The diplomatic crisis between Israel and Ireland

By Melanie Phillips

(JNS) Among Western countries that have expressed hostility to Israel, Ireland has long stood out as the most vicious.

A few weeks after the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel, the Irish parliament passed a motion declaring that “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza.”

Ireland is backing South Africa’s “genocide” case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Now this has turned into a diplomatic crisis.

Israel has closed its Dublin embassy in fury at Ireland’s attempt to gerrymander international law by asking the court “to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state.”

In other words, Ireland is seeking to convict Israel for a crime that currently doesn’t even exist in international law. This is reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where the chief of Stalin’s secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, said: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

The Irish prime minister, Simon Harris, claimed that Ireland wasn’t anti-Israel but was “pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law.” Yet he failed even to refer to Oct. 7 and the plight of the Israeli hostages. Instead, he baselessly accused Israel of “killing children” and causing civilian deaths on a “reprehensible” scale and claimed falsely that Gazans had been left to starve with humanitarian aid failing to flow.

Israel’s reaction was increasingly incandescent. Foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar accused the Irish government of “antisemitic actions and rhetoric” based on “double standards” and “delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state,” and accused Harris himself of antisemitism.

To which Ireland’s president, Michael Higgins, said it was a “very serious business” to brand people as antisemites “because, in fact, they disagree with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu.” Higgins then baselessly accused Netanyahu of breaching “so many bits of international law,” as well as breaching “the sovereignty of three of his neighbors, in relation to Lebanon, Syria” and that he “would like, in fact, actually to have a settlement into Egypt.”

In response to that stream of falsehoods, Sa’ar exploded on X: “Once an antisemitic liar—always an antisemitic liar.”

Higgins had dug Ireland further into its hole. The Irish weren’t criticizing Netanyahu. They were instead slandering and demonizing Israel with lies and blood libels. And in attempting to change the definition of genocide, they were trying to tamper with international law and the meaning of language itself.

The same strategy is being pursued by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, which are campaigning to change the meaning of genocide to convict Israel in their own kangaroo courts of reputational defamation.

It’s clearly not only obscene to turn Israel’s just war of defense against genocide into an accusation of genocide by Israel; it’s also patently ridiculous. The population of Gaza has actually increased during the war by around 0.2%.

and the Irish government don’t treat any other country as they do Israel by going to these insane lengths to pin the worst conceivable crime on a people who are not only innocent of that crime but are the intended victims of it.

The reason the Israel-haters are so determined to do this is that the term genocide was invented after the Holocaust to describe what was done to the Jews—the intended extermination of an entire people.

If genocide can be pinned on the Jews themselves, the Jews turn into Nazis; the Holocaust becomes an exaggerated crime, and the world that was complicit is exonerated. Accusing Israel of genocide is therefore a form of Holocaust denial, and all those who level this charge thus stand revealed as profound Jew-haters.

Ireland’s campaign of venom and lies reserved uniquely for the Jewish state has long been on eye-watering display, along with unvarnished open antisemitism.

At a county council meeting in Dublin on Oct. 7 this year—the anniversary of the Hamas pogrom—a councilor representing the Fine Gael Party, Punam Rane, claimed: “The entire U.S. economy is ruled by the Jews, by Israel.”

A report published last month by the education monitoring group IMPACT-se exposed profound distortions of the Holocaust, Israel, Judaism and Jewish history in textbooks used in Irish public schools.

Unlike most European countries, Ireland has refused to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

In May, while the war in Gaza was raging and armed Arab groups were still committing war crimes by firing missiles at Israeli civilians, Ireland decided to reward Hamas by recognizing an independent Palestinian state.

As for Higgins, he sent a letter of congratulation in the summer to Masoud Pezeshkian when he was appointed president of Iran—a country that threatens genocide against the Jews and commits gross human-rights abuses on its own people. Higgins then blamed Israel for leaking this letter, which turned out to have been posted by the Iranian regime on their social media channels.

In October, Higgins said it was “outrageous” that the Israel Defense Forces were “threatening” Irish peace-keepers in the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon—omitting to note that UNIFIL had stood by while Hezbollah launched thousands of rockets into northern Israel in direct contravention of the U.N. resolution enjoining the demilitarization of the area and the removal of all Hezbollah forces.

Why are the Irish so bigoted against Israel and the Jewish people?

Ireland has a deplorable history. As Sa’ar said, it was at best neutral during World War II. In 1945, the Irish leader Éamon de Valera sent his condolences to the German people over Hitler’s death.

One reason often given is the country’s Catholicism with its ancient history of theological antisemitism. But this can’t be the whole reason since other Catholic countries aren’t suffused with this degree of venom towards Israel and the Jews.

An important further reason is that the Irish identify with the Palestinian Arabs as perceived victims of Israeli “colonial” oppression just as they identify the Irish as victims of British “colonial” oppression.

Some point to the critical influence in Ireland of Sinn Féin, the party that served as the political fig leaf for the Irish Republican Army. The IRA waged a terrorist war against Britain and the Protestants of U.K.-run Northern Ireland on and off from early in the last century and was responsible for a campaign of bomb attacks in disturbances known as the “Troubles” from the late 1960s to 1998.

The IRA received massive arms shipments from Libya in the 1980s, and was funded and trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization. After the IRA disarmed in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams met Hamas leaders in 2006 and 2009.

According to Irish journalist and anti-extremism researcher, Dr. Eoin Lenihan, the links in the Irish mind between Israeli and British “colonialists” and between the Palestinian and Irish “resistance” resulted from Adams yoking together Arab and Irish nationalism under the banner of revolutionary socialism.

This permeated more widely, he says, because, unlike other countries, Ireland doesn’t have a tradition of centrist politics. Its two big parties, Fiánna Fail and Fine Gael, have no core values; so they veer towards wherever the wind is blowing—in this case, Sinn Féin’s revolutionary leftism and the Israel-bashing NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.

Through Sinn Fein’s influence, Ireland has become enmeshed with the international radical left and its promotion of intersectionality and victim culture. Under this dogma, the Jews can never be victims because they are seen as all-powerful, controlling the Western world in their own interests to the disadvantage of everyone else.

Victim culture is therefore itself innately anti-Jew. So there’s a double source of Jew-hatred in Ireland—both from its Catholic heritage and from the secular religion of universalism and victim culture.

Ireland is simply a danger to Israel and the Jewish people. It should be treated as a pariah until and unless it decides to support civilization rather than its nemesis.