On Connor Cruise O'Brien

I read Connor Cruise O'Brien's wonderful book, "The Siege", on the history of Zionism loaned to me, as I recall, by my aunt and uncle, and was delighted to spot these paragraphs in The Times Literary Supplement on the occasion of his passing in December last:

At the very start of the Troubles, O’Brien described pathological allegiance in Northern Ireland as a kind of “racism” allied to religion. But his unease with that description was made apparent by the inclusion of inverted commas around the word. By 1972 he had resorted to a different term, presenting the problem as one of “tribalism”. But he could not have been very happy with this formulation either. In the 1960s he had parodied the notion of Ibo tribalism in Nigeria, presumably recognizing the lack of fit between a nation of many millions and the anthropological category of the tribe. Soon O’Brien settled on the idea of “sacral nationalism”. He had in mind the infusion of nationalism with religion. He argued that the appetite for religion was an irrational longing, which in a secular age was disseminated by literature. He then claimed that it sought political fulfilment in reverence for the state.

O’Brien had thus moved to the conclusion that pathological allegiance derived from the sacralization of politics. But by the middle of the 1980s he was coming to accept that there were problems with this proposition as well. Immediately after his resignation from the Observer he embarked on a study of politics in the Middle East. His aim was to vindicate Israel’s attempt to consolidate its national security, but in pursuing this objective, he was obliged to modify his take on the “bloody” intersection of politics and religion. “Sacral” nationalism no longer constituted an object of easy condemnation, since Israel was so readily identifiable in these terms. At least, Israel could hardly be presented as the sole exception to the idea that national allegiance benefited from the support of a civil religion. This new orientation in O’Brien resulted in the publication in 1986 of The Siege – a history of Zionism in which he argued that sacral nationalism did not have to be pathological after all. He now needed a more subtle account of how passion inflamed politics.

Searching around, I found this:

"He wrote one book the New York Times did not refer to in its Friday obituary. It is a gargantuan book (nearly 800 pages) called The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, one of the three or four most authoritative and certainly the most literate in the field. Maybe it is understandable, this coarse omission by the newspaper of record. Zionism was O'Brien's last great passion, and I recall an evening at my house with Amos Oz when he tried to rekindle what he thought was the Hebrew writer's unaccountable pessimism about the dream. But, as O'Brien himself wrote at the end of his grand opus, "what is not in sight is the end to the siege.""

It's "understandable" if you take for granted the NY Times passions for erasing Israel from its pages. Much the same as they tried to erase the Holocaust while it was in progress.