Ireland’s ‘progressive’ elite has fallen for a lie
For decades, Dublin has been vindictively hostile to Jerusalem. Now the Emerald Isle, which has long boasted one of the most progressive leaderships in Europe, has taken its Israelophobic fetish to a new level.
On Wednesday – little more than seven months after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – it joined Norway and Spain in unilaterally recognising a Palestinian state.
The Taoiseach, Simon Harris, insisted rather feebly that “Hamas is not the Palestinian people”. The terror group itself, however, which enjoys majority Palestinian support, had no time for such subtleties, praising the “brave resistance” for winning such international legitimacy with kidnap, murder, mutilation and rape.
In truth, without a credible plan for Israeli security, the two-state solution is currently simply a staging-post for the final solution. Given the absence of a single meaningful democracy in the Arab world, the chances of a democratic State of Palestine are not good.
If a future Palestinian state turned into an Iranian-sponsored terroristan – a second Gaza, if you will – would the Taoiseach support IDF counter-terror operations? Or would he accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and genocide (until the Jews succumbed to ethnic cleansing and genocide themselves)?
When Ursula von der Leyen visited Israel to show solidarity a week after October 7, the Irish president, Michael Higgins, reacted with anger. “We need a better performance in relation to European Union diplomacy,” he ranted. This surely suggests an answer to that question.
Such boneheaded Irish Israelophobia is the end-point of the journey of progressive radicalisation that commenced during the Cold War. In the 1940s, during the movement for Israeli independence, Ireland supported the Jewish insurgency in Palestine, viewing it as a struggle for indigenous self-determination against imperial Britain.
In 1946, when members of the Jewish underground retaliated against whippings by the British army – a classic colonial punishment – by subjecting two officers to the same humiliation, former colonies celebrated. “We received congratulations from Irishmen,” Israeli leader Menachem Begin wrote in his memoirs. “They had witnessed an episode which restored their dignity and self respect.”
In the late Sixties, however, Soviet ideological infiltration, combined with the rise of radical academics like Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, led to the spread of a new “anti-colonial” theory on the Left. This forcibly reinvented the identity of the Jews of Israel, replacing a persecuted, non-Caucasian people rooted in the Middle East with a fantasy of Aryan imperialist invaders.
Such obvious bunkum is credible only in a world of Israelophobia. Which, shamefully enough, returns us to Ireland today.
There remains some distinction, however, between the Irish people and the Irish elites. How we laughed in March, when the absurd attempt to push through anti-motherhood language in the country’s constitution was rejected at the ballot box. How we laughed during Eurovision, when Ireland’s jury awarded Israel “nul points”, but the Irish public gave it ten, the second highest score.
This may not be much but it’s something. The green shoots of sanity are there.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of ‘Israelophobia’
