‘Céad míle fáilte’, the Irish love to say. It means ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’. It’s emblazoned in the arrivals hall at Dublin airport. You’ll see it written in the Celtic font on the walls of Ireland’s cosy pubs. It has led to Ireland being christened ‘the land of a thousand welcomes’, where all visitors, no matter their heritage, will be greeted with a hearty hug.
The tragic truth is that Ireland is awash with Israelophobia
Well, not all. There’s one group of people to whom Ireland’s famed friendliness seems not to extend. ‘Zionists are not welcome in Ireland’, barks an Irish leftie at an Israeli gentleman in a chilling video clip that is going viral. ‘F**k you and f**k Israel’, she says and then spits on him. Ireland’s national slogan needs a reboot: we’re the land of a thousand welcomes except for You Know Who.
It’s a horrible video. It shows two young women, both ‘pro-Palestine’ activists, accosting Israeli businessman Tamir Ohayon in a hotel bar in Dún Laoghaire in County Dublin last week. He’d flown in from Tel Aviv for a conference. The women recognise him from his social media where he has posted pics of his time in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). ‘[You] son of a whore’, they scream at him.
Then one of them spits at him. ‘Did you just spit on me?’, asks Mr Ohayon, clearly shaken at being subjected to such a vile act in the land of a thousand welcomes. ‘I did and I did not miss’, the woman says. The most unsettling thing is the silence of the other patrons. They just sit there contemplating their pints as a man is maligned for the ‘crime’ of being a Zionist. Would they have been so schtum and gutless if it had been another minority person getting gobbed on?
Talk about casting a shadow over St Patrick’s Day. Today is the day when the world raises a pint to the Irish and our penchant for having the craic with all-comers. Yet spend five minutes online today and you’ll likely stumble upon this clip that the Ireland Israel Alliance aptly calls a scene of ‘pure, unadulterated hatred’. Happy St Patrick’s Day, but not for Ireland’s Jews, most of whom will also be Zionists. Are we welcome here, they’ll be wondering?
If the Dún Laoghaire ugliness were an isolated incident we might shrug it off. But it isn’t. Time and again the Irish left has declared that Zionists are not welcome in the Emerald Isle. Zionist students have been made to feel unwelcome on campus at Trinity College Dublin. Last year’s Gaza encampment at University College Dublin had an ominous sign at its entrance. ‘Zionist-Free Zone’, it said.
Who are these ‘Zionists’ that Irish radicals are so keen to cast out and to abuse and even to spit on? They’re Jews. Polls consistently find that a majority of the Jewish diaspora identifies as Zionist or feels a strong attachment to the Jewish homeland of Israel. When student agitators create ‘Zionist-free zones’, when loudmouths say Zionists are not welcome in Ireland, they’re fundamentally targeting Jews. Most Jews are Zionists, and most Zionists are Jews – kick Zionists out and you kick Jews out.
I’m sorry, but when people use the phrase ‘Zionist-free’ I just hear ‘Judenfrei’ – the term the Nazis used to describe areas of Germany that had been ‘cleansed’ of Jews. In January, anti-Israel activists waved the flag of Hezbollah on the streets of Dublin, a movement that calls Zionism a ‘cancerous growth’ which ‘must be destroyed’. Last year, ‘pro-Palestine’ activists in Dublin chanted: ‘Zionist scum off our streets!’ I hear it again: Judenfrei.
Ireland’s political class is in no position to reprimand these fanatics who dream of making Ireland a Zionist-free entity. For the Dublin elite itself also has a problem with Israel and Israelis. At the end of last year, Israel took the drastic decision to close its embassy in Dublin over what it called the ‘anti-Semitic rhetoric’ of Irish government officials who seem hell-bent on ‘the de-legitimation and demonisation of the Jewish State’.
That Ireland cannot even retain an Israeli embassy is shameful. It finds itself in the company of such iffy states as Yemen and Afghanistan in having no permanent Israeli presence. Taoiseach Micheál Martin justly got an earful from Jewish representatives in Washington, DC during his St Patrick’s Day visit there last week. Ireland is ‘one of the most problematic countries in Europe’, they told him. They warned him that Ireland’s hostility towards the Jewish State was translating into hostility towards Jews. They’re not wrong.
The tragic truth is that Ireland is awash with Israelophobia. It is especially rife in influential circles. Pop into any hip eaterie in Dublin and you’ll hear it. Walk down O’Connell St and you’ll see it – a sea of keffiyeh-wearers hollering their loathing for Israel. It feels menacing, as if some medieval animus has burst back to life. St Patrick is said to have banished Ireland’s snakes – now let’s banish this frothing animosity for the world’s only Jewish nation.
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