Israel’s foreign minister is anti-Catholic. That is why he decided to shut the Israeli embassy in Dublin.
To him, Ireland is a culturally and historically Catholic country and he is biased against Catholics. Ergo, we must presume that any criticism he makes of Irish Government policy is motivated by religious prejudice.
This should be the default response of the Government in Dublin to any negative commentary on its actions emanating from Israel.
A ludicrous and false hypothesis, I know, but, according to the logic of Gideon Sa’ar, it makes perfect sense. Without a shred of evidence, the Israeli minister has branded Simon Harris an anti-Semite. It is an abominable thing to say and it wounds deeply in this country haunted by decades of bloodshed resulting from religious bigotry. Sa’ar seems unaware that Ireland was violently reminded of the attraction of peaceful ethno-religious coexistence during those years of horror.
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Next Wednesday, Christians and many others around the world will celebrate the birth of a child who became one of the greatest influencers of all time. On that night roughly 2,000 years ago, shepherds and wise men gathered at a stable in wondrous joy at the virgin birth while yonder in Bethlehem, or so St Matthew’s unsubstantiated gospel goes, soldiers butchered scores of infant boys. Had the baby Jesus been among the massacred innocents, might history have turned out to be less hellish for humanity? The Spanish Inquisition might not have happened, nor the Crusades, the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The Great Big Book of Horrible Things by Matthew White cites religion as the primary cause of 100 of the world’s deadliest atrocities. In many of the holy wars he lists, religion was used as a crude label to differentiate the warring sides. In others, it was a purported justification for the bloodletting rather than its cause.
History warns us to think twice before reaching for religion as a flag of convenience, because its consequences can be cataclysmic. Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the people. Its abuse has killed legions of human beings down through the centuries.
Adolf Hitler despised the Jews so much that he and his collaborators had six million of Europe’s 11 million Jews murdered by death squads and in concentration camp gas chambers. Anyone who has read Leon Uris or who has visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, who has seen the personal belongings of victims on display and been confronted by the hall of names of those who perished, needs no instruction in the barbarity that religious hatred can cause. Sa’ar and his prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu certainly need no reminding. Yet their mantric accusation of anti-Semitism whenever their Government is criticised for Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza does a disservice to the six million Jews whose lives were wiped out by the Nazis.
Ireland is not anti-Semitic.
Yes, there was a business boycott in Limerick – instigated by a Catholic priest – before this State was created and, yes, Éamon de Valera did visit the German embassy in Dublin to convey sympathy on Hitler’s death, albeit he did not sign the book of condolence, as is often claimed. There was no book.
What is less often mentioned is that there is an Éamon de Valera memorial forest near Nazareth. When it was planted in 1966, the Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, wrote to president de Valera that it was “a fitting expression of the traditional friendship between the Irish and Jewish peoples”.
In a letter on August 18th, 1966 to an academic colleague, Yaacov Herzog, the director general of the Israeli president’s office, said of Dev: “In Israel, it is not forgotten that in the crucial years of struggle for independence, he evinced understanding and sympathy towards the restoration of Israel in the land of its fathers”. The Dublin-reared author of that letter was a brother of Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president, and an uncle of Isaac Herzog, the current president.
More recent ties bind the two countries. In the 1990s, three of the 160 TDs in the Dáil were Jewish – Fianna Fáil’s Ben Briscoe, Fine Gael’s Alan Shatter and Labour’s Mervyn Taylor. That hardly betokens prejudice against Jews, who accounted for just 0.04 per cent of Ireland’s population at the time. Ireland has had an emotional bond with Israel too as a place of religious pilgrimage. The Holy Land, as it was known, was a popular honeymoon destination for newly-wed couples of previous generations.
Bethlehem, with its Church of the Nativity, was a shrine for many pilgrims, but Bethlehem is a different place now. The birthplace of Jesus Christ is situated in the occupied West Bank where the Israeli government gives statutory, financial and military support to illegal and sometimes violent settlers.
About half a million Israelis of Jewish ethnicity live on land expropriated from Palestinians. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has advised that the settlements are illegal and that Israel should evacuate them. Ireland’s long-dormant Occupied Territories Bill proposes boycotting merchandise from the settlements. The Bill’s expected passage through the Oireachtas early this year has infuriated the Netanyahu administration.
Compared to the pulverising of Gaza, a death total exceeding 45,100, the mass killings and orphaning of children, the starvation and premature deaths caused by the obstruction of aid convoys, and the imprisonment within the Strip of a population under bombardment, Ireland’s Occupied Territories Bill, its recognition of Palestinian statehood and its support for South Africa’s genocide case in the ICJ are but gentle nudges towards a peaceful two-state resolution.
Israeli citizens have suffered appallingly too since October 7th, 2023 when Hamas murdered 1,189 people and abducted 251 others. Many have been displaced from the Gaza and Lebanese border areas because of rocket and drone attacks and families have lost soldiers on duty.
Flinging the anti-Semitism slur around is an injustice to the many Israeli citizens who decry their government’s protracted killing spree in Gaza and the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
As the Ha’aretz newspaper put it, shutting the Dublin embassy “reflects the insanity” of Netanyahu’s government. The Irish Government needs to stay resolute in the face of Sa’ar’s slanderous bullying. In time, not only Palestinians will be thankful for Ireland’s brave and somewhat solitary stand but many Israeli citizens and Jewish Irish citizens will too.