I don’t believe in the idea of being on the right side of history. The histories of the future are none of our concern. Our concern is the present

Mark O’Connell, The Irish Times, Dec 21 2024

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the historian Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi, who recently retired as professor of Modern Arab Studies in Columbia University’s history department, is a pre-eminent Arab-American intellectual, and has for many years been one of the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

The conversation, which appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, focused on Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, and on the world’s response to it. (Since October 7th, 2023, Khalidi’s excellent book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine has rarely been out of the New York Times bestseller list. A couple of days after our conversation was published online, President Joe Biden was photographed walking out of a book shop on Nantucket Island with a copy of it under his arm – a turn of events that seemed to anger supporters of Israel and Palestine about equally.)

In 2022, Khalidi was a visiting fellow at Trinity College’s Long Room Hub, where he researched parallels in the colonial administrations of Palestine and Ireland, and the ways in which Ireland served as a laboratory for the kinds of settler-colonial practices the British state went on to export to Palestine. In our conversation, we touched on the subject of Ireland’s unusual status within Europe, and the West more generally, as a country whose population is largely supportive of the Palestinian cause – a support that is furthermore reflected, in a watered down form, by the foreign policy positions of its government.

I told Khalidi that it made sense that, given our history, Irish people might be broadly sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause. What made less intuitive sense to me, I said, was that such a cultural memory of colonisation – the knowledge that atrocities took place in your own country at the hands of a foreign occupying power – might be some kind of necessary condition for understanding that similar atrocities occurring today are also wrong. I got the impression that Khalidi, despite his expertise in colonial history and his years of political activism on behalf of the Palestinian cause, was also a little mystified by it. As the country with the longest colonial experience, Ireland, he acknowledged, was a “special case”; that such extraordinary historical conditions might be a requirement for basic morality did not seem so easily explicable.

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One partial explanation might be that that colonial history is not simply history – as though history could ever be “simple”. The civil rights struggle in the North, the Bloody Sunday massacre, the long years of brutal paramilitary violence on both sides: all of these things remain comfortably – or, more accurately, uncomfortably – within living memory. My own grandfather was born a British subject, in Co Kilkenny. The past is never dead, as William Faulkner put it. It’s not even past.

In any case, the mystery is not why we Irish have responded as we have to Israel’s barbarism. (Do you need me to provide the numbers of the dead here, and of the missing? Do you need me to detail the ongoing horror and depravity, the children shot by snipers, the starvation policies, the systematic destruction of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza?) The mystery is why the strength of that response is unmatched, with the exception of Spain and Norway, by our fellow European countries.

For Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, speaking in the wake of his country’s decision this week to close its embassy in Dublin, it’s all very straightforward: the Irish government’s policies toward Israel – its recognition of a Palestinian state, and its intervention at the International Court of Justice in South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, requesting a broadening of the court’s interpretation of genocide – are intolerably “extreme”, and our taoiseach Simon Harris is “anti-Semitic”.

That our country – its people, and its political establishment – is making its voice heard above the deafening silence of most other western nations is something of which we can, for now, be proud

No intellectually or morally serious person could view this claim with anything other than contempt; it reflects a grotesque effort, by a state on whose prime minister the International Criminal Court has placed an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, to smear anyone who dares point out the obvious. And this, in turn, reflects a grim historical irony of our era: the global norms in which criticisms of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are based exist because of the recognition of the lethal danger of anti-Semitism, and of the Shoah as a crime that must never again be countenanced. That edifice of global norms (international law, human rights), built in the aftermath of the second World War and the Holocaust, is now collapsing into smoking rubble in Gaza, buried beneath the silence and complicity of what used to be called “the international community”.

Earlier this week, as he received the credentials of the new Palestinian ambassador Jilan Abdalmajid, President Michael D Higgins said the Israeli foreign minister’s accusation of anti-Semitism against our Government was a “deep slander” on the Irish people. It seems to me to be more a shallow slander: a transparently unserious response to the deeply consequential charge that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

The President went on to say that, because of our history, Irish people have an intuitive understanding of concepts such as dispossession and occupation, and that this is why we stress the importance of international law. He’s right, of course, though it makes me wonder, again, why such a history would be necessary in order for a country and its people to understand such things. Why should Ireland be, as Khalidi put it, a special case? Perhaps I flatter myself, but I’d like to think that even if I were British, or American, or German, or Dutch, I would still be able to look at the campaign of slaughter and destruction Israel is waging, and see it for the moral outrage that it is.

It is a great shame that Ireland is a special case, but the shame is not Ireland’s. That our country – its people, and its political establishment – is making its voice heard above the deafening silence of most other western nations is something of which we can, for now, be proud. I don’t believe in the idea of being on the right side of history. The histories of the future are none of our concern. Our concern is the present. And our country is, in at least this one important sense, on the right side of it.