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