Aida camp because there are “clear indications of terrorist activity threatening the security of Israeli civilians”, saying, “only those directly involved in terrorist activity are arrested”.
The Lajee Centre itself has been broken into repeatedly, with a video posted on ACLAÍ Palestine’s Instagram page showing Israeli soldiers inside the gym itself at the end of September. In December 2023, staff say Israeli soldiers used an electric saw to cut down the flagpole on their building’s roof, which was flying a Palestinian flag, and repurposed the same pole to fly the Israeli flag from a nearby military base. Another time, they say, soldiers stole camera equipment. An Israeli military spokesperson denied this.
“The occupation forces use the Aida camp like a training ground,” Ó Cairealláin says. He accuses them of practising “how to use weapons, how to do home invasions, how to fire tear gas, how to arrest people, how to interrogate people”. The Israeli military spokesperson also denied this, saying Israeli forces only enter the camp “based on prior intelligence”.
Ó Cairealláin notices trauma reactions in children. “There’s kids that, when they hear the army coming in, they put on their clothes and their shoes because they think they’re going to be taken away ... It’s not a friendly knock on the door, like they blow the door in. And they’re in full combat gear ... you’re talking to 10 soldiers in your house at three o’clock in the morning to arrest a 12-year-old.”
Ó Cairealláin says it feels important not to paint Palestinians as a “kind of perfect victim”: he says those he spends time with are “defiant in the face of occupation, no matter what”. Instead, he would like to see Ireland and Irish people doing more to address what he terms “complicity”.
“People generally have in Palestine an affinity with Irish people because there’s an understanding that we have kind of a shared experience when it comes to standing against occupation. For us in Ireland it’s our responsibility to live up to that – it definitely goes beyond empty words from the Government and settling for symbolic gestures.”
He says “the depth of complicity that we have in the ongoing genocide in Palestine is something that I think has really come to light” over the past two years. He references US military flights passing through Shannon Airport, and the delay in passing the Occupied Territories Bill. Yet Irish people “have become more politicised in Ireland for sure, become more aware of companies that are maintaining and sustaining the occupation here”.
This means, Ó Cairealláin says, “we all kind of have our part to play. People have different spheres of influence. People have different skills. People have different opportunities to be involved ... We all need to just take stock of where we’re at individually and collectively, figure out what we can do, and then do it.”
