LAST WEEK, IRELAND was one of 120 United Nations member states to vote in favour of a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian truce between Israel and Hamas and demanding aid access to Gaza.
It is yet another foreign policy stance that sets Ireland at odds with many of its European Union partners, as well as other nations typically thought of as allies such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada. Nearly three quarters of Ireland’s EU neighbours either abstained from voting or voted against the motion entirely, as in the case of Austria, Croatia, Czechia and Hungary.
The vote was broadly in line with the Irish government’s public pronouncements on the conflict since 7 October. In a statement issued on Wednesday morning, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said of civilian casualties in Gaza: “This cannot continue, this has to stop.”
Irish attitudes – both those expressed by the State and the attitudes of the public at large – have been publicly cast as antagonistic by certain high-profile diplomats.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has in the past week publicly referred to Ireland as “one of the more challenging arenas for Israel in Europe”. His comments came after an Israeli diplomat based in Ireland’s Israeli embassy tweeted: “#Ireland Wondering who funded those tunnels of terror? A short investigation direction – 1. Find a mirror 2. Direct it to yourself 3. Voilà.” This tweet was later deleted, with the Israeli Embassy clarifying that “the text and wording were wrong”.
A tweet by the German Embassy to Ireland this week quoted German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck as saying “Anticolonialism must not lead to antisemitism,” framing the statement as a “reminder to Ireland”.
Historically, Ireland was the first EU member state to declare that peace in the region “had to be based on a fully sovereign State of Palestine”, in a joint statement alongside Bahrain in 1980.
Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs continues to acknowledge the seizure of land for Israeli settlements, evictions of families, destruction of homes and farm buildings… and unequal treatment” faced by Palestinians.
For decades, Ireland has officially been calling for “a permanent and sustainable ceasefire” as well as the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, and ultimately the establishment of a two-state solution which is based on the borders of 1967 – before Israel tripled its territory in the aftermath of the Six Day War.
With specific reference to Israel, the Department of Foreign Affairs says: “Any use of military force in self defence must be in accordance with international humanitarian law, and in particular must be both discriminate and proportionate.”
"Anticolonialism must not lead to antisemitism" - an important and timely reminder from Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, both for Germany and Ireland. https://t.co/3IwEfINGzr
— German Embassy Dublin (@GERMANYinIRL) November 3, 2023
Speaking to The Journal this week, Professor of Politics at DCU Donnacha Ó Beacháin said: “There has been a rather robust, to put it mildly, campaign by the Israeli embassy to defend its own position but also to counteract those which it perceives to be adversarial.
“The view that is often presented by some sections of the Israeli media is that Ireland is the most hostile country in the European Union towards Israel,” Ó Beacháin added.
This rhetoric has boiled over amongst many ordinary social media users who are also referring to Ireland in antagonistic terms.
One post, seen over 300,000 times on Twitter, listed Ireland as among the “forces of darkness,” cherry-picking more of the 120 nations who voted in favour of a calling for an immediate humanitarian truce, such as Russia, China, and Iran.
While events in Gaza have intensified such rhetoric, this tension between Ireland and Israel is not new. The day before Hamas’ brutal attack, The Jerusalem Post ran a feature reflecting on Micheál Martin’s visit to Israel in September which explicitly asked: “Is Ireland ready to acknowledge their Nazi-sympathizer past?” Other headlines from that same publication include: “Irish anti-Israel sentiment almost indivisible from antisemitism”, “Why does Ireland hate Israel?”, and “Ireland’s delusional orgy of criticism of Israel”.
Ó Beacháin notes that, in editorials such as these, that there is an attempt to link modern Ireland’s attitude towards Israel to Eamon De Valera’s infamous visit to the German ambassador in Dublin in 1945 following the death of Adolf Hitler. Such editorials give the impression that Ireland’s attitude towards the conflict in Palestine “is linked to a deep-seated antisemitism in Ireland”.
Just weeks before Hamas’ attack on 7 October, Micheál Martin had visited the region, and appealed for a return to the negotiating table by both Israel and Palestine. During the visit, Martin said: “It matters to me personally as someone who’s been involved both in foreign policy and in being part of bringing peace to the island of Ireland for the 40 plus years of my political life.”
During this trip, Martin visited the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Yad Veshem, and told reporters: “It is only through remembrance and education that we can ensure that nothing like the Holocaust can be allowed to happen again.”
While the Occupied Territories Bill, opposed by Fine Gael and omitted from the programme for government when the current coalition was formed in 2020, would see a ban on a legislative ban on goods from Israeli-occupied territories, the bill’s progress through the Oireachtas appears to have stalled.
Speaking to The Journal last month Maurice Cohen, Chariman of Ireland’s Jewish Representative council said the Jewish community has experienced “major support from the non-Jewish community” in the wake the Hamas attacks which saw 1,400 people killed and hundreds more abducted. Although Cohen said there has been “no major increase” in real-life antisemitic incidents in Ireland, he pointed to an obvious increase in online antisemitic rhetoric, adding that Irish elected officials had not done enough to condemn the 7 October attack.
One such real life incident was recorded this week, however, when a Star of David was graffitied alongside a swastika in Tramore, Co Waterford.
A survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish NGO and civil rights group which supports the state of Israel, found that Ireland generally scores better than the average western European country when it comes to anti-semitic beliefs.
The survey is based on how many respondents from an area agree with statements such as: “Jews have too much power in the business world” and “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars”. Ireland’s index score is 20%, lower than the 24% regional average.
Ó Beacháin argues that it is not antisemitism that drives the broad Irish affinity with the Palestinian cause, however.
“The reality is that Ireland has a longstanding policy of empathising with those it considers to be victims of injustice,” says Ó Beacháin, citing Ireland’s domestic protest movements against apartheid-era South Africa.
“I wouldn’t take Israel-Palestine out of context. I think it’s part of a consistent practice of Irish people empathising with the underdog, and I think that goes to our own history, which is marked by imperialism and settler-colonialism.”
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