It is an unfortunate statement of fact that a great many, perhaps even a majority, of Irish people will not particularly either notice or care that, in their country yesterday, a Jewish woman who is the descendant of holocaust survivors was forcibly manhandled out of a holocaust memorial event for the crime of peacefully protesting the President.
Or at least, most such people would not care on the merits.
It would be pointless, therefore, to try to explain to those of our fellow citizens amongst that contingent what exactly was so outrageous about yesterday’s events. Nevertheless, the basic facts should be put on record for those who might care about them.
First, that the holocaust was a unique crime in history, for starters, and that its targets were the Jewish people. Not, as some politicians like our President like to say, Jews and gypsies and gay people and some catholic priests and other dissidents. Yes, it is true that many others of all races and creeds died in the camps, but the extermination camps only existed because the Wansee Conference of 1942 sought a solution to the Jewish problem. Not the Jews and the gypsies and the gays. The Jews. Hitler and his friends may well have accepted the extermination of the gypsies as a happy by-product of the camps, or perhaps moved on had they won the war to exterminate some other group in order to keep the camp workers in employment. But that was not the purpose of the camps, or the mass killing exercise. It was, as the record and official documents showed, intended to be a final solution of the Jewish question.
Second, that the State of Israel exists as a direct consequence of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. To put this in terms that may seem flippant, the Jewish people tried Europe, and Russia, and Ukraine – it did not work out. Israel was established because only there did the surviving Jews of Europe feel safe, where they mingle today with the descendants of all the Jews expelled in anti-Jewish pogroms in the Arab nations.
In 1900, for example, more than a million Jews lived in Hungary. Today fewer than 100,000 survive, though it is still the country with the proportionally largest Jewish population in Europe. 90% of that population was murdered, or fled, despite centuries of loyal service to the Hapsburg Empire.
The state of Israel therefore is the one country on earth where Jewish people can be confident that they will be free from persecution by the state. This is not to suggest that Irish Jews owe their loyalty to any country other than Ireland. It is simply to note that they feel an affection and a comradeship with a nation that has provided so many of their families and friends with a home, much in the same way that many Irish people feel a fraternal affection for the United States and its enormous population of Irish emigrants and the descendants of our famine-fleeing ancestors.
Third, that President Higgins really is an offensive figure for many Jewish people, both at home and abroad. Not, as some would assert, simply because he criticises Israel (many international figures do so, with some justification) – but because he constantly applies standards to it that he applies to nobody else. In the simplest terms, he has never wished an Israeli leader the very best of luck in their endeavours. He has wished that only of the Iranian President – a man who has committed himself to a policy of exterminating the Jewish population of Israel. He is the cheerleader of Iran and Cuba and of left wing tyrants everywhere, yet the bile in his throat for the Israeli state rarely lies restful for a day.
And fourth, that this was all that was asked of him: To let his bile lie restful for a day. To speak if he really must, but to confine his remarks to the Jewish holocaust.
He could not do it. Nobody who has observed a single day of his career would ever have imagined that he could. Those in the Jewish community who might have imagined that he really is their friend might finally, yesterday, have realised that he is not.
And so, some few Irish jews in his audience protested peacefully, by standing up and turning their backs. They did not chant, or rush the stage, or shout in protest. They simply turned their backs on the President. For which crime, the woman amongst them was manhandled from the arena:
Now, as I said at the beginning, I sorely doubt that many Irish people will care much about the reason for the Jewish lady’s upset. Especially if our beloved President is being criticised, at which point the tribal instinct for whataboutery kicks into high gear.
However, one might hope that self-interest alone might make us ask exactly how it looks internationally to be a western country that physically ejects Jewish people from an event to commemorate the holocaust, simply because said Jewish people objected to the President using the event to attack the Jewish state.
I am reliably told by various contacts in the Dublin Embassy circle that the Government of Ireland is already well aware of the increasing disquiet with which it is viewed by many countries in Europe and around the west on account of what is perceived to be its hysterical conduct over the war in the Middle East. This diplomatic pushback is widely accepted to be the explanation for the new Government’s rapid, mildly amusing, and comprehensive climbdown on the Occupied Territories Bill, which has been sent away for a lengthy and extensive re-drafting process that is designed to ensure that it never sees the light of the legislative day – or that if it does, it will be meaningless in effect.
Readers who observe these things will also perhaps note the grovelling being done by the Irish Government towards the new Trump administration, which is so outrageously pro-Israeli that the American President wondered aloud yesterday whether it might not just make sense to deport the entire population of Gaza to the Egyptian desert, and call it a day. That administration has just appointed a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defence (Mssrs Rubio and Hegseth) who might well be the two most Pro-Israeli men on the planet not named Benjamin Netanyahu.
How does it look, then, to be the country where Israel shuttered its embassy due to anti-semitism? How does it look to follow that up weeks later with an event where actual Jews are thrown from a Holocaust memorial event to accommodate the whims of our pro-Iranian President? How does it look that on the very same day, Hamas and Hezbollah flags were parading through Dublin on Holocaust memorial day, without a word of public criticism from the Government?
We are told that Ireland is at grave economic risk from the Trump administration, which takes a dim view of this country on economic grounds already. We’re now adding to that the spectacle of being perceived as a country – whether we like it or not, or whether we accept it or not – with what could at its most charitable be called a tin ear about the sensitivities of Jews. On Holocaust Memorial day, no less.
As somebody once said in a movie, it’s a bold strategy, Cotton.
Let’s see if it works out for us.