“There’s something about us Irish,” Joe Biden once told an audience, "about how we view ourselves and how we are viewed by others.
“We have a combination of spirituality and yet we are doubters, we are compassionate, but we are demanding.”
Speaking after his induction into the Irish-America Hall of Fame in March 2013, the then United States vice-president gave a performance that was years in the making. Joe Biden demonstrated that he knew the importance of a good story.
“I remember I was going to meet the queen of England as a young senator and as I was getting ready to leave for the airport – I give you my word – before I left the house I got a call from my mother – swear to God – ‘Joey, be polite, BUT. DO. NOT. KISS. HER RING.’ – swear to God.
“I got the great honour of introducing my mother to Pope John Paul. My mother said ‘Joey, don’t kiss his ring’. There was this thing. This Thing. This Thing. About never bending. Never bending. As my dad would say, it’s all about dignity. All about dignity. Everyone. Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity. No man, under any circumstance, has a right to treat someone in a way that doesn’t acknowledge their dignity.”
The assembled crowd of Irish-Americans loved this, didn’t even seem annoyed by his habit of intoning and repeating the simplest of words as if they were his campaign fund account details. First, they cracked up with laughter and then descended into reverential silence. Joey was on form.
Before Biden did any story-telling that day in the Marriot Essex Hotel on Central Park, he got his god-daughter, “Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden Owens”, to rise from among the audience – “Where are you missy? Stand up, baby… I want you to know, she represents CO-CA CO-LA in New York, I just want you to know that, so take damn good care of her”. The crowd cracked up at this too, and on – or back – Joey seamlessly moved to the Coffin Ships and the Molly Maguires. Money and power draped in the fine linen of Irish-American endurance.
Fast forward eleven years, and Joey’s now the main man in the White House and people in the Gaza Strip are eating grass by the side of the road. They’re shovelling animal feed into their children’s mouths as the month of Ramadan begins. They can only dream of Coffin Ships.
Joey, now in charge of the largest military that has ever imposed itself upon the earth, says he’s going to build a temporary port to get some food fit for human consumption to the Palestinians of Gaza, while his air force has been dropping packets of Skittles and tabasco sauce on the refugee camps. People who know about these things aren’t impressed.
“If the Americans or the EU give a hoot about Palestinian lives, they would not pretend like they are Hollywood action heroes airlifting supplies into Berlin… they would stop the endless flow of weapons to Israel, and stop the political support for Israeli genocide,” human rights professor Osaka Jogakuin told Al Jazeera last week.
“Biden could halt all of this tomorrow with one phone call. The fact that he is not doing so – and thinks voters will be fooled by this – shows that he must think they are stupid.”
Avril Benoit of Doctors Without Borders labelled the US plan a “glaring distraction”: “This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem… the US should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist.”
Mohammed al-Masri, from the Palestinian Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, added “if the US was serious, it would have pressured Israel into opening the land crossings and allowing aid and relief in as well as stopping the onslaught. We have not heard Biden call for a stopping of the war or even a ceasefire.
“What is important for the Palestinians is that Biden pressures Israel, because he is a partner in the ongoing war.”
In June 1982, the senator from Delaware was making a name for himself in Washington when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, then under pressure in the US over the invasion of Lebanon, appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee. As Begin was “grilled” over Israel’s use of cluster bombs to target civilians, Biden intervened and “delivered a very impassioned speech”.
According to Begin, Biden said, if it were up to him, “he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children”.
Begin was shocked, “I said to him: No, sir… according to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war. Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.”
Three months later, on September 16 1982, a right-wing Christian Lebanese militia entered the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut and, as their Israeli military ally observed from a distance, massacred an estimated 3,000 Palestinian refugees, women and children among them, over a 48-hour period. The United Nations later found that “Israeli authorities or forces were involved, directly or indirectly, in the massacres”.
Presumably, given his comments on Capitol Hill, Biden could understand the need for Sabra and Shatila.
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On January 29 1863, Kerry man Patrick O’Connor led soldiers from the California Volunteers into the Bear River camp of the Shoshone people, in present day Idaho, where they slaughtered four-hundred of them – men, women and children. Men like Patrick O’Connor, whose family had left their own trail of tears behind them in An Bualtín, Corca Dhuibhne, helped the Irish in America to become White.
Oppressed and starved at home, where England used Ireland as a laboratory for racism and colonial rule, the fleeing Irish, initially viewed with contempt and suspicion by the original Anglo-Saxon settlers of north America, were gradually if painfully accepted into the fold, rendering valuable services like staffing the police forces that kept other immigrant communities and freed blacks in their place.
This isn’t the universal story of how the Irish earned their place in America – there was struggle against indentured servitude, alliances with rebellious slaves, there were the Molly Maguires and Jim Larkin and Daniel Berrigan – but it is the element of the story that allowed the Irish to become Coca-Cola executives and war-time presidents.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has described how Jewish settlers – reviled and discriminated against in the European societies they fled in the years leading up to the Holocaust – became White through similar work in Palestine.
In the 1920s, says Pappé, Zionism, beginning the eviction of the Arab population from the land in Palestine, “became a settler colonial project and not just a project for salvaging Jews from anti-semitism…
“It was not just the classical settler colonial imposition of settlers from abroad imposing themselves upon the native population, it also was kind of creating this idea that they can produce or establish a European state in the midst of the Arab world, very much like the white supremacists in South Africa.”
Maybe Biden sees parallels then in the stories of the Irish in America and Israel in the Middle East, maybe he’s a fan of Leon Uris’ Exodus and Trinity novels – "Just keep the arms coming to Israel”. Regardless, he’s not for turning in his support for the war on Gaza.
What then would be the point of a bit of grandstanding on the part of a few small-time Irish politicians?
According to Irish News columnist Brian Feeney, “There are 230 US companies in the north employing tens of thousands. [Stormont finance minister Conor] Murphy and US special envoy Joe Kennedy have been working together all week to expand that number. Visiting different cities, meeting prospective investors, allows the north to be part of what Billy Cantwell, editor of Australia’s Irish Echo, calls Ireland’s ‘shamrock empire’.”
State Department figures have put the level of US Foreign Direct Investment in the south of Ireland at $557 billion for 2021. “There are over 950 US subsidiaries in Ireland,” a State Department report has noted.
It's easy to see why, in this context, Leo Varadkar doesn’t believe in boycotts. Leader of the opposition Mary Lou McDonald says she’d talk to “the Devil himself” if it meant getting a ceasefire in Gaza. But are they going to tell Biden something he doesn’t already know? And surely “the Devil”, by definition, couldn’t care less anyway?
Seriously, though, nobody’s going to the White House on behalf of the Palestinians. This is about us and our relationship to empire and what it can do for or to us.
***
Whose war (genocide) is this anyway? Last week, the Washington Post reported that the US has provided more than 100 shipments of military hardware to Israel since the attacks of October 7 2023, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid”.
“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former official in Biden’s administration.
“The US cannot maintain that, on the one hand, Israel is a sovereign state that’s making its own decisions and we’re not going to second-guess them, and, on the other hand, transfer this level of armament in such a short time and somehow act as if we are not directly involved.”
Defence secretary Lloyd Austin said last month that US munitions had killed 25,000 women and children in Gaza since the beginning of the onslaught. On Tuesday this week, it was reported that US airstrikes on port cities and towns in western Yemen had killed at least eleven people and wounded fourteen more.
The week before, the Irish Examiner was reporting that “almost 1,200 civil flights carrying weapons were allowed to travel across Irish airspace last year, the highest number in six years”.
Transport minister Eamon Ryan rejected just eight applications to transport weapons in that time and has said “the vast majority tend to be, in terms of military, American chartered flights, where the personnel are being brought to Germany or to their various bases”.
The direction of travel is west-to-east, USA to Arab world, with Ireland conveniently in between. Where does neutrality then sit in this itinerary, and where complicity and where waging war and where useless words and where downright lies?
Either Irish people in the White House on March 17 matter or they don’t. And if they do matter, who to? Is the shamrock reception purely an exercise in sentimentality and goodwill towards the old country on the part of Biden (a politician with more than five decades’ worth of experience in a cut-throat world) or is there something in it for him too? Would a boycott damage his chances among Irish-American voters? Maybe, maybe not.
***
It’s Friday, March 15 and there’s over 20 dead after the Israeli military attacked desperate people searching for food at the Kuwait roundabout in northern Gaza. Footage from the scene shows at least one victim with an arm torn off due to the ferocity of the helicopter gunfire aimed at them.
People say this isn’t a war, that a war needs two more or less matched sides slugging it out, but in a pure sense war is nothing but the serial killing of poor people on an industrial basis, day after day; in 21st Century terms, usually made possible by US munitions.
Biden says there’s no line Israel can cross that will lead him to putting a hold on those munitions. Not even massacring starving civilians looking for food.
Ireland’s leaders, when they talk about our interests and having private words with Joey, drastically underestimate just where we are in historical terms. For the first time, we are watching a genocide being played out in real time “in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something” as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice, has put it – a genocide made possible only by the arms and political cover provided by the man we, in turn, are going to give cover to.
In fairness to him, Leo Varadkar called again for a ceasefire in Gaza when he spoke at the John F Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston on Monday night, but he walked a torturous path to get there. The path went through Ukraine, where there is an ongoing “battle between freedom and tyranny, between the rule of international law and war crimes, between hope and despair”.
The west must remain steadfast against Russia, Varadkar insisted, and “provide the political, humanitarian, military, financial and other help to ensure that Ukraine prevails”. Simple moral imperatives.
By the time Varadkar had reached the Middle East, however, he had entered an inexplicable “cycle of violence”. Last year’s Hamas attacks can never be “contextualised”, Varadkar insisted; alone among all the days in the world, there must never be an attempt to understand October 7 2023 and its brutality and slaughter and where it might have sprung from.
Then, the taoiseach felt comfortable in saying the innocent shouldn’t be punished along with the guilty, that their cries would haunt us if we didn’t speak up.
Varadkar wants humanitarian aid for Gaza, but when was the last time you heard someone call for a no-fly zone over the Strip? I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard anyone call for that ever. Because the call would be absurd, wouldn’t it? And failing the rest of the world defending them, have the Palestinians the right to defend themselves?
The leaders of the government and the opposition in Ireland have been better than most but what have they risked?
As the Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd has written: “The rallying cry that we are all Palestinians must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep. Meaning we reject our complicity in this bloodshed and our inertia when confronted with all of that blood. Because Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice.”
***
Empire cloaks itself in stories. The ascent of the downtrodden Irish to the White House. Barak Obama’s eight years in power (during which Libya and Syria were condemned to death).
The American version of empire is just the latest that needs stories to sustain itself. The Romans had their foreign emperors, Sepitimius Severus from Libya and his son Marcus Aurelius. The Algerians were Frenchmen until they flung indefinitely deferred privilege back in the metropole’s face.
Likewise, Biden stitches his narrative together using St Patrick’s Day as the needle, it’s his foundation myth.
It’s only when empire is stripped bare of its stories that we can see its real face, decide whether we can live with it or not in the cold light of day and decide what to do about it.
And if not now, then when? If not this St Patrick’s Day, then which one will we opt out of, when will the blood we allow them to soak up with shamrock begin to choke us? When Donald Trump is back in the White House and has invaded Mexico or Nicaragua? If a catastrophe like that happened and we then found our courage (Mexicans are good Catholics after all), what will that say of our regard for Palestinians, and before them the Afghans and Iraqis, whose bones we did a Morrison’s Jig upon in the Oval Office?
Some say to boycott the White House would be an act of madness and probably they’re right. The representatives of a tiny, insignificant country like Ireland daring to reject the attentions of empire on behalf of a despised, condemned people would almost be an act as absurd as declaring war on a superpower from an occupied post office.
It would be an act so ridiculous, so mad that it would be sublime. And maybe that’s what the world needs, maybe that’s the only thing that can save us, disrupt the story arc, strip power bare and give the Wretched hope – acts of sublime madness.