Why is Ireland the most anti-Israel country in Europe?
Paraphrased via Quora:
Why is Ireland the largest opponent of Israel in Europe, despite having once been a major supporter?
Ireland’s longstanding opposition to Israel has — in my view — a few contributory factors.
Firstly there’s the extremely pervasive idea that the Israel/Palestine conflict is “the same” as the Northern Ireland/ Israel conflict.
According to this historically ignorant comparison, Israel plays the role of the evil colonialist British. And by extension, the Irish feel an obligation to sympathise with the so-called “underdogs” in this conflict, the Palestinians.
This comparison relies on denying more or less the entirety of the Jewish experience in Israel — and discounting the entirety of Jewish history and the Jewish people’s millennia-long connection to Israel. For only by negating these inconvenient facts can Jews be cast as the necessary invading “colonialists.”
Likewise in the Irish discourse the historical existence of a longstanding state called Palestine — which was supposedly displaced by those invading Zionists — is never questioned. Indeed this false narrative is enforced in educational textbooks.
I believe that those making this comparison either show themselves up as being ignorant of Jewish history or — just as possibly — are selectively quoting facts to suit their narrative.
In any event, I would regard the comparison as being historically and factually spurious.
Another contributory factor that has to be noted is anti-Semitism.
Irish political discourse against Israel often contains antisemitic remarks.
At a recent rally in Dublin, for instance, Richard Boyd Barrett (an elected member of Ireland’s parliament) demanded that Israel be “brought down” through “intifada” — asserting also that Israel was only interested in “power and money.”
He also claimed that Israel was subhuman stating that one can only negotiate with “humans” — implying that Israelis were not.
Nobody including me knows the extent to which anti-Israel sentiment is motivated by anti-Semitism given that anti-Semites (including Richard Boyd Barrett) generally go to pains to avoid self-identifying as such.
My longstanding view is that Ireland is not extraordinarily anti-Semitic. But what is remarkable about Ireland — compared to other Western liberal democracies — is the extent to which blankly antisemitic discourse (like that referred to above) is allowed to go unchallenged.
Finally there is prevalent media bias against Israel in Ireland
If social media is a good barometer for general Irish opinion, statements from the IDF or official organs of the Israeli state are afforded zero credibility while the statements of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are regarded, a priori, as sound.
A former Irish diplomat recently stated that the diminutive size of Ireland’s Jewish community gave it “free rein” to take a more “principled” (read: anti-Israel) position.
Although this statement reflects the opinion of only one person, it does raise the well-justified question of whether the comparative lack of pro-Israel voices in the Irish public sphere — including its parliament — is a contributory factor to the extent and vigor of the antipathy against the world’s only Jewish State.
About me:
A Jewish person born in Ireland. I immigrated to Jerusalem from Cork, Ireland in 2015 and have lived here ever since. I have been observing Ireland’s position vis-a-vis Israel for a couple of decades now.
