Ireland’s latest grandstanding shows how provincial it really is

Judges at the International Court of Justice rule on emergency measures against Israel following accusations by South Africa that the Israeli military operation in Gaza is a state-led ‘genocide’

Ireland has joined South Africa in its genocide case against Israel, nailing its hatred of the Jewish state firmly to the doors of The Hague. The Irish government says it felt obliged to intervene to put a stop to Israel’s “indiscriminate use” of explosives in populated areas, “collective punishment” of Gazans, and an impending famine.

Ministers say they carefully poured over the evidence and didn’t take the decision lightly. But it seems likely that Ireland has rowed in behind South Africa less from the evidence of genocide in Gaza, which is sorely lacking, but for reasons closer to home. The Irish public have long been among the most hostile in Europe to Israel. This is because Ireland has for decades viewed the Israel-Palestine conflict as a rerun of its own bloody struggle with Britain. “We see our history in their eyes,” Leo Varadkar said of the Palestinians in the White House earlier this month. “A story of displacement, of dispossession and national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger.”

Ireland, in other words, views the plight of the Palestinians solipsistically – as a recapitulation of its own victimhood, not a unique tragedy in its own right. This has too often spared the Irish public from feeling the need to wrap their heads around the particulars of this messy conflict, more than 3,000 miles from its shores, which are wholly different from Ireland’s fight with Britain.

While the IRA wanted land, and was eventually willing to compromise, Israel’s antagonists have far grander ambitions – Hamas has made clear in its charter and public utterances it wants to kill not only all the Jews in the Levant, but worldwide. October 7 was effectively a dress rehearsal for how Hamas and its Iranian patrons would like this genocidal crusade to take shape. Short of horse trading in the death of Jews, it is unclear how Israel could meet Hamas halfway, or tolerate having such people as sovereign neighbours. But Ireland will forever be unable to comprehend this if, deep down, they see in the likes of Yahya Sinwar a kind of Michael Collins, or even Gerry Adams.

The analogy further implodes given that, despite Arab hostility, Israel has agreed to the formation of a Palestinian state no fewer than five times since 1937. All of these offers – several of which would have left Palestine with the vast majority of the land – have been rejected. Ireland, on the other hand, took Britain up on the offer of home rule in 1922, deciding wisely that an imperfect state was better than none. The Palestinian leadership have for a century arrived at the opposite conclusion, to the great detriment of their people.

A vague impression has also coagulated among the Irish that there’s a moral parity between the English plantation of Ireland and the arrival of Jewish settlers in Israel in the 20th century. But this doesn’t hold water. The English were sent to Ireland over the centuries as an instrument of the English power. Whereas the Jews fled to their ancestral homeland from persecution in Europe – in the aftermath of the pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus Affair, and, finally, the Holocaust. Ireland, with its genuine compassion for refugees, has a glaring blind spot when it comes to the series of cataclysms which drove Jews to found the state of Israel. The final vindication of this instinct for self-preservation came, paradoxically, with the founding of the Jewish state in 1947 when yet another wave of pogroms swept across the Middle East and North Africa. This caused an exodus of a million Jews, who have never returned (or been offered a “right to return”) to their homes.

In near total ignorance of this history, the aperture of Ireland’s much-cherished empathy has narrowed to exclude Israel. It is ironic that as Ireland projects its cookie cutter Anglophobia onto a conflict where it has no place, its skies and seaways are guarded by the RAF – a luxury Israel does not have, widening the gulf between what Ireland can understand of a country under constant threat and which is also responsible for its own security.

By grandstanding on the international stage, and levelling spurious accusations of genocide against the Jewish state, the Irish government has shown little more than how utterly provincial it is.

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