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