An Ulsterman's Irishrman an Arab's Jew

...The old wing of the IRA has been pushing such a revolution for years...

...First, war is a ritual with a life of its own quite apart from political matters...

...You are challenging a part of the Irish identity...

...Although throughout the book analogies to other situations occur constantly, which is part of its tremendous power, they don’t occur in the sense that one concludes all situations match Ireland...

...But in practice the more violent their language and gestures-nominally in the service of a revolution of all the workers-the more they were polarizing Catholic feeling in both communities...

...You remember the ever-forgotten realization which the Left, in all its trumpeting about peace, has buried particularly deeply this time: that while class struggle and economic revolution may be the name of the game in some instances, nation, religion, history, mythology, all the mysterious psychological frontiers which are most aptly summed up as tribalism, remain the chief cause of war in the world today...

...Faced with the prospect of using whatever money did come in from loyal supporters purely for subsistence, he pulled a publicity stunt, and announced that he would fast until the $40,000 had been raised...

...of a UN resolution condemning the Israeli raids...

...It is also extremely difficult, once the big muscle dominates the scene, to do anything along the lines of Abie Nathan’s work , which is why , perhaps , his efforts seem so inevitably isolated from the “professional” world of international politics...

...Not only would they lose their status and political control over themselves, but would reap additional hatred as a minority known to be disloyal and a kind of fifth column...

...While most people were not ready to applaud the tarring and feathering of young girls, or the blowing up of cleaning women, popular reserve concerning the IRA is a fragile one: the minute the terrorists are caught and imprisoned, they regain in the minds of the people the holy, brave glow of the patriots...

...The ways in which the blind spot is cultivated in the South are varied...

...Then a television reporter called, asked him how he felt, and said he would wait until the more spectacular effects of starvation had set in before he bothered to come out...

...An Ulsterman’s Irishrman an Arab’s Jew by Suzannah Lessard Occasionally, an act of war flashes in one’s face out of the removed world of newsprint...

...Forgetting Yeats O’Brien has written a book (States of Ireland, to be published by Pantheon in January) which gives his position a very sharp edge, not only as one tries to sort out one’s feelings about the particular situation in Ireland, but in wrestling with this sort of highly charged ritualistic feud in general...

...In this context, the cause of peace becomes rather militant, and any sense of an accommodation by both sides acquires overtones of wrong,” chanted the antiwar demonstrators to McGovern in Miami Beach...

...I did so by refusing to attend an Erskine Childers (senior) commemoration in mv home village of Howth...

...The reason she retained control was not that she overpowered the people there, but because the Protestant population wanted no part of the Southern rebels and refused to send representatives when the Irish parliament was formed...

...Once the muscle has been put to it, it is almost impossible to withdraw it without risking vastly increased bloodshed as the reinforced side, driven by its native passion, overcomes the abandoned side, which suffers longer because it has been built up beyond its natural strength by the now-vanished patron...

...Despite the author’s efforts to describe their perspective, the Ulster Protestants come off as a raunchy lot, 19th-century in their social attitudes, arrogantly superior, superstitiously suspicious of the superstition which they see embodied in the Catholic Church, and wildly chauvinistic, an archaic quality that even Britain, the object of their affection, finds distasteful, -“like being embraced by an argumentative drunk...

...A Drunken Embrace O’Brien’s viewpoint, in his own words, is neither “impartial nor detached...

...We all seemed to be like sleepwalkers, locked in some eternal ritual reenactment, muttering senselessly as we collided with one another, wrestling in the dark...

...And not without reason, for the stammer reappears with the revolutionaries as well...

...Nor does he even have inflated visions about what he might accomplish: He does not expect to directly bring about peace, only to work towards creating a climate in which peace can be achieved...

...The $40,000 came in shortly thereafter, 90 per cent of it in small amounts...

...Discovering others and putting them into practice should be the primary treachery...

...Equating civil disobedience with Antigone, he writes in 1968: We should be safer without the troublemaker from Thebes...

...The Peace Ship, equipped with a 50 kilowatt transmitter, its lower decks stocked with the most modern radio paraphernalia, and its profde altered by a radio tower, complete with an international crew of volunteer technicians, will sail sometime this month...

...In fact, however, the Protestants see such appeals only as another Catholic plot...

...So, for instance, when the IRA leader we have seen early on as a gentle, pipesmoking, rather poetic character is revealed as a fanatical killer later, the reader takes the shock with O’Brien...

...Like him, one emerges from the book chastised both as a romantic and as a 20thcentury social and political progressive...

...Why is it that such an idea, modest enough perhaps, in face of the huge problem, but practical and distinctly positive, does not have a place among the “real facts” of the Middle East...

...These stirrings are the clues to what the real works of peace must be...

...Nathan, who in 1966 flew an old biplane to Port Said as an appeal to the Egyptians to seek peace, and in 1968 made five trips to Biafra bringing donated food in and children out, has, for his trouble, earned a “wellintentioned kook” image throughout most of the world, with the notable exception of Holland...

...The second person is a different kettle of fish...

...In this context it’s difficult for them to see the Catholic struggle as a clear-cut matter of civil rights...

...Lemming-like, other coverage followed, the most significant of which was eight minutes on the Today show, which departed from policy and gave an address where money could be sent...

...What I value in the book is his way of looking at the situation, his way of trying to get at the core of the matter in spite of the endless curtains of ideology and mythology which keep brushing in his face, in spite of the conspiracies within him which hush the truth...

...Another way in which the blind spot is cultivated comes from an en tirely different political direction, from Bernadette Devlin and the radical students...

...The fact, as O’Brien asserts, that the Northern Catholics welcome the IRA only as defenders, but do not share their concept of the struggle, is hard to perceive-much less inspire faithunder the circumstances, particularly when the Southern government, while officially against IRA activities, tacitly condones them...

...But the gap between traditional Irish Republican doctrine, formed in the 18th century, and the realities of late 20thcentury Ireland would confuse anyone obliged to think about the realities in terms of the doctrine-especially the doctrine as refracted through Mr...

...Finally The New York Times gave him its blessing with a front page, second section piece...

...He has been called a “Shoneen” (equivalent of an Uncle Tom) and “an Englishman’s ideal Irishman...

...One instance of this stripping away is particularly powerful because it is O’Brien confronting himself in the past...

...There is some history of the past, but most of the book deals with the modern situation and is written over time, without revision, as events happen and as O’Brien changes...

...When you realize that in Ireland the romanticism is not neatly confined between the covers of books but flows daily through every pub and cottage, then you realize why it takes guts to attack it...

...As O’Brien puts it, to the Protestants the situation is what the civil rights years would have been to white Southerners if a large black nation south of the border had been seething with passion over the issue while repeatedly asserting a claim to the Southern states...

...The Arab killings of the Israeli hostages was one of those events, as were the reactions which followed...

...a touch of the Jesus complex and no muscle...

...To those editors, dealing daily with the complexities of the Middle Eastern conflict itself and the intricacies of its relationship to American politics, Nathan’s project no doubt seemed worthy but a little pathetic, a little fanatical-the double hallmark of individually inspired good causes-but most of all, irrelevant to the real facts of the Middle East...

...The stammer is one...

...he explicitly describes his role as provider of the facility for others...

...Had he endeavored to repress that identification, or had he been a truly impartial foreigner, the book, however objective, wouldn’t have been nearly as potent...

...In an article on civil disobedience and civil rights in the North, written in 1968, he said: “The condition in Derry may be thought of as one of frozen violence: any attempt to thaw it out will liberate violence...

...Another, and the most theatrical, has been the regular commemoration since 1966 of the historical events of 1916-1921, perhaps the eeriest evidence of that “infatuation with my thology .’, Though the officials who participate in these ceremonies are allegedly against IRA terrorism in the North, the occasions regularly revive the old spirit, and the terrorists, who claim to be the legitimate heirs of past heroes, have nothing but sympathy to gain from these emotional occasions...

...Tied up month after month to a ratinfested pier, with no power and no heat, the Peace Ship and its captain undoubtedly seemed flatly “unconvincing...

...Having acquired the ship, Nathan brought it to the United States, as it seemed likely he could raise the money to equip it more quickly in America...

...Of himself, O’Brien writes: It is to the Irish Catholic community that I belong...

...Such moves are not likely to gain one popularity in a country where the past is in ways more real than the present...

...The suspicion is not allayed by the fact that the IRA is in heavy evidence in the North...

...This is a very seductive line in any internecine situation because it is reasonable-the Catholic and Protestant workers do have a common cause-because it gives all the violence a point (if that is the end, perhaps it will have been worth it), and because it is such a gratifying solution, almost mathematically elegant, to all the messy contradictions...

...That partiality illuminates his presentation of the issues, however, as from within the context of his primary identification he strains to understand the tribal dynamic intelligently...

...Every foundation, and other sources of large sums, had turned him down, and he was cut off from small contributions because the media studiously ignored him...

...Three years later, be still needed $40,000 and incoming money had slowed to a trickle...

...In actual terms of bringing Catholic and Protestant workers together, revolutionary rhetoric actually drove them farther apart and made socialist revolution an ever more remote possibility...

...The Olympic games, having theoretically asserted the predominance of friendly competition, came to a sullen end...

...The reflection leads nowhere, except to piousities like “All men are brothers...

...Israel bombed Syrian villages, hurting no militants and many civilians...

...Secondly, it is a tribal ritual...

...Nathan and O’Brien are hardly alone in the world-every “trouble spot” has probably produced similar voices, similarly considered irrelevant, if not downright treacherous...

...Abie Nathan is quite unlike the 1 earn e d , self-checking, repectable O’Brien, but he takes O’Brien’s viewpoint one step further out of mythology into reality...

...But their particular cases are especially challenging to Americans who consider themselves advocates of peace, precisely because many of us experience the stirrings of the tribal instinct when we think about the violence in their countries...

...The political intricacies of particular wars, such as Vietnam, recede before a larger, timeless, picture of which Chad, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Ireland, Uganda, and so on through the lexicon of small wars, all appear to be choreographed according to the same tribal-historical ritual, regardless of whether the big powers are playing through them, or the international left has blessed one or another side as part of a world-wide revolutionary front...

...When off their guard, they refer to “the people” and “what they want” in ways which could apply only to Catholics, and besides, the vision is of a revolution throughout Ireland, in other words, after it is all over Ireland will be united, submerging all the Protestant socialists in a socialist Catholic population...

...no more, perhaps, than a way of imagining and dramatizing man’s dignity . . . .In losing it, man might gain peace at the price of his soul...

...de Valera’s Constitution...

...Nathan has provoked few accusations of treachery, though it is clear that his ideas are deemed unpatriotic by the Israeli government, and he faces a year in jail upon his return (for having traveled to Egypt several years ago to urge the leaders to come to the peace table...

...Nathan has come up with a way to put the idea into practice...

...O’Brien has shown us a way of understanding such conflicts, demonstrating, in a sense, the intellectual habits one must develop in order to recognize the demands of peace...

...And they are both members of one of the tribes in the conflicts they seek to pacify...

...They have made the familiar claim that religion is completely irrelevant to the struggle, which is economic, and that the only solution lies in overcoming the ignorance of the lower-class Protestants (of whom there are far more than Catholics), so that both can join together and overthrow the corrupt capitalistic government in a socialist revolution...

...His main obstacle in this particular project, however, has been that other ingrained reaction to peacemaking as amateurish (unless moving to the pomp of pacts between the mighty), crackpot, and, in any event, somehow limp...

...O’Brien, however, does not venture beyond the theoretical...

...Nathan’s Folly Nathan is a little naive, and there is no question that he is unfashionably optimistic about human nature, and somehow basically unfashionable in general-hard to fit into the scheme of things in a serious way...

...The stammer takes the form of talking about all the people of the North and then describing them in ways which apply only to Catholics, making the Ulster Protestants into non-people...

...Thus, after a televised discussion between O’Brien and Erskine Childers, who is Deputy Premier of Ireland and a Protestant himself, O’Brien said that Childers: . . . claimed that Mr...

...Through simple exposition, Conor Cruise O’Brien demonstrates how deceptive the left-wing formulas can be...

...But he has not launched this project to expose his own ideas...

...For several days nothing happened...

...The Ulster Protestants, with their 19th-century attitudes and their association with none other than the British Empire, were clearly “wrong...

...The movement almost completely lost its sense of direction over Israel, as some of its members stuck to ideological guns which dictated backing the Arabs while most responded to the tribal urgency felt by large numbers of American Jews...

...The Dutch have helped him before, and this time, too, came through with enough money for him to buy a 570-ton freighter, sail to the Mediterranean, and broadcast to both the Arab countries and Israel...

...Because Irish mythology is one which has touched anyone who has dipped into Irish literature, working through that mythology as it is practiced in that civil war is particularly instructive as the reader can actually feel the distorting pull, in a mild form, of the tribal inspiration...

...I am not an expert on Ireland, North or South, and so cannot judge the accuracy of O’Brien’s description of the situation there...

...de Valera’s Constitution [asserting the claim to the North] was now accepted by “all our people...

...He doesn’t think this project will bring about peace in itself, but hopes it will help create a climate in which the warring countries will be able to talk to each other...

...Third, it is perpetuated through tightly interrelated escalations, a kind of coordination almost, between sides...

...They did not just spark off one “mass response,” they sparked off two-a Catholic mass response and a Protes...

...that wars, whatever political and philosophical or even civil libertarian elements they may also include, are choreographed according to those contours and that peace can only be achieved by recognizing them...

...Even while dismissing them, they influence the way one perceives a situation...

...Turning one’s back on Antigone, no matter how compelling the situation may be, is a hard thing to do, as the first opinion demonstrates...

...Nathan has shown one way of putting that recognition to work-one of many possible ways...

...But that sounds like pacifism, for which Americans have always had a distaste, putting it in the same category as vegetarianism...

...Neither man is likely to produce earthshaking results, but both are interesting in that they are looking straight at the cause of the exacerbation of tribal hatred which keeps the two sides from reaching an accommodation...

...The blind spot does affect the Ulster Protestants, however, in the sense that it terrifies them because, though they are in a clear majority as long as Ireland is partitioned, they would be a helpless, downgraded minority should it be united...

...In any case the play has been moving -like so much else in Northern Irelandbackwards, away from the ceremonial act of non-violent disobedience, and into the fratricidal war...

...What O’Brien locates here is a tribal blind spot...

...The response to his action is a perfect case of peacemaking perceived as treachery...

...No matter how one tried to redefine the situation-natives versus settlers, imperialists versus the colonized, or workers versus the ruling class-the redefinitions ran amuck of the realities...

...Childers, he seemed unable to understand it, although he is an intelligent and highly educated man...

...The commemorations also remind every Irish person that the aims for which those romantic heroes of the past had given their lives, a united Ireland, has not yet been achieved...

...It’s not difficult to understand, why...

...Their activities were highly significant, but did not have the significance they themselves ascribed to them...

...So the piece is cautionary, but ends on a note, however moderately put, which leaves a reader with little doubt that the risks of civil disobedience are worth taking...

...This statement is demonstrably untrue, if “all our people” means all the people inhabiting the territory claimed by the Constitution in question...

...No matter how you look at it, his idea is unquestionably intelligent...

...Formally, they) had been not only non-sectarian, but even anti-sectarian, their objectives class objectives...

...And that which would be lost, if she could be eliminated, is quite intangible...

...The Irish situation also also touched off natural sympathies in many Americans, and unlike the situation in Israel, this time the structure fit the paradigm perfectly...

...Fine as the goal itself might be, O’Brien perceives more clearly how the revolutionary rhetoric, intended to bridge the gap between poor Catholics and Protestants, actually widens it...

...He plans to take it to the Mediterranean and broadcast to both the Arab countries and Israel, counteracting with ridicule and undistorted news the inflammatory and distorting fare served up in both countries to avid radio-listening populations, and offering an open forum for Jews and Arabs-and anyone else-who wants to reach an accord...

...When I put this point to Mr...

...In other words, the counterpoint to the tribal blind spot is a tribal fear, and the dynamic between them is the essence of the bloody conflict, hence the proper object of efforts to make peace...

...Arabs and Jews have lived together for thousands of years in peace,” he says, and with a peace heritage stronger than the war-like one, “they can learn to do it again,”-if only the repressed seeds of the instinct to coexist are watered...

...The book is a personal account of his struggle as a politician and as a Southern Catholic to arrive at his true opinion in the matter...

...During the time that Nathan’s ship was tied up in the East River (and subsequently across the Hudson in New Jersey), the Times killed two stories on him for “insufficient interest...

...According to O’Brien, the fact that most of the people in the North like their affiliation with Britain has always been carefully dodged in nationalist writing and talk, always “touched by a curious flicker or stammer when this question comes in view...

...If Nathan is an optimistic fool, what does that make all the statesmen, editors, and analysts, with the rights t o the stage, who proclaim themselves to be advocates of peace but can find no place in their vision of the problems for work like Abie Nathan’s...

...But the romance of the Irish heroes and the hope for class solidarity are hard notions to let go...

...Because no mention had been made of Munich, the United States vetoed the formidable gesture Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...If such revelations don’t tell you what can be done about war, they at least jolt one into reevaluating one’s conceptions of the cause of peace...

...Very shortly after this, on 2nd July [1971] I decided personally to opt out of the commemorative culture...

...Nathan, in a very different way, exposes the inadequacy of the Kissinger view by literally intruding another idea into the scene...

...The peace movement condemned the chessboard theory of international politics, not only because it tended to encourage military intervention, but because it entailed a wanton disregard of the lives and the wishes of the people in‘the squares on which the big pieces maneuvered...

...Three years later he writes: After four years of Antigone and her understudies and all those funerals (a hundred at the time of writing, 460 at the time of going to press), you begin to feel that Ismene’s common sense and feeling for the living may make the more needful, if less spectacular element in “human dignity...

...Conor Cruise O’Brien, as a member of the Labor party and of the Irish Parliament, or Dail, has bucked the sacred tribal romance of the Irish Republic’s claim to the North...

...tant mass response...

...Out of that outrage developed a new picture of the world, in which small groups struggling for liberation from the grip of the “imperial” powers were highlighted...

...O’Brien said very plainly both that the claim is imperialistic (an adjective usually saved for Britain), since most of the population in the North wants no part of the South, and that it is the major irritant in the conflict, because the threat of being submerged into the vast Catholic population of the South is what makes the Protestants fear and hate the Catholic minority with such a passion in the North...

...The core of that romance is the Republic’s claim to the North, over which Britain retained control when the South was let go...

...They are hardly alone as peacemakers in the world, but they have a curious practicality which is refreshing...

...The succession of acts and responses, played out at a morbidly slow pace, seemed a grotesque anecdote of all war...

...Another way of putting it is that peace is a goal which can only be attained by tapping the desire for it in the ordinary citizen...

...He wouldn’t have been able to communicate the strength of the element which lies at the bottom of the conflict-tribal mythology...

...Those moments in which events bring on the reality of war also bring revelations, but they are overly simple, small and hard, like ball bearings around which the mind swivels in trying to get a grip...

...That is my “little platoon,” to love which, according to Edmund Burke (whose family were in that same platoon) “is the first, the germ, as it were of publick affections.,’ I am motivated by affection for that platoon, identification with it, and fear that it may destroy itself, including me, through infatuation with its own mythology...

...Abie Nathan, an Iranianborn Israeli, has turned a cargo ship into a fully equipped radio station...

...The ideal accomplishment of the balance-ofpower theory in the Middle East would be a kind of stalemate in hostilities, brought about by two of the big powers putting their muscle into alternate sides of the local conflict and thus stabilizing it...

...That is the scenario we face in South Vietnam, and which, in a slightly different version, is giving signs of playing itself out in the Middle East Now that Russia is pulling out, taking with her not only arms but apparently the judicious restraint of the chessboard, the unbacked-up Arabs seem about to let fly at the powerfully backed-up Israelis, opening a new act which could only escalate the tension in the Middle East for years to come...

...O’Brien’s book is a total stripping away of ideology, and even though he starts from a point of healthy skepticism on all these matters (his development is really more of a clarification than a change), a bit of himself goes with the residue as he purges it, and a bit of the reader as well...

...Actually, his picture of the Middle East is rather different from O’Brien’s picture of Ireland...

...The whole population of Northern Ireland now suffered between these two great fires...

...Antigone’s 460 Funerals These conclusions are not original: the Irish government was aware enough of the destructively provocative nature of the IRA to know it shouldn’t openly support it, and few really believed the socialist formula could actually be pulled off...

...Captured Arab terrorists spoke of their allegiance to a higher form of justice than the present world could comprehend...

...One side’s right, one side’s I focus of the work for peace...

...An Irish Uncle Tom Two men have recently tried to execute the thought in real life...

...The way it fits into the total situation, however, is a little complicated, because the blind spot is probably not shared by most Catholics in the North, who not only are faced daily with the fact that the Protestants exist, but don’t have the same burning religion of a united Ireland...

...Irish romanticism deeply entangled with politics is a very heady seductress, as any reader of Yeats knows...

...The Ulster Protestants are living out the same ritual: And the day after the 50th anniversary of the Truce in Dublin, came in Belfast the 281st anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne...

...The hostility he feels is not the product of an ingrained tribal instinct, but the result of manipulation by politicians for their own ends...

...The Jewish Defense League declared its intention of assassinating Arab diplomats...

...Anyway, it doesn’t have much to do with realpolitik...

...In that piece O’Brien closes the door and opens it, closes it again, and then, turning away, gives it a little push so it will drift open, knowing a chink is all that is needed for the spirit of Antigone to flow through...