Tinteán

A Response to Tim Lynch by Rónán McDonald

The following piece first published in the Australian was written initially in response to public criticism that Ireland’s policy on Palestine was rooted in Ireland’s history of antisemitism and specifically as a rebuttal of my University of Melbourne colleague Tim Lynch’s piece the previous week.   Tim Lynch’s comment piece was published in The Australian online newspaper on 1 January 2025 and subsequently in the print edition. My piece was not intended to either support or condemn Ireland’s current policy, but rather to consider the charge of antisemitism in historical context.

I am grateful for the invitation from the Tinteán editors to republish this comment piece and to the Australian for permission to reproduce it here.

Israel’s closure of its embassy in Dublin last week, in response to pro-Palestinian actions by the Irish government, has led many commentators to accuse Ireland of Israelphobia and even antisemitism (https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/why-irelands-new-morality-thrives-on-israelophobia/news-story/c9d5e6bea24de472b318d0f61a698a6b)

We are hearing suggestions that Ireland has a particularly noxious history of this ancient hatred, a bigotry that has survived the collapse of its erstwhile Catholicism. 

The Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, announcing the decision (and playing to a domestic audience), declared that the ‘antisemitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimisation and demonisation of the Jewish state and on double standards’. As eminent an historian as Simong Sebag Montiofore explains Ireland’s ‘weirdly unreasonably antisemitic and anti-Israel’ position by pointing at the experience of his own family in the notorious 1904 ‘Limerick Boycott’. 

About one-third of the early settlement of Australia came from Ireland, and the Irish still come here in significant numbers. If they are bringing an antisemitic bacillus with them, it concerns us here too. Especially since both the Irish and the Jews often come here to the same places and share much – if you see someone with red hair in Bondi Junction it’s likely to be one group of the other.

To understand the root of the current diplomatic collapse between Ireland and Israel we would do better to look to the parallels and connections between these two diasporic peoples rather than exceptional Irish prejudice. In the Irish case, a balanced look at modern Irish history reveals extensive solidarity and sympathy with the Jewish people and the Jewish state, at least up until the last few decades. Let’s start with the fact that the current President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, is entitled to an Irish passport. His father, himself the sixth president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast and raised mostly in Dublin.

The stories of the Jews and the Irish, both persecuted and scattered, intertwine around the world, especially in America, where both groups (until recently) tended towards the Democrat Party. In the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in the East End of London in 1936, the Jewish and Irish residents, working together, faced down Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Irish nationalist ideas were deeply influential on early Zionism and the Irish and Jewish independence movements were aligned over many decades. However much the memory of ‘Zionist Sinn Féin’ might embarrass that party today, it was an historical reality. 

No figure exemplifies the relationship between the two countries more than Robert Briscoe (1894-1969), born into an orthodox Jewish family in South Dublin, and raised as committed Irish republican. The Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky visited Dublin for instruction from Briscoe on the use of guerrilla tactics against the British. Briscoe was one of the founders of Ireland’s largest party Fianna Fáil and a close friend of Éamon de Valera. Both campaigned against the partition of Israel because of the Irish experience. We often hear about de Valera’s lamentable visit to the German legation in Ireland to offer his condolences on the death of Hitler. Less often these days, do we hear about ‘Éamon de Valera Forest’ outside Nazareth, arranged by Dublin’s Jewish community in 1966 in recognition of Dev’s support for Jews in Ireland. That support includes special recognition of the Jews in Ireland’s 1937 constitution, unprecedented at the time. 

Irish sympathy for persecuted Jewry goes further back. The most prominent Irish politician of the nineteenth century, the ‘Liberator’ Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), was a champion of Jewish emancipation throughout Europe. Michael Davitt, the great Land League leader and social justice advocate exposed the Kishinev progrom to the world in his The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia. Davitt held that political independence for both was the only solution to both the Jewish question and the Irish question. Before he took up his role as Ireland’s first ambassador to Australia, T.J. Kiernan was posted to the Holy Sea during the war. There with his wife (the singer Delia Murphy) and the celebrated Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty, he plotted to help Jews in Rome escape from the Nazis. Those old enough to remember the worldwide bestselling Jewish-American novelist Leon Uris, author of Exodus (1958) and Trinity (1976) may recall that in the 1970s and into the 1980s it was not at all uncommon for the Irish and Israeli cause to resonate together. 

When did these links begin to change? Bluntly, it changed when Israel started winning. Once Israel became successful militarily and politically following the 1967 war, Irish progressives began to identify more with the Palestinians as victims of Western ‘settler-colonialism’, a narrative that has been tremendously assisted by the influence of the American academy in a globalized Ireland. The alignment with the Palestinian cause has hardened into a coarse binary, perhaps most manifest in Belfast, where nationalists swathe the streets with Palestinian flags and loyalists with Israeli. 

Nonetheless, when we seek to understand why Irish people in great numbers feel sympathy for the Palestinians there are far more plausible explanations than the history of Irish antisemitism nor ‘blood and soil’ Irish ethnic nationalism. 

Probably the most obvious is the fact that the Irish are reacting to the live-streamed images of horrific human suffering from Gaza. You can see that reaction as ‘double standards’ – given they reacted less strenuously to horrors in Syria, Yemen and the Sudan. But ‘whataboutery’ is not a strong moral defence. Most Irish people, like most humane people around the world, were also horrified by the footage of Hamas’s barbarity on 7 October. One moral response must not cancel the other. 

If Ireland is applying double-standards to Israel, as the latter alleges, the same is true in the opposite direction. Israel maintains its embassy in South Africa, the instigator of the charge of genocide in the International Criminal Court that Ireland supported. Norway and Spain allied with Ireland back in May to recognise a Palestinian state but still retain consular relations. Why has Israel decided to make an example of Ireland? Could it be that Israel expects of Ireland, as Ireland expects of Israel, higher standards than it does of other countries? 

It’s notable that those who are the quickest to proclaim ‘antisemitism’ against critics of Israel are often the same as those complaining of the left’s proclivity to close down free speech by shouting ‘racist’. You can criticize Ireland for naïve idealism, for moral self-congratulation, for too readily taking on a progressive orthodoxy, for not listening well to its EU partners and for under-recognising the eliminationist imperialism of Israel’s adversaries. But the idea that Ireland’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause originates in its history of Catholic nationalist antisemitism holds little explanatory weight.

Professor Rónán McDonald

Rónán is the incumbent of the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies, University of Melbourne