Irish leaders’ condemnation of Israeli attacks are too piecemeal and punch-pulling to be meaningful

Michael Davitt, the founder of the Irish Land League in 1879, travelled to Kishinev in the Russian empire in 1903 and identified similarities between British imperial control of Ireland and Russian treatment of Jews, leading him to believe in the “remedy of Zionism”. One-hundred years later, Irish minister for foreign affairs Michael O’Kennedy stated that Ireland “recognised that in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, account must be taken of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, including their right to a homeland”.

These assertions are a reminder that, historically, both Jewish and Arab nationalists have had reason to look to Ireland sympathetically. Speaking on RTÉ Radio in 1980, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin denounced the Irish government’s recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) as it was “a Nazi organisation that ordered genocide”; it was, he maintained, essentially an Irish acceptance of the PLO’s right “to destroy the Jewish state”. Begin also spoke, however, of Jewish affinity with Ireland: “We are friends of the Irish people and I have a deep sentiment for the Irish people and for their fight for liberation. We regret very much the deterioration of relationships between us, but I hope we can renew our friendship.”

The Irish Constitution afforded explicit recognition and guarantees to Jews and in 1966 the Irish-Jewish community funded the planting of a forest of 10,000 trees in Israel in honour of Éamon de Valera

The reference to the Irish fight for liberation was partly a nod to Begin’s time in the Zionist Irgun movement when fighting the British occupation of Palestine in the 1940s. Begin and others were partly inspired by the IRA, and PS O’Hegarty’s 1924 book, The Victory of Sinn Féin, was translated into Hebrew by Avraham Stern, another Irgun leader.

Despite Irish failures to embrace Jewish refugees during the second World War, Irish-Jewish relations were not hostile. Chief rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, appointed in 1949, wrote of a “close and cordial” relationship between Jews and the Irish State: “Ireland is one of the very few countries that has never blemished its records by any serious anti-Jewish outrages.” The Irish Constitution afforded explicit recognition and guarantees to Jews and in 1966 the Irish-Jewish community funded the planting of a forest of 10,000 trees in Israel in honour of Éamon de Valera.

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But Irish interest in the right of Palestinian self-determination was also sustained and deep. Rory Miller, author of the 2004 book Ireland and the Palestine Question 1948-2004, suggests various reasons for this: not just identification with anti-imperial struggles, but a clerical and political interest in the plight of the Holy Land and hostility to partition as a solution to territorial disputes.

There were fraught debates in the Dáil and at EEC level from the late 1970s onwards about the Middle East. Irish sentiments influenced the first EEC declaration that included specific support for Palestinian self-determination. Ireland was also the last EU member to allow Israel to open a residential embassy, in 1993. Minister for Foreign Affairs Brian Cowen was in a car driving through Ramallah with Yasser Arafat of the PLO on September 11th, 2001, when news of the World Trade Center attacks came through. At that time, Ireland had a seat on the UN Security Council and sought to use that to encourage recognition of Palestinian statehood. But there was parallel reticence about the conduct of the Palestinian Authority and muted criticism of Arafat’s failings; Miller suggested this amounted to “blind loyalty”.

There is still too much hedging in these comments given the scale of Israel’s attacks, which are clearly well beyond self-defence

Debates about these intractable problems brought into focus Ireland’s self-declared right to be thought of as a restraining influence, or “middle power” in international affairs. When speaking to the Foreign Policy Association in New York in 2000, taoiseach Bertie Ahern insisted the “first and foremost” driver of Irish foreign policy was the “moral dimension”.

What does that mean now? In an interview last week on RTÉ, when asked about war crimes, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said Israel’s bombing of refugee camps was “not proportionate. This is a personal view I have.” Surely, in his position, more than a timid “personal view” is required? He insisted it was for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to decide what constitutes war crimes, At the same time, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan stated Israel had clear obligations, “not just moral but legal obligations ... It’s there in the Rome Statute. It’s there in black and white. It’s there in the Geneva conventions”. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar struck a different tone from Martin, maintaining the Israeli onslaught after the heinous Hamas assaults looked like “something approaching revenge”.

There is still too much hedging in these comments given the scale of Israel’s attacks, which are clearly well beyond self-defence. The knotted history of Ireland’s engagement with these themes is reflected in disagreements about language, diplomacy and boycotts, but continuity is required in relation to the recognition, as voiced by Brian Cowen in 2001, that “there is no military solution ... the only way to end this dreadful conflict is to resume the peace process”.