Mark O'Connell and the Irish Times on Gaza

 The coverage of the Gaza crisis by Ireland's 'newspaper of record' and leading social and moral arbiter, the Irish Times, has been mixed - as its coverage of Palestine and Israel always has been.   The IT keeps a stringer correspondent, Mark Weiss, who lives and works in Israel and rarely, if ever, visits the Palestinian territories.    They also take copy from Michael Jansen, a veteran American Middle East correspondent who lives in Lebanon, although the paper publishes less from Jansen than from Weiss.   Weiss's work is entirely lodged within the Israeli mainstream, with a liberal tinge - government statements and army reports are portrayed as factual and repeated without comment or critique.   Palestinians are rarely interviewed.   Palestinians living inside the Green Line are 'Israeli Arabs'.  And so forth.   Jansen's work is much more historically informed and open to Arab voices, and she is capable of criticism of the various mostly ghastly Arab regimes.

Nevertheless, though Irish Times columnists rarely take on the question of Palestine, the magnitude and horror of what has happened on and since October 7 2023 has forced its way into their purview.   Mostly the commentary is marked more by well-meaning emotion than intelligence - Justine McCarthy's impassioned articles, Michael McDowell's decent if rather condescending ones, Gerard Howlin's ignorant liberal hypocrisy about Irish anti-Semitism.  Fintan O'Toole's pronouncements from the heights of Heaney biography, wrapped in the clouds of glory conferred upon him by being until recently a Princeton professor, are carefully judged but rarely radical or, indeed, as analytical as they purport to be.    This blog has already published a critique of O'Toole's writing on Palestine.

It's a pleasant change, therefore, to remark the powerful work of a new columnist, relatively speaking: Mark O'Connell.   I confess I knew little about him until I head about his 2023 book, A Thread of Violence, which offers a reading of John Banville's fiction incorporating O'Connell's own interviews with Malcolm McArthur, the double murderer whose 'grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented' (Conor Cruise O'Brien) story was the material for the novelist's The Book of Evidence.   But it turned out that O'Connell was already the author of two earlier books and the winner of several literary prizes.    He now writes a regular column for the Irish Times, while also enjoying an occasional platform at the New York Review of Books.  

O'Connell's writing about Gaza has been powerful, thoughtful, moral and informed.   He recently published - at the NYRB - a long interview with Rashid Khalidi, the distinguished Palestinian historian: Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi  Such work and such affiliation will lead some to conclude that O'Connell is merely partisan, but the problem with that formulation is the 'merely'.  He is clearly well read in the history of the region, well beyond Khalidi's work, and he is fully capable of thinking out the moral and philosophical implications of what we are witnessing.   That he does this in a discourse of controlled fury only adds to his credit.    

Here is a letter I recently sent to the Irish Times, in qualified praise of O'Connell.  The IT doesn't like criticism and it doesn't like criticism of its writers.    It has not published my letter - ambushed perhaps by Donald Trump's 'Liberation Day', which has unleashed a level of panic in the Irish political and media systems which is striking to see, though it has not really caused so far any serious thought.   

Anyway, the letter:

Dear Sir

Mark O'Connell's masterful column ('The little boy in Gaza lost his entire family.  He does not cry; he just sits there, staring at the wall', Irish Times online, March 30)  touches the  root problem of the Gaza 'war' and ongoing massacres.   In ways that are rarely articulated in the day to day news cycle, he points out crucial large issues at stake: 1) that the reportage of this 'war' is conducted within tightly policed rules of discourse and vocabulary.   Hence the extraordinary Orwellian phraseology of the BBC reporter he quotes - he says that the cutting off of water and power to Gaza 'will add to those accusations that Israel has been committing war crimes', when we all know Israel has been committing numerous war crimes; 2) the fact that the endpoint of this process is the eradication or expulsion of the Palestinian population of the Strip, whether by actual killing, by starvation, or by the reduction of the Strip to an uninhabitable condition; 3) the fact that this process did not begin with the new Trump Administration but was continuously underway during the Biden Administration.   In other words,  American Democrat governments are and have been just as rabidly Zionist, and biased against the Palestinians, as Republican governments; 4) the terrifying harm - cultural, philosophical, most of all moral harm - which Israel is doing to the whole apparatus of international law and humanitarian law constructed in the wake of World War Two, and, in the most bitter of ironies, in the wake of the Holocaust and with a view to preventing its recurrence: the Geneva Conventions and the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  This harm is done both materially and ideologically: materially, on the one hand, with 2000 lb bombs dropped on hospitals and residential buildings; and, on the other, in the realm of ideology, with the weaponisation of the discourse of 'anti-Semitism' to shut down criticism of Zionism and Israel, or the cynical spectacle of Israel's UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, shredding a paper copy of the UN Charter in front of the General Assembly.  So we see, among many examples, the collapse of Columbia University and the end of academic freedom at that institution in recent days, accused by the Trump government of being soft on anti-Semitism; and the bizarre rise of what the philosopher Susan Neiman has called 'philo-Semitic McCarthyism' in Germany, where anti-Zionist Jews are now labelled anti-Semites, arrested and their protests crushed.  

Mr O'Connell's only error is in pushing his history back only as far as the Bden Administration and the Netanyahu government..   But the war on Palestine, as pointed out by Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, has been going on for at least a century.   Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, suggested in the 1890s that 'We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country … expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly'.   'We must expel the Arabs and take their place', wrote David Ben-Gurion, later first prime minister of Israel, in 1937.    The discourse of 'transfer', Israel's polite euphemism for ethnic cleansing, is as old as the Zionist movement itself.  It has been documented in the greatest detail in two essential books by Nur Masalha, which should be required reading in the chancelleries of Europe.   It is this process, and the ideology which subtends it, which we see working out its endgame in Gaza now.   In demonstrating this, and reminding us how Israel's crimes leave a moral stain on us all, Mark O'Connell performs an important service.

yours sincerely

Conor McCarthy

Thermidor on the Upper West Side - The Fall of Columbia

Columbia University is one of America's great academies of higher learning.    Situated on a handsome, even monumental, campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it is a massive and powerful New York institution.   With an endowment of $14 billion (still dwarfed by Harvard's $50 billion) it is a fabulously rich university, and is also the largest landlord in New York City.   

For me, Columbia is, or was, the site of a particular kind of intellectual ferment.   Long the home college of Edward Said, its English and Comparative Literature Department still hosts radical luminaries such as Bruce Robbins and Gayatri Spivak.  (It also hosts the overrated and dreary Fine Gael novelist Colm Tóibín).    In the recent past, Columbia played host to the radical historian Eric Foner and the great American sociologist of the 1960s, C Wright Mills. 

  

I interviewed for a post at Columbia in December 2001, at the MLA Convention held in New Orleans.   It was only months after 9/11, and the political atmosphere was chilly.   But my head was well turned even to be offered an interview.   The panel included Spivak, Jonathan Arac and David Damrosch.   Damrosch was genial and pleasant, Arac was respectful and Spivak was haughty and self-regarding.   I didn't get the job, but no hiring was made in the process.   My dreams of working alongside Said melted away.    

Abo I interviewed for a post at Columbia in December 2001, at the MLA Convention held in New Orleans.   It was only months after 9/11, and the political atmosphere was chilly.   But my head was well turned even to be offered an interview.   The panel included Spivak, Jonathan Arac and David Damrosch.   Damrosch was genial and pleasant, Arac was respectful and Spivak was haughty and self-regarding.   I didn't get the job, but no hiring was made in the process.   My dreams of working alongside Said melted away.    

About a decade ago, I was visiting New York and I was lucky enough to attend a day of a wonderful conference on Israel/Palestine, organised by my friend and comrade Bashir Abu Manneh, who was then teaching at Barnard College.   At it I met brilliant and courageous scholars such as Rashid Khalidi, Nadia Abu El Haj, and Gershon Shafir.    Such a conference now would be hard to organise at Columbia.   

About a decade ago, I was visiting the city and I was fortunate enough to attend one day of a superb conference held at Columbia by my friend and comrade Bashir Abu-Manneh, who was then teaching at Barnard College.   I was able to listen to and then meet brilliant scholar-intellectuals, such as Rashid Khalidi, Nadia Abu El Haj, and Gershon Shafir.    Such an assemblage of radical writers and thinkers would be very hard to achieve now at Columbia.

In recent months, Columbia has been important as the forcing ground of American student protests regarding the developing slaughter and genocide in the Gaza  Strip.  Encampments were set up, policing was heavy handed, staff and students were assaulted, and the University administration called in the NYPD to clear the campus.  Even Colm Tóibín was critical of this disgraceful conduct.  All of this was a repeat of the famous Columbia occupation of 1968, mounted by the Students for a Democratic Society and infused by anti-Vietnam and Black Power protest.    It too was cleared violently by the cops, called in by administrators in a flagrant attack on political expression and academic freedom.

Unsurprisingly, these events are unfolding in even worse mode now under the Trump Administration, though the situation was bad enough under Biden.    Mahmoud Khalil, a  Palestinian student and holder of a Green Card, has been arrested and detained and looks set for deportation - on the basis of no clear charge.   

It's very obvious that Columbia, and the Khalil case, are being used by the Trump Administration as test cases in a struggle ruthlessly to shut down dissent and crush student organizing.   This, from an administration whose Vice President had the temerity to lecture European states on their poor record on 'free speech'.   This, from an administration which is gutting American education at all levels - promoting the witch-hunting of progressive teachers and students, slashing funding, and promoting a conformism of which fascist regimes would be proud.

Adam Shatz, American editor of the London Review of Books, and author of a fine volume of critical essays, Writers and Missionaries, as well as an interesting new intellectual life of Fanon, has now written an extended blogpiece on the destruction of Columbia as a true university, at the LRB.  I am going to post it in here, whole, as I believe that the article is an important treatment of  the political clampdown on American higher education and intellectual life which is only just getting off the ground.    Much worse is to come.

Conor

24 March 2025

Submission

Adam Shatz

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On Friday, 21 March – two weeks after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Syria; a week after Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian graduate student, fled to Canada to avoid being detained by ICE; and just a few days after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, killing more than four hundred Palestinians in less than 24 hours – Columbia University capitulated to the Trump administration’s menu of demands, including a ban on the wearing of non-medical masks on campus, adherence to a broad and highly tendentious definition of antisemitism that would forbid almost any criticism of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, and the imposition of a ‘senior vice president’ to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.

Columbia’s surrender – a ‘shameful day’, in the words of Sheldon Pollock, who oversaw MESAAS – took place hardly a week after the Trump team presented its ultimatum. Four hundred million dollars in federal funds for scientific research were at stake, but it would be a mistake to view Columbia’s decision as a painful concession under financial pressure. The university could have compensated for the loss by dipping into its $14.8 billion endowment; it could have taken the administration to court for its extortionate assault on academic freedom and the right to assemble; it could have sought to build a united front with other universities facing unconstitutional demands from the White House. Instead, the board of trustees – stacked with supporters of Israel – took advantage of Trump’s ultimatum to accelerate a campaign against pro-Palestine dissent launched when Joe Biden was in office.

Pro-Israel faculty, as well as prominent deans and a representative of Jewish alumni, had met in February with the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, urging her to ‘get ahead’ of the Trump administration with new restrictions on protest. Esther Fuchs, a co-chair of the antisemitism task force at Columbia, said that ‘a lot of these things are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly.’

Paul Weiss, a liberal law firm, has followed suit, agreeing to work on $40 million in cases approved by Trump, and to donate tens of millions of dollars to a group combatting antisemitism. Up next is the University of Pennsylvania, under threat of losing $175 million in research grants for allowing a transgender woman to compete in the women’s swimming team.

That Columbia was first on the list was predictable, not just because of the scale of the protests there but because of Trump’s personal animus against the university. More than 25 years ago, Columbia’s then president, Lee Bollinger, turned down a Trump development project, the price of which would have been – by coincidence – $400 million. ‘Destroy Columbia University’ was among the proposals advanced by Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute last December, in an article headlined ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education’. Eden advocated arresting Bollinger: ‘Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.’ Trump is also aligned with right-wing Zionists in the United States who loath Columbia for having been the home of Edward Said (the ‘professor of terror’) and for its Middle East Studies programme, which they called ‘Birzeit on the Hudson’.

There’s nothing surprising about Trump’s attack on the universities, or on the liberal law firms that he also despises. What is shocking is the ease with which his attack has so far succeeded. Like the academics and politicians in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, American college administrators and lawyers are responding to Trump’s bullying as if it were an opportunity to carry out ‘reforms’ – and as if they were secretly relieved that their hand has been forced by the Leader. This is a tale not so much of capitulation to an authoritarian leader as of collusion with him.

The groundwork for Trump’s assault was laid by the universities themselves, and by the Biden administration, which supported the crackdown on the encampments. In the show trial Congressional hearings that led to the firing of Claudine Gay and other university presidents, Gay and her colleagues never contested the claim that slogans such as ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ amounted to ‘calls for genocide against Jews’. In effect, the universities ceded the ground to Israel and its supporters, allowing them to paint the protesters as antisemites calling for the murder of Jews – and conveniently distract attention from the actual genocide unfolding in Gaza.

There were disturbing incidents of aggression against Jewish students on some campuses, including Columbia. But there were also cases of physical violence against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including a mob attack at UCLA, and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, one of whom was left permanently paralysed. Columbia and other universities could have punished individual incidents of anti-Jewish hatred, while defending the right of student protesters – many of them Jewish – to call for divestment from a state that, with American weapons, has carried out the destruction of an entire society.

Instead, Columbia embraced the narrative of its accusers, amplified by highly selective accounts of the protests by ‘liberal’ writers sympathetic to Israel. On this view, the protests were themselves antisemitic, or at the very least caused Jewish students to feel unsafe, and therefore could not be tolerated. The rights of Palestinian students, whose voices, unlike those of conservative Jewish students, are not echoed by members of the board of trustees, were ignored, as were their much more serious concerns over discrimination and safety.

In an email to the administration in January, Mahmoud Khalil warned that he and other student protesters faced ‘severe and pervasive doxxing, discriminatory harassment, and very possibly deportation in retaliation for their lawful exercising of their rights to freedom of speech, expression and association’. An organised campaign against Khalil and others was already underway, both within the university and in right-wing Jewish organisations such as Betar and the Anti-Defamation League (which celebrated his arrest). Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, denounced Khalil as a ‘terror supporter’ on X, and, in another post, suggested deporting him, tagging Marco Rubio. The night before his arrest by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, Khalil wrote to the university administration: ‘I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.’

Armstrong not only failed to come to his aid; she has not been able even to mention his name in any official correspondence since he was handcuffed in his apartment, where he had just returned from dinner with his pregnant wife. As the Trump administration hailed the detention of Khalil, a green card holder and legal resident (‘Shalom, Mahmoud,’ the White House wrote on X), Armstrong claimed that her university was committed to making ‘every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus’.

Shortly after Khalil’s detention, in a meeting with international students, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, urged them to remove posts about the Middle East. ‘Nobody can protect you,’ he said. ‘These are dangerous times.’ True enough. Nonetheless, it was extraordinary that the dean of the country’s most prestigious journalism school was advising students to practice self-censorship – and expressing, in effect, the ‘learned helplessness’ that the American government has so often sought to instill in its critics. On 21 March, Armstrong and the board of trustees effectively buried the Columbia University of C. Wright Mills and Richard Hofstadter, of Edward Said, Barbara Fields and Eric Foner.

The response of some liberal commentators to Trump’s attack on Columbia has been to argue that ‘antisemitism’ is simply a pretext for his effort to impose his will on institutions of higher learning. There is some truth to this. But the choice is hardly accidental. Trump is surrounded by antisemites and himself prone to making antisemitic comments about sinister globalists. By styling himself as a warrior against antisemitism, he packages a highly repressive – and discriminatory – campaign as a crusade against bigotry. The charge of antisemitism is, more importantly, a way of delegitimising the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence, and strengthening Israel’s efforts to inflict ‘politicide’ on Palestine. It is the logical corollary of Trump’s support for Israel’s resumption of the war on Gaza, and his call for the creation of a Palestinian-free ‘riviera’. Those who raise the mildest of objections – even the Zionist ultra Charles Schumer, the minority leader of the US Senate – can be derided as ‘Palestinian’. Protesters will find themselves at the mercy of the Justice Department’s Joint Task Force October 7, which seeks to ‘investigate acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies and their affiliates, as well as acts of antisemitism by these groups.’ In other words, students who protest against Israel’s war on Gaza could be charged with material support for ‘terrorism’ and possibly jailed.

The Trump administration’s approach to the policing of pro-Palestine dissent is ruthless, but not much more than that of universities like Columbia. Other universities are falling into line. Harvard recently endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a pillar of Israel’s efforts to muzzle discussion of its oppressive practices. Susan Neiman coined the term ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’ to describe the situation in Germany, where writers, artists, museums and cultural institutions that receive state subsidies have seen their funds cut for expressing support for Palestinian rights, and where many left-wing Jews have been assailed as antisemites. Philosemitic McCarthyism in Germany has underwritten a policy of unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu, while doing nothing to curb the rise of the neo-Nazi AfD party. The AfD, whose pro-Israel credentials are impeccable, is this week headed to Israel for a conference on ‘combating antisemitism’.

Mahmoud Khalil, who never wore a mask, had a strong premonition that he would be arrested. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Syria and fled the civil war, he’d never had the luxury of safety, unlike his accusers. As a Palestinian, he knew his rights were conditional – even in a ‘country of immigrants’. After his unlawful detention, only thirteen members of the House signed a letter demanding his release. In his letter from prison in Louisiana, he said:

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Khalil’s invocation of the ‘right to have rights’ is an allusion to Hannah Arendt. Arendt was thinking of Jewish refugees like herself, whom the Germans had stripped of their citizenship. Today it is refugees from the Global South, and above all Palestinians, whose right to have rights, whose very existence as a people, is under threat. (The law under which Trump seeks to deport Khalil is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which originally targeted suspected Communists among Jewish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust.)

Liberals in the West – on our campuses and in our politics – have contributed to an anti-Palestinian hysteria by carving a ‘Palestine exception’ into their liberalism. What they have chosen to overlook – the ethnocratic, racist character of the Israeli state; its brutal, authoritarian policies towards Palestinians – has now been embraced as a model for their own societies by Trump and the far right. The right to have rights was always asymmetrical, but its denial has now been radicalised by MAGA to include virtually anyone who incurs the disfavour of the Trump administration.

There is of course a difference between hypocritical liberalism and violent right-wing authoritarianism. But the one has helped pave the way for the other. Behind Armstrong’s cowardice, and the cowardice of her accomplices in the university administration and faculty, lies the hope, or the calculation, that caving to Trump’s ultimatum will allow Columbia to function ‘normally’ again. Research funds will return, along with donations from wealthy supporters of Israel, and the campus will be quiet. But the result is to make a mockery of the academic freedom the university claims to uphold, and to ensure the erosion – the destruction – of the university’s values. The campaign of repression is already spreading to other targets. Submission is no way to stave off fascism.

The Fires This Time - Los Angeles, wildfire and Mike Davis

The Irish Times, in its usual liberal thick-as-two-planks way, has a headline on its website that declares that even wealthy areas of Los Angeles are not immune to the terrifying bush fires which are ravaging parts of that extraordinary city.   But what has been plain for years is that it is precisely the planning or non-planning that has allowed the very wealthy to build in vulnerable forested areas in the hills that has put the glitterati in harm's way.   So, though the Irish Times would never admit it, we need to return to the grim logic so mordantly outlined by Mike Davis - 'the case for letting Malibu burn'. 

This blog has eulogised Davis, virtuoso historian of Los Angeles and of eco-disaster generally, on several previous occasions.    Davis, a gritty, stylish and erudite writer, made his name with Prisoners of the American Dream (1985), a brilliant account of the American working class, and sealed his reputation with his wonderful history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1990).

 

 

Davis died in 2022 but his writing about LA, its misgovernance and the violence on nature which its construction and meteoric growth have entailed is as interesting and illuminating as ever.

Here is his classic essay, named to piss everyone off: 

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

And the LRB has republished his 2007 essay on a similar theme:

California Burns

And here is a chapter from his book Ecology of Fear:

The Fire Boom | Mike Davis

Conor