Summary: an elegant exploration of Hiberno-Indian relations over the decades
While anti-colonialism is now deeply culturally embedded in contemporary Ireland, our history on the matter, as Cauvery Madhavan gently reminds us with this book, is rather more complicated.
The Tainted takes as its starting point a fictionalized story of a 1920 mutiny by Irish troops in India. (In the book the “Kildare” rather than the Connaught Rangers are the mutineers).
Because, superficially, the British and Irish are white, the British expect the Irish to collaborate with them in treating the Indians in the way that the British treat the Irish at home.
By and large the Irish are happy to comply. But when news of the depredations of the Black and Tans percolates through to the Irish barracks the centre cannot hold, and the colonial authorities are murderously provoked when Irish soldiers down arms in protest.
The second two-thirds of the book explore the repercussions from this incident down the years, not least for Rose, a young “Anglo-Indian” woman – daughter of an Irish father and an Indian mother.
Cleverly Madhavan does not allow her narrative to rest with any single character for too long. Instead she shifts the psychological perspective of the novel across a range of characters into the first decades of Indian independence. By doing this she gives insight into the attitudes and prejudices of different communities, and shows how these pose needless challenges to the appreciation of each other’s common humanity.
Madhavan’s novel is an engaging and illuminating exploration of identity, cultures and history, elegantly written and ultimately hopeful. After all, whatever our skin, our blood is the same colour.
Summary: two books plumbing the depths of the intelligence war during the Troubles
The morally vile, but tactically brilliant, American Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest had a philosophy when giving battle: Get there first with the most.
This philosophy seems to have been taken up with some degree of alacrity by a raft of English politicians and writers who want to capture the history books to rewrite the Irish peace process as a benevolent English achievement.
Hemmings’ book gives a nod to diplomacy with mention of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 – also portrayed as a British initiative. But, like Taylor he is also principally interested in intelligence operations, albeit with a broader perspective. At its core his book explores three parallel but occasionally overlapping British intelligence operations: In addition to MI6 and the Back Channel, Hemmings describes MI5’s efforts to boost Sinn Fein’s electoral fortunes with a view to weaning them away from violence, and the army’s efforts to disrupt the IRA’s military operations through the activities of, in particular, Freddie Scappaticci – Stakeknife.
Scappaticci was the army’s most important agent in the IRA. A senior figure he was the head of the IRA’s internal security – the Nutting Squad. He was personally involved in the interrogation, torture and murder of dozens of suspected IRA informers. Many of these were, of course, also British agents, like Scappaticci himself.
The term “British agent” can be a misleading one. It can lead one to think of James Bond, who was an intelligence officer NOT an agent. The agents are the vulnerable people who through blackmail and bribery are recruited by officers to turn traitor on former friends and neighbours.
The pathetic plight of these desperate people is a central concern of Richard O’Rawe. O’Rawe, a former IRA man himself, knew Scappaticci. But given the sociopathology that he documents, he records that he is thankful that he did not know him well.
Scappaticci was an army intelligence operation. But O’Rawe shows, there was an essential unity between the IRA’s Nutting Squad and the “Tasking and Co-ordinating Group”, the senior officials from all British intelligence agencies who oversaw their diverse operations. So much so that it was they, ultimately, who decided who would live and who would die, and gave orders accordingly for favoured British agents like Scappaticci to kill other less valued ones.
O’Rawe’s past IRA involvement gives him access to other IRA volunteers and his interviews with them provides a broader perspective on the Troubles to Hemmings whose book is more dominated by British sources. O’Rawe also has an altogether more morally clear-sighted view of that squalid war than Hemmings. He is not afraid to use the term “war crime” in his assessment of the savagery of both IRA and British actions.
Aside from the desperately sad human stories that these books recount, and the important ethical questions relating to the conduct of insurgency and counter-insurgency that they raise, these books also offer valuable insights into some broader historical questions.
First, the whispered accusation that Martin McGuinness was a tout is effectively discounted. Given the efforts that MI5 was putting in over decades to coaxing the republican movement onto a more constitutional path, compromising McGuinness like that would have risked wholly undermining their efforts. But while he may never have been a tout, the callousness which McGuinness showed towards human life, particularly in diverse killings of suspected informers, means that while he may be an important figure in Ireland’s history, he should never be thought of as a hero.
Second, the idea that the IRA was beaten is disabused. Even though British intelligence had compromised major parts of the IRA, its rural organization in South Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh were still capable of sustaining the killing, even if there was never any hope of military victory.
This leads us to the third point, that of the importance of the political processes that were running parallel to these intelligence ones. Without those, offering a constitutional framework that, if not giving the IRA all that they wanted, at least gave them some, there would have been nowhere for the Back Channel to go. The British might like to now remember the peace process as a British led affair, one of the great achievements of New Labour as that morally bankrupt party likes to chauvinistically put it. However, without the thread of Irish leadership showing the way, they would still be entangled in the labyrinth of killing typified by their Stakeknife operation.
Both O’Rawe and Hemmings describe with some admiration the efforts of Jon Boutcher’s Kenova enquiry to get to the bottom of the moral morass of the Troubles intelligence operations. Boutcher, who was involved in the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes may have been expected to do the decent thing by the British Establishment and cover up embarrassing information. Instead, he recommended prosecutions in 28 cases involving both former IRA and senior British personnel.
The Public Prosecution Service declined to undertake these prosecutions, which seems a travesty. But in that it is hardly surprising. The Stakeknife operation is but one among many war crimes that the British state was involved in: Aside from Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday there was also extensive collusion with Loyalist death squads across the North. So, this makes it more understandable why past British governments have scrambled to introduce blanket amnesties for all Troubles era killings. It also gives insight into why the current British government of “human rights lawyer” Keir Starmer still strives to prevent a public inquiry into the killing of Sean Brown.
Both Hemmings’ and O’Rawe’s books may require some revision – in the details but most probably not in the substance – in the light of Boutcher’s final Kenova report. But they are still fine work, grappling with difficult subjects. O’Rawe’s in particular, while more narrowly focussed than Hemmings, is an elegantly written work, marked by a burning sense of indignation at the scale of the depravity that he describes
Summary: Diverse, highly readable perspectives on the First World War
Like many of my generation, my introduction to the First World War was at school, studying the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen. Owen’s writings along with others such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, did much to promote the “lions led by donkeys” view of that war.
This is a perspective on the war that Peter Hart takes considerable exception to. A key theme of his fine narrative history of that war, similar to Hew Strachan, is that the allied generals have been unfairly maligned, made scapegoats by civilian leaders who bore more responsibility for the carnage.
The generals of the Western Front were, he argues, by and large, diligent soldiers, trying to learn the best way to fight an industrial war. This is something that their prior experiences, helping their colonial empires steal other people’s countries and butchering anyone who objected, had not properly prepared them for.
Better than Strachan, Hart illustrates well the impact of the generals’ decisions on the front line troops of all armies. He quotes extensively from the letters and diaries of the combatants to give a truer sense of their experiences, including of the vicious fighting. This makes it hard to sympathise with Hart’s broader argument that the generals were doing their best.
The industrialised trench warfare of the First World War was not quite unprecedented: the Union’s final campaign against Richmond under Grant previewed the sort of warfare that would come to define the Western Front. Grant had realised that an attritional campaign would bleed the South to such an extent that even if he lost every battle the Union would win the war.
With no extant tactics to breach the fortified lines in a way that would have meaningful strategic impact on the course of the war, the opposing sides settled into a similar war of attrition. This led to regular battles that hoped to inflict such a butcher’s bill on the other side as to make it difficult for them to continue.
Other pressures, not least that of coalition warfare, also demanded action, irrespective of how inadvisable. That is how the British came to attack fortified German positions on the Somme in 1916 – to provide some “relief” to the French under German attack at Verdun. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 deaths. That still does not seem to me a reasonable price for generals learning on-the-job or offering moral support to an ally.
By way of contrast, during the Second World War Matthew Ridgeway, an American Airborne general risked his entire career by refusing to lead his troops on what he believed would be a suicidal assault on Rome. This would have entailed dropping his lightly armed forces in the midst of two German heavy divisions.
I suspect most of the allied troops on the frontline of the First World War, such as Owen, Sassoon and Graves, would have happily swapped their “diligent” generals for a few with a fraction of Ridgeway’s moral courage.
Graves was almost killed in a later stage of the Somme battle. It is striking that in Goodbye to All That, his engaging account of his wartime experiences, he never describes killing anyone, though he hints that he did. The closest he comes is describing a sniping opportunity to kill a bathing German. Graves writes that he could not bring himself to press the trigger on the naked man, so he assigned the task to a subordinate instead.
Graves clearly carried the war with him for decades after. The guilt and trauma of it infuses his account of the Greek Myths, for example.
Given the horror of the war, it is understandable that we all should look for who to blame. This is among the tasks that Max Hastings undertakes in his typically gripping account of the outbreak of the war. Hastings is at pains to point out that Germany more than any other nation was the one that could have put a stop to the descent into cataclysm. Hence in Hastings’ view this is the country that should bear most of the blame. Hart has a similar perspective, noting that Germany believed that as war was inevitable the sooner it began the better it suited them.
In this Hastings and Hart offer somewhat different perspectives to Christopher Clark’s exceptional book on the same subject, The Sleepwalkers. This lays considerably more of the blame on Serbia, Britain and France’s ally. Margaret Macmillan, whose book, The War that Ended Peace, also explored the dangerous, dizzying array of alliances and egos that shepherded Europe to war. Both these accounts suggest there is plenty more blame to go around all combatant nations.
With The Peacemakers Macmillan explores the end of the war, specifically the Paris Peace conference that led to the Versailles Settlement. This established much of the contemporary political shape of Europe. Alongside the “Great Power” politics of the Conference, Macmillen’s book is also the story of how the peoples of, in particular, central and eastern Europe shook off the rule of the Great Powers whose blundering had dragged them into catastrophic war.
But the Versailles settlement also sowed the seeds of future war in Europe, by assigning all the guilt for the war to Germany. This ignored the role of, in particular, Serbia in starting things. It also ignored the fact that the Germany that came to Paris was a different country to the one at the start of the war. Not fundamentally different, of course: as German history since 1919 has shown it a country that has never quite lost its relish for atrocity. But by 1919 it had been through a democratic revolution that was economically crippled by the demand for reparations from the victorious powers. This created the political conditions for the Nazis to emerge.
In granting to Britain the Palestine mandate the Versailles Settlement also paved the way for a new settler-colonial entity there, and for the Zionist genocide of the indigenous people that, with shameless US, German and British support, continues to this day.
The First World War remains an example of, as William Faulkner once wrote, the past not even being past. Its dark legacy is a bloody one in the present for millions of defenceless human beings.
So, perhaps Wilfred Owen remains still the most vital voice on the First World War, understanding from that one war the pity of all war, and encouraging a level of empathy for the victims of war that no discussions of causality, strategy or blame ever can.
Sequels are a tricky thing. Some, like Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments add something to an earlier classic. More ill-judged ones, like Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, can dent the lustre of their more accomplished predecessor, seeming to aim to cash in on a successful formula rather than say anything compelling or new.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the Ghosts of Rome, Joseph O’Connor’s follow up to his superb novel of European Resistance to Nazism, My Father’s House.
Time has moved on a few months from the first novel, the German occupation has become more brutal, and the pressure on the Choir – the escape line for Allied prisoners of war and Jews established by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty – more extreme.
The pattern that O’Connor uses for this book is similar to its prequel: It focuses on one operation, and one individual in the midst of the otherwise present and correct ensemble of the Choir, in this instance Contessa Giovanna Landini – Jo.
O’Connor admits that all of the novel, including the purported transcripts of BBC interviews, is his own invention. But many of the people involved including Jo and her Irish pals, Delia and her daughter Blon, were real. This accentuates the sense of awe regarding what these ordinary people endured and achieved in such extraordinary circumstances. And, even if we know they survived the war this does not diminish the tension.
The Ghosts of Rome is a gripping thriller. But like the best thrillers it is more than that. It explores and asserts the importance of morality and friendship in the face of monstrousness. These remain important ideals in a world in which the genocide of vulnerable people is again high on the agendas of many of the supposed liberal democracies of the West.
There are diverse perspectives on leadership. Mine is leadership as a responsibility to choose – particularly in choices that affects the lives of others, in organisations or in wider society.
That has been most the defining feature of my experience of leadership, and something you never really appreciate until you are in that role. Key aspects of leadership involve decisions on resource allocation. Such choices are always fraught because there are always winners and losers, upset and distress, and lingering resentments.
Of course it can always be worse – I spend a good number of years leading humanitarian operations in, among other places, Angola during the civil war there. This led to some choices that were even more filled with anguish than the difficult but routine budget allocations that all leaders have to deal with. I write in my book, Ethical Leadership, about having to prioritize the lives of one group of people over another and how you have to learn to live with that after. That thought experiment with the runaway tram can get very real in some leadership roles.
So given that these are leadership realities, ethical leadership is self-evidently important: by ethical leadership I mean the attempt to make the most life affirming choice possible, irrespective of the difficulty of the situation. A life affirming choice is one that optimizes the protection of the environment on one hand and the protection of human rights on the other.
Now, when we are making choices it is important for leaders to remember that those choices are made in, what I call in my book “a cruciform of agency”.
That is, there are aspects of the choice – whether that choice relates to a love affair, or work, or war – that are in the social world: those are the rules and resources associated with the choice: the laws, polices, practice, finances or people who will be affected.
Then there are the personal aspects of the choice: the ones relating to the choice maker’s aspirations and experiences, and most fundamentally to their moral values.
The dialogue between these personal and social aspects of choice can be conceived of interacting orthogonally, hence the idea of a cruciform of agency emerges.
Now there is a 2002 paper by Craig and Greenbaum on a mining operation in South Africa. In that paper they recount how when they raised concerns with the mine management about issues such as health and safety, or labour terms and conditions, or the environmental damage that the operation caused, the managers they interviewed would express sympathy, but assert there was nothing they could do. The company they worked for caused the problems. Their responsibility was simply to get on with the job. They seemed to believe that they had no moral responsibility for the damage caused by the company despite the fact that it was they themselves who constituted the company.
This denial of personal responsibility of policy makers and business executives for the consequences of their choices is a central constraint on obtaining progress on many of the world’s contemporary problems including slavery, something that affects an estimated 50 million people in the world today.
I have rarely met anyone who has been in favour of slavery in principle. However, many in reality are in favour of slavery in practice. And if you doubt that, to take just one example, look at the hostile environments for migrants that many political leaders, from left to right in rich countries, take such pride in. This, despite the well documented fact that such hostile environments lead to the trafficking into forced labour and sexual exploitation of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people.
If the personal aspects of leadership, particularly the moral responsibility of the leader for the consequences of their choices is abandoned then ethical leadership becomes impossible, and indeed much worse may emerge. But this is not uncommon.
You all know the history: The Nazi’s used the idea of “just following orders” to try to evade personal moral responsibility for their atrocities.
Henry Kissinger infamously used the notion of “realpolitik” to justify his murderous foreign policy that devastated the lives of millions in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Today, Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer and David Lammy use the formulation “Israel has the right to defend itself” to justify their craven complicity in war crimes and genocide.
While the words used in each of these examples are different, their purpose is the same. They are explicit attempts to disguise moral bankruptcy and evade basic leadership responsibilities for the catastrophic human consequences of their choices. For this they deserve utter condemnation in “history and eternity” as Abraham Lincoln once put it.
The evasion of personal responsibility in a choice is the anathema of ethical leadership, and it brings with it a loss of authority: what follower worth their salt is ever going to respect a moral coward.
And there is always something more moral that leaders can do, even in the most extreme of circumstances. At the very least they can protest.
The current British prime minister likes to boast that his is not a party of protest. Which of course is true. Because protest is leadership. Protest is a way in which a society can open dialogue with itself and change the ways it thinks about itself.
Protest is sometimes the only way more formal dialogue with power can be obtained. Protest is how women’s rights and gay rights, minority rights and, indeed, all human rights have been advanced in the world. Protest matters nationally and internationally as the struggles to end apartheid in South Africa and bring some measure of justice to the north of Ireland have shown.
It also matters internationally because the failure of the West to protest Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria, compared to our volubility on Ukraine exposes an ugly, frankly racist, double standard at the centre of Western policy.
Much of the progress towards human dignity, including limiting contemporary forms of slavery, has been through advancing international rule of law. This avenue for progress has now been struck a grievous blow, because the profound undermining of the principle of the universality of human rights that Western policy towards Gaza has asserted. This has undermined in a fundamental way the ideal of an impartial system of international rule of law.
Many European leaders are expressing concern at the threat that Donald Trump poses to international order. But the damage done to that system of rule of international law by Biden, Starmer and Scholz is already catastrophic.
At the heart of ethical leadership is the ideal once set out by the Irish patriot and anti-slavery campaigner Roger Casement who said, “We all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong and to protest brutality in every shape and form.”
That is a commission which we must all take up. Because, more than any other time in my life, the challenge for all of us to lead ethically is at its most urgent. We are all leading in the grey zone now. Indeed, it is almost night.
[1] In his essay collection, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi wrote of the “grey zone” a morally ambiguous space where the ideas of right and wrong are no longer absolute and “good” decisions are impossible.
Summary: Netanyhu’s war is racism and should be condemned as such
Perhaps I have missed it, but I have not seen many anti-slavery organisations condemning the mounting slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and now Lebanon, over the past year.
I wonder about anti-slavery organizations more than other specialist NGOs or human rights issues because, for the past 20 years this has been my principal area of professional practice and so is a sector with which I have some familiarity.
Perhaps some anti-slavery organization feel that something like Gaza is not part of their mandate and so would be inappropriate for them to raise their voices. Perhaps others are afraid of upsetting donors by raising question about another specialist area – human rights in war – and losing funding for other important work. Maybe others are afraid of annoying the governments of the US, UK and Germany, or certain parts of the EU Commission, who may be complicit with the policies of Netanyahu’s cabal and so losing precious access and the occasional invitation to convivial cocktail parties.
The thing is this: if we survey the realities of slavery through history right up to the present day we see very clearly that it is rooted in racism and the dehumanisation of others. Hence, anti-slavery organisations must be anti-racist if they are at all serious about tackling the causes and consequences of enslavement. If they fail in that fundamental then they are not truly anti-slavery. They are merely performative distractions.
Each of these examples, and there are many more, is a naked expression of racism against a whole people. Racism is at the root of every atrocity that is committed by Netanyahu and his cronies.
The continued acquiescence of US, UK and Germany in this, up to and including the provision of money, material and intelligence to sustain the Israeli offensives, in spite of overwhelming concerns regarding both their morality and legality, has dealt a grievous blow to international rule of law. It has also done something that would have seemed unbelievable a mere 18 months ago. It has established a credible case that there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of Biden’s America, and Putin’s Russia. Both appear ready to shred law and the most basic principles of human rights when it is convenient for them.
It is upon meaningful rule of law and a common adherence to the fundamental principles of human rights that the cause of anti-racism, and anti-slavery, have been advanced. Now, however, if campaigners challenge transgressing governments that their policies are in breach of human rights many will laugh and point to Gaza and Ukraine and say that the US and the UK, Germany, Israel, and Russia have demonstrated that the only right is might.
So, every anti-racist organisation on this planet, and that includes all anti-slavery organisations that are worthy of the name, and every organisation that derives its mandate from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, must add their voices to the international condemnation of the Netanyahu government’s racist wars. If they do not then they will seem as hypocritical as the western governments who facilitate these wars in spite of the mounting evidence that the bloodshed that Israel perpetrates is foul murder.
As the Irish anti-slavery campaigner Roger Casement put it, “we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong and to protest brutality in every shape and form.”
That commission was never more urgent than it is today as we daily bear witness to Netanyhu’s unfolding policy of genocide.
Summary: why partition in Ireland has been such an injustice.
“… sometimes it is absence itself which is the hardest thing to hide.”
I grew up in South Armagh, just a mile or so from the British-imposed border in Ireland. That border is a thing that, in many ways, has cast a long shadow over my life. It was, I sincerely believe, at the root cause of many of the problems for both parts of Ireland during the Twentieth Century, not least the squalid little war known as the Troubles during which I grew up.
With partition, the British sought, successfully, to create two sectarian states in Ireland rather than one plural one. My novel, Some Service to the State, is at heart an exploration of some of the human rights abuses that Irish people had to endure as a result of this.
Hence it is an indictment of the injustice of partition’s continuation. As the impetus takes hold for an end to partition and the establishment of a new Ireland, I hope that this book will resonate with an audience that wants to understand better why the status quo has been such a poisonous thing for ordinary people living on the island of Ireland.
But Some Service to the State is also a gripping detective story, about the repercussions of an enquiry into the fate of a girl who seems to have gone missing in that politically divided island.
Here is what other authors said about it: Ronan McGreevy, author of Great Hatred: the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, has said of Some Service to the State that it is “a superb book with dialogue that would not be out of place on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. … [in Mick McAlinden} McQuade has created a character whose travails highlight the thwarted dreams and the tragedy of partition for so many people in post-revolutionary Ireland.”
Rosemary Jenkinson a multi-award winning playwright and author of Marching Season, has said that the book shows a “prodigious skill in shining a spotlight on the scandal of the mother-and-baby homes and in brilliantly imbuing the past with … [a] potent blend of heart, soul and wit”
If you would like to get a copy, the book is available in the UK from Bookshop.org and in the US from Barnes and Noble. It is also available on Amazon.
I hope you will read it, and if you do, I would love to hear what you think in the comments below.
Summary: those who have lost their moral compass will never understand that protest is leadership
Rule of international double standards
Today, it appears that many Western political leaders apply multiple caveats to the principle of the universality of human rights. The result is that rather than rule of international law we seem increasingly to have rule of international double standards.
The moral black hole at the heart of Western policy towards Israel
British, American and German policy on Gaza appears to be underpinned by a view that Palestinian lives are not equal to Israeli lives and so unworthy of comparable protection. Hence those three governments seem to have decided that it is better to arm and provide diplomatic cover for the far-Right Netanyahu government rather than to uphold the most basic principles of human rights and international humanitarian law.
In the face of the considerable evidence of genocide these governments are deaf to the international protests of conscience, and to the demands of Palestinian and Israeli voices for peace. Instead, they work to maintain the murderous Israeli Defence Forces supply lines at all costs.
I have heard some try to justify this human rights double standard in relation to Israel by responding to protests with patronising reference to the need for realism, for a “realpolitik” approach to the conflict. This is, perhaps, a notion they may imagine that the protesters do not have the sophistication to properly understand. However, many will know that “realpolitik” is a term that has considerable previous, notably in the hands of Henry Kissinger, as a euphemism for moral vacuity and acquiescence in crimes against humanity.
Given this many will remain unconvinced that “realpolitik” really is a sufficient justification for the mounting horrors in Gaza and the West Bank. So, why are the US, the UK and Germany so steadfast in their support of a far-Right Israeli government pursuing such a horrendous campaign of violence?
It is worth remembering that Germany was genocidal in Namibia well before the Nazis ever came to power. While relatively democratic, Britain and the United States were also genocidal in the 19th and 20th centuries in relation to, amongst others, Native Americans, Ireland and South Asia. It was democratically elected governments in the US that launched the invasion of Vietnam and the destruction of Cambodia. It was democratically elected governments in the US and UK that unlawfully invaded Iraq. Today it is democratically elected governments in the US, UK and Germany that have facilitated the far-Right in Israel in their indiscriminate slaughter of Gazan civilians.
So, if we take even a medium-term historical view on these countries, it seems that there is a strain of thinking in those nations’ political cultures stretching from Left to Right that still view war crimes and genocide not as appalling and even unforgivable aberrations, but as legitimate policy options when it is convenient for them or those, however unsavoury, that they deem allies.
But it is the protests of which they are so contemptuous that so often change cultures and countries in the ways in which corrupt politicians can only dream. This is because protest is moral leadership that seeks to make the world a better place by demanding that it become so.
It is because of protesters that women have the vote, that apartheid has been ended in South Africa, that civil rights have been advanced in the US and the North of Ireland. When many governments have sought to merely manage the status quo – the “realpolitik” – protesters have asserted that this is not good enough and demanded better.
Today protesters understand, as the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement once put it, that “… we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form”.
So, at the end of the day, as Israel’s allies become ever more deeply mired in the murder of children, it is the protesters they disdain who will perhaps contribute most substantially to an end to apartheid in Israel/Palestine and thereby save the souls of their own countries.
In 1967 General Mattityahu Peled, who, as head of logistics of the Israeli Defense Forces, was one of the architects of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, investigated an atrocity.
Peled had heard from a Palestinian prisoner how IDF soldiers in Gaza had massacred over 30 unarmed civilians, including a 13 year old boy and an 86 year old man. After they were shot the IDF drove a bulldozer back and forth over the bodies until they were unrecognizable.
Peled, an Arabic speaker, went personally to Gaza to find out what happened and met the families of the victims. Afterwards he wrote a report to the Israeli government warning them about the moral degradation that the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories would bring and how atrocity would become a commonplace if it was allowed to continue.
Peled’s son, Miko, reckons now that this was probably the decisive moment in his father’s life that transformed him from soldier to committed peace activist, something he remained for the rest of his life, a mantle taken up, in spite of incredible suffering, by both Miko and his sister, Nurit.
But perhaps Matti Peled should not have wasted his breathe with his warning to the Israeli government. Because as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains in depressing detail in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, atrocities of the sort Matti Peled uncovered in Gaza – atrocities of the sort that Israel continues to perpetrate year in, year out, including in its genocidal post October 7th operations in Gaza – were part of the DNA of Zionism from when Israel was but a glimmer in David Ben Gurion’s eye.
Prior to the founding of the state of Israel Ben Gurion and the cadre of Zionists that he gathered around him to be his closest political and military advisors, drew up detailed plans for the expulsions of the indigenous people of Palestine so they could realise their sectarian dreams of a Jewish state. They recognized from the outset that mass murder and terrorism would be intrinsic to this project.
With the UN vote to partition Palestine they put their plans into bloody action. Deir Yassin was the pattern, not an aberration.
On visiting the aftermath of one ethnic cleansing operation by the Haganah, the forerunner of the IDF, Golda Meir was reminded of the Eastern European pogroms that had terrorized her own family from their home. But, aside from this momentary lapse, she otherwise remained comfortable with her role as a war criminal. But Pappe wonders how a mere three years after the Holocaust its survivors could inflict such barbarity on fellow human beings.
Pappe’s forensic analysis of the war crimes of Israel and the fundamental racism of Zionism has, of course, drawn criticism from other Israelis – the sort who benefit from apartheid in Israel and the West Bank and who celebrate the genocide in Gaza.
But, like Miko Peled, Pappe is on the right side of history. As the world increasingly sees Israel for the rogue terrorist state that it is, Peled and Pappe explain why it is as it is, and plot a path towards the inevitable end to apartheid there.
Both Pappe and Peled represent the enduring voice of conscience in the midst of atrocity. They are advocates of a common humanity in the face of prejudice and sectarianism. In the end it is this humanity that will always triumph over apartheid.
Bishop finds some novel perspectives on the story through recounting the experiences of JD Salinger and Ernest Hemmingway in the fighting in France. Bishop is also much less generous to the German commander of the Paris garrison, von Choltitz, than were Collins and Lapierre: That von Cholititz did not set Paris ablaze had little to do with his moral qualms and much more to do with the logistical difficulties of such an act of terrorism. Bishop is also rightly caustic about how the grossly collaborationist French police switched sides when they discerned how the tide of the war was turning.
The Paris uprising in 1944 was possibly the luckiest such insurrection in occupied Europe. Elsewhere resisters were encouraged with considerable cynicism by the Allied high command to give battle to the Germans to draw off forces from the main allied armies. But Paris was one of the few places where the allied armies moved to support the uprisings before the Germans had time to massacre them. The relief of Paris by a Free French armored division was something of which the Home Army in Warsaw, or the Maquis on the French Vercors massif could only dream.
It is a compelling story no matter how it is served up, and Bishop does this with quite some style.
aidanjmcquade 