A new religion blights the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism has been supplanted by a far more cultish creed. Its doctrines are declared with great fervour, its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia.
I knew Ireland was hostile to Israel but I had no idea how bad things had got. It’s suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you’ll see it and hear it – that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil!
It feels like the Jewish State has become a Satan substitute in post-Catholic Ireland
It’s inescapable. It’s all over Dublin, of course, long a hotbed of leftish activism. You won’t walk five metres there without seeing a youth wearing a keffiyeh and a look of smug self-satisfaction. The Palestine flag flutters at Trinity College. Even the Hamas flag has been waved at protests in the capital: leftists for fascism.
In the country too, where Dublin fads once held no sway, Israelophobia has put down roots. I find no relief from its dogmas out in Connemara, where my parents are from. Palestine flags fly in random fields. ‘STOP’ road signs have had the word ‘GENOCIDE’ attached to them, meaning everywhere you turn you’re reminded of that most unholy nation. There were once statues of the Virgin Mother on Ireland’s roadsides, imploring you to resist evil; now there are dire reminders of the evil Israel commits. It feels like the Jewish State has become a Satan substitute in post-Catholic Ireland. You prove your virtue through renouncing it.
On a drive from Connemara to Clare I switch on the radio. The first thing I hear is an interview with a folk singer from Galway who’s become a national treasure by going on a ‘hunger strike for Gaza’. The presenter fawns over her with holy reverence: Ireland’s new saints. She called off her strike after seven days – less Bobby Sands than a body detox. The interview bleeds into a breathless report on famine in Gaza. I turn it off; only silence brings respite from the religious fury.
Even pubs bow and scrape to the new faith. A bar in Bundoran in Donegal has banned ‘all Zionists’. Zionists are the devil here. One was spat on in Dublin and told to get out of the country. So much for Ireland’s old cry of ‘Céad Míle Fáilte’: a hundred thousand welcomes.
I take a pint in a quiet bar in Clifden. A TV in the corner is whispering about genocide. It’s a panel discussion about Israel’s crimes against humanity. They all agree. It’s interrupted by news of Gerry Adams’s libel victory over the BBC. Gloating Gerry is in a keffiyeh. They say it’s the one gifted to him by Ismail Haniyeh, the former leader of the neo-fascists of Hamas. You can’t so much as finish a drink without hearing the cult’s claims and seeing its paraphernalia. The old priests would have killed for such reach.
Politicians of all persuasions genuflect at the altar of Israelophobia. The Dáil is a sea of keffiyehs some days. A proposed new law, the Occupied Territories Bill, would make it a criminal offence to trade with any person or business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The moral deviant who does so risks five years in jail. One envisions pilgrims returning from the Holy Land and being grilled by gardai over whether their holy trinkets were bought from a Jew in a settlement. ‘You traded with the Zionists? Off to Mountjoy.’
This week both the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, said Israel is committing genocide. Martin, frustrated by his failure to convince other nations to sign up to this vile calumny against the Jewish State, called for a ‘broadening’ of the definition of genocide. They’re shameless. They want to alter the very meaning of words in order that they might frame Israel for the gravest crime. Like all witchfinder cults, they twist truth to ensnare the demons they irrationally fear.
Some say the reason Ireland feels so strongly about this is because we too experienced ‘colonial repression’. What an insult to the men and women who fought for Ireland’s freedom to speak of them in the same breath as the murderous obscurantists of Hamas. Israel is not waging a colonial war on Gaza, as Britain once did in Ireland: it is pursuing the army of anti-Semites that raped and murdered hundreds of Jews in the 7 October pogrom.
If Ireland’s fury is just ‘solidarity with Palestine’, then why does it feel so hateful? So stifling? Why does it involve the expulsion from public houses of Jews who believe in a Jewish homeland? And the spitting on such Jews? And the criminalisation of trade with such Jews? And the waving of the flag of the army that butchered a thousand Jews 18 months ago? Ireland is in the grip of a new hysteria. The country I love has fallen. Who will save it?
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