Mystical race memory

 Several weeks ago, a friend of mine shared an article he introduced as ‘Well worth reading’.

Writing in The Irish Times, on 21 December, contributor Mark O’Connell expresses his view that ‘it made sense that, given our history, Irish people might be broadly sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause - a support that is furthermore reflected, in a watered down form, by the foreign policy positions of its government’.

It’s worth elucidating the forms he cites that this support has taken. First, ‘the Irish government’s...recognition of a Palestinian state’, as I have argued, is not unambiguously conducive to Palestinian liberation. On the contrary, recognising the State of Palestine, as the UN and all other parties understand it, entails endorsing the racist principle of ethnic partition, specifically accepting Israel’s existence as an apartheid Jewish ethnocracy on at least 78% of the territory of historic Palestine, and legitimising the quisling Palestinian Authority. As if to emphasise this, he writes of Rashid Khalidi as ‘one of the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine’, an expression I’m confident Khalidi would reject. In reality, Israel is a country initially carved out of historic Palestine which has since 1967 occupied its entirety. To write ‘between Israel and Palestine’ implies that they are separate entities, and O’Connell can only mean ‘Israel proper’ – the country demarcated by the 1949 armistice lines, and ‘The State of Palestine’, that is, the Palestinian Authority, an entity established by the Oslo Accords in 1994, whose mandate to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip expired in 1999, and is under the control of Fatah, the party that lost the last election in 2006 and headed by a president whose term expired 16 years ago. So the history of British colonialism has somehow failed to engender sympathy with the majority of Palestinians, who live not in the State of Palestine (c. 5.6 million), but in ‘Israel proper’ (c. 1.8 million) and the diaspora (c. 7.4 million).

Ireland’s support for the colonial State of Israel is not just hypothetical. While Israel has thrown a tantrum and recalled its ambassador from Dublin, Ireland not only explicitly recognises Israel, but ‘said diplomatic relations will be maintained between Jerusalem and Dublin following the Israeli move move [sic], with Ireland also stressing it will keep its embassy in Israel open’, notwithstanding the Irish parliament’s declaration that ‘genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza’. Furthermore, as a member of the EU, Ireland is complicit in funding the Israeli arms industry.

The Republic of Ireland has also joined ‘South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide’ at the anomalously denominated International Court of Justice (ICJ, aka ‘The World Court’). This is doubtless laudable. But we need to bear in mind that the ICJ has little to do with justice as commonly understood. Note, for instance, that if the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) really has anything to do with prevention, the ICJ would not be sitting on its hands a full year after South Africa launched its case, particularly in light of Israel’s refusal to implement any of the Court’s three sets of Provisional Measures. The World Court’s principal roles are, as in this case, to adjudicate disputes between states party to a treaty, and to provide opinions clarifying treaties’ terms on the request of designated UN bodies. Insofar as the ICJ functions as a real court, the judges must decide cases on the basis of facts presented and their interpretation of the relevant treaties regardless of which or how many countries support one side or the other. So Ireland’s broad sympathy amounts to no more than a fundamentally empty gesture.

Finally, O’Connell thinks ‘requesting a broadening of the court’s interpretation of genocide’ is somehow supportive of the colonised Palestinian people. Nothing I’ve found elucidates the nature of the desired expansion, but as the definition of genocide in Article 2 of the Convention is already quite expansive, I suspect the substance of the request relates to the interpretation of intent. Since South Africa’s submissions to the court amply document genocidal intent on the part of Israeli officials from the Prime Minister down, and Forensic Architecture’s exhaustive analysis of the pattern of Israeli attacks confirms that intent, it’s not clear how he thinks this evidences sympathy for the Palestinians, or the colonised in general.

It’s curious that the examples of colonial barbarity O’Connell cites, ‘The civil rights struggle in the North, the Bloody Sunday massacre [his link makes it clear that he means the Derry massacre of 1972 and not the Dublin massacre of 1920], the long years of brutal paramilitary violence on both sides’, all pertain to events in the Six Counties, which the Republic of Ireland does not represent. That suggests that the broad sympathy derives from some kind of mystical national, or race, memory that transcends borders. He mentions Spain and Norway as matching Ireland’s response, although Norway has not joined South Africa’s case. Even though it is not within living memory, he must attribute Spain’s alleged sympathy with the Palestinians to their race memory of Moorish occupation up to the Fifteenth Century, although that would leave him to explain why Portugal lacks it. Nor does he offer any explanation for Norway’s recognition of The State of Palestine, as if that evidenced sympathy, in that country’s history.

By the same token, if race memory can explain one previously colonised country’s sympathy for a people under current occupation, surely, Israel, as the self proclaimed Jewish State must retain the memory of the Holocaust, which, in his reasoning, would preclude it from carrying out the very genocide everyone can observe and that he lauds his own government for opposing.

There’s certainly no mystery ‘why so many countries are silent’ about Israel’s genocide. They have common economic and geopolitical interests with Israel and need to sustain cordial relations with Israel’s principal sponsor, the US. As for ‘why we Irish have responded to Israel’s barbarism’, a timid and strictly rhetorical response, the explanation may indeed lie in a response to public opinion.

What truly is mysterious is why anyone would articulate such outlandish conceits as that the government of the Republic of Ireland represents the sentiments of ‘the Irish people’ as a whole, independent of class and other divisions. Another is how they could mistake a few performative gestures, at least some of which actually support the coloniser, for a meaningful response to which other European countries should aspire. It’s particularly mysterious that O’Connell prefers a mystical narrative about race memory over a concrete analysis of the ruling class’s economic and geopolitical interests.