Now Ireland is erasing its Jewish history. This week Dublin City Council voted to change the name of Herzog Park in the south of Dublin. The park was named for Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised Jew who later became the sixth president of Israel. ‘Following consideration, the Committee agreed… that the name “Herzog” should be removed from the park’, says the council’s chilling missive. Scrubbing the name of a Jew from a public park? Tell me that isn’t anti-Semitism.
For two years now, Herzog Park has been the focal point of that spittle-flecked Israelophobic fury that is so commonplace in modern Ireland. Last year an online petition demanded that its name be changed to ‘Hind Rajab Park’, after the five-year-old Palestinian girl tragically killed in the Gaza war. Some anti-Israel agitators took it upon themselves to rechristen the park with this new name – they put up with signs and festooned it with Palestine flags.
His name was Chaim Herzog. Memorise it before they savagely delete it from the historical record. He was the son of Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1921 until 1936. Rabbi Herzog was a passionate supporter of Irish independence and a confidant of Eamon de Valera. No matter – still his family name must be wiped from the public realm in order that Ireland might memory-hole the fact that it birthed some great Jews who fought for the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
Chaim himself moved from Ireland to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s. He fought with Zionist revolutionaries to re-establish the Jews’ ancient homeland. From 1983 to 1993 he served as Israel’s president. The current president – Isaac – is his son. Far from taking pride in its role in forging this great line of Jewish leaders, bourgeois Dublin is consumed by a frankly racist shame over Ireland’s link with the Herzogs. ‘The Herzog family has been complicit in in the oppression, displacement, murder and genocide inflicted on the Palestinian people’, said that shrill and defamatory digital petition.
And the members of Dublin City Council seem to agree. The park was named ‘Herzog Park’ in 1995, to commemorate the 3,000th birthday of the city of Jerusalem. Fast forward 30 years and the name ‘Herzog’ has become unutterable in Irish polite society. ‘The name “Herzog” should be removed’, in the words of that sinister council ruling. There will now be a discussion about what the park’s new name should be. Some are suggesting ‘Free Palestine Park’.
To eradicate the name of one of Ireland’s most influential Jewish sons is a moral outrage. It is an act of bigoted vandalism. It is Jew deletion masquerading as ‘progressive’ activism. It is an attempt to make a historic park ‘Judenfrei’ by laying waste to the memory of the Irish Jew for which it was named. Not content with boycotting Israeli wares and refusing to engage with Israeli art or music – well, you never know what you might catch – now Ireland’s keffiyeh mob wants to expunge a Jew from the nation’s memory.
Jewish memory is no longer safe in Ireland. This isn’t even the first time the name ‘Chaim Herzog’ has been erased. In 2014 the memorial plaque marking his birthplace in north Belfast was so frequently attacked and daubed with insulting graffiti that it had to be taken down. Anyone who says the attempted renaming of Herzog Park in Dublin is just a protest against the war in Gaza should be given short shrift. Chaim Herzog died in 1997. The thirst for effacing his legacy has nothing to do with the current war and everything to do with hating Jews who are proudly Zionist – which is the majority of Jews.
Ireland and Israel once shared a deep common bond
The Irish government needs to step in and stop this. Does it really want Ireland to be known as a land that defames and forgets its Jewish citizens rather than celebrating them? Israelophobia is rampant in Ireland, especially in activist, academic and media circles. Hating Israel is all but mandatory in high society. Enough is enough. All Irish people of good conscience should stand with Ireland’s Jews, both past and present, and oppose this dogmatic sacking of Herzog Park by mobs of irrational Israel-haters.
‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, said Milan Kundera. That’s what we’re faced with in Ireland right now. Renaming Herzog Park won’t only be an act of anti-Semitic intolerance. It will also bury the great truth that the Herzog family history speaks to – namely, that Ireland and Israel once shared a deep common bond as two plucky nations struggling for independence against outsiders. We need to defend that truth from the fools and wreckers of the anti-Israel lobby.
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