The truth about Ireland’s hatred for Israel

Is there a politician more sanctimonious, more smug, than Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins? His pompous scolding of Israel this week after it had the temerity to call out the anti-Israel animus of the Irish elites was a truly unedifying spectacle of false virtue and cant. Shaking with fury, every word bitterly spat out, he said it is a ‘gross defamation and slander’ to ‘brand a people’ anti-Semitic just because they ‘criticise Benjamin Netanyahu’. He seemed to be in the grip of a paroxysm of pique. I’ve never seen him quake and froth like this over anything else: not poverty, not homelessness, not war. Well, unless it’s a war being fought by Israel.

It’s hard to decide what was most grating in Higgins’s theatre of fury, which, as he knows, will have been lapped up by every scribe at the Irish Times, every patron of the wine bars of Dublin 4, every rich kid in a keffiyeh at Trinity. Let’s start with the fact that his windy invective was in large part misinformation. Israel has not accused the Irish people of anti-Semitism. It has accused ‘the Irish government’ of pursuing ‘extreme anti-Israel policies’. That’s why it took the decision to shut its embassy in Dublin: not because it thinks every Irishman is a Jew-hater but because it thinks Ireland’s ruling class is possessed of a curious abhorrence for the Jewish nation. Imagine accusing Israel of ‘slander’ even as you wilfully twist its words.

Then there’s the sanctimony. Higgins reaches for the smelling salts when an uppity nation like Israel has the brass neck to accuse people like him of possibly being bigots, yet he’s more than happy to make that accusation against others. The Irish establishment loves nothing more than pontificating on the pox of racism in modern Ireland. In his St Patrick’s Day message last year, Higgins lamented the ‘poisonous xenophobia’ of our times and said racism is ‘increasing rather than decreasing’. Irish officials have fashioned initiatives for ‘Combatting Racism in Ireland’. The Irish Times never stops wanging on about racism. It publishes headlines like ‘Racism is rampant in Ireland, across all sectors and levels’.

Yet when Israel says the obsessive Israel-hate of Ireland’s rulers has a whiff of prejudice to it, these people run for the fainting couch. It’s fine, it seems, for them to bemoan the bigotry of Ireland’s oiks and culchies, but not for anyone else to wonder if certain biases might lurk behind the correct-think façade of Ireland’s own establishment. Rarely has the self-serving cynicism of what now passes for ‘anti-racism’ been so starkly exposed. In the eyes of Ireland’s rulers, and other Euro-elites, racism is a pleb problem, a moral disease of the riff raff, and it falls to us, the educated and pure, to call it out. ‘Anti-racism’, tragically, has become a weapon of elite reprimand, wielded with abandon against unruly populations who ask awkward questions about mass immigration, multiculturalism, Islamism, etc.

This is why Higgins spluttered so furiously over Israel’s j’accuse – because in spying something like racism in the heart of the Dublin elite, Israel threatens to detonate that elite’s thin claim to moral authority. ‘Anti-racism’ has become the ideological glue of the 21st-century political class. It is the means through which they distinguish themselves from that madding crowd of the uneducated and unaware. It is the ethical underpinning to their very right to rule, where they haughtily posit themselves as the enlightened steerers of the witless throng. Israel has possibly upended this self-regarding dogma, in Ireland at least. We end up with the glorious vision of the Irish Times, having once said racism is ‘rampant in Ireland’, now crying: ‘Not here, though! Not in our offices!’ They will never forgive Israel for saying about them what they love to say about others.

But the main reason President Higgins’ bluster was so vexing is that Israel is clearly right. It’s right to say the Irish elites are ‘anti-Israel’. It’s right to say the Irish government’s animosity towards Israel is fuelled by ‘double standards’ and ‘demonisation’. Consider that Ireland’s leaders have been happy to cosy up to the Saudi regime, even during its barbarous war on Yemen. As Sinn Féin has pointed out, Ireland’s rulers love to go ‘touting for more business’ in Saudi Arabia, even if the moral price of such enterprise is to maintain a ‘shameful silence on [the] Saudi war in Yemen’. So Ireland’s elites are schtum when Saudis massacre Yemenis, yet they rage when Israel fights back against the army of anti-Semites that raped and murdered more than a thousand of its people. If that’s not ‘double standards’, what is it?

Or consider Ireland’s crude intervention into South Africa’s ‘genocide’ case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It’s this that made Israel lose its patience. For not only did the Irish government call on the ICJ to punish what it loftily described as Israel’s ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinians – it also said the ICJ should ‘broaden its interpretation’ of genocide. In short, change the rules so that justice might finally ensnare this wickedest of states. Israel is right: this is demonisation. To dream of altering the laws of war, and the meaning of words, in order that a state you hate might finally get its comeuppance – to me this smacks of a discriminatory fanaticism.

I laughed when Taoiseach Simon Harris responded to Israel’s closure of its embassy by saying ‘Ireland is not anti-Israel’. Anyone who has set foot in Ireland of late – I’ve been there four times since Hamas’s pogrom – will know this is untrue. Irish polite society hums and bristles with anti-Israel rancour. You see Palestine flags everywhere in Dublin. Sometimes you’ll see the Hezbollah flag. Members of parliament don the keffiyeh. The pat explanation for this hostility towards Israel is that the Irish suffered centuries of colonial rule, and so they’re predisposed to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. The Guardian says it’s part of the Irish ‘psyche’ – Ireland’s antipathy for Israel is ‘rooted in its own history’.

For me, this is the most offensive claim of all. Israel is fighting a barbarous army of Jew-haters, not a people aspiring for independence. To speak of Israel’s existential clash with Hamas in the same breath as Britain’s many clashes with Irish rebels is a vile calumny against both Israel and the Irish. It defames Israel as a cruel power, when in truth it was Israel that was cruelly attacked by the anti-Semitic rapists and killers of Hamas. And it likens the Irish people’s centuries-long struggle for self-rule to Hamas’s dream of creating an unforgiving, unfree caliphate on Arab lands. If you cannot distinguish between liberation struggles of old and this tyrannical Islamism, and between Israel’s fight to preserve its homeland and the urge of old empires to extend their dominion, then you have forfeited your right to be taken seriously on these matters.

Ireland’s elites are playing with fire. By responding so defensively to Israel’s accusations, they have contributed to the nasty woke prejudice that says charges of anti-Semitism are often a ruse, a ploy designed to silence Israel’s critics. Listening to the Irish elites, and the influential classes across Europe, you would think every accusation of racism must be taken seriously except this one. Racism must always be combatted, except when the targets are Jews, when maybe it should be queried. Racism is ‘rampant’, but anti-Semitism? Have you considered the possibility that that’s a moral panic? Israel offered Ireland’s rulers an opportunity for self-reflection, but instead they doubled down on their poisonous ideology of Israelophobia. A truly shameful moment in Irish history.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy