The Irish are in many ways the ideal neighbours. They’re quiet, industrious, peaceful, send their best talents to London, and turn out poets and playwrights we can pass off as English to gullible Americans. There are, unfortunately, one or two character flaws. They never tire of reminding you that your forefathers shot their forefathers, a reasonable complaint somewhat undermined by their fondness for ditties about their forefathers bombing your forefathers.
Then there’s the, well, you know… the J-E-W thing. It’s raised its head again in a proposal before Dublin City Council to rename Herzog Park, which in 1995 was dedicated in honour of Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast but raised in Dublin. He made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael in 1935 and, after a career in law, then diplomacy, then Labour-Zionist politics, became the sixth president of Israel in 1983. His son, Isaac, is the Jewish state’s eleventh and current president.
The report on scrubbing Herzog’s name has been withdrawn on procedural grounds, the procedure in question being Micheál Martin putting out a statement on X last night urging the council to drop the plans which ‘will without any doubt be seen as anti-Semitic’. Anti-Semitism does come with that unfortunate side effect. The Taoiseach’s words echo those of other elected officials, a rare example of Ireland’s political class collectively agreeing to tone down the old Jew-baiting just this once.
Palestine is the only occupation the Irish left shows an interest in anymore
Ireland ought to venerate Herzog as a favourite son. Born before partition, his Irish life encompassed both the north and the south, moving between them when his father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was appointed the first chief rabbi of Ireland. As Israeli president, he returned to honour the country’s Jewish community. And, sure, he might have gone off to make a life for himself in Jerusalem, but he could hardly be accused of abandoning his Dublin roots: upon settling in Palestine, he swiftly joined a paramilitary organisation, the Haganah. (Unfortunately for his standing among Irish elites then and now, Herzog, like other brave and conscienced Irishmen, rejected neutrality in the face of Nazism and signed up for the British Army. He quit his legal career in 1942 to enlist at Sandhurst, served as an intelligence officer with the Guards Armoured Division, and suffered permanent hearing damage during a German artillery attack at Bremen.)
But he was an Israeli and the Irish establishment reacts to the I-word like Regan MacNeil to holy water. The last time the Anti-Defamation League polled Irish attitudes in 2014, it recorded a majority for the proposition that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their birth country and one in five declaring that Jews control the global media. A 2024 study of Irish Christians found ‘disturbing’ and ‘mediaeval’ levels of anti-Semitism, with half saying ‘Jews are more loyal to Israel than this country’ and one third saying they ‘still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust’.
Now-former Irish president Michael Higgins used a Holocaust Memorial Day speech in January to talk about Gaza, prompting Jews in the audience to silently stand up and turn their backs on him. This led to grim scenes of the peaceful protestors being dragged out of the event. In May, former defence minister Alan Shatter told the Jewish Chronicle that Ireland had become ‘not merely the most anti-Israel country in the European Union’ but was seeing ‘narratives being used on a regular basis that replicate the narratives in Nazi Germany in the 1930s’. The ‘only difference’, he said, was that today ‘the word Zionist is substituted for “Jew”.’ Israel has simply given up and closed its embassy in Dublin.
Ireland is a case study in the futility of trying to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. Discussions about Israel aren’t marked by criticism of the contemptible Netanyahu government nor philosophical dispute with the moral claims of Zionism. It’s unhinged fixation, righteous fury, and an invincible credulity towards even the most dubious accusations, provided the finger is being pointed Zionwards. Some of the discourse wouldn’t be out of place at Friday prayers in Tehran.
It’s wild. They’ve thrown off every yoke of state Catholicism except the keen interest in perfidis Judaeis. Israel is the ultimate malefactor of the Irish imagination, the bogeyman of Dublin politics and Dublin media, and a national myth posits the republic as a modern-day David taking on Goliath, when most Israelis would struggle to locate Ireland on a map and the rest think it’s still part of Britain. Mind you, the tendency of its activists and ideologues to declare themselves ‘Paddystinians’ makes sense. Palestine is the only occupation the Irish left shows an interest in anymore.
The thing is, though, there are about three Jews in all of Ireland. (Okay, two to three thousand.) It’s like being obsessed with the scourge of ninjas, dedicating your life to documenting the crimes of ninjas, convinced that ninjas control the world, organising boycotts of ninja-owned businesses, but you live in Sweden and there are no ninja-owned shops and not enough ninjas to fill a Volvo hatchback, let alone form a local chapter of the international ninja conspiracy.
Should Britain stage an intervention? Take Ireland out for a pint and subtly work anti-Semitism into the conversation? We’re not making any accusations, mate; we’re just wondering if everything’s okay at home. Wife all right? Kids doing well at school? You still handing out those Protocols of the Elders of Zion pamphlets down Grafton Street every Saturday? You know, maybe it’s time to move on because the Jews don’t actually run the world, the Mossad isn’t monitoring you, there’s no genocide in Gaza, and I’m almost certain the profits from Medjool dates don’t go directly to AIPAC.
Oh, and drop the Chaim Herzog thing. People are starting to talk. The fella was an Irish Jew who made history. A park is the least we can do.
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