Ireland has a long history of antisemitism. Very few Jews left, maybe 3000. 0.06% of the population.
Antisemitic Ireland needs to shake off the imbecility
Not a few of Ireland's gallant heroes were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators
There’s something wrong with Ireland.
For several years now, the nouveau-riche political class that dominates the republic has been something of an embarrassment. The scandals and the cronyism, the gross domestic product data masking a tax-haven economy with hundreds of thousands of people scraping by below the poverty line, the pathological unseriousness.
It’s all a bit much, but ever since the bloody Simchat Torah pogrom of Oct. 7, which drew Israel into a last-straw determination to smash the Hamas terror infrastructure in Gaza entirely, Ireland has become the unbearable, hectoring, sanctimonious bore of the entire 27-nation European Union.
Three weeks ago, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar kicked things off by asserting that Israel’s military operations in Gaza constituted “something approaching revenge.” On Sunday, Varadkar told Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE that the EU is applying “double standards” in the case of Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine, compared to Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron in Gaza.
Between these two histrionic bookends, the Irish legislature came 16 votes away from approving a motion to expel Israeli ambassador Dana Erlich, and 10 votes away from approving a motion to haul Israel before the International Criminal Court. Along the way, the several political parties in the Irish legislature have appeared to compete with one another for the most outlandish thing that can be said about Gaza’s ongoing misery.
On Monday, Varadkar was called upon to assure People Before Profit Teachta Dála (member of Parliament) Paul Murphy that U.S. planes were not stopping at Shannon Airport carrying weapons bound for Israel. Murphy had insisted that any Israel-bound aircraft at Shannon had to be formally inspected. “Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Its number one supporter and military backer is the U.S. … by allowing Shannon Airport to be used by the U.S. military while it is aiding and abetting genocide, Ireland is complicit.”
Ireland’s official position on the Hamas-Israel war is that its “root cause” is the blockade Israel maintains around the Gaza Strip in order to prevent the entry of munitions and war materiel. Varadkar leads a narrow Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Green Party coalition, but Mary Lou McDonald’s Sinn Féin party, which spent most of its life as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, is tied with Fianna Fáil for the largest share of TDs.
Ireland is a comical EU outlier on the matter of Israel for a variety of reasons. Irish politicians generally like to claim that it’s because of Ireland’s history of dispossession, occupation and resistance to colonialism — three subaltern virtues fashionably attributable nowadays to the Palestinians.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche — underneath it all we side with the underdog.”
But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros of Portobello, Ranelagh and Rathmines. Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators.
Mary Lou McDonald assumed the reins of Sinn Féin in 2018 from an older, harder leadership that was deeply integrated with the Provisional wing of the IRA in Northern Ireland. She first came to public notice as a social justice activist in Dublin 20 years ago, right around the time she spoke at a commemoration for Sean Russell, a 1930s-era IRA chief of staff who spent time in Nazi Germany training in the use of explosives.
Russell died of a perforated ulcer in a Nazi submarine that was returning him to Ireland to lay the groundwork for an IRA sabotage campaign to assist a planned Nazi invasion of the Six Counties in British-controlled Ulster.
It has been commonplace for Irish pseuds to boast that the Irish could not be antisemites, that unlike any other country in Europe, Ireland’s Jews have never known persecution. This was true only until the 20th century. And in recent years, Irish Jews are commonly baited, harassed and badgered every time there is some eruption in Israel involving Palestinian “resistance.”
Just one awkward thing buried in the Irish psyche is the Limerick Pogrom of 1904, a series of incitements led by a renegade Redemptorist priest that resulted in mob assaults on Jewish businesses and the beatings of several Limerick Jews. The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved, calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911.
There was always a deep division in the Irish nationalist movement between Irish republicans who felt an affinity with the Jews owing to a shared history of dispossession and exile, and Catholic extremists who ranted and raved about Jews. Those Catholic shouters are still abroad, apparently unaware that for half a century, Catholic doctrine has established that antisemitism is a mortal sin.
Irish Jews, too, were active in the struggle for a sovereign Irish republic. In return, the early Zionists drew inspiration from the Irish freedom struggle. Today’s proud Irish “pro-Palestine” shouters would rather forget that the militant Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the insurrectionary Zionist Irgun organization in British Mandate Palestine, wrote to IRA leader and later Irish president Éamon de Valera asking for advice and guidance. He wanted to learn as much as he could about Ireland’s guerrilla war against the British. De Valera invited Jabotinsky to Ireland, where he stayed for several weeks, mostly taking counsel from IRA leader Robbie Briscoe, himself a Jew.
Jabotinsky returned to the Holy Land determined to form “a physical force movement in Palestine on exactly the same lines as Fianna Eireann and the IRA.”
The Irish political class needs to show a great deal more humility and a great deal less sanctimony and imbecility on the Israeli-Palestinian predicament. It’s fair enough to empathize with the Palestinians, even to see something in the Palestinian struggle for statehood that harkens to Ireland’s long journey. But for all the similarities, there is a difference, even between the IRA at its worst and savage moments in the 1980s, and Hamas, in its routine conduct and standpoints.
The IRA never vowed to slaughter every British loyalist on the island of Ireland and hunt every Englishman to the ends of the Earth, to the ends of time. That’s what Hamas has in mind for the Jews.
The Irish should remember that.
Not a few of Ireland's gallant heroes were vulgar antisemites and Nazi collaborators
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