The apology, annually repeated, is for the many “failures of the Irish state” in the 1930s and 40s. While thousands left Ireland to join the British forces fighting Nazi Germany, the Irish state assumed a position of neutrality during World War II, acted as a bystander and is complicit in the genocide of European Jewry.
At the July 1938 Evian Conference discussion of the plight of German and Austrian Jews trying to escape Nazi rule, the Irish representative, like many others, offered no persecuted Jews sanctuary. Charles Bewley, the notoriously antisemitic Irish ambassador in Berlin during the 1930s, trenchantly advised the Irish government to refuse Jewish families permission to live in Ireland, concerned Jews would contaminate Catholic Irish purity. The Irish national archives of that time are riddled with antisemitic depictions of Jews.
Permission to reside in Ireland as a safe haven during the 1930s was denied to almost all who sought it. Following then-Taoiseach Eamon DeValera expressing his condolences in Germany’s Dublin embassy in May 1945 on Hitler’s death, Ireland kept its borders firmly closed to all but a handful of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust for whom permanent Irish residence was sought. While 100 Jewish orphan children who survived the concentration camps were temporarily allowed to reside in Ireland, their stay was strictly conditional on them leaving after one year and they did so.
The apology, first publicly given in 1995 by then-Taoiseac, John Bruton, is annually recycled by Irish political leaders who have limited knowledge of Jewish history and who display minimal understanding of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While most know of the 1967 Six Day War, they show little knowledge of the Yom Kippur War, of the number of Israelis murdered and maimed during the First and Second Intifada, of Israel’s 2005 departure from Gaza or of Hamas’s barbarity and ambition to replace Israel with a Palestinian state. Nearly all Irish politicians also choose to ignore Palestinian division, the pay-for-slay policy, a Palestinian education system that encourages murder and martyrdom, that Gaza and the West Bank have for 14 years been ruled as two separate Palestinian political entities, the malign role of Iran in training and funding two terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, and their united dedication to Israel’s destruction. They are also oblivious to Hamas’s diversion of resources to make rockets and construct terrorist tunnels, resources that could be beneficially used in Gaza to build homes, essential infrastructure, utilities, hospitals and acquire COVID vaccine. As for the 1947 UN resolution that envisaged the establishment of two states, Israel, as a Jewish state in which Arabs may reside as a minority, and an Arab state in which Jews may reside as a minority, they present as knowing nothing at all.
IN THE DÁIL, the Irish parliament’s primary chamber, the Taoiseach, Tanaiste and foreign minister, all opposition parties and various Dáil deputies have engaged in an orgy of condemnation of Israel. Debating last month’s Israel/Hamas war, few referenced explicitly the more than 4,300 rockets indiscriminately fired by Hamas at Israeli civilians and no one criticized their launch from locations in Gaza adjacent to homes, schools, hospitals and mosques. Comparing the tragic loss of civilian lives in Gaza, including children’s lives, with the small number of Israeli dead, no criticism was voiced of Hamas putting Palestinian civilians in harm’s way as human shields, of their defective rockets causing Palestinian casualties or of their not constructing bomb shelters to protect Palestinian civilians. Israel was pilloried for defending Israelis. Ireland’s continuing much-lauded neutrality demanded more Israeli dead for Israel’s defensive action to be justified.
The orgy of criticism climaxed with a toxic debate on a motion proposed by the main opposition party and long-time Provisional IRA political front, Sinn Fein. The motion was a Trojan horse for rhetoric intended to demonize and delegitimize Israel and to lay a foundation for state-supported BDS legislation. Embraced by the Irish government and unanimously passed by the whole Dáil without a single dissent, it labeled Israeli “settlements” in eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods and on the West Bank as illegal de facto annexations of Palestinian territory and as the sole barrier to a two-state solution. Under the terms of the motion, any Jewish resident in east Jerusalem is guilty of “the crime of de facto annexation,” as are all Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria. No mention was made of the Oslo Accords. The fact that the new towns are built on disputed lands Israel acquired from Jordan in a defensive war after Jordan’s illegal occupation of the West Bank ended in 1967 was a detail deemed too irrelevant to mention.
Legislators, including Ireland’s foreign minister, proudly celebrated the Dail’s triumphant unanimity and the motion’s antisemitic objective of achieving a Judenrein east Jerusalem and West Bank as a European first and as a message to the global community. The Dáil celebrants carelessly missed its synergy with the objective of Nazi Germany to create a Judenrein Europe and how that might be negatively viewed by some. They also lacked the insight to understand that it is truly delusional for politicians of a country which denied a safe haven to persecuted Jews to claim moral authority to dictate where it is permissible for Jewish people to reside today. Speakers advocating Jewish exclusion during the debate, oblivious to irony, competitively depicted Israel as an apartheid state. No objection was voiced to that depiction by the Irish government. The Irish government’s sole objection was to a proposal that Israel’s ambassador be expelled, which was defeated by 87 to 46 votes.
During the recent conflict the Irish foreign minister repetitively criticized Israel and also called in, berated and publicly embarrassed Israel’s ambassador. He also had a much-publicized friendly meeting in Dublin with Iran’s visiting foreign minister. No public criticism was voiced of Iran for its many threats to eliminate Israel, for its funding and training of terrorists or for cheering on Hamas rockets. Official photos were published of two happy ministers bumping elbows and clearly smiling behind their COVID masks.
In Ireland, while it remains politically correct to memorialize Jews murdered more than 76 years ago, it has ceased to be politically correct to speak out on behalf of the Jewish living. As Ireland more closely aligns its approach to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to that of Sinn Fein and Iran, as a state it is incapable of positively contributing to conflict resolution. That is unfortunate, as much learned from the Irish peace process could beneficially contribute to a permanent peace.
How many years will elapse before a future Taoiseach apologizes for the conduct of today’s Irish government and Parliament cannot be accurately predicted.
The writer, a former Irish minister for Justice, Equality and Defense, was a member of the Dáil for 30 years.