Why is Ireland one of the world's most critical countries of Israel over the war in Gaza

Why Ireland is one of the world's most critical countries of Israel over the war in Gaza - Author, Matías Zibell - Author's title, BBC News World - Publication date - Reading time: 12 min On November 5, 2023, when less than a month had passed since the Hamas attack on Israel that resulted in 1,200 deaths and 251 hostages, the then Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu said that launching a nuclear bomb over Gaza was "an option". The words of the extremist party politician Otzma Yehudit cost him strong criticism within and outside his country, including reprobation from the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. The impact of this statement overshadowed other opinions in his interview with the radio Kol Berama, where he also highlighted one of his responses to the question of what to do with the Palestinians in the Strip: "They can go to Ireland or the deserts". The choice of the European country as one of the possible destinations for the population of Gaza was not accidental. The Republic of Ireland is one of the nations that have shown the most public support for the Palestinian cause and have voiced the most criticism against the State of Israel. All of this has generated tensions between both countries. The latest was on a football field. Before the confrontation for the UEFA Nations League, there were threats of a boycott by the Irish team, which displayed black armbands "in recognition of all the lives lost in the conflict (in Gaza)". In response to October 7, 2023, Israel launched a massive military offensive in that territory during which more than 73,000 people have died, according to the Ministry of Health of the territory, administered by Hamas, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN. In January 2025, Ireland joined the case of "genocide" in Gaza presented by South Africa against Israel before the International Court of Justice. For Miceal Canavan, a professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University in Belfast (Northern Ireland), the Irish case presents unique and surprising characteristics, in a world where the general public does not usually pay much attention to foreign conflicts. "This happens especially when there are no ethnic, religious, economic, or political ties to the conflict in question; and, in this case, Ireland has none of these ties to Palestine or the region in general," he tells BBC News World. Along with Liam Kneafsey, an associate professor of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, Canavan conducted a study with approximately 1,500 people in the Republic of Ireland in which around 76% of the population recognized that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict mattered to them a lot or quite a bit. "A figure that far exceeds that of any other comparable country in Europe, or at least in Western Europe," says the academic. For Kneafsey, co-author of the study, it is also unusual in the Irish case not only the interest in the conflict in the Middle East but also the almost massive support for one of the two actors in that conflict. "We observe that Ireland is a very particular case in terms of the level and intensity of feeling towards one of the parties. There is a majority of people who sympathize with the Palestinians, a proportion much higher than recorded in other European countries—such as Spain, for example—which also consider the Palestinian cause favorable." This support, adds Kneafsey, transcends party differences and permeates a large part of Irish society. For Yanky Fachler, president of the Jewish Historical Society of Ireland, "when surveys are conducted and the Irish are asked to list the issues that concern them, the Palestinian issue occupies a very secondary place". But Fachler adds in conversation with BBC World: "Both the government parties and the opposition, as well as the media and academia—in other words, all the pillars of conventional Irish society—express themselves openly and unequivocally against Israel". Backgrounds and historical narratives Ireland was the first member of the European Union (EU) to declare that the solution to the Middle East conflict should be based on a fully sovereign Palestinian State that coexisted with Israel. This statement was included in a joint declaration by the foreign ministers of Ireland and Bahrain in 1980. This country was also the last member of the EU to express its agreement with the opening of an Israeli embassy in its territory. It did so in December 1993 and, at the same time, invited the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—the organization that originally brought together the main Palestinian nationalist movements—to open an office in Dublin. Finally, the first Israeli embassy in Ireland was inaugurated in January 1996, 21 years after diplomatic relations were established between both countries. In December 2024, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa'ar, announced the closure of the diplomatic mission in Dublin by accusing Ireland of "extreme anti-Israel policies". "The anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric employed by Ireland against Israel have their root in the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish State, as well as a double morality. Ireland has crossed all the red lines in its relations with Israel," Sa'ar stated, according to a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For Canavan and Kneafsey, it is the "historical narratives" that influence the position of the Irish towards the conflict in the Middle East and their support for the Palestinians. The authors basically identify three: - Colonization by England during the 16th and 17th centuries, which left an indigenous Irish population displaced and deprived of their lands, which passed to the hands of colonists allied with the English administrators. - After colonization, the mass emigration of Irish people for political and economic reasons, such as the great famine of the 19th century, which left approximately one million dead and two million exiles. - The independence and partition of Ireland, between 1920 and 1922, giving rise to what we now know as the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In this latter territory, there was a minority population of Catholics and nationalists, and another majority population of Protestants and unionists. "There is, for the Irish, a historical narrative of dispossession, transfer of lands, settlement, and displacement of the indigenous population. Obviously, that displacement continues to occur in Gaza, due to the events of recent years, in addition to being a historical process," explains Kneafsey. Regarding the partition, it occurs—according to academics—as an analogy with the United Nations project to divide the former Ottoman province of Palestine into two parts, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews, which was not implemented after the rejection by the Muslim population. Many of the territories that were in the area designated by the international community for the Palestinians, such as the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, passed to Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. Others have been occupied by settlements of Jewish colonists that the international community considers illegal, currently supported by the Israeli government and protected by its security forces. "The Irish (pro-Palestinians) build a parallel with the partition and what happened later in Northern Ireland: a considerable minority of Irish Catholics under the direct rule of Great Britain and, in particular, under the dominion of descendants of a settler population, the unionist population," concludes the professor from Trinity College Dublin. The lens of history Both academics specify that these are not the only analogies the Irish might resort to and that the aim of their study was not to certify whether this historical interpretation behind support for the Palestinians is correct or not. "History is a lens that can be applied in various ways. In different stages of Irish history, this lens has been used in different ways. Thus, there were those who resorted to the Irish revolutionary experience to understand and support the Zionist Jewish militias in their struggle to establish a Jewish homeland and overthrow British colonial rule," explains Kneafsey. In a column written for the newspaper "The Jerusalem Post" in February 2022, more than a year before the Hamas attacks on Israel, the former Israeli ambassador Mark Regev stated that the Irish saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through what he called a "distorted lens" that presents Israel as a colonial power. "One would expect a natural friendship between the Republic of Ireland and the State of Israel, as both are Western democracies that arose from quite similar struggles for independence," Regev opined, referring to the struggle of the founders of the State of Israel against the British Mandate of Palestine. "There undoubtedly existed a great synergy between both nationalist movements 130 years ago," recalls Yanky Fachler and adds: "In the 19th century, when Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement declared: 'I want to be the Parnell of the Jews'. (Charles) Parnell was the Irish leader who promoted the independence of Ireland". The president of the Jewish Historical Society of Ireland mentions other three names from the 20th century in which the struggle of Jews and Irish for liberation from the British intersects: - "During the Irish Civil War, in the early 1920s, there was a very prominent Irish Jewish politician, Robert Briscoe, who was an active part of the original IRA (Irish Republican Army)". - "Yitzhak Herzog, the Grand Rabbi of Ireland, openly showed his support for independence against the British. When he was elected in 1937 to hold the position of Grand Rabbi of the British Mandate in Palestine, the British were very displeased. He is the grandfather of the current President of Israel, Isaac Herzog". - "One of the first Israeli ministers who held the position for the longest time, Yitzhak Shamir, chose the nickname 'Michael' as his wartime name during his struggle in the shadows against the British, explicitly in honor of Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary leader". But in this dance of names, logically, there are those who fall on the other side of the coin. In 1917, the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, was the author of the declaration by which the British government first supported the establishment of "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. As the academic Miceal Canavan indicates, the author of this key document did not leave a good memory in his time as a British official in Ireland, where he opposed the legislative autonomy of this territory. "Balfour, before being associated with that declaration, was destined for Ireland, where he was known as 'Balfour the Sanguinary', after a massacre of Irish people in a small town in the country," noted the professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University in Belfast. Northern Ireland Although his study focuses on the Republic of Ireland, Canavan and Kneafsey point out that there seems to be a big difference between this country and Northern Ireland. While in the south a general support for the Palestinian cause is proven, in the north the opinion is divided, and this division responds to the traditional lines of the conflict between a Catholic and nationalist population, and another Protestant and unionist one. "Each community interprets the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its own history," says Liam Kneafsey, and adds: "Nationalists are reflected in the situation of the Palestinians, affected by the partition, settlement patterns, and colonization. For their part, unionists identify with the State of Israel—besieged or harassed by its neighbors—and share that feeling of being a settled people that feels threatened." According to the academics, the conflict between these two factions may have influenced, with other historical events, the massive shift of the Irish towards pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli positions. According to Canavan, there are studies that suggest that until 1967, when the Six-Day War took place in the Middle East, a considerable level of sympathy for Israel persisted among the Irish population in general. "It seems that it is from 1967 that the situation begins to change, as a more marked imposition of Israeli rule over the Palestinian population is observed," the academic expresses. In parallel, in Northern Ireland, in the same decade when armed clashes between factions began, prominent members of the nationalist groups drew parallels between the struggle of the Northern Irish republican movement and the Palestinian liberation movement, and there were contacts between the IRA and the PLO. "I believe that it is precisely in the decades after 1967 that Irish public opinion experiences a definitive transition: from a situation of uncertainty—in which sympathy existed for both sides—to a clearly pro-Palestinian stance," concludes Canavan. Antisemitism The public support of the Irish population for the Palestinian position and their criticism of Israel have generated questions of antisemitism that are also based on old historical disputes. Many point to the neutrality of the Republic of Ireland during the Second World War, or even years prior. "Before the war, antisemitism begins to manifest more openly in Ireland, and a part of the political establishment—and perhaps the country itself—positions itself in favor of Germany; in other words, they refuse to distinguish between Nazism and the Western democracies," says Yanky Fachler, the president of the Jewish Historical Society of Ireland. Two other events during that conflict are used to point to the Irish government during those years: one is the rejection of receiving a significant number of Jewish refugees and the other is the condolences presented by President Eamon de Valera after Hitler's death to the German representative in Dublin. "I do not believe that this was motivated by antisemitism. Rather, it was the strict adherence of De Valera to what he considered diplomatic protocol. And it did not reflect the Irish population as a whole, which celebrated the defeat of Nazism in the streets," says Canavan and adds: "Ireland should have hosted more refugees during the Holocaust. That is another stain on the country's history, but the Republic has never had an antisemitism backed by the State that expelled the Jews as we saw in other nations of Western Europe." In his study, the two academics asked open and closed questions to detect positions or statements of antisemitism in the population. "In fact, we find more Islamophobia than antisemitism. There are more people who feel uncomfortable, for example, with the idea of having a Muslim neighbor than with the idea of having a Jewish neighbor; something that is the opposite of what a prejudice-based explanation would predict to justify Irish sympathies towards the Palestinians," notes Kneafsey. According to Fachler, at the end of the Second World War, there were about 4,000 to 5,000 Jews in Ireland, but today he estimates that this figure is around 2,500. The community includes—in his words— groups as different as the descendants of those who arrived at the end of the 19th century fleeing pogroms in the Tsarist Russia as well as the Israelis who work for technology companies. "Among many of the older members of the Jewish community there is now a clear feeling that the security they had taken for granted for 120 or 130 years has vanished, so the situation is not comfortable," concludes Yanky Fachler. - Download the new BBC World Service app. Choose BBC News Mundo and receive news alerts, documentaries, and analysis, all in one place. Important: the new application is not available in the United Kingdom or the United States. - You can also follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and our WhatsApp channel. - And don't forget to subscribe here to our newsletter to receive a special selection of our best content every Friday.