Ireland’s Alarming Antisemitism

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of young Jewish scholars at the Tikvah Fund in New York about my book, which connected, in its Irish way, to deeply Jewish themes about inheritance, identity, and nationalism. They listened politely and then surprised me by asking why the modern Irish state was so uniquely hostile to Israel. This was tough to answer because many of the heroes of the Irish revolutionary period a century ago collaborated with Zionists. They saw in Zionism a kindred desire of an oppressed people for a state to protect their interests, and a chance to revive a language of their own. The two countries have an intertwined history. Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog, had a father born in Belfast and raised in Dublin. Robert Emmet Briscoe, who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in the 1960s, was an ardent Irish nationalist, traveling with Éamon de Valera to America during the revolutionary period. He was also an ardent Zionist and Jewish patriot. But in recent decades, Irish public opinion, led by its media class, has become notably pro-Palestinian and sometimes has a febrile anti-Israel energy.

Ireland joined a case brought to the U.N. by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The very concept of “genocide” was devised to describe what was done to Jews in the Holocaust. And that is why there is a peculiarly evil thrill that antisemites get when they can effectively accuse Jews of being Nazis. Ireland, as part of its diplomatic efforts, lobbied to have the legal definition of genocide expanded in order to convict Israel in this trial. Israel has responded by withdrawing its diplomats from Ireland. Ireland has responded by saying, “Who, us? Antisemites?”

Well, yes. The president of Ireland (a mostly ceremonial head of state role), Michael Higgins, took umbrage at the accusation. He then portrayed himself and the Irish people as mere critics of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said that branding critics of that leader as antisemitic was a “gross defamation and slander”:

Higgins ought to know, because, in the very same breath, he accused Netanyahu of breaching the sovereignty of Lebanon and Syria and, with no evidence whatsoever, preposterously held out that Netanyahu sought to carve up Egyptian territory for settlement. Higgins went on to say that anyone in Ireland who expressed antisemitism could be arrested under acts against incitement. But of course this is preposterous to say when in fact one member of the ruling party and a Dublin city counselor said last month said that “Jews control America” and wasn’t even disciplined by her party.

Higgins is of course blustering when he talks about the supposed sovereignty of Lebanon and Syria — things he cares about only when there is a Jew to blame. Months ago, the Iranian government shared a letter it received from President Higgins congratulating the new Iranian president and offering his “very best wishes for your endeavours.” Those endeavors also include breaching the sovereignty of nations: Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon. When the words embarrassed him, Higgins blamed the Israelis for circulating it and slyly implied that perhaps it was the Israeli intelligence at work. Then he complained more when people treated his words seriously. Was all this also an example of the Irish state’s chipper commitment to human rights just happening to sound exactly like an unhinged antisemitic conspiracy theory?

Many Irish try to explain their attitudes toward Israel as a commitment to international law or as the reflex of a former colony, but as John McGuirk points out in a righteous tirade at Gript.ie, the country never got as worked up, or as active in the U.N., about Assad in Syria or about anything happening in Ethiopia right now. It didn’t raise a peep about the role of Saudi Arabia or Iran in Yemen’s civil wars, which caused an actual famine. And of course, this moral commitment never intrudes upon their growing relationship with China, which is conducting a recognized genocide (by the real definition) against Muslims in Xinjiang. It doesn’t bother their relationship with the U.S. either. Americans can drop bombs in Syria and refuel their military planes in “neutral” Ireland’s airfields. McGuirk is onto something: There is a student-union quality to Irish political life. The Irish are ready and proud to give offense, but not to anyone subsidizing a lifestyle they could never afford on their own.

The yelping since Israel withdrew its ambassador is a sign of worry that such a gesture might attract the attention of an incoming Trump administration loaded with figures like Robert Lighthizer, who singled out Ireland’s tax-shelter economy as ripping off Americans. Ireland has been able to prosper as a free rider. Its neutrality and small military investment are enabled by the security needs of the United Kingdom and the existence of NATO. Its budget surpluses are the product of indulgence granted by the U.S. and Europe’s looking the other way at its tax schemes. Ireland had better hope that this big ineffective protest doesn’t have real costs in the end.