Oh God I've done it again - Fintan O'Toole, the Irish Times and Israel

A week ago today, Fintan O'Toole, the Irish Times's leading columnist and in-house intellectual, published his weekly article.  In it, he declared that, though it gave him no pleasure to make such an announcement, he had to point out that 'Hamas is winning'.   By this he meant that though Hamas is an allegedly odious 'terrorist' organisation, whose legitimacy is non-existent, it is nevertheless winning the propaganda war with Israel in regard to Gaza.  Even though Hamas's infrastructure and fighting forces must now, after a year of combat and one of the fiercest bombardments since the Second World War, be greatly weakened, it is nevertheless succeeding in eliciting from Israel such a brutal response to its 'outrages' that Israel is rapidly destroying its image both in the world and in its own thinking as a 'secular, liberal  democracy'.   Hamas wishes Israel to display to the world, to the oppressed Palestinians and to itself that it is not a liberal democracy, and it is succeeding spectacularly.

Fintan O'Toole is not only a very successful Irish columnist and writer, but an internationally recognised figure, who now is an 'Advising Editor' (whatever that is) at the New York Review of Books, and, at least as of 2022,  Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Visiting Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University.   He gave one of the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Princeton in 2022, joining an extraordinarily august roster of past speakers.  He is the official biographer of Seamus Heaney.

None of these manifest accomplishments seem to help O'Toole to realise that Israel is not and never has been a 'secular, liberal democracy'.   It has always understood itself  as the 'state of  the Jewish people', and that relation to the state is posited vis-a-vis Jewish people everywhere, not just those Jewish Israelis living inside the state.  The upshot of this is the raft of legislation which Israel has produced since its foundation, including the Law of Return, which confers greater citizenship rights either de facto or in potentia, on Jewish people (resident in Haifa or in Brooklyn) than on Palestinians living inside Israel or as part of the exiled communities driven out in 1948.

Fintan O'Toole is not stupid.   Fintan O'Toole lectures the world on human values.  Fintan O'Toole has intellectual and political platforms and resources most of us can't imagine.   Is it possible  that his American success and profile has made Mr O'Toole cautious about actually saying something critical of Israel?   Is he, like some old leftists and indeed like old Irish Official Sinn Fein intellectuals such as Eoghan Harris, still in thrall to an idea of Israel as promulgated by Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his gigantic pot-boiler defence of the indefensible, The Siege?

Dear readers, I promise not to do this repeatedly but I am going to post in below another letter I wrote to the Irish Times, which has not been published.   It's hard to do this without seeming like an egomaniac, but it's also important that massive establishment figures like Fintan O'Toole be taken on and contested.   I sent my letter to the Irish Times twice.  The second time I contacted the Opinion Editor, and I also sent the letter to what I think may be email addresses of Fintan O'Toole's. None of these communications were acknowledged or responded to.    

I'll paste in the letter below.  Thanks for your forbearance.   Fintan, if you see this, I hope you read it.

Conor

_______________

October 8, 2024

Dear Sir

Fintan O'Toole writes a characteristically intelligent column today, declaring unhappily that 'Hamas is winning' the struggle in Israel/Palestine ('I take no pleasure in saying that Hamas Is Winning', IT, Opinion, 8/10/24).   His point is that, in 'asymmetric warfare' of the kind Hamas can wage against Israel, mere survival, in the manner of the IRB or the IRA in Ireland, is a form of victory.   Bringing the enormous wrath of the state actor - Israel in this case - down on the oppressed population reveals to the world and themselves the extent of their oppression.   Israel betrays its status as a 'secular liberal democracy' in pulverizing the Strip as it has done since October 7, 2023.

Unfortunately, Mr O'Toole is wrong on at least two crucial points.   Firstly, Israel is not and never has been a 'secular liberal democracy'.   It  has always defined itself as the state of the Jewish people everywhere and it has codified that ideology - the root of modern Zionism - in the notorious Nation State Law of 2018.  This means that political sovereignty in Israel is vested, and always has been vested, in one ethnic group.  Therefore, Israel is properly called an ethnocracy, as the Israeli political  scientist Oren Yiftachel has argued: the demos has been defined as one ethnos.    This ethnic supremacy of one group over all others in the state is the core of Israel's problems.

Secondly, Mr O'Toole is entirely mistaken in suggesting that before October 7, 2023, Israel never engaged in the kind of murderous ethnic cleansing it is now visiting on Gaza.   The state was founded amidst the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, and reinforced in the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Palestinians from the West Bank in 1967.   Israel has engaged in what were termed in British colonial times as 'punitive raids' against Palestinians just over the borders since the 1950s: Ariel Sharon launched his blood-drenched career with the Qibya raid into Egyptian-held Gaza in 1953 and capped it with the invasion and destruction of Lebanon in 1982.   The violence now is worse, but it is not unprecedented.

Israel is a colonial and ethnically supremacist state.  When will we recognise this?

yours sincerely

Conor McCarthy

110,000 visits!

 Dear friends and comrades

Sometime last night,  my blog passed the threshold of 110,000 visits.    I am proud to be read by so many people (hoping that most  of you are people!).   Please keep up your support, which is greatly appreciated.

Conor

Jaw-jaw as war-war: diplomacy as war by other means

 

A couple of weeks ago, my brilliant comrade Harry Browne was speaking on Irish radio about a speech or interview by Kamala Harris.    Harris's status as the Democrat candidate in November's US presidential election was not at this time confirmed.    The interviewer, the professional but stolid Pat Kenny, asked what Browne thought of comments Harris made about the need for a ceasefire in Gaza.   And Browne replied sardonically that he thought that the term 'ceasefire' in political and media discourse had become an 'empty signifier', like the much-fetishized 'two-state solution'.    Both terms are forms of words which have been evacuated of substantive meaning and which really only function within the discourse - they have no purchase on the real world of blood and bone, refugees and genocidal governments, 2000lb bombs and the return of polio in the Strip.    Worse, both terms can be seen to operate as fig leaves, providing cover for colonisation, resource theft, ethnic cleansing, racism and genocide.    

Now Tom Stevenson, who writes on security issues for the London Review of Books, has published a superb critique of the 'ceasefire talks' which elaborates on Harry Browne's shrewd point.   Stevenson's article is so important I am going to print it in its entirety here in this blog, rather than just providing a hyperlink.    

Conor

____________

All Talk, No Ceasefire

Tom Stevenson

LRB Vol. 46, No. 18

For​ the last nine months, representatives from the United States, Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas have ostensibly been negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza. The delegations have met more than a dozen times, though it’s hard to point to anything that would be different had they not. Over the months the talks have taken a predictable form. Negotiators are convened. Unnamed officials say that, this time, they are optimistic about a deal – right up until the proceedings break down. The US has presented a succession of final proposals that have led nowhere. On 25 March, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2728, which called for a ceasefire over Ramadan followed by ‘a lasting sustainable ceasefire’. The resolution was months overdue, meagre in itself and passed after thousands of Palestinians had already died. It has not been heeded. Since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that Israel will not agree to a ceasefire without ‘eliminating Hamas’ and ‘total victory’. Yet the talks continue.

Information about the negotiations has come out in controlled bursts. Hand-picked reporters write up stories based on intimations from members of the US and Israeli governments. Headlines are written about hard work and steady progress that are contradicted even within the story below. Negotiators shuttle between Cairo and Doha – there have also been a couple of excursions to Paris and Rome, presumably for reasons of scenery and gastronomy. There has been no ceasefire, but for the mediators there are consolations. For the witless chief of Egyptian intelligence, Abbas Kamel, trips to Tel Aviv and the opportunity to pretend to be more than an office manager to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. For Qatar’s foreign ministry officials, a chance to display their country as neutral ground where the US and its allies are ‘pressuring both sides to commit to a deal’. For the CIA director, William Burns, the whole thing has seemed to be more of a burden, only occasionally relieved by passing off duties to the Middle East proconsul, Brett McGurk.

In Doha, the delegations from Israel and Hamas are installed in separate rooms, across the corridor from each other, in a private wing of a luxury hotel. American, Qatari and Egyptian officials go between them carrying messages. In Cairo, they are whisked off to an unknown location, probably in one of the many compounds owned by the Egyptian armed forces. At the end of May, Joe Biden announced a framework for an agreement on what he described as an ‘Israeli ceasefire proposal’, which was immediately rejected by Israel. According to the plan, a ceasefire would be declared and Israeli forces would begin to withdraw from Gaza. The remaining hostages would be released in stages, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Over the first six weeks, the Israeli army would withdraw from major population centres and humanitarian aid would be allowed in. Air operations over the strip would be suspended for ten hours a day. During two subsequent phases the remaining captives would be exchanged, and the details of a permanent ceasefire would be confirmed. The only problem was that the Israeli government had no intention of halting military operations. And Hamas persisted with the vexatious demand that a ceasefire should involve the ceasing of fire.

As early as March, the White House was said to have ‘lost its patience’ with Israel’s intransigence. Yet enough patience was left for it to be running out again in June, and in August. In May, a ‘source close to the White House’ noted that one difficulty was the scale of Israel’s demolition of Gaza, which meant that getting messages to and from Hamas leaders there had ‘at times been difficult’. On 7 July, Netanyahu reiterated that any agreement must allow Israel to continue fighting in Gaza. In other words, there could be no agreement. Yet three days later in Doha, US officials were ‘more optimistic than ever’. When Israel’s rejection of the May framework was at last admitted, the US presented a new ‘comprehensive bridging proposal’. It was vague about whether a ceasefire or a temporary truce was needed, and whether Israeli forces would remain in Gaza indefinitely. Israel was now insisting that Hamas agree to indefinite Israeli control over Gaza’s southern border with Egypt and over the Netzarim corridor that now bisects the strip. After a negotiating round in Cairo, the White House spokesperson John Kirby said on 23 August that ‘there has been progress made.’ All that was needed was for ‘both sides to come together and work towards implementation’.

The background to the negotiations has been the continued destruction of the Gaza Strip. Between two rounds of talks in July, a polio outbreak was reported in Gaza, which had been polio-free for more than 25 years. Epidemics were a predicted consequence of Israel’s actions, with even soap having quickly become rare (in the tent camps, many people resort to using abrasive sand). Talks in Rome were capped off with the assassination in Tehran on 31 July of the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh. On 28 August, the day its negotiators travelled to Doha, the Israeli army launched an attack on Jenin in the West Bank. Even the roads were bulldozed. ‘Israel has decided to turn the West Bank into the Gaza Strip,’ an editorial in Haaretz claimed.

After the talks in August in Doha, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the discussion had got ‘to the point where it is in the nitty gritty, and that’s a positive sign of progress’. In reality the central problem remained: Hamas is willing to exchange the remaining hostages for a ceasefire; Israel isn’t. At the beginning of September, US officials said they were about to present a ‘take it or leave it’ deal. The director of Mossad, David Barnea, travelled back to Doha. He said Israel was ready to withdraw from the so-called Philadelphi corridor (along Gaza’s southern border) in a potential deal. But hours later, Netanyahu gave a televised address in which he said that Israel must occupy the Philadelphi corridor indefinitely. It’s very unlikely that Israeli forces would be able to control the corridor without also maintaining control of the roads leading to it, which means there will be no withdrawal of Israeli soldiers. The Doha talks duly collapsed and US officials, who had the day before briefed that a deal was close, switched to saying that the talks had been derailed in advance by Hamas when it executed six of the hostages it took on 7 October, whose bodies were located by Israeli forces on 31 August.

The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert had a different view: Netanyahu, Olmert said, had ‘sabotaged the negotiations’. More than that, the talks themselves were a sham. ‘We must shake off the illusion that the negotiations for a deal to free the hostages under Netanyahu’s guidance are being held in good faith,’ Olmert wrote in Haaretz. Instead, the talks were better understood as ‘a game in which there is no intention of reaching an agreement’. Netanyahu has made clear at every opportunity that he does not intend to withdraw Israel’s armed forces in a negotiated ceasefire. During the one-week truce last November, Hamas released 105 hostages (by contrast, only eight have been recovered by Israeli forces). But despite pressure from the families of the hostages for some sort of deal, the Israeli security cabinet has at every stage thrown up decoys to mask the obvious fact that it prefers to continue its genocidal rampage and is unwilling to stop in exchange for the lives of the remaining hostages.

What then does Israel intend? The evidence from Gaza is that it wants to go on as it has been. A week after the 7 October attacks, Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence produced a white paper outlining three options for the future of Gaza after an Israeli assault. The first was to install the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, the second was to form a new authority under the supervision of the Israeli army, and the third was the wholesale deportation of the population. Israeli forces have driven most Gazans from their homes, but not from the strip. On 28 August, the IDF appointed General Elad Goren as its chief officer in Gaza. A ‘senior defence official’ told Ynet that ‘this is not a temporary project; this position will be with us for years to come.’ Some parts of Israel’s security apparatus are ambivalent about whether they are capable of operating in Gaza over the long term. But for now Israel’s preference appears to be for some version of military control.

The ‘ceasefire talks’ seem to exist mainly so that the fact they took place can be reported. At every stage they are said to be ‘constructive’. Progress is being made. Details are being ironed out. Never mind that nothing has in fact happened. The rolling diplomatic pseudo-event is an end in itself. In this respect the talks are similar to the debacle of the US floating pier, when US forces jerry-rigged a pontoon to get humanitarian aid into a territory that its closest ally was besieging. The pier was afloat and operational for less than three weeks, during which it enabled the delivery of a token quantity of food aid, some of which rotted on the shore. It was then dismantled, with its mission declared ‘complete’. The absurdity of the scheme almost seemed to be the point. The ceasefire talks have a similar air. What have they been except a smokescreen for the killing? A face-saving exercise, perhaps. And, in a US election year, the smallest possible concession to domestic aversion to the horrors in Gaza. More than that, they were an attempt to impart the impression, against all the evidence, that the US is a neutral party tirelessly working for peace.

It’s an old motif in the mythology of Israel-Palestine: peace negotiations stalled by intransigent participants, with supposedly neutral mediators sweating through their suits in search of an elusive breakthrough. On 7 September, Burns and the head of MI6, Richard Moore, wrote a joint article in which they claimed their two organisations were ‘working ceaselessly to achieve a ceasefire and hostage deal’ – presumably in between ammunition runs and sending Israel targeting imagery of Gazan tents from their satellites and reconnaissance planes. On 2 September, the British government was widely reported as having shifted its policy when it annulled thirty arms export licences to Israel. In fact Britain has maintained 92 per cent of its arms supply contracts, including all of those that include components for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets. British bases on Cyprus remain a critical node of international support for the destruction of Gaza. For the US, the exoteric appearance of acting as neutral arbiter (while in practice being the war’s main sponsor) is not a new role. Israel could not continue the war without the support it enjoys from the US. Were that support to be withdrawn, and the flow of munitions, aid, diplomatic cover, intelligence and surveillance services to stop, Israel would be forced to change its actions.

Marx, Again

We've just passed the anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Capital, on September 14, 1867.   This gigantic and enthralling work has been a resource for critics, intellectuals, activists, politicians, economists, the curious and the obsessed ever since.    Produced over years of work by Karl Marx, subsidized by the unhappy labours in Manchester of his brilliant friend and interlocutor Friedrich Engels, the book contains astonishingly rich analyses of the commodity, of trade, of early capitalism.   It weaves together Marx's philosophical heritage from German Idealism and Hegelianism in particular, with his interest in the history of socialism and his reading in British political economy.  But though Marx went on to work on (though not in his own lifetime finish) the later volumes of the project, he also was keen to revise the first volume.   Indeed, of course, one can argue that the unfinished status of Vols. II and III was due to his recursive mode of scholarship going back to Volume 1.    In fact anyone doing serious intellectual work finds that moving on to the next stage of that work causes one to want to revise the first iteration.   

Just in the last few days I found myself reading Italo Calvino's essay 'Why Read the Classics?' and so it made me smile to find Marcello Musto invoking it to think about Capital.   One way of thinking of a classic, Calvino suggested, was that it 'relegates current events to the status of background noise'.   A book like Capital remains indispensable, gathering new generations of readers and speaking to the crises and needs of the bad new times.

Here is Musto writing on why Marx continued revising Volume I, published at Jacobin:

Why Karl Marx Kept Reworking Capital, Volume I

Meanwhile Paul Reiter and Paul North have produced a new translation of Marx's masterwork.  Redoubtable scholars of German at Ohio State and Yale, here they are interviewed by the brilliant Wendy Brown, one of the most interesting political thinkers now active. Also on Jacobin: 

Retranslating Marx’s Capital

And here is Paul Reiter himself, discussing the work of the translation:

The Challenges of Translating Marx’s Capital

Conor

The Kind of Letter the Irish Times Will Not Publish

 I've been writing letters to the Irish Times for years.    In my teens, I wrote, on my mother's old typewriter, an angry reply to some moron who'd suggested that famine in Africa was largely created by African governments and had no relationship to the colonial history of the continent.    For a long time in the 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed (to me, of course) that Raymond Deane - later to become a dear friend and comrade - and I were the only people writing cogent letters to the papers about Palestine.   We wrote well and our letters were often published.   We got hate mail and furious replies.

Not so any more, or not for me.   My Irish Times letter glory days are over - probably mercifully for everyone else, and probably mercifully for me.   The Irish Times doesn't publish my letters, though some of my colleagues, including Raymond, still regularly get published.   Raymond's high profile in Palestine activism - a lot higher than mine - gives his brilliant letters a representative character which mine lack.   But it's probably a good thing my letters are no longer published.   It would be as well not to be precious about these things - not when the IDF has murdered many dozens of journalists who are at the real sharp end of things in the Strip.  And there are other ways of finding a readership.

And yet - these days, as the genocide in Gaza continues and only occasionally is considered newsworthy, as the brutality of Israel becomes ever-more obvious, as the moral and political cowardice of the United States and the European Union on the issue becomes more and more shameful, I am stung into writing.    Last week, the Irish Times published an editorial of more than usual mediocrity and caution, noting that Ireland was likely to suffer a diplomatic riposte from Israel similar to one just borne by Norway, because of the 'support' both countries have expressed for something called 'Palestinian statehood'.  And the editorialist noted that while Israel might furiously denounce Ireland and Norway, the correct Irish response was to maintain, like Norway, a self-characterisation as a 'friend of Israel'.   This came in the week when the Gaza death toll passed 40,000.   

 

So I wrote the letter I will post below.  It was not published because it criticizes the Irish Times and that newspaper takes itself very seriously, with an amour propre akin to that of the New York Times.    The letter, most readers will find, is not actually very radical at all - for most people, the horror that Israel perpetrates in Gaza is so clearly barbaric and disgusting that one does not have to be a wide-eyed leftist to recognise it.    But the Irish Times has not twigged this yet.   I will not be holding my breath until it does.

Here's the letter:

August 16, 2024

Dear Sir

We have now passed the 40,000 mark in Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip since October.   A recent article in the distinguished medical journal The Lancet suggested that the death toll might actually be as high as 186,000.   In this context, the recent Irish Times editorial on the situation in Israel and Gaza  and Israel's furious diplomatic response to Irish and Norwegian support for Palestinian statehood ('Building Tensions, 12/8\24) is a morally and politically weak and frankly pathetic response to the apocalypse which has been unfolding in Gaza since October 7 last and which shows absolutely no sign of change or improvement.    

In a 'conflict' which has witnessed the most intense bombardment of an urban space in recent memory, which has seen the fastest deliberate starvation of any population in recorded history, which has seen the greatest number of journalists killed in any conflict in the world, and which has seen the greatest number of UN staff murdered in any period, how can anyone, even in the euphemistic language of diplomacy, see any value in Ireland casting itself as a 'friend of Israel'?   

 To stress 'friendship with Israel' in the same week as the Israeli Finance minister suggested that to starve the entire population of the Strip would be 'just and moral' is akin to declaring that Ireland is a friend of the Ku Klux Klan.   The last thing Ireland should be doing is 'echoing' the feeble and equivocating words of the Norwegian government.   It is time Irish politicians and Irish newspapers including the Irish Times, woke up and named what is happening in Gaza for what it is, and named Israel for what it is - a racist state bent on ethnic cleansing or genocide.

yours sincerely

Conor McCarthy

Coming to terms with reality - reading John Mearsheimer on Ukraine, again

This blog has long shown its interest in and admiration for John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago international relations scholar and theorist.     I've been reading Mearsheimer since 1990 and I've read several of his books, including his masterpiece, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001).    This book, published at the peak of what he calls the 'unipolar moment', when the United States made a 'Faustian bid' (in Peter Gowan's words) for global dominance, cheerfully punctured the language of the American-led 'rules based order' and showed that great power rivalry was no thing of the past, apparently replaced by Kantian universal peace and the 'new world order' at 'the end of history'.  Rather the rise or return of older great powers - Russia, China - or the emergence of new ones - India, Brazil - would contribute to an increasingly unstable, fraught and potentially violent disorder in global politics.    This has all duly come to pass.

Mearsheimer long ago offered a discomfiting prognosis of the Ukraine crisis - a video of a talk he gave at the time of the annexation of the Crimean peninsula has been viewed 29 million times and carries over 18,000 comments - where he suggested that the major driver of the problem was the determination of the West to push NATO and EU membership right up to Russia's borders, by bringing Ukraine and Georgia into the fold.    This basic element of Mearsheimer's analysis has always struck me as correct and crucial.    It's a matter of a Russian Monroe Doctrine - we can all imagine what the American reaction would be if a Russian or Chinese military alliance were to extend membership to Mexico or Canada; we all remember (or we should remember) what the reaction was of the Kennedy administration to Soviet efforts to deploy medium range ballistic missiles to Cuba in 1962.    We in Ireland could even speculate productively as to what the British response might be if Ireland were to enter a defence treaty with Russia.    It would not be a happy reaction, for sure.   Shades of Churchill's ugly comments about Ireland's neutrality in the spring of 1945.

 

None of this suggests that the Russian regime is innocent of invading Ukraine, or that it is a charmingly anti-imperialist government, or that the war has not been conducted with great brutality.   None of this suggests that Russia is a democracy; it's not.   But that is not the point: the point is that an apparently moralising foreign policy brings with it severe problems: it leads the United States into actions and interventions which are driven by realpolitik even as they are cloaked in liberal rhetorics.   Some American politicians, and many American people, actually believe the liberal language.

Mearsheimer now has a personal website - Mearsheimer | Home  - which is chock-full with links to his essays and books.  He also now maintains a Substack blogsite where links to his many appearances in the media can be found.  He's now published a new essay on the Ukraine war, on this Substack site.   It's well worth reading.

Who Caused the Ukraine War?.

The question of who is responsible for causing the Ukraine war has been a deeply contentious issue since Russia invaded Ukraine


Conor

Coldness and Cruelty: Netanyahu's Willing Executioners?

 I can still remember the controversy raised by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners.  The book, published in 1996, stoked controversy (following on the German Historikerstreit about the interpretation of the Holocaust) for apparently suggesting that the entire German nation and population was gripped by an ahistorical anti-Semitism, and that this ideological climate facilitated the participation of 'ordinary Germans' in the slaughter of Jews.  Goldhagen felt that the debate between 'functionalists' and 'intentionalists' among Holocaust historians was itself a blind alley, and that the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism had not been taken fully into account.    

Goldhagen's work aroused passionate and even vitriolic responses.  The great Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg declared that Goldhagen was 'wrong about everything', and the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that Goldhagen 'stumbled badly'.  Fritz Stern said that Goldhagen's book was gripped by an undeclared but saturating and essentializing Germanophobia.

Nevertheless, Goldhagen's book raises the question - he was not of course the first writer to discuss this theme - about the wider legitimacy accorded by German society to what was perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen and in the death camps.  Now the Palestinian writer Faris Giacaman teases out some of the issues surrounding Israel's actions in Gaza and their relation to Israeli society with its various classes, ideological groupings and institutions.   He does this via a critical re-reading and discussion of Goldhagen's book.   

 

Here is Giacaman's important and interesting essay, published at the excellent Mondoweiss site:

Netanyahu’s willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers

Conor

The Decay of Lying - Arendt on lying in politics

 

The Neck and the Sword - This is what genocide looks like - and too bad if it makes you uncomfortable to think about it

Despite, or maybe because of, the focus of the Western news media switching considerably away from Gaza in recent weeks, with the concentration instead on the French and British elections and the American presidential campaign, the brutality in Gaza goes on.   The last week, in particular, has seen a major increase in Palestinian deaths, with civilians massacred in 'safe areas'.    Large masses of people continue to be moved around the Strip by IDF fiat, moving to such 'safe areas' which then become free fire zones just like anywhere else.    The Irish political class - with the Oireachtas now on its summer recess - is no longer talking much about Palestine.    Students have gone home from university.     Protests happen, but there is no avoiding the awful contrast between the uptick in deaths in Gaza and the downtick in public agitation.   At least that's how it seems in Dublin.

Here is some reading to keep us all up to date and to bring us the 'bigger picture'.   Rashid Khalidi, whose superb work has often been referenced on this blog, has a long and impressive interview (conducted by the redoubtable Tariq Ali) in the current New Left Review:

Rashid Khalidi

And the courageous Israeli historian, Amos Goldberg, at Jacobin

Israeli Historian: This Is Exactly What Genocide Looks Like

And here is a tremendous blog piece by my redoubtable comrade and colleague, Ronit Lentin.   Ronit has been a pioneer in the study of racism in Ireland, but she's also a brave and steely writer and campaigner on the question of Palestine.   Here, riffing on Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest, she meditates on the way that some people are made 'uncomfortable' by the insistence that activists make that 'Palestine is still the question', and what this desire for 'comfort' means.

The zone of (dis)comfort

Conor

Comrade, laureate of the barricade, inspiration - Éric Hazan

I feel very sad this evening.  A great writer and agitator, Éric Hazan, has died.  I never met Hazan, and now I never will.   But I felt powerfully that I had a sense of him from his books.   This is something one quite often feels about authors whose work one likes, but I felt it with regard to Hazan strongly.

Maybe 15 years ago, I noticed a book, probably in the Verso catalogue, that intrigued me.   The Invention of Paris.   I got a copy and gave a copy to someone else.  The someone else never read it, but no matter.  I read it, or I started reading it - probably on an early visit to Paris.   Sometime around 2010, I began to visit the city often.  My dear friends R and R booked me into a little hotel on the north side of the Butte of Montmartre, not far from their own tiny apartment on the delightfully named Rue Cyrano de Bergerac, and I met them and ambled around parts of the city.

R and R's chaperoning was important to me, because though I was fascinated by French culture and intellectual life, I was deeply embarrassed at the inadequacy of my French.   I was raised by a intensely Francophile mother, who even after years away from France was fluent in the language and read in the literature avidly.  My dear mother, so gentle and forgiving in most ways, was snobbish about French pronunciation, and would correct me and others around her for infractions on the beauty of the language.   So it may be that it's to her I owe my fear of using my French.   But then I reached middle age, and while I didn't have a crisis and I didn't buy a Porsche, I took myself in hand in various ways.  One of these was reminding myself of the obvious fact that the only way to improve my French was to use it, and to plunge into the country and the language without fear.    So, though visits to Paris might be a fairly gentle or even genteel immersion, I pushed myself to visit and explore the city.  And fell in love with it, of course.    R and R were cicerones to me at the start of that process.   Éric Hazan and The Invention of Paris were and will remain the guide and map of my love.

I had long been enamoured of French culture and intrigued by Parisian intellectual culture - the existentialists, the poststructuralists, French Marxism, the jousts of writers and activists.    I had read a bit of this stuff in English.  I had also been slowly working my way through the most famous nineteenth century French novelists - Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola and, particularly, Balzac.  I loved them all.  I still do.  I've read other French writers but these are my favourites.  I'd also encountered great non-French writers who could write brilliantly about the city - Walter Benjamin, in particular, but also the wonderful English Marxist geographer, still with us, David Harvey.  Harvey's epic tome, Paris: Capital of Modernity, is a great account of the city and its development.

But none of these books quite caught my heart as L'Invention de Paris.  Once I started reading it, with its chapters spiralling out from the old city core to the barren wilderness of the périphérique, I was completely entranced.   Paris must be one of the most written-about places on earth, and I make no claim to having read more than half an iota of that literature.   But I still want to say that Hazan's masterpiece is the best book ever written about the metropolis.    It is detailed, it is erudite, it is salty and pithy at times, it is furious and denunciatory at others.   Hazan has no compunction about describing certain developments of Paris as stupid or crude or vulgar or just shitty.   He is completely trenchant in his account.  Unsurprisingly, the book ends with a long account of 'Red Paris', the Paris of revolution and barricade (Hazan wrote a short brilliant book on the history of barricades), the Paris of the northeast, of Belleville and the industrial side of the city, now the part of the city of the immigrant communities, insofar as they have a toehold inside the ring road and beyond the banlieues.   

Over about a decade, until stopped by the Covid crisis, I visited Paris every year, sometimes twice a year.  I found a lovely little hotel in Montmartre that I  kept returning to. I went often just after Christmas, when the city was maybe a little quieter than in midsummer.    I walked as much as I could.   I followed routes set out by Hazan across the city, in later books.   But always I carried The Invention of Paris with me.  I enjoyed it so much that I would smile for sheer happiness when reading it alone on the metro, for sheer pleasure at the writing.   I was not using the book as a guidebook, though one could do so.  It's not written as a guide, but as a psychogeographical history of Paris.   But revisiting it, with a good map spread out on the table, is a pleasure too, even when at home in Dublin.   

Hazan was a remarkable man.    Trained as a heart surgeon, he quit the medical profession in his fifties and became a writer and publisher.   His company, La Fabrique, now stands as a pre-eminent, though small, publisher of the French left, such as remains of that left.   Hazan and his books, and his colleagues at La Fabrique, remain a beacon.  I write this tonight, when the French right has won sweeping gains in the European elections and President Macron has called a snap general election.    To say that Hazan would have had strong  opinions about this would be a feeble understatement - he'd be firing off acrid but acute commentary: clever, committed, utterly fearless.

   

Here is Tariq Ali's obituary to Hazan, from the Verso website:

• 

  Eric Hazan: Friend, Comrade, Publisher

Self-quotation is usually an unattractive and pompous trait.   But I will allow myself to post in some past blogposts that discuss Hazan:

Reading and Walking in Paris - The incomparable Eric Hazan

Better Fewer, But Better - Walking and Reading in Paris

At the Mur des Fédérés - remembering the Paris Commune

Conor