Adieu to Alexander Cockburn

Little did I think, when setting up this blog only 3 months ago, and taking as one of my guides the great Alexander Cockburn, that I would soon be mourning his passing.  Cockburn died on July 20 of cancer, having kept his illness secret for the last two years, all the while continuing his wonderful coruscating writing.

Disgracefully and sadly, Alex's death was barely covered at all in the Irish media.  I published this tribute on Irish Left Review, an excellent leftwing website edited by Donagh Brennan.  Warm thanks to Donagh for his help with this piece.

Adieu to Alexander Cockburn

Conor

The Nazi Past of Yitzhak Shamir

This week witnessed the death of Yitzhak Yezernitsky, better known as Yitzhak Shamir, at the age of 96.  Though other Israeli prime ministers are remembered more immediately - Begin, Rabin, Meir - the fact is that after David Ben-Gurion, Shamir was Israel's second-longest-serving leader.  He served as Prime Minister of Likud governments, after the resignation of Menachem Begin in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon War, and also at the time of the Madrid Conference, organised by the United States after Iraq was beaten out of Kuwait in 1991.   He had a reputation as a hardliner, though he did not always show political nous: determined that the PLO would not be represented at the Madrid Conference, he and his government demanded that any Palestinian representation should come only from within the Territories, and as part of the Jordanian delegation.  But this proved to be a diplomatic blunder, as the Palestinian leaders who attended the Conference - people like Hanan Ashrawi, Haidar abd-al Shafi, and Faisal Husseini - proved to be vastly more able than the Fatah hacks that Israel might otherwise have found itself debating.  Of course, the downside of this was that Israel then stonewalled so determinedly at Madrid that eventually the Oslo process began, behind the backs of the Palestinian delegation, between Arafat and Israel, and we all know what emerged from that.

What many people are less likely to know of are the (pretty minor) Irish connection Shamir had, and his extremely dubious ideological background.  Born in Poland, he became involved in Betar, a rightwing Zionist youth movement, some of whose activities were recently mythologised in a ghastly Edward Zwick historical epic film, Defiance (which can be read as a clunky allegory of the creation of the State of Israel).  In 1935, he made aliyah to Palestine, and there became involved in the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the main 'Revisionist' or rightwing Zionist militia in the Yishuv.  When it split in 1940, he joined the even more aggressive splinter, the LEHI, or 'Stern Gang', named for  its first leader, Avraham Stern.  The Irish connection is that Shamir took a nom de guerre - 'Michael', after Michael Collins.  The fact is that the Jewish guerillas in Palestine greatly admired the IRA and its struggle against Britain during the Irish War of Independence.  Funnily enough, this admiration did not extend to the IZL or LEHI being particularly in touch with the Irish situation - some years ago, Ben Briscoe, Fianna Fail TD and ex-Lord Mayor of Dublin, revealed that a delegation from the IZL arrived in Dublin in 1948, hoping to make contact with the IRA and learn from it, but clearly not knowing that by this time, the IRA was a proscribed organisation, many of whose current members had been interned during WW2 by their erstwhile colleagues now at the head of the Free State. 

But the real clue to the make-up of rightwing Zionism of Shamir's kind is illustrated by the fact that whereas the Haganah, the main Zionist militia in Palestine, observed a ceasefire during Britain's struggle with Germany during the Second World War, the IZL and the LEHI regarded the war as their opportunity.  Most strikingly of all, the LEHI made two overtures to the Nazi regime to enter the war on its side, suggesting that the creation of a 'folkish-national' Jewish polity in the Middle East would be mutually beneficial. Stern, with Shamir among his chief colleagues, put forward a document entitled 'Fundamental Features of the Proposal of the National Military Organization (NMO) in Palestine Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the Side of Germany', which noted inter alia that 'Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO', and, furthermore, that 'The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East'.
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That this idea was advanced well after the murderous and anti-Semitic character of the German regime had been revealed, and after it had conquered most of Europe, shows the alarming symbiosis between Zionist ethnic exclusivism, and the most brutal strains of European Fascism, and their mutual moral degeneracy.

Yitzhak Shamir was a representative of an older world of Zionism, but his cynical and racist attitudes are reproduced today, in the Liebermans and Netanyahus at the head of Israel, with only a little more polish.  He will not be missed by anyone who wishes to see justice in the Middle East.

Conor

The last two months have revealed to me some of the difficulties of blogging!   I mean by this that it seems to  me that for a blog to be of interest, it must be updated reasonably frequently.   That 'reasonably' is open to interpretation, but every few days, or once a week, might be 'reasonable'.

However, I have failed to write on my blog for nearly two months.  Ordinary work intruded, but also the fact is that the accumulating controversy involving the cultural boycott of Israel, Dervish, Gerard Donovan, the slanders on the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and on my comrade Raymond Deane, the yet-again-revealed bias of the Irish Times in the course of the whole business (not to mention the rubbish published on this matter by Independent Newspapers) produced a concatenation of issues which I simply could not keep up with.

I hope to add to this blog more frequently in the coming months.  Friends and foes alike will note that we are now in what is called in Irish and British media circles 'the silly season'.   I'll try not to be too silly.

Conor

Anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel

Along with my letter and those of Laurence Davis and Raymond Deane in yesterday's Irish Times, there was a 'pro-Israel' letter from David Fine.

Mr Fine asserts that there is 'something wrong' with Irish democracy 'if cultural groups are prepared to boycott the only functioning democracy in the Middle East', and if these groups support instead 'a quasi-state whose party in power has enshrined the demand in its own constitution to "drive the Jews into the sea"'.  He endorses Minister Alan Shatter's description of efforts by Palestine activists to persuade Dervish to give up its planned Israel tour as 'cultural fascism'.  Fine goes on to assert that 'Any form of opposition to the Jewish state ...  can only be interpreted as a veiled form of anti-Semitism'.  He then notes that Israel, 'unlike the Palestinian state', guarantees the vote to all its citizens, regardless of their ethnic background, gender identity, and so on.

This statement is problematic in various ways.  Firstly, it denounces 'cultural fascism' and then, without missing a beat, suggests that any form of opposition to the Jewish state is anti-Semitic - a formulation that is awe-inspiring in its totalizing reach. Secondly, the statement is factually incorrect.  Let's deal with the facts first.

Israel is not 'the only functioning democracy in the Middle East'.  Turkey is another democracy in the region, albeit also with serious flaws.  Israel is better characterised as an ethnocracy, because of the priority given in its Basic Laws to the Jewish people.  In that Basic Law, Israel is defined not as the state of its citizens, but as the state of the Jewish people.  This has the immediate and practical result of rendering all non-Jews in Israel as second-class, in juridical terms.  Furthermore, under the terms of the Law of Return, it means that a Jewish person living in Paris or Miami has the automatic right to citizenship of Israel, whereas a Palestinian person living in Cairo, whose parents left in 1948, has no such right.  Uri Davis has pointed out how at its inception the state of Israel transferred certain functions pertaining to the state over to organisations which are constituted only to assist or work for Jewish people.  A good example of this would be the administration of state lands by the Jewish National Fund.  Because the JNF continues to see its function as, indeed, the Judaization and 'redemption' of the land of Palestine, the ability of Palestinian citizens of Israel to buy or trade in land is fundamentally restricted.  A more recent example of this kind of structural racism would be the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.  This law prevents Palestinians from the Territories who marry Palestinian citizens of Israel themselves becoming citizens of Israel. It was renewed by the Supreme Court in 2006 and extended to persons from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.  The publisher of Ha'aretz, Amos Schocken, said in 2008 that the existence of this law on the statute  books turned Israel into an apartheid state.

Fine's statement is completely unclear as to what Palestinian 'state' he refers to.  Neither the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, nor the Hamas government in Gaza could be said to exercise anything like true sovereignty, so there is no Palestinian 'state'.  Neither the PLO Charter, nor the Covenant of Hamas (which is deeply problematic, and shot through with elements of anti-Semitism) make any mention of an ambition to 'drive the Jews into the sea'.

As to the idea that any opposition to the  Jewish state is a veiled form of anti-Semitism, well, the intention of such a statement is to delegitimize and block any criticism of Israel by the use of one of the worst slurs or aspersions that can be cast in the post-Holocaust world.  But there is a number of problems with this strategy:

1) it seeks to block all opposition, of any kind - be that militant or written or verbal or political or cultural or religious, violent or non-violent. We should note that it even blocks criticism of Israel by Jewish people, and by Israeli citizens.  This kind of blanket suppression of opinion is, surely, one of the essences of fascism; 

2) it elides the differences between the Jewish state and Jewish people everywhere.  Far more Jews live elsewhere in the world than in Israel.  Not all Jews identify with the 'Jewish state' - many of the most courageous and powerful critics of Israel are Jewish.  Not all Jews inside Israel identify with or fully endorse government policy.  Not all Jews fully identify with Zionism.  This statement in fact arrogates to Israel the right to represent all Jews everywhere, whether they like it or not.  This too is hardly democratic;

3) the fact is that the charge of anti-Semitism is thrown so often, and so easily, these days means that it has become profoundly and dangerously cheapened.   Its use by someone like Fine elides the gulf of difference between Nazi advocates of genocide and non-violent protestors who demonstrate outside Israeli embassies.  This elision, too, is characteristic of the fascism Fine purports to oppose.

One excellent point of reference in discussion of this kind is the work of the brilliant Jewish-American philosopher and cultural theorist Judith Butler.  Butler teaches at UC Berkeley, and is best known as a theorist of gender and sexual identity working at once in the Hegelian and poststructuralist traditions.  But she has also written influentially on hate speech, and she has long been an anti-Zionist activist.   In August 2003, she published an essay in the London Review of Books, 'No it's not anti-semitic', which she then re-published in extended form in her collection of political essays, Precarious Life (2006).  It starts off from statements made by Larry Summer, president of Harvard University, about campus 'anti-Semitism', and proceeds, carefully and politely, to demolish positions such as that of David Fine.  Anyone interested in the debate about Israel and Palestine should read it.

Conor

Letters in the Irish Times

In today's Irish Times, my letter replying to Ivor Shorts, along with letters by Raymond Deane and Laurence Davis, is published.  I am pleased, of course, though it must be noted that up until now the IPSC-bashers and proponents of 'balance' have had the field.  I am leaving my letter up here.

The link to today's letters is  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0516/1224316194435.html

Conor

Failed Arguments

When it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict, bizarre, illogical and incoherent arguments are often produced to 'defend' Israel.  An example appeared in the Irish Times last Saturday May 12.  One Ivor Shorts suggested that criticisms of Israel would have greater credibility if they acknowledged the warlike intent and efforts of the Arab states against Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973.  Here's his letter: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0512/1224315982020.html

Here's the text of a letter I submitted to the Irish Times by way of reply, which has not been published:

May 12, 2012

Dear Sir

Ivor Shorts (letters, Saturday May 12, 2012) argues that criticism of Israel has more credibility if it's preceded by criticism of wars launched by the Arab states against Israerl in 1948, 1967 and 1973, and rockets launched at Israel more recently.

Mr Shorts' argument is deficient on at least two counts, historically and logically. Historically: by the time that the Arab armies attacked Israel in May 1948, Jewish guerillas had already ethnically cleansed 250, 000 Palestinians, and assaulted the areas labelled as the Palestinian state to come under the UN partition plan. Everybody knows that Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria first in 1967, arguably unnecessarily, by destroying their airforces on the ground. 1967 was a 'war of choice' for Israel. Even the 1973 war, launched by Egypt and Syria, never touched pre-1967 Israeli territory, but only territory conquered by Israel in 1967.

Logically: the barbarous crime of the 45 year occupation was not erased or exculpated in anticipation by the 1948, 1967 or 1973 wars. Who started those wars is irrelevant to the occupation now.

Yours sincerely

Conor McCarthy

I think that these points stand.  There are multiple  complications with Shorts's suggestion that Israel was the victim in 1948 and 1967.  Not only were the Haganah and the Irgun Zvai Leumi involved in offensive operations in the areas of the 'Palestinian state' envisaged under the UN Partition Plan as early as March 1948 - two months before the 'declaration of independence' after which the Arab armies intervened -  but infamous episodes such as the Dayr Yasin massacre of Palestinian villagers took place before the arrival of Arab troops.  Further, the Jewish militias were never outnumbered - by the end of the war in 1949, they outnumbered their Arab opponents by 2:1 - and after a crucial shipment of Czech armaments arrived during the first truce (June-July 1948), they were much better-equipped.  Jewish/Israeli forces successfully beat off their attackers, while the Palestinian exodus continued.

In 1967, similarly, the lead-up to the war was characterised by both Israeli and Egyptian brinkmanship.  As late as May 1967, Israel was told by American intelligence sources that it could successfully defeat any combination of the Arab armies.  Israel famously attacked first, in the swift and devastating 'pre-emptive strike' on the airforces of its Arab enemies, almost completely wiping out the entire strength of the Egyptian air force, and putting in strikes on the Jordanian and Syrian air forces later on the same day.   Israel's rapid and tremendous victory was due to its taking the initiative in this way.  Of course, what Shorts also fails to note is that during the fighting, another 250,000 Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank into Jordan.

Shorts fails to mention the 1956 Suez War, where Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt, and he fails to mention the 1982 Lebanon War, where Israel invaded Lebanon, laid siege to Beirut, precipitated the Sabra and Chatila massacres of Palestinian civilians, and occupied large swathes of Lebanon for many years after.  

Having surveyed the historical record, one nevertheless then must note that the wars of Israel and the Arab states, started by one side or the other, in no way justify the occupation.  Are Israel's current crimes of illegal population transfer and colonisation, collective punishment, ethnic prejudice, extra-judicial execution, water and resource theft somehow wiped off the record by the fact that the Egyptian Army crossed the Bar-Lev Line in 1973?   Of course not, and to argue that they are is illogical and incoherent, a non sequitur on the grand scale.  So why does the supposed national newspaper of record  publish such crassly inaccurate and badly argued missives as that of Ivor Shorts?

Conor

Palestine Is Still The Issue

Here are links to three articles I've written touching on Palestine in the last few years.  Inevitably, they are already dated, but might still be of interest.

The first is a review of Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah in Village Magazine.  Village, both in its more recent low-profile manifestation, and in its original version edited by Vincent Browne with Sarah Burke, was one of the few Irish publications to take the question of Palestine seriously, and to be open to critical views.  Norman Finkelstein has been a radical historian of and commentator on the Israel/Palestine conflict for 30 years, since his brilliant debunking of Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial.  Beyond Chutzpah, which has since gone to a second edition, remains useful as a critique of the political use of the 'anti-Semitism' slur, and as a powerful human-rights-orientated rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel. 
 
Beyond Chutzpah in Ireland


The second article is an essay I published in 2010 in The Citizen, the magazine of the Ireland Institute, a think-tank on modern republicanism in Ireland based in the Pearse Centre in Dublin.  The essay's endorsement of the Goldstone Report would seem to have been rendered out of date by Judge Goldstone's subsequent recantations.  Yet the furore the Report created at the time, the immense pressure then put on Goldstone, and the perceived propaganda victory for Israel of his turn away from the implications of his work perhaps bear out its original power. 

Palestine, Once Again the Issue

The third piece is a review of Gideon Levy's The Punishment  of Gaza, written for the Irish Left Review in 2010.  Levy is a columnist with the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz.
 
The Punishment of Gaza