Limerick Q&A event with author of new book Castastrophe

THE writer, Fintan Drury, has just published Catastrophe - Nakba II (Merrion Press) which is both an account of the genocide conducted by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 and how the West has sponsored its destruction of Palestine.

This Thursday, June 12, at 6.30pm in O'Mahony's Booksellers on O'Connell St, Limerick Irish author Mary Costello discusses with Fintan, his new book Castastrophe: Nakba II.

In this special article for the Limerick Leader Drury suggests we need to bring the catastrophe being endured by the Palestinian people into our own place if we’re to appreciate its full horror.

When you get to be in your late 60s, you think there’s very little that can really shock or horrify you; that our capacity to hurt others can hardly find new depths and then you realise that, institutionally at least, we can always fall further into apocalypticism. The invasion of Ukraine and the brutality of that conflict has brought an overwhelming pro-Ukraine response both politically and civically in most of the West. In contrast, most of the institutional West has defended Israel with many of its biggest powers choosing to actively sponsor its genocide. The West, including the European Union of which Ireland is a member, has at the very least supported Israel in its despotic endeavour. Some countries - Germany, Britain, France and especially the United States - have actively sponsored Israel’s campaign with an unprecedented supply of arms. 

Catastrophe - Nakba II was written because I found it hard to believe what I was seeing and reading about Israel’s violent assault on the people of Palestine. That ongoing strife was a story right through the 1980s when I was a journalist with RTE but never before has the barbarism been as savage as over the last 20 months. I marched and I protested because I knew enough to appreciate that there was a great deal more involved than Israel simply responding to the brutal Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. I knew enough to argue Palestine’s case but I didn’t fully understand the detail. As I write in the book, I was among the “tens of millions of Europeans, who knew what was afoot was egregiously wrong, but who might have struggled to explain why. We were horrified by the scale of death and destruction, but unsure of the backstory, so we protested and our hearts ached for the people of Gaza, but maybe, truth be known, we didn’t know our Hamas from our Hezbollah or our East from our West Jerusalem.” 

This book was written for me and for those like me, for whom the visceral reaction to what has unfolded needs to be grounded in some better appreciation of the narrative. In my early twenties, I was trained as a news and current affairs journalist. Curiosity isn’t taught, but journalism layers it with accuracy and balance. While that is a mighty combination, there are times when instinct needs to lead the narrative, which is how this book evolved. In the early months of last year, large swathes of the West’s media had become so consumed by Israel’s account and so concerned not to be accused of antisemitism that truth had become another casualty of its colonialism. 

I suspected Israel had, this time, gone fully rogue and that there was no basis, not even 7 October 2023, on which its onslaught could be justified. I let that belief lead me; I read and watched, absorbed everything I could; I travelled widely to meet people - including Israelis - to further my knowledge. Gaza was off-limits to international media, but I visited the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. Catastrophe - Nakba II is the result.

To understand this extraordinarily sad story, we need to reflect on more than what’s happened to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the last twenty months. The history is not complex; it is of settler colonialism with Israel striving to take the whole of Palestine (and parts of Lebanon and Syria too) because, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said ten months before October 2023, ‘The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the land of Israel … Galilee, the Negev, Golan, Judea and Samaria. The first Nakba (the word Palestinians use for a catastrophe) occurred in 1947 as the state of Israel took shape. Israel, which was founded in May 1948, appropriated Palestinian land, killed 15,000 people and forced the displacement of more than 750,000 indigenous people. Nakba II is on a whole different scale. 

To truly understand its monumental scale, we need to imagine that the city of Limerick has been completely destroyed. The Gaza Ministry of Health has accounted for more than 50,000 casualties - almost 20,000 of whom are children - but Doctors Without Borders and the Lancet, the respected international medical journal, estimate the figure to be well in excess of 100,000. Try to imagine, in 18 months of the most brutal bombardment, that the city of Limerick was reduced to rubble and every child, woman, and man erased for all time. It may be that it’s only by transferring the horror of this genocide to our own place that we can hope to fully appreciate the scale of what Palestinians have experienced over the last twenty months and counting! 

Israel’s intent with Nakba II is to remove any trace of Palestine and of its people. The toll for any community facing such force, such manic resolve, is unimaginable. For us to try, we need to bring it into our own place and think of the elderly in hospitals, the children in schools and know that they are being slaughtered as Israel alone ignores - and is allowed to - international law. Imagine University Hospital Limerick Hospital in ruins, somehow still functioning with doctors and nurses risking their lives to try and save others, but the bombs still coming until the rubble is reduced to dust, patients and medical teams alike lying shredded among it. Impossible to imagine?. In July 2024, a group of US medics, just returned from Gaza, wrote to President Biden that women and children were being deliberately killed, as were Palestinian doctors, warning that ‘Israel had directly targeted and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system’ They were ignored; the day the President received the letter Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the joint houses in Capitol Hill. 

We need to imagine other things, that the surrounding countryside is forever shattered, that, along with hospitals, schools and public buildings, in some ways most tragically, the land itself is being targeted to destroy the people’s capacity to feed themselves. In the book, I reference London based, Forensic Architecture as branding Israel’s destruction of Gazans’ agricultural land as an ‘ecocide’ and how, since 2014, ‘Palestinian farmers along Gaza’s perimeter have seen their crops sprayed by airborne herbicides and regularly bulldozed, and have themselves faced sniper fire by the Israeli occupation forces.’

When you see references to famine, something seared into the Irish psyche, most especially along our western seaboard, try to focus on how, in Gaza, this is a deliberate policy of Israel. It is determined to starve to death those Palestinians it has not been able to kill with bombs or bullets. This is not to exaggerate the crime and the deliberate intent. When the UN and international agencies reference how the Palestinians are on the brink of starvation, realise it’s not a random consequence of the bombardment; it is planned. Israel’s refusal to allow anything approaching necessary levels of aid into Gaza is part of its strategy to squeeze every means of life out of the people. Gaza had a thriving agriculture sector that could provide for the people, but by June 2024, international agencies confirmed that more than 80 per cent of that capacity had been destroyed, as had half of its 3,700 productive greenhouses. Global experts, using satellite imagery, said that 50 per cent of Gaza’s groundwater wells and 65 per cent of water tanks were destroyed or damaged over the period from October 2023 to June 2024. These strands of oppression are woven together into a deliberate policy to incapacitate the people’s capacity to feed themselves and then, as they starve, prevent aid from getting through to them. 

When you live in the safety and security that most of us in Ireland enjoy, it's almost impossible to imagine going about your daily life in this kind of a living-hell. That’s precisely what it is for the Palestinians, yet much of the West, for all the protestations to the contrary, is guilty of coalescing with Israel in its genocidal endeavour. Germany and Britain, France and Canada are among those most responsible, but the United States’ sponsorship of the genocide is unparalleled. As I write, when the definitive history is written, it will be on the US and the inept administration of Joe Biden that the greatest burden of guilt will rest. ‘Its political leadership has behaved as though it comprises fifty-one states, the fifty that are part of the Union and the state of Israel. Its flag, the Stars and Stripes, should really carry fifty-one stars, including the Star of David.’ 

Catastrophe - Nakba II sets out how it is that Israel has, for decades, been allowed to engage in its settler colonial intent against international law and a clear breach of United Nations resolutions. It goes back to the original Nakba and examines the steady loss of Palestinian land since. It narrates how it has ignored even the boundaries that followed the end of the Six-Day War in 1967 in its determination to kill Palestinians, drive them from their land and wipe every trace of their civilisation from history. The intent of the state of Israel is precisely that - nothing less.