I promised myself I’d keep off the Gaza War here but O’Toole’s awful column overwhelmed my self-restraint. The next stack will be about the PP showing signs of coming to its senses.
……….
Fintan O’Toole is the intellectual voice of liberal, cosmopolitan Ireland, an Ireland purged of Catholic unpleasantness and superstition, one committed to justice and equality for all. That’s how many see him, at any rate. From a modest start as a theatre critic he now writes regularly on politics, literature, and history in the NYRB and LRB, among other outlets.
He is worried about the Jews. Not what has happened or might happen to them but what they are doing. I know it’s subs that write headlines but this one is entirely in tune with his text.
If Israel succeeds in Gaza, it will drag the west down with it
Remind you of anything you studied in history class at school about 20th century Europe? If it doesn’t, substitute “the Jews” for Israel and I’m sure you’ll get it.
Come now, he’s talking about Israel, not the Jews!
Half the world’s Jews are Israelis. The overwhelming majority of the rest are at least to some degree sympathetic to Israel and many have family connections to it. Judith Butler Jews and wacko anti-Zionist Jewish sects are a small minority.
But even were I to concede that point O’Toole would still have to explain how a state of nine million would be capable of taking down the West. From what special characteristic would it derive such extraordinary power? Could it possibly be that the majority of its population are members of an ethnoreligious group to whom racist loons have long attributed global power and nefarious intentions?
For the first five paragraphs of his column he quotes extensively from Avi Shavit’s account of his national service in Gaza in the 1990s. He doesn’t mention that that occupation ended in 2005, nor that Hamas staged a coup and seized power there in 2007 and has since subjected Israel to constant rocket attacks. In his view the presence of Israeli soldiers and settlers in any given territory is not necessary to constitute an occupation, their phantasmal presence is enough.
The children who were being beaten and broken and humiliated in that Gaza camp would be, if they are still alive, middle-aged men now. It’s a fair bet that some of them helped organise the atrocious assaults on Israeli civilians of October 7th last.
Here he deploys a classic trope of Western liberal commentary on the Israel-Palestinian conflict; the latter may do atrocious things but only in reaction to atrocious things that were previously done to them. The Israelis act, that Palestinians react. Only the former have agency, the latter merely lash out in pain. Only the former can be held fully responsible for their actions.
And here’s another classic,
The question defenders of Israel’s actions always ask its critics is: why are you so obsessed with us? Where were your mass demonstrations when Assad and Putin were wiping out Aleppo? Why do you not give a damn about the catastrophic violence now raging in Sudan? Why is Israel held to a higher standard?
But there is an obvious answer; Israel does not claim to be like Assad or like the mass murderers and rapists who are fighting for control of Sudan. It is held to a higher standard because the higher standard – democracy, human rights, respect for the rule of law – is the one it claims for itself. It is, in Shavit’s words, “everything we were to be”.
I really don’t think he thought this through. He seems to be saying that only states that proclaim adherence to human rights and international law can be criticised for violating them. In any case both Assad and Putin do claim to on the side of the angels and some on the Western left agree with them. I have no idea about the Sudanese Civil War but I’d bet both sides would claim to have respectable reasons for what they are doing.
And it is that self-image that has justified the West’s support for Israel. Which is why tolerance for its mass slaughter of children and women in Gaza doesn’t just corrode the legitimacy of Israel’s own existence. It corrodes the legitimacy of the West’s self-definition as a bastion of human rights and respect for law.
It wouldn’t be difficult to make a coruscating critique of the Israeli state’s behaviour in Gaza and leave it there, many Israelis are doing just that. O’Toole sees a bigger picture though, one in which the Israelis are not just a threat to themselves and Palestinians but to the West in general, to you and me.
Why would it do this? Unspeakable acts spring from unspeakable motives. There are two clear reasons for the destruction of Gaza: vengeance and ethnic cleansing. Neither can be articulated because both are crimes.
The vengeance claim is debatable but the ethnic cleansing one isn’t; it’s insane. No Palestinians have been driven from Gaza nor will any be, neither Israel nor anyone else wants them. Israel doesn’t want Gaza either and has already withdrawn the bulk of its forces from it. Hamas and the so-called “resistance axis” have won the war, this stage of it anyway. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been forced out of their homes near Gaza and in the north and it’s unclear when, if ever, they’ll be able to return to them. O’Toole’s infantilisation of the Palestinians prevents him from crediting them with their successes.
After a quote from Ben Gurion that he doesn’t give readers a source for he rounds off his column like this
But even if this mass expulsion were possible (and it runs up against the reality that Egypt and Jordan will not take in five million Palestinian refugees), the Israel that accomplished it could no longer be part of “the West”. This is not just because it would have had to abandon all pretence at being a liberal democracy. It is because it would have dragged “the West” down with it. There can be no meaningful idea of a “democratic world” distinguished from a world of brutal autocracies if those democracies collude in the elimination of an entire people.
He acknowledges such an expulsion is impossible but that doesn’t seem to lessen Israel’s guilt; that elements of Israeli society yearn for it is enough. And what can one say about “the elimination of a people”? The Palestinians are more numerous, better organised and have more sympathisers in the West than at any time in their history. Their principal national movement has survived the Israeli onslaught and is rapidly retaking control of Gaza.
O’Toole doesn’t really give a flying one about the Palestinians. He’s worried about imaginary Jewish power, and I worry about people who worry about that.
A well-deserved takedown of a sanctimony not entirely unknown to Mr O'Toole
Good piece.