Ireland’s Anti-Israel Drift: How Did It Come to This?: Lawrence A. Franklin, Gatestone, Mar. 17, 2019 — Ireland’s legislative lower house (Dáil) on January 29 approved a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell any product produced by Israelis in areas located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, most of which, such as Jerusalem, were actually liberated by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War from their illegal occupation by Jordan in 1948-49, after Israel was attacked by five Arab armies who were literally hoping to crush it the day of its birth.
Why Is Ireland The Most Anti-Israel Country in Europe?: Sean Savage, JNS, Feb. 6, 2018 — The Irish and Jewish people share a common history of suffering cruel persecution and achieving national redemption against immeasurable odds. But today, modern Ireland is one of Europe’s fiercest critics of Israel.
As I See It: Ireland’s Obsessional Hatred of Israel: Melanie Philips, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 1, 2019 — There’s a particularly sweet spot in the enormous technology deal Israel has just pulled off.
Ireland’s Complex Jewish History: Influential Figures Who Were Antisemites: Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien, Irish Times, Oct. 23, 2018 — The first ever mention of Jews in the Irish historical record was in the medieval Annals of Innisfallen. In an entry for 1079 (but probably written down much later), it is recorded that “Five Jews came from over sea with gifts” for the medieval King Tairdelbach “and they were sent back again over sea”.
On Topic Links
Knesset Speaker Scraps MKs’ Mission To Ireland Over Boycott Legislation: Times of Israel, Jan. 28, 2019 — Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein on Monday canceled an official Israeli parliamentary delegation to Ireland in retaliation for an Irish bill that seeks to ban the import of goods produced in areas captured by Israel in 1967.
Dublin Mayor Calls For Irish Boycott Of 2019 Eurovision In Israel: Times of Israel, May 14, 2019 — Dublin’s mayor on Monday called for Ireland to boycott next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which is to be held in Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Ruth Dudley Edwards: Like the Hard Left of Labour, Sinn Fein Have for Years Nursed a Bitter Streak of Antisemitism: Belfast Telegraph, Apr. 23, 2018 — The storm about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is clearly irritating Jeremy Corbyn, who can’t see it.
Ireland’s Schindler – Story of Irishman Who Saved Over 100 Jews From Nazi Gas Chambers: Aidan Lonergan, Irish Post, Aug. 8, 2017 — The Nuncio And The Writer – which airs on RTE One tonight – tells the astonishing story of how Co. Kilkenny man Hubert Butler conducted his own rescue missions to save men, women and children from the gas chambers.
IRELAND’S ANTI-ISRAEL DRIFT: HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?
Lawrence A. Franklin
Gatestone, Mar.17, 2019
Ireland’s legislative lower house (Dáil) on January 29 approved a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell any product produced by Israelis in areas located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, most of which, such as Jerusalem, were actually liberated by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War from their illegal occupation by Jordan in 1948-49, after Israel was attacked by five Arab armies who were literally hoping to crush it the day of its birth. In 1967, Egypt, presumably hoping to finish the job it had started in 1948, created a casus bello (cause for war under international law) by announcing a blockade of Israel’s access to the Red Sea via the Straits of Tiran.
So, Ireland has actually turned history on its head: it has sided with the aggressors and demonized the victim, all under the self-righteous guise of moral preening. The proposed Irish law would ban goods produced by Israelis in the West Bank and East Jerusalem from being marketed in Ireland.
The vote was 78 in favor, 45 against, with three abstentions. The “Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018” received the backing of the government’s two main opposition parties: Sinn Fein and Fianna Fáil. Sinn Fein is a long-time supporter of the Palestinian-led movement to try to destroy Israel by strangling it economically. The proposed law is opposed by the minority governing party, the Fine Gael. Previously approved by the upper house (Senate) in a 25 to 20 vote on 11 July 2018, the bill has yet to be signed into law by Ireland’s Prime Minister.
To date, the European Union (EU) has not weighed in on the bill’s legality under current EU trade regulations. Ireland, as an EU member state, is subject to the EU’s commercial rules. EU trade rules may prohibit Ireland’s unilateral action, as an EU treaty requires common commercial policy for all member states.
This legislation may also have legal and political consequences for American corporations with affiliations in Ireland. If US companies refuse to abide by the boycott of Jewish settlement-produced goods, they could be contravening Irish law.
Additionally, the bill could adversely affect Ireland’s trade with the United States, as the US government strictly opposes companies participating in any foreign boycotts it has not approved. This potential predicament, according to Arizona State University law professor Orde Kittrie, “could force US companies with Irish subsidiaries to choose between violating the Irish law or violating US Export Administration Regulations.” If the bill does become law, harsh penalties could be meted out for violators, including a fine of 250,000 euros ($285,000) or five years in prison.
The Irish electorate’s feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are possibly influenced by continual public displays of Irish hostility toward Israel, such as the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), which helps organize anti-Israel events in Ireland. The annual “Israel Apartheid Week” was held this year from February 23 to March 3. Others take place throughout the year. In June 2018, for example at a Tesco supermarket in Dublin, anti-Israel activists removed Israeli vegetables from the store’s shelves.
What is most notable, of course, is that there is no commensurate hostility toward any other country, such as Turkey for its invasion and occupation of Cyprus in 1974 or northern Syria in 2018; China for its invasion and destruction of Tibet in 1950, or Pakistan for its continuing incursions into Kashmir. Ireland’s rancid vote also needs to be contrasted to its virtual silence regarding countries that are daily committing hair-raising crimes against humanity, such as Iran, China, Turkey, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mauritania, Cuba, Venezuela or Sudan, for instance. Why, only Israel? What is now on display is a hypocritical condemnation by Ireland of the only democracy in the Middle East with equal rights for all its citizens…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
WHY IS IRELAND THE MOST ANTI-ISRAEL COUNTRY IN EUROPE?
Sean Savage
JNS, Feb. 6, 2018
The Irish and Jewish people share a common history of suffering cruel persecution and achieving national redemption against immeasurable odds. But today, modern Ireland is one of Europe’s fiercest critics of Israel. This tension was on display last week as the Irish Senate was considering legislation aimed at criminalizing trade with Israeli settlements.
The legislation, titled “Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018,” calls to “prohibit the import and sale of goods, services and natural resources originating in illegal settlements in occupied territories,” according to Sen. Frances Black, the bill’s sponsor.
While the vote on the legislation was eventually postponed, many in Israel saw it as another example of the growing effort in Europe to single out and boycott the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the legislation’s “sole purpose is to support the BDS movement and harm the state of Israel.”
The Israeli Embassy in Ireland also denounced the bill, saying that it “only offers an incentive to those who wish to boycott Israel and stands in stark contrast to the guiding principles of free trade and justice.”
Orde Kittrie, a professor of law at Arizona State University and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that the proposed legislation was clearly aimed at delegitimizing the state of Israel. “On its face, the bill is about pressuring Israel to evacuate the West Bank and turn it over to Palestinian rule. However, as in so many cases of BDS, it appears the goal was at least also a broader one: to contribute to delegitimizing the state of Israel,” he said.
A spokesman for the Irish pro-Israel group Irish4Israel said that the bill was also backed by several anti-Israel NGOs, including Christian Aid and Trocaire, in addition to trade unions in Ireland. “The bill was endorsed by trade unions and others and had the support or many smaller parties. The motivation is a naive hope to show solidarity with the Palestinians,” the spokesman said.
Economic consequences
In the days leading up to the vote, a debate emerged in Ireland over impending economic consequences for the country if it went ahead with the legislation. Of particular concern was the possibility that the legislation could run afoul of both E.U. and U.S. law, potentially jeopardizing critical ties.
“This bill would make U.S. companies with subsidiaries in Ireland, Irish companies with subsidiaries in the U.S., and their employees who are Irish or resident in Ireland, choose between violating the Irish law or violating the U.S. Export Administration Regulations,” said Kittrie. “Violations of these U.S. antiboycott laws are punishable by fines and by imprisonment for up to 10 years.”
As such, in requesting the postponement of the vote on the bill, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney noted that the bill may violate an E.U. law that all members have a common commercial policy. Coveney also expressed concern that the bill would harm relations with Israel and thus Ireland’s ability to play a constructive role in the Middle East peace process.
Current E.U. law stipulates that Israeli products originating from beyond the pre-1967 lines cannot be labeled as “Made in Israel.” Israel considers the West Bank to be disputed territory, with borders to be determined in any peace negotiations with the Palestinians… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
AS I SEE IT: IRELAND’S OBSESSIONAL HATRED OF ISRAEL
Melanie Philips
Jerusalem Post, Feb. 1, 2019
There’s a particularly sweet spot in the enormous technology deal Israel has just pulled off. Over the next five years, the tech giant Intel will invest a whopping $11 billion in a new semiconductor fabrication plant in Israel. The investment will be worth around 0.7% of Israel’s gross domestic product and is expected to produce thousands of jobs.
The sweet spot is that in securing this deal, Israel beat off competition from Ireland. For Ireland has become the most extreme Israel-bashing country in the West. Its Dáil, or parliament, recently gave a first reading to a bill which would make it a serious criminal offense to supply goods or services provided by Israelis in east Jerusalem or the disputed territories of Judea or Samaria. Claims by the bill’s sponsor, the Irish senator Frances Black, that it doesn’t target any particular country are disingenuous. Its terms have been drawn up in such a way that they apply only to the disputed territories and east Jerusalem.
It is also uniquely vicious. For it wouldn’t just target Israeli “settlers.” It would also mean, for example, that an Irish tourist on a visit to the Western Wall for which he is paying an Israeli tour guide might be arrested when back in Ireland for an offense carrying a potential jail term.
The bill is promoted by a coalition of NGOs, including several Christian groups, and is seen as a Trojan horse for a wider onslaught against Israel, with many of its supporters actively campaigning to boycott this year’s Tel Aviv Eurovision Song Contest.
The Irish government may yet block the bill. It was promoted in the Dáil by Fianna Fáil, the largest opposition party and on which the ruling minority Fine Gael party depends.
Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, has warned, however, that the bill contravenes EU trade laws and would, therefore, place Irish companies in jeopardy. Moreover, Irish-American companies might be in violation of American laws forbidding US-based companies from co-operating with trade bans on Israel.
Whether or not the bill becomes law, it once again raises the question of why Ireland is so consumed by the obsessive hatred of Israel it so regularly displays.
One obvious answer is that, as a country which believes itself to have suffered under British colonialism, it identifies with other peoples acknowledged by anti-colonialists as similarly “oppressed” among whom the “Palestinians” enjoy iconic status.
With the island of Ireland divided between the Irish Republic and the UK province of Northern Ireland, Irish republican terrorists have waged war against the UK on and off over the past century with a fragile peace finally brokered in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Strangely, the Israel issue has become emblematic in this battle over Irish identity, with the Protestant Unionists identifying with Israel and the Catholic Republicans identifying with the Palestinians.
As a slavish EU member, Ireland has allowed Brussels negotiators to use the fraught issue of the post-Brexit border with Northern Ireland as a weapon to force the UK to surrender its independence even after it formally leaves the EU.
The essence of this Irish passion for the EU is that Ireland doesn’t understand what it means to be an independent nation. Like so many cultures with a shaky sense of what they are, with an outsize chip on their shoulder and infantilized by being almost entirely dependent on others to survive (their “Palestinian” friends fall into that category too) the Irish hate Israel, the paradigm nation-state of a people with an unequivocal sense of itself…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
IRELAND’S COMPLEX JEWISH HISTORY: INFLUENTIAL FIGURES WHO WERE ANTISEMITES
Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien
Irish Times, Oct. 23, 2018
The first ever mention of Jews in the Irish historical record was in the medieval Annals of Innisfallen. In an entry for 1079 (but probably written down much later), it is recorded that “Five Jews came from over sea with gifts” for the medieval King Tairdelbach “and they were sent back again over sea”.
In this one short sentence, there seems to be an ominous prediction of the intolerance Jews would face in later Irish history. Yet there is also a subtle paradox at work; if we are to believe the Annals, no one in Ireland had ever seen a Jewish person before, and yet the Irish annalists clearly had some knowledge of Jews. The medieval Irish who gave such short shrift to these Jewish guests “knew” some things about Jews, or more accurately they think they knew some things about Jews: they “know” that Jews are not trustworthy, that Jews bearing gifts are not to be taken into one’s care. And Jews are not suitable for residence in Ireland – they should be expelled from the country.
It is quite telling that the medieval chroniclers of the Annals of Inisfallen did not feel the need to explain any of this: a contemporary reader would presumably have readily agreed with the implicit assumptions here about Jewish perfidy and untrustworthiness.
In this one short sentence, there are two quite different histories at work. First, there is a conventional social history: five Jews, presumably seeking a better life, arrived in Ireland hoping to find refuge there. This was refused to them and they were promptly expelled from the country. And second, there is a kind of cultural history, or what is sometimes called The History of Ideas. In this case, ideas about Jews and Jewishness. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions is a collection of essays that explores both of these divergent strands of Irish Jewish history.
At its demographic height, at the very end of the Emergency, the Irish Jewish community numbered about 4,000 in total; one-tenth of 1 percent of the total population of Ireland (north and south). Hardly a major aggregate. And yet, at that time, Jews were the only sector of the populace whose origins lay outside of Britain and Ireland and the community had long been a noticeable presence in Dublin. In 1908, for instance, the charter meeting of a Judæo-Irish Home Rule Association at the Mansion was the cause of noticeable controversy in Ireland and within the British Jewish community; should Irish Jews remain a loyal subset of their co-religionists on the other side of the Irish Sea or should they throw their lot in with nationalists on this side?
A desire to prove their nationalist bona fides and thus to prove that they are “real” Irish would endure within the Irish Jewish community. And the community’s official narratives have often downplayed the existence of anti-Semitism among Irish gentiles.
Likewise, the prevalence of anti-Judaism in 20th-century Ireland has been somewhat de-emphasised in written histories of the Jews of Ireland. None of which is really in line with the historic record.
Some of the most central figures of 20th-century Irish life have been overt anti-Semites; DP Moran, John Charles McQuaid, Arthur Griffith, Oliver St John Gogarty, Oliver Flanagan, the prominent Jesuit priest Richard Devane, his clerical colleague Denis Fahey of the Holy Ghost Fathers. Anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery regularly surfaced in the nationalist press before and after 1922. The IRA-backed campaign against usury in the late 1920s targeted Jewish moneylenders far more than their gentile counterparts. Jewish industrialists who fled the Nazis and established factories in the west of Ireland in the 1930s and ’40s often had to negotiate a matrix of stereotypes and negative perceptions. The sizeable numbers of Irish men who served in the Palestine Police in the same period regularly interpreted what they saw in Jaffa, Jerusalem or Bethlehem in terms of the anti-Jewish animosities traditional to Catholicism.
“Irish-Jewish History” is the history of the actual social lives of actual flesh-and-blood Jews in Ireland. But it also names another history: ideas of Jewishness in Ireland. This is partly a history of this kind of anti-Semitism, but something else also; the history of the idea that the Jews and the Irish share something in common. Some of the weirder race-obsessed fringes of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, for example, convinced themselves that the Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and attempted to excavate at Royal Tara in 1902, with hopes of finding the Ark of the Covenant there. This caused well-publicised and well-attended protests; WB Yeats, Douglas Hyde, George Moore, and Arthur Griffith were all present. They were all aghast at this attempted desecration of a site of nationalist memory. Griffith was probably also aghast at the suggested comparison.
Around the same time as this insensitive archaeological dig, George Bernard Shaw threw himself into the published works of Max Nordau, a Zionist ideologue and best-selling (if highly pessimistic) writer of popular philosophy. Bernard Shaw used his reading of Nordau to imagine strong parallels between the Irish and Jewish experiences. And in more maudlin terms, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, describing the 1906 funeral of Michael Davitt, noticed the Jewish attendees – they were grateful for Davitt’s several interventions into Jewish causes and were, apparently, “the one race which has suffered more than the Irish”. The comparable patterns of Irish and Jewish assimilation in America and the similar motivations behind the revivals of Hebrew and Irish suggest that – his mawkish language aside – Sheehy Skeffington was right to identify such parallels…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]