Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple

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Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.

Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain. 

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this. 

There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..

Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw. 

But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken. 

The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must. 

Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.  

The Shortest History of Ireland, by James Hawes

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Summary: “… in this great future we can’t forget our past, so dry your tears I say…”

Perhaps not quite as arresting as his Shortest History of Germany, but James Hawes Shortest History of Ireland is an exquisite thing. 

Rather than allow himself to lose narrative momentum, Hawes does, perhaps, skip over a few historical controversies – notably the impact of the Invincibles’ atrocity on the Kilmainham “Treaty”, and Collins role in the assassination of Henry Wilson. But the overall coherence of that narrative, his rigorous attention to evidence, the entertainment of his storytelling and the elegance of the prose are exceptional.

It is refreshing to see proper attention given to the role of Hume in the peace process. This has become something of a rarity in recent accounts which tend to emphasise the parallel squalid spooky shenanigans that some English writers (yes I do mean Peter Taylor!) like to dubiously  assert were central. 

This is immediately the best concise history of Ireland available anywhere. So, it is nice that it concludes on a hopeful note albeit one that must be underpinned by caution: Irish reunification is now inevitable. 

To grasp the full potential of this demands careful planning, perhaps aiming for a new federal constitution based on the four provinces. The current Dublin-centric model of government hordes power in the very way the English did during their colonial exploitation of the island to the continuing detriment of those living “beyond the Pale.”

So, if this book has a moral it’s that if today’s Irish politicians don’t rapidly reconvene the New Ireland Forum to gather evidence and plan for the future, then they will deserve every iota of historical ignominy that will inevitably be heaped upon them. 

Life so far

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On turning 60, I thought I should take stock to ponder if have spent my years usefully.

So what have I actually achieved?

Tick tock
  1. I started my professional career working for a couple of years organising hand dug wells for water, and check dams for soil conservation, in rural Ethiopia and Eritrea.
  2. Then I designed a piped water system for a quarter of a million war-displaced people outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan.
  3. After pushing papers in Oxford for a year or so I led a water, sanitation and public health programme for a quarter of a million war-displaced people in the besieged cities of the Angolan interior for the best part of five years.
  4. During that time I caught a sailfish off the coast of Angola. Tagged and released it.
  5. After Angola I learned to dive.
  6. Then I earned a PhD.
  7. I was appointed director of Anti-Slavery in 2006 and immediately had to organise its financial turnaround.
  8. I successfully advocated for making slavery eradication a post-2015 development goal.
  9. I found a woman who’d put up with me.
  10. I contributed to the introduction of a new statute in British law proscribing forced labour.
  11. I ran a marathon, very slowly.
  12. I helped expose slavery in the manufacture of garments for Western high street brands.
  13. I won Mastermind with the specialist subjects Michael Collins, the novels of Dennis Lehane, and Abraham Lincoln.
  14. I helped develop the jurisprudence around “abuse of a position of vulnerability” as a means of trafficking in the case of Chowdury et al v Greece at the European Court of Human Rights.
  15. I helped obtain inclusion of victim protection and supply chain transparency measures in the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015).
  16. I achieved recognition of forced marriage as slavery in the International Labour Organization’s 2017 estimates of global slavery.
  17. I published my 1st novel – The Undiscovered Country about the investigation of a murder during the Irish war of independence.
  18. I learned how to take a better photograph.
  19. I played a key role in mainstreaming anti-slavery in a major UN migration and livelihoods programme in Myanmar.
  20. I published Ethical Leadership: moral decision-making under pressure
  21. I published my 2nd novel – Some Service to the State about the damage caused by partition on modern Ireland.
  22. I worked out how to end slavery. Wrote it down in a book chapter called “Justice against Power: Marshalling a credible response to slavery eradication.”
  23. I’ve been an expert witness in over 200 trafficking cases.
  24. I began writing a play on the life of Frederick Douglass.
  25. I’ve started writing my fourth book on the Irish peace process… which has given me the idea for another play.

I think, on reflection, I have not led a life of quiet desperation. But that doesn’t mean it’s been without crushing disappointments.

Still, once more onto the breach, once more.

21st Century Candidates for Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

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Summary: an evolving list

Ambrose Bierce defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.

As Trump, Netanyahu and Putin continue to use this as their platonic ideal, here are a few more commonly used terms to better understand this brand of politics in the 21st Century.

  1. Terrorism: violence committed by the enemy against civilians.
  2. Self-defence: violence committed by ourselves against civilians.
  3. Tragic mistake: violence committed by ourselves against civilians after we got caught.
  4. Investigation: a process for discovering that the “tragic mistake” was unavoidable.
  5. Context: why the “tragic mistake” was all the enemy’s fault.
  6. Responsibility: we are sorry that the enemy made us kill those civilians.
  7. Consolation: nits become lice.
Mikaeil Mirdoraghi on his way to be killed

The careless application of high explosives: reflections in the shadow of the unlawful US-Israel assault on Iran

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Summary: The myth that violence solves problems persists despite history often proving the opposite.

At the end of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, George shoots his friend Lennie. Lennie, a well-meaning but simple-minded man, does not understand his own strength or the fragility of others. So, he has accidentally killed a young woman, and George knows that if the mob reaches him first Lennie will be tortured before he dies. 

Steinbeck understood something that popular culture often forgets: violence rarely solves anything cleanly. Yet in cinema it frequently does. From Westerns to modern action films, societies’ problems are tidily resolved by lethal force.

Wyatt Earp invariably sorts out his society’s ills by use of his six-guns. James Bond’s liquidation of supervillains always makes the world a better place. 

The satisfactory resolution of daunting problems through the use of violence is so commonplace a trope in cinema that it is perhaps now as deeply embedded a cultural idea in the West as that of Santa, and the Easter Bunny. However, unlike these last two myths, some adults seem to continue to believe it. 

Put another way, in spite of the vast historical evidence to the contrary, they believe that the most complex of geo-political problems can be solved, as Eddie Izzard’s character says in the movie Valkyrie, “with the careful application of high explosives.”

Anyone who has any experience of actual war will attest that the matter is much less clear-cut. Violence tends to be the bluntest instrument in problem solving, often ineffective and opening as many new problems as it was meant to resolve. 

As Shakespeare warned, in war the dogs are let slip. The ensuing carnage leads to the ties that bind society being sundered, civilians being slaughtered in even the most “surgical” of military strikes, and the infrastructure of daily life being decimated. 

There may be diverse reasons that people celebrate the unlawful 2026 US-Israeli assaults on Iran and studiously ignore the piles of children’s corpses that have resulted. What those celebrating have in common is a lack of empathy with the innocent falling under the weight of metal, and a lack of imagination about what will transpire. In particular, they fail to conceive of the legacy of bitterness that will result. 

Violence rarely ends a conflict. More often it plants the seeds of the next one. As James Baldwin noted, “The perpetrator always forgets; the victim never does.” Societies that know little history never learn this truth. That has long been true of much of England. It is also true now of the United States. 

Anyone who watched the Tucker Carlson interview with US Senator Ted Cruz will have been struck that US foreign policy is being made now by the spectacularly ignorant. Cruz did not even know the population of a country he thought the US should invade. 

Such people are malicious contemporary equivalents of Steinbeck’s Lenny – simple-mindedly disdainful of complexity, absent of empathy, and contemptuous of those who are fragile before their military strength. 

The world is currently in the hands of such dangerous buffoons, people who treat violence as a solution and assume they will never face consequences for the murderous destruction they unleash. 

Even Steinbeck would be at a loss to find a neat narrative resolution to deliver us from their evil. 

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

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Summary: Theatre in a theatre of brutal war.

Glorious Exploits is something of a literary first cousin to Michael Hughes’ superb Country, a retelling of the Iliad transposed to the mountains of South Armagh during the Troubles. 

Like Hughes, Lennon tells his story of the ancient world in an Irish vernacular – Dublish, in this instance – and the result is a comparable dark magic that brings to unsettling life a barbarous moment from humanity’s bleak history. 

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Athenian invasion of Sicily two literature loving Syracuse potters, Lampo, the narrator, and his childhood pal, Gelon, take to visiting the prisoners, exchanging food for snatches of Euripides. After a while Gelon has the idea of staging a full production of Euripides’ masterpieces Medea, and his new play, The Trojan Women, with the doomed Athenian prisoners in the quarry where they are quartered. 

Though his motives are never fully explained, one gets the sense that Gelon hopes to provoke an empathy for the prisoners similar to that Euripides encourages his audiences to feel for his tragic protagonists. This, perhaps, might save both some prisoners and a threatened portion of Syracuse’s soul as it hovers on the edge of a monumental war crime.  

The story is based on a true episode in the ghastly Peloponnesian War, and Lennon’s imaginative exploration of it in turn seeks to provoke in the reader an empathy for the long-dead, and help understanding that war’s pities are a constant in human history.  

Glorious Exploits is a wonderful book.