I S S U E  10

An Open Letter

Pretended Humanism

‘If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one,’ said the president of an invented country, a country without circumscription, of unlimited expansiveness, a blueprint for those Zionist fanatics of Eretz Yisrael, the territory promised to them by a god.

The tenet of Manifest Destiny and the hubris of Zionism represent the same function—theft, land grab, dispossession, annihilation, colonisation, not just by any mortal but by exceptional people chosen and excused by the gods of Christianity and Judaism.

Despite the televised genocide in Gaza, thousands of images of limbless infants and slaughtered mothers, neither Biden, Sunak, Starmer, Macron, or Ursula von der Leyen have resiled from their original political cover, the blank cheque they gave the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. They rushed to his arms in the wake of October 7th when Israeli civilians and soldiers were victims of the Hamas attacks—but have never rushed to any Palestinian representatives after the killings of many thousands of children in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces or after the pogroms by illegal settlers for years prior to October 7th.

Such evident hypocrisy demonstrates that there is no such thing as Western ‘civilisation’—if there ever was. The double standards are stark when one considers the West’s condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of innocent civilians, but carte blanche support for Israel, its ‘right’ to invade, and the West’s refusal to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza where civilian deaths are of a greater magnitude.

The gushing von der Leyen embracing Zionism thoroughly disgraces herself, has no mandate to represent Europe as a totality, and EU rules will need to be rewritten to prevent similar solo runs by any state official speaking without mandate. She and other incriminated leaders later finessed their statements on the conflict (calling for a ceasefire, which they had originally rejected at the UN), not out of remorse but out of self-interest given the backlash by the millions of citizens globally who took to the streets demanding ceasefire and an end to the destruction of the Palestinian people. 

In 1986, Biden, then a member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, made comments about having to invent an Israel if it hadn’t existed; a state to protect American interests in the region—this beachhead of US imperialism. He said the billions spent on it, particularly on war matériel, was a worthwhile, political investment. 

At the time of my writing, the US’s contribution to peace in the Middle East has been to supply Israel (since October 7th) with 57,000 artillery shells, 15,000 bombs, and 100 bunker-buster BLU-109 bombs. Those bombs that you see blasting infants to smithereens, blowing up doctors, nurses, UN relief workers, journalists, all came from Uncle Sam. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Italy and Germany are also complicit in supplying arms to Israel. The UK has lucrative deals supplying the Israeli Air Force, as investigated by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT). Everyone has blood on their hands. 

An American newspaper editor, John L. O’Sullivan, in 1845 coined the term ‘Manifest Destiny’ to describe the inherent superiority of white Americans over indigenous people and attributed to the US a divine mission to spread democracy and promote the American way of life. Emigration to America gave oppressed and poor Europeans—including many Irish, especially fleeing famine in Ireland—a piece of the pie, making them stakeholders in this fabricated destiny. So desperate were they for the opportunity to start a new life, symbolised by the Statue of Liberty, that the extinction of the native people, whose lands they were colonising, was ignored and rationalised as a case of ‘either them or us’. 

One’s right to life based on the extermination of other people who, in the first instance, did us no injury, can never be accepted as a codified moral value. Of course, when the natives fight back—with tomahawks, bows, arrows—and do harm to ‘us’ they are demonised as ‘savages’ and ‘animals’ (as Palestinians have been) . . . and since the twentieth century by the pejorative ‘terrorist’ designation.

A character in Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel, Nostromo, describes the US as ‘the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe’. The character goes on to talk about its power, based on capitalism and imperialism: ‘We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not.’

Manifest Destiny is a cover for rape, plunder, aggrandisement at the expense of the weak and the meek, Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’. Once a corrupt code of behaviour becomes imbued in a psyche, becomes an established norm, it is virtually impossible to eradicate it and we are presently living with its consequences where politicians can repeat ad nauseam—despite the bloodshed, screams, heart-breaking footage of a live-streamed apocalypse—that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’.

In a live interview on American television decades ago James Baldwin said: 

But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger, so there won’t be any more like him.

Israeli spokespersons have told Goebbelsesque lies which are repeated in the uncritical mainstream Western media in the wake of the October 7th slaughter: that babies were beheaded, children tied together and burnt, some in ovens (a deliberate, callous choice of word, given its resonance with the Holocaust). A pregnant woman’s stomach was cut open and her foetus removed. 

None of it was true. As Mark Twain said: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.’ 

I have no doubt that the playbook used by Zionist supporters to bring down Jeremy Corbyn in Britain will be used in an attempt to prevent Sinn Féin taking power in the Republic of Ireland. Israel has already insulted the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, and lambasted an Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, for his perceived lack of unbridled support for the Israeli narrative. So expect Israeli proxies to do their utmost to undermine the party riding high in opinion polls. Sinn Féin, which is pledged to formally recognise a Palestinian state, supports the BDS Movement, will bring into law the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill, and which last November called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Dublin.

The success which Israel has achieved to date of accusing anyone who criticises it of being anti-Semitic appears to be wearing thin. The definition of anti-Semitism, proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has been adopted by the US, Germany and Britain, among others, is an attempt to muzzle and censor critics of Israel’s human rights record and its ongoing settler-colonial project in Palestine. 

The late José Saramago, Portuguese writer, had the measure of racist Israel, that modern epitome of the apartheid state. He analysed the cruelty of the Israeli state which trades on the dead of the Holocaust: ‘He who was once exploited and has lost his memory of being exploited will become an exploiter.’ In his Notebooks he writes:

Israel wants us to feel guilty, all of us, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel wants us to renounce the most basic critical judgment and transform ourselves into the docile echo of their will, Israel wants us to recognize de jure what for them is already de facto: their absolute impunity.

. . . I wonder whether those Jews who died in the Nazi concentration camps, the ones who were butchered in the pogroms, the ones who were left to rot in the ghettos, I wonder whether that huge unfortunate mass of people wouldn’t be ashamed at the dreadful acts their descendents have perpetrated. I wonder whether the fact of their having suffered so much shouldn’t be the best reason not to make others suffer.

In the biblical story of ‘the massacre of the innocents’, at the time of the birth of Christ, King Herod, ruler of the Roman province of Judea, slaughters all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem and its environs because he imagines that among them is the future Messiah who will threaten his power and his position. 

King Netanyahu, ruler of an American province, is absolutely taking no chances and slaughters all male and female infants, those swaddling threats to his power, his declining glory, his political megalomania.

I will conclude with Baldwin’s words: ‘All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.’

Belfast, January, 2024

—Danny Morrison

Danny Morrison is an Irish writer. He co-edited the book A Shared Struggle (An Fhuiseog, 2021), which tells the stories of surviving Palestinian and Irish republican hunger strikers. In the 1980s he was the national director of publicity for Sinn Féin, served time as a republican prisoner, and as well as writing/reviewing is a political commentator in newspapers, on television and radio. He is the secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust. See www.dannymorrison.com.