There are 193 member states in the United Nations. All of them are entitled to bring cases against other member states to the International Court of Justice. Just 10 of them, including Ireland, have joined the action being taken by South Africa against Israel, accusing it of genocide in Gaza.
If you were an Israeli sitting in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it would be hard not to see the world as falling into two camps: those who support, or are neutral on, the war in Gaza; and those who are against it. If you had any doubts about which of the two camps Ireland falls into, these would have been scotched on Tuesday when Ireland officially joined the South African case.
Yet the Government remains steadfast in the assertion that Ireland is not anti-Israel. Squaring this circle has required a display of verbal gymnastics by various politicians over the past 15 months, for the most part along the lines of “love the sinner, but hate the sin”. Israelis could be forgiven for thinking Ireland is engaged in some sort of diplomatic gaslighting: we are your friends, but we are also taking you to court for a heinous crime.
The row took a turn for the worst in the run-up to Christmas when the Israeli foreign minister linked Ireland’s attitude to latent anti-Semitism. This provoked a robust response from President Michael D Higgins.
Leaving anti-Semitism aside, the question as to whether we can really still say we are not anti-Israel is a valid one. Perhaps we would be better off owning our position rather than denying it.
There is one obvious reason we should not do so, which is our economy’s deep links to the global technology sector, in which Israeli investors, and investors sympathetic to Israel, have huge influence. As Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave found out the hard way, it is not a sound business strategy to antagonise these investors.
This raises a question: why risk standing out from the crowd in supporting Palestine when you don’t have to? The answer is, of course, that it is the right thing to do morally, but sadly that is rarely the rationale for government policy, particularly foreign policy.
A more compelling explanation for why we have put ourselves in this position is the unlikely conflation of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination with what might be called late-stage Irish republicanism. The political wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation has a long connection to Sinn Féin. From one perspective they were natural bedfellows. Representatives of the PLO were regular attendees at ardfheiseanna and its military wing’s connections with the IRA are also well established, but that is less relevant in this context.
As Sinn Féin embraced the peace process and moved into the political mainstream, it did not – to its credit – ditch its Palestinian friends. If anything, they turned out to sit well in the context-free and romanticised republicanism that makes Sinn Féin politically attractive to many younger voters.
Could this have a bearing on Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s decision to go the extra mile politically for the Palestinians and the parties’ apparent determination to press ahead with a ban of products made in the occupied territories?
It is not a complete explanation but might be a clue as to why the deep empathy Ireland – in common with most of its European counterparts – has for the Palestinian cause has not been tempered by the pragmatic realities of international diplomacy, as it has elsewhere.
When the dust settles in Gaza and the true extent of what happened emerges, we will know if we were on the right side of history.