Ireland was the last country in the European Union to host an Israeli embassy. It is now, nearly 30 years later, the first to have one closed down. Ireland – self-appointed standard-bearer of the peaceniks – joins Iraq, Somalia, North Korea et al in having no Israeli diplomatic representation. Israel had repeatedly criticised Ireland for its reflexively anti-Israel disposition. When the Irish government announced on 11 December it would intervene in calling for the International Court of Justice to expand its definition of genocide (to incorporate Israeli action in the Gaza War), the Rubicon was crossed.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar explained that “Ireland’s extreme anti-Israel policy” had become overwhelming, that the “anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimisation and demonisation of the Jewish state and on double standards”. He is right about at least one thing: Ireland’s stance on Israel is among the most hostile in Europe. For the bien pensant middle classes of Dublin’s universities, it is almost a social requirement. In the leaders debate ahead of the recent election all candidates agreed that Ireland must boycott Israel. Parliament is treated to frequent invectives on the topic. Cork County Council helpfully banned Benjamin Netanyahu from entering the city, even before the International Criminal Court issued his arrest warrant in November.
Ireland likes to tell a simplified story about its own history: a small country ruthlessly colonised and then cleaved in two by Great Britain, its people starved and forced to emigrate before a bloody fight for independence. Now it stands astonishingly (if precariously) rich with much soft power, as both the victims and victors of modern history. This combination allows Ireland to profess the grievances of a downtrodden underdog with the authority of a rich Western nation.
With that soapbox afforded by all of its wealth and soft power Ireland has taken on the diplomatic mantle of being Europe’s most vocal Israel critic. No matter the moral credulity of the campaign, its source is rather strange. Ireland sees a false kinship in Palestine: two peoples subject to the whims of an overweening imperial power, under the thumb of intractable sectarianism. Pauline Tully, a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD, or member of parliament), said in 2021 that the people of Ireland “sympathise [with] and understand” the Palestinian plight, “as the northern part of our country experienced similar for many years”.
The disposition becomes more potent the further you slide along the nationalist scale (the Palestine Liberation Organisation, for example, allegedly provided guns and training for the provisional IRA in the 1970s). The youth wing of Sinn Féin – Ógra Shinn Féin – superimposed its logo on a Palestinian flag and shared it on social media as news emerged of Hamas’s massacre at a music festival in Israel on 7 October. The war in Gaza has hardened these sympathies in the year since. That the roots of Irish nationalism and the plight of Gazans are neither morally nor intellectually comparable appears not to trouble them. The shallowness of their historical analogy goes unremarked.
Ireland does not have many Jews. The Jewish population was highest before the Second World War, at around 4,000. Now it is less than 3,000. As the founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland Oliver Sears notes, Ireland’s most famous Jew is Leopold Bloom – the protagonist of Ulysses, rendered by a non-Jewish author. Both by drawing an erroneous (and offensive) equivalence with Northern Ireland and Palestine, and through an absence of Jewish people in Irish public life, the language has coarsened. And Ireland has, among European countries, underscored its outlier position on the Middle East. “The most anti-Israel country in Europe” so the refrain goes.
The posturing from Simon Harris’s government might one day be considered a major diplomatic failure. Ireland is vulnerable at the moment due to the spectre of a Trump presidency: his economic isolationism threatens to upend Ireland’s economic model. Meanwhile in Europe, Ireland has squandered a lot of the good will earned over the Brexit years, as its refusal to cooperate on matters of foreign policy (while still wanting to be at the centre of the club) is beginning to grate. That hard-fought reputation as the world’s tiniest superpower is threatened. And Harris’s claim that – despite all evidence to the contrary – Ireland is not anti-Israel borders on the delusional.
[See also: Inside Syria’s “human slaughterhouse”]
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