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