PoliticsIn August 1984, I travelled to Israel as minister for labour to deliver an invitation to the Irish-born president, Chaim Herzog, to make an official visit to Ireland. To my surprise, I was informed in the pre-visit briefing that I would be the first Irish minister to visit Israel officially, even though many Irish ministers had travelled through the country to meet United Nations personnel and to visit Irish troops on UN peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and particularly in Lebanon.
The first Irish troops went to that region in 1958, 26 years before my visit. A similar time-gap was reflected in Ireland's de facto recognition of the state of Israel in 1949 and its de jure recognition in May 1963.
From 1956, when Ireland was admitted to the UN, our foreign ministers, particularly Frank Aiken, balanced recognition of Israel with a continued emphasis on the need to deal with the plight of the Palestinian refugees. His views were expanded by Brian Lenihan who, as foreign minister on a visit to Bahrain in February 1980, anticipated the contents of the EC Venice Declaration of June 1980 when he called for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state. This, it must be remembered, was at a time when the national covenant of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) regarded the state of Israel to be null and void and when the PLO was committed to the total elimination of Zionism and the state of Israel.
Rory Miller has produced a scholarly and deeply researched account of Ireland's attitude to what he terms "the Palestine Question" over a period of 60 years. He draws his material from a wide range of official sources and weaves a chronological narrative that is highly informative, if at times somewhat confusing.
A matter of historical interest now is what Conor Cruise O'Brien described as "the Vatican Factor". This refers to the dominance of the views of Rome in influencing Irish political attitudes in the late 1940s and early 1950s to the safeguarding of the holy places and their status in any final political settlement.
Pope Pius XII, in two encyclicals in 1948 and 1949, developed Vatican policy and called for a separate international legal status for the city of Jerusalem so as to safeguard the holy places. In the context of these proposals, the archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, wrote, in a menacing way, to the Irish chief rabbi, Dr Jacobovits, looking for an official Israeli declaration about the future of the holy places:
It would indeed be a grievous pity if after having safely traversed a period of worldwide and unexampled crisis, innocent people in your community should now suffer hurt, by reason of the attitude and actions of irreligious members of Israel whose merely political and commercial aims would never be countenanced by peaceful members of your community in Dublin.
Concern for the holy places was soon to be replaced with the desire by Israel to open an embassy in Ireland, particularly after we had joined the European Community in 1973. Repeated requests were politely or evasively turned down. No clear reason was given. After 1974 the need to secure supplies of Arab oil outweighed the requests for an Israeli presence in Dublin. The Vatican Factor was, in my experience, replaced by the beef factor during the 1980s. The Department of Agriculture was opposed to my efforts in government to accede to the Israeli embassy request, for fear of Arab retaliation against our lucrative beef industry. It was not until December 1993 that Iveagh House, under foreign minister Dick Spring, finally permitted the Israeli government to open an embassy in Dublin. Ireland then opened an embassy in Tel Aviv.
Support for the Palestine cause, at European and Irish level, grew in the 1990s and the early years of this century following the Venice Declaration of 1980 and the later Oslo Peace Accords. In 2003, the then foreign minister, Brian Cowen, during Ireland's presidency of the European Union, visited the besieged president, Yasser Arafat, in his compound in Ramallah in a very public act of solidarity with the Palestine Authority and its oppressed population.
In 1984, I brought a gift of two pieces of Irish art to President Herzog. One was Winetavern Street, painted by Harry Kernoff back in the 1930s, long before the controversy of Wood Quay. The other was a work by Gerald Davis - a portrait of himself as Leopold Bloom from Joyce's Ulysses. Both pieces now hang in the Presidential Palace in Jerusalem, a tangible and cultural link between the people of Israel and the people of Ireland.
Rory Miller's book is a thoughtful and comprehensive overview of the complex relations between Ireland and all of the people who live in what used to be known as the Holy Land; on which hopefully we will see, sooner rather than later, two viable states living peacefully, side by side - the Republic of Palestine and the Republic of Israel.
Ruairi Quinn is a Labour Party TD