10 min read
Driving around Ireland earlier this month, my wife Leah and I saw here and there Palestinian flags hanging from windows or plastered across hedges in remote farmhouses. In Dublin, with its relatively large student and (growing) Muslim populations, one might have expected “Ceasefire Now” signs draped across multi-story buildings, echoing Hamas’s demand that Israel halt its protracted anti-terrorist counter-offensive in Gaza. But in villages like Terryglass off the N52 on the road to Galway?
The support for the Palestinians, today represented by the Hamas, is now the taste of the month, the fashion among Western Europe’s mainly ignorant young, who know nothing about the Israel-Palestine conflict beyond the daily and nightly images, many of them fake, broadcast on TV screens of dead and dying children, images efficiently engineered by the Hamas’s propaganda machine; know nothing of, and care even less about, the consistent Palestinian rejection of all compromise proposals by the international community and, periodically, by the Zionist leaders these past hundred years; and know nothing of, or care about, the constant Palestinian resort to terrorism, culminating in the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which some 1,200 Israelis (a few of them Arab Israelis) were killed and 250 (mostly civilians, aged six months to 89 years old) taken hostage.
Over the past years, the Irish, including their government, have emerged as Israel’s most vociferous beraters in Europe as reflected in the Palestinian flags draping the hedges. I suspect that antisemitism plays at least a minor role in this though I would like to be fair Historically, Ireland has generally been benign, if not welcoming, toward its Jews, who never numbered more than 5,000 (the republic’s population is five million). As Daniel O’Connell, the leading 19th century proponent of Catholic (or Irish) emancipation, once put it: “Ireland … is the only country that I know of unsullied by any one act of persecution of the Jews.”
But Catholic doctrine, which included the image of Jews as Christ-killers, was always somewhere there in the background. But violence was nonexistent. Or almost. In the first decade of the 20th century, the central Irish town of Limerick, which had several dozen Jewish families, witnessed anti-Jewish riots and a boycott (the Jews called it a “pogrom”), and some families to fled the town. Against the backdrop of rising antisemitism in Europe, the primate of Ireland, archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, in 1932 publicly charged the Jews with engaging “in practically every movement against our Divine Lord and His Church” and, in effect, with worshipping “Satan.” But politically, McQuaid remained an outlier and Ireland never veered toward alliance with Hitler. However, to its shame, Ireland, partly because of its historic antagonism toward Britain, opted for “neutrality” in World War II (though 50,000 Irishmen joined the British army during the war and the government was generally sympathetic toward the Allies).
In November 1947, Ireland supported the UN General Assembly partition resolution, which underwrote the emergence of the State of Israel. But something changed during the late 1960s and the 1970s when the terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA) aligned with the Palestinian terrorist (or resistance) organizations and sent fighters to train in PLO camps in Lebanon. (The PLO then went on to undermine the Lebanese state.)
The continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the decades after the 1967 Six Day War began to alienate many Europeans, including Irishmen; this alienation increased during Netanyahu’s protracted premiership and the distaste for Israel exploded on 7 October 2023. During my visit, I read the Irish newspapers and I found the space devoted to the Gaza War and the nature of the coverage truly mind-boggling. It was as if, perversely, the Gaza War was the only crisis on the planet and central to Ireland’s very life and destiny and as if the Palestinians themselves had no part in the descent to the current savagery.
Take The Irish Times of 25 July 2025. Not a word or barely a word about Ukraine-Russia or the ongoing civil wars in Sudan and Yemen and the still sputtering slaughter in Syria and the violent oppression of citizenry in such places as Iran and Afghanistan. Yet that day the Times ran five separate articles on Gaza\Israel. Five.
An op-ed by Justine McCarthy, a Times columnist, formerly an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Limerick, dealt with how 32 Palestinian children from the West Bank, “some … sporting Tipperary jerseys,” were forced to watch an all-Ireland hurling final on a TV screen in Amman rather than attend the game in person in Ireland. The children, “avid hurlers and camogie players,” aged nine to fourteen, and their 14 adult mentors, McCarthy complained, had been refused entry visas by Ireland’s Department of Justice. So they saw the game, televised, in Jordan. One of the young Palestinians, she writes, failed even to make it to Jordan because “his requisite school certificate had burned to ashes when the Israel Defense Forces attacked his [refugee] camp.” The villains of the story were, clearly, the Irish and Jordanian authorities. But McCarthy could not resist shifting her readers’ ire to Israel, and not merely via the allegedly “[IDF-]burned school certificate.” On the day the 32 left their homes in Ramallah and the Tulkarm, Jenin and Am’ari camps – of course, these so-called refugee “camps” have for decades been solidly built, though-densely populated, suburbs of Arab towns (perhaps McCarthy doesn’t know this) - Israeli soldiers, she tells her readers, shot a 13-year-old boy dead. “Amr Ali Qabha had unwittingly walked down a road in Jenin where soldiers were present during violent raids by Israeli settlers. When he rounded a bend and saw them, Amr turned to go back. They shot him seven times – in the neck, abdomen, back, groin and right thigh. As he lay dying, the soldiers prevented an ambulance from going to his aid.” McCarthy, of course, was not there and what she asserts as fact was apparently passed on to her by Palestinians, directly or via media reports. How true or accurate we don’t know.
The 32 had been invited to Ireland to watch the final by the Gaelic Athletic Association Palestine, an organization that promotes Gaelic games in the West Bank (McCarthy made it sound like hurling was the Palestinian national pastime). The 32 were to have been hosted by Irish host families. McCarthy takes to task the Irish government. Earlier, it had recognized Palestinian statehood. The Irish parliament, she tells us, is currently debating a bill to stop the import of products originating in the West Bank Jewish settler community. McCarthy (correctly) informed her readers that these settlers were currently busy seizing Palestinian homes and farms in the West Bank and occasionally killing Palestinians, “with the assistance of Israeli soldiers.”
So far so good (or bad). But then McCarthy switches to Gaza: “It becomes ever more obvious that Israel is trying to kill as many Gazans as it can.” Is this true? Trying to kill as many Hamas fighters as possible, for sure. But Gazans? She then speaks of Israel’s “killing rampage in Gaza in October 2023” – and I thought the “killing rampage” observed in October 2023 was by Hamas gunmen. True, Israel began reacting against Hamas in Gaza in the days after 7 October – but surely, in this context, the Hamas slaughter of Israelis that month deserves at least a mention.
But the Times’ coverage of Gaza on 25 July was not limited to McCarthy’s piece. Its “World News” pages were led by an article zeroing in on a statement by Amichay Eliahu, a second-rank politician who is Israel’s “minister of [Israeli-Jewish] heritage.” The report, dealing with Israeli restriction of humanitarian aid to Gaza, quoted Eliahu as saying “that there is no nation that feeds it enemies.” “The British didn’t feed the Nazis, nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians [now] feed the Ukrainians.” Eliahu added, according to the article’s authors Patrick Kingsley, Johnatan Reiss and Derek Scally, that in fact the Israeli government was “driving out the population that educated its people on the ideas of ‘Mein Kampf,’ an antisemitic text written by Adolf Hitler.”
I’m not sure about the phrase “driving out” – but all the rest of this “history” is actually true. States in wartime do not feed their enemies and Hamas has now for two decades indoctrinated Gaza’s population with the teachings of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, to be fair, the authors of the article did eventually note that the IDF spokesman had dismissed Eliahu’s comments as not reflecting IDF “policy” and that Eliahu was not party to “security decisions” by the Israeli government.
In a second article on the same page, Sally Hayden, reporting from the town of Jericho in the West Bank, interviewed workers from Gaza stranded since the start of the war in the West Bank, cut off from their families in the embattled enclave. The stranded Gazans were enduring what they described as a form of torture. They spouted the Hamas propaganda line that Hayden quotes - “the Israelis target everyone, this is a genocide.” The article contained not a word about the Hamas. The interviewees, of course, knew – as Hayden appears not to have known – that any condemnation of Hamas would likely be repaid by revenge attacks on their families back in the Gaza Strip.
On page two, the Times that day sported another, medium-size piece about an Irish MP (Social Democrat Gary Gannon), who had filed legal proceedings against Ireland’s Central Bank for “facilitating the sale of Israeli [government] bonds on the European market.” Gannon claimed that the “bonds are not neutral financial instruments. They are a funding pipeline for a military campaign that includes the bombardment and starvation of thousands of civilians.” All the Times articles that day, highlighting the injury and death of Gaza civilians, avoided mentioning that a war was actually ongoing between Israel and Hamas, a war launched by Hamas, and that fighters on both sides were being killed.
The Times that day also published an article about the Irish Prime Minister, Micheal Martin asking to see a report, published by an Israeli organization, alleging that Irish school textbooks promoted antisemitism. In one textbook, according to the Times’ report, Auschwitz was described simply as a “prisoner of war camp.” The body overseeing Irish school curricula responded that individual schools choose their textbooks and publishers were responsible for textbook content.
The tone and content of the reporting on Gaza\Israel in other quality Irish newspapers was no different. The Irish Independent of 23 July sported two long articles in a two-page spread, accompanied by photographs depicting Palestinian hunger and death, one by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Dawoud Abu Alkas and the other by Nedal Hamdouna (all Arab names and, presumably, Palestinians). The first article was titled “Six-week-old boy among 15 people to die of Starvation in Recent Days”; the second, “Skeletons Marching to Death - Palestinians Face Hunger and Bullets as Israel Steamrolls into Gaza.”
Hamdouna’s opened her article with a striking quote by “Younis,” a 32-year-old Gazan father of four: “The gunfire was so intense that it was like they were aiming to drink our blood.” A curious phrase, given that I have seen no reports of anyone drinking anyone’s blood in Gaza these past twenty months of combat – but, deliberately or not, it echoes the Medieval antisemitic trope about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children and maybe the Gazans have been so indoctrinated that they believe Jews routinely do this.
That day, the Independent also ran two relevant letters to the editor. One, by Declan Foley from Melbourne, Australia, read: “The abhorrent and continuing inhumanity to the people of Gaza cannot be described as anything other than genocide.” It can, but I won’t go into this here. But the letter fails to note that “the people of Gaza” – and, incidentally, the Arab population of the West Bank – overwhelmingly endorsed the Hamas onslaught on Israel on 7 October 2023 (while, of course, denying the mass rape, mass executions, decapitations, etc. that accompanied it). Foley laments “the killing [by the IDF] of innocent people – God’s children” and goes on to decry the “antisemitism” charge voiced by Israel’s defenders by saying, in effect, that Arabs, “Phoenicians” and “Akkadians” are also “semites,” so they can’t be accused of antisemitism.
The flood of reportage on Gaza’s suffering in the Irish press appears to stake the moral high ground and Irish righteousness. I wonder whether these newspapers devoted a hundredth of their attention to the world’s other humanitarian crises during the past decades, especially crises in which Muslims slaughtered fellow Muslims actually in their hundreds of thousands.
One last point: Israel’s efforts on the world stage to rebut criticism of its policies and actions have indeed been dismal. While in Ireland, a Sky network interview with an Israeli government spokesman, David Mercer, brought me almost to despair. The interviewer was barely able to get in a question edgewise as Mercer harangued him with endless numbers and names. In the end, the uncivil Mercer simply berated and insulted the interviewer and the man called it a day. And Israel’s refusal since October 2023 to allow foreign correspondents to freely roam the Gaza Strip, whatever the danger to themselves, has been a prolonged, terrible mistake. There are so many facets to the awfulness of Netanyahu’s premiership.
But Palestinian flags were not the only thing we encountered in Ireland. We ended our tour of the island at Clonmacnoise, an inspiring site of medieval Christian ruins. By chance we were greeted there by a late middle-aged Irishman, John, one of the site’s staff. After incidentally hearing we were from Israel, he hailed us in Hebrew “Barukh Haba” (welcome) (where he acquired his (little) Hebrew I know not), and went on to recount the following: A few years ago a former Israeli prime minister – Ehud Barak, who back in July 2000 had offered the Palestinians a compromise two-state solution and had been rebuffed by then PLO leader Yasser Arafat – had visited the site. John had rushed forward and hugged him, much to the annoyance (or fright) of Barak’s bodyguards, and, then taken a selfie with the man. He had subsequently sent Barak the photo and asked him to sign it. Some six months passed and no photo. But, after losing hope, a large brown envelope arrived, the photograph duly signed.
John saw us off with “I like (or was it “I respect”?) the Jews. Jesus was a Jew” and “God Bless Israel,” warming our hearts – and perhaps suggesting that there was a silent majority or large minority of Irishmen out there who, while mindful of the horrors inflicted on the Gazans in this war, understood that it was not the Jews alone or mainly who were responsible.
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