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
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