ISRAELI OPPOSITION LEADER Yair Lapid has criticised the Israeli government’s move to close the country’s embassy in Dublin, describing the closure as a “victory for anti-Israel organisations”.

Israel announced on Sunday that it was closing its embassy in Dublin in light of what it described as “the extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government.”

Announcing the closure on Sunday, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said that the Ireland “has crossed every red line in its relation with Israel”.

Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, wrote in a post on X that the decision to close the Israeli embassy in Ireland “is a victory for anti-semitism and anti-Israel organisations”.

“The way to deal with criticism is not to run away, but to stay and fight!” Lapid said.

Foreign minister Sa’ar rejected Lair’s criticism, saying that the opposition leader was wrong for “defining the Irish treatment of Israel as ‘criticism’”.

The decision to close the Israeli embassy in Dublin came days after Tánaiste Micheál Martin announced that the Irish government would file an intervention in support of South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The case against Israel concerns breaches of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Ireland will support South Africa’s case against Israel, initiated following the launch of Israeli military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

“Israel needs to maintain embassies precisely in places where there are acute conflicts with the government, and a foreign minister who is only concerned with surrender and escaping conflicts is not doing his job,” Yair Lapid said.

In a post to X, Taoiseach Simon Harris said that he “utterly reject[s] the assertion that Ireland is anti-Israel”, adding that the embassy closure is a “deeply regrettable decision from the Netanyahu government”.

Former Irish ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall rejected claims that Ireland is an anti-Semitic state, saying that Ireland is only opposed to “certain aspects of Israeli government policy”.

“We’re not anti Israeli, we’re not anti-Jewish, and we’re not anti-Semitic,” Mulhall told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.

“We simply have concerns. If somebody criticizes Ireland for some particular move we’ve made, it doesn’t make them anti-Irish.”