Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul

To see what a lethal malady Israelophobia can be, how fully it can rot a man’s soul, consider recent events in Ireland.

On Thursday, Ireland played Qatar at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. The match was continually disrupted by raging spectators who threw tennis balls emblazoned with the words ‘STOP THE GAME’ on to the pitch. But here’s the thing, the amazing thing: they weren’t referring to this match, this game against a despotic, misogynistic, homophobic regime whose hyper-exploitation of migrant workers has caused thousands to perish in the Arabian sun. No, they were referring to a future fixture against – you guessed it – the Jewish nation.

Ireland is due to play Israel in the UEFA Nations League on 27 September. This has got the keffiyeh classes fuming. Worried they might catch something – the pox of genocidal mania, perhaps – the ‘progressive’ middle classes love to forcefield their precious lives against the wares, food and art of that most unholy state in the Middle East. So naturally, the pompous Trinity grads of the Dublin left are devoting furious amounts of moral energy to stopping the Ireland-Israel game. And there they were at the Aviva Stadium, so drunk on demented animus for the Jewish State that they could see their team play Qatar – a nation that jails homosexuals, robs women of their fundamental rights and maintains a massive migrant underclass to do all its hard graft – and still think to themselves: ‘Well, we had better not play against Israel.’

Watching those tennis balls rain down on the Aviva pitch, I thought that this is one of the finest, grimmest case studies of Israel Derangement Syndrome. This was the Jew-state myopia of the activist class summed up. Their team plays against a nation notorious for its tyranny and its persecution of women and minorities – not to mention its funding of the Islamofascists of Hamas – and all they can think about is Evil Israel. The Jewish nation occupies their every waking thought. It’s an obsession that has completely fried their moral circuit boards. It has blinded them to every other injustice on Earth. Russia could nuke Europe into an apocalyptic wasteland and these people would still be wrapped in their keffiyehs around a campfire hoarsely bleating about ‘Fucking Israel’.

Israelophobia is rife in Europe. It stalks the academy. It travels at lightning speed through the digital highways. It is a mandatory belief in literary circles. But here in Ireland it is especially bad. It is everywhere. The nightly news still leads with lurid tales of Israel’s ‘murder’ in Gaza and Lebanon, as even the BBC has discovered that other things are happening in the world. You won’t walk two blocks in Dublin without encountering someone wearing a keffiyeh and a punchable smug smirk. Even way out West, on the Atlantic coast, there it was, flying from the roof of the first pub I ever got drunk in: the Palestine flag. Why?

That flag is so omnipresent that it feels like Ireland has been colonised again – not by the Brits this time but by that Euro-fervour of anti-Zionism. All of the most Guardian-approved, Shoreditch-thrilling Irish artists – Sally Rooney, Kneecap, the Mary Wallopers – bow obsequiously at the altar of Israelophobia.

It stinks up the political class, too. Indeed, just last week, Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, returned from one of those thwarted flotilla jollies to Gaza that the hyper-smug love to engage in. She said Israel behaves like a ‘Nazi state’. She described her brief detention in Israel as being akin to a ‘concentration camp’. She said she and her fellow seafaring narcissists ‘got a feeling of what the Jews felt like during the Second World War’. Comparing the two-day detainment of posh, well-fed mugs with the incarceration and burning to death of millions of Jews? There’s repugnant, then there’s that. Stay classy, Israel-haters

Defamations against Israel fall from the mouth of every influencer here. Even a sports presenter, following the game with Qatar, could casually say on air that Israel is waging a ‘genocidal campaign’ in Gaza. Nothing to say about Qatar? The team we just played? Which funded the army of anti-Semites that killed more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis? Of course not. Israel is the all-consuming devil that stalks the fever dreams of Ireland’s pious. It is a substitute Satan in a post-Catholic land. You can’t even watch the footie here without being subjected to self-righteous homilies about the uniquely wicked nature of this far-off nation. It is relentless. It is exhausting.

And get this – the Irish men’s cricket team is due to play Afghanistan in Belfast in August. Do the sanctimonious of Dublin 4 long to stop that game too, in protest against the Afghan government’s violent gutting of women’s rights, its theft from women not only of the right to play sport but also of the right to show their faces in public, speak in public and attend schools and universities? Nope. There have been a few expressions of ‘moral discomfort’ about hosting the Afghanis but nothing like the orgy of moral inebriation that greeted the news that the Irish football team would play Israel. As I say, moral circuit boards fried, all over this isle.

Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul. The Irish establishment’s frothing animus for the Jewish state is an embarrassment to us Irish who refuse to convert to the cult of Israel-hate. It is disproportionate, hysterical, and so obviously driven by bigotry, meaning these people will go mental over a sports fixture against the Jewish nation but say nada about a sports fixture against an Islamist nation ruled by violent men who treat women like cattle. Let Ireland be a lesson – when you drink too heartily from the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, you lose your reason and decency. You become so consumed by hatred for a tiny foreign state that you let your own state go to moral rack and ruin.

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 latest 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.