Ireland’s Anti-Israel Mania Is a National Disgrace

Ireland’s self-styled ‘solidarity’ with Palestine has curdled into something much darker. In the recent words of Israel, Dublin could today be considered the “capital of antisemitism.” 

The latest antisemitism row to engulf Ireland revolves around the name of a park. Herzog Park, located in south Dublin, found itself the target of pro-Palestine activists who found its name offensive. The green space is currently named after Chaim Herzog, the sixth president of Israel, who was born in Belfast and grew up predominantly in Dublin. That this park exists and that some might want to commemorate the achievements of an Ireland-born Jew is apparently too much for the pro-Pal lot. They demanded that the name be changed to memorialise Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was reportedly killed in Gaza last year.  

This campaign even made it to the Dublin City Council, which was supposed to vote on the proposal this week. Until, that is, the motion mysteriously disappeared from the agenda. This was apparently the result of a legal technicality, but the bad optics of the whole situation was no doubt also a factor. Even Taoiseach Micheál Martin stepped in to describe the ordeal as “overtly divisive and wrong,” and worried that renaming the park “will without doubt be seen as antisemitic.” As John McGuirk points out in Gript, the language here is important—Martin is worried that Dublin City Council will be seen as antisemitic, not that those involved in this furore might actually be antisemitic. McGuirk puts it well: “It is said that a fish does not know that it is wet. When you swim in water all day, that is simply your natural state of being. The alternative to being wet, for a fish, is being dead. A similar observation might be made about very many Irish people when it comes to antisemitism. Our Taoiseach can never tell us that a thing is antisemitic. This would be the equivalent of explaining to a salmon that it is immersed in water.” 

Ireland has become a nation that is rabidly and irrationally obsessed with Israel and with Jews. This is a country with a Jewish population of less than 3,000 and falling. Ireland has only one fully kosher establishment, two Jewish schools, and just two synagogues. Yet despite the size of Ireland’s minuscule, but culturally and historically significant, Jewish community, antisemitic incidents have soared, as they have practically everywhere. In Dublin, walls have been daubed with “kill Jews” and “Zionists out of Ireland.” Posters showing the Israeli hostages are routinely torn down or defaced within hours of being put up. Last year, in the council chamber itself, a Fine Gael councillor stood and declared that “the entire US economy is ruled by the Jews, by Israel.” Sinn Féin recently hosted Bob Vylan, the British punk duo that had previously been on the receiving end of a police probe for chanting “death to the IDF” during their Glastonbury set this year. Jewish students and schoolchildren also describe feeling unsafe in classrooms and on campuses. “Zionist-free zone” slogans and motions signal that anyone associated with Israel—and, in practice, many Jews—are no longer welcome. 

This hostile atmosphere can surely come as no surprise to the Irish political class, who have spent the past two years since October 7, 2023 attacking Israel at every possible opportunity. As early as November 2023, the Social Democrats were already demanding that Ireland expel the Israeli ambassador and refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for “war crimes” and “collective punishment.” TDs stood up in the Dáil to insist that Israel “must be held accountable for the war crimes it is committing now in Gaza” and that Ireland had to “step up” and help bring Israeli leaders before judges in The Hague. Around the same time, a motion calling for the Israeli ambassador to be expelled from Ireland was debated, as roughly 1,000 protestors gathered outside Leinster House to demand the ambassador’s removal. The motion failed when put to a vote, but, sensing the poisonous climate, the Israeli embassy took the decision to close its doors in December last year, citing “the extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government.” 

In May 2024, then Taoiseach Simon Harris announced, in concert with Spain and Norway, that Ireland would formally recognise a Palestinian state. He called it “an historic and important day for Ireland and for Palestine,” explicitly linking the decision to Ireland’s own diplomatic campaign in 1919, when the fledgling Irish state pleaded for recognition from the great powers. The Palestinian flag was raised over government buildings, and Harris boasted about being “on the right side of history.” The move was, naturally, also applauded by Hamas. 

Unlike in many other Western nations, this faux revolutionary, ‘anti-colonial’ cosplay extends far beyond the younger generations. Earlier this year, Ireland’s 84-year-old president, Michael Higgins, used his keynote address at the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Dublin to pivot from the Shoah to Palestine. Higgins was less interested in marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and more in denouncing the “horrific loss of life and destruction” in Gaza. He also called the ceasefire “long overdue,” prompting walkouts and the forcible removal of Jewish attendees, who turned their backs on him in disgust. 

There is a kind of botched attempt to relate Ireland’s own colonial struggle under British rule to the situation in Palestine—without acknowledging that these two scenarios are very different. For starters, it ignores the Jewish people’s very valid claims to the land of Israel. Besides, Israel is not a colonial power, no matter how loudly the pro-Palestine activists scream that it is. The conflict between the Jewish State and Hamas is more a matter of survival than anything else. It is facing an Islamist movement whose charter openly calls for the destruction of the Jewish people, and whose leaders boast about repeating October 7th “again and again.” That Ireland’s political class has chosen to cast its moral lot with that movement’s cause rather than with the besieged Jewish state is, to put it mildly, revealing.

Far from being on the “right side of history,” as Harris so proudly put it, Ireland is backing those who would see Israel (and perhaps even the Jewish people as a whole) erased from the map. And it is leaving the Irish Jewish community to deal with the consequences. It is neither anti-colonial nor remotely ‘progressive’ to support a bunch of militant, medieval, genocidal extremists. That Ireland’s elites cannot see this is damning proof of their moral and intellectual bankruptcy.