The story this week about Dublin City Council’s anti-Semitism did not surprise me in the least. In 2014, during the last major Gaza war, I wrote a series of posts for the IJN blog, Rocky Mountain Jew, about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a proxy war, with Catholics supporting Palestinians and Protestants supporting Israel. The IRA-PLO alliance was well established; the Loyalist allegiance to Israel was new for me.
Once I left Northern Ireland for the Republic, however, there was no “balance,” if one can even use a logical word in reference to this frankly absurd proxy war. Everywhere I went I overheard venomous anti-Israel, anti-Zionist speech. I remember sitting on St. Stephen’s Green and swearing that I would never return to the Republic (admittedly, as I prefer the North, it was a fairly easy pledge to make).
“I wasn’t too surprised to see Northern Ireland’s Catholic or nationalist neighborhoods adorned with Palestinian flags. After all, the IRA has long accepted under its banner any sort of ‘freedom-fighter/anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist/liberation’ group — never calling them terrorists, of course!” I wrote in 2014.
“More surprising was that in this latest conflict,” I continued, “the Protestant or Loyalist side has adopted the Israelis as mascots.
“The whole thing was truly bizarre, as was the ‘Viva Palestine’ atop the hills — you know, kind of like LA’s Hollywood sign — just outside Belfast’s most known Catholic enclave. It drove home the point of the utter imbalance of the world’s interest in Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
“There’s something pathological about the attention this conflict receives out of all the other horrible and far more violent and deadly conflicts taking place globally right now.”
While the current Gaza War far exceeded the violence and global impact of the one in 2014, so too did Hamas’ vicious Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis, Bedouin, foreign workers and dual nationals — including those with Irish citizenship (a kidnapped little girl who, when released in Nov., 2023, Ireland’s former prime minister described as “being found,” as if she’d gone missing.)
That pogrom, however, doesn’t seem to plague the consciousness of some of the Dublin city councillors; it doesn’t align with their anti-Semitism — or, pardon me, are they still pretending that erasing the name of the most prominent Jewish Irish family is still merely “anti-Zionism”? Can anyone with intellectual honesty actually explain the difference?
Shana Goldberg may be reached at shana@ijn.com
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