As everybody knows, the Irish Times is about as close as it gets to being the house journal of official Ireland, which makes this paragraph of its breaking news story this afternoon about the Israeli decision to close the Dublin Embassy particularly hilarious:
“To date, Israel has not applied similar measures to other countries, including Egypt, Spain, and Mexico, which also joined the petition accusing Israel of genocide..”
The subtext is obvious: The perfidious Israelis have unfairly singled out little old Ireland again. Why, we’ve been unfairly treated!
In reality, the reasons why Ireland would be treated differently to those three countries are obvious and self-evident to anybody with a working brain.
In the case of Egypt, the public hostility of the Egyptian dictatorship towards Israel is matched only by its private determination to work with the Israelis towards shared goals. Egypt is the only other country on earth to share a border with the Gaza Strip, and has assiduously kept that border sealed for years, including via the construction of a massive wall. Egypt might protest in public to keep the Arab street quiet, but throughout the current war it has persistently refused to allow its territory to be used as an escape valve by Hamas. It knows – though Ireland does not – that the people who run Gaza are as much a threat to Egypt as they are to Israel.
Then there’s Spain: Spain undoubtedly has a Government that is hostile to Israel. But that Government, the most left-wing since the civil war, is unpopular. It is likely to be replaced in time by a Government of the Spanish right, which will take a very different approach to relations with Israel. The Israelis are happy to wait out the natural course of democracy. In Ireland, by contrast, the hysterical hostility to Israel is so great that at a recent debate every single political party committed itself to sanctions on Israel. We might also mention here that Spain is larger and more geopolitically relevant.
And Mexico? Like Spain, it has just elected a radical leftist as President. But like Spain, there is a wide network of opinion in Mexico that is much more friendly to Jerusalem. There is value to a diplomatic outpost there, in the long term.
In Ireland, the Israelis have clearly decided that there is no value whatsoever to maintaining a diplomatic presence. Further, they have decided that there is value in publicly denouncing Ireland and severing diplomatic relations. These decisions are not emotional, but logical and a direct response to the policy choices of the Irish state. The Israelis know what too many people in Ireland appear to have been willfully blind to: That we have much more to lose from this than they do.
First, an obvious statement: Not one single thing that the Irish Government has done since October 7th 2023 has impacted Israeli policy one way or another. Ireland has tried to use that thing we boast so much about – soft power, punching above our weight internationally – to apply diplomatic pressure to the Israelis to get them to stop their war on Hamas prematurely. Every single effort has been rebuffed.
You might recall, for example, a grandiose Government announcement that it was seeking to have EU trade with Israel reviewed. In this effort, it partnered with the aforementioned Spanish. How did that go? They were batted away by an EU establishment that largely regards Ireland as a land of kooks and wackos on the Israel issue.
Ireland’s policy has amounted to jumping up and down, waving its arms, and throwing a tantrum. We recognised a Palestinian state – though no Irish official can tell you who the legitimate Government of that state is – in the hope that this would send some sort of international signal. In truth, everybody ignored us.
We opened an embassy in Iran – a move that got very little attention at home but which drew international diplomatic scorn. When the USA and others defunded UNWRA – a UN agency widely proven to have worked hand in hand with Hamas – Ireland’s response was to send more aid. A piddling amount, but symbolically very clear. Then Michael D. Higgins sent his best wishes to the new Iranian President on his endeavours, shortly before the Iranians launched a missile attack on Israel.
How has Ireland’s “soft power” worked? The policies of the EU and the US towards Israel are unchanged. Donald Trump – a fanatical pro-Israeli – won the recent election. Ursula Von Der Leyen – a quietly determined pro-Israeli – was comfortably re-elected over Irish objection to another term in Brussels.
At home, repeated calls to expel the Israeli ambassador were resisted by the Government. Why?
They were resisted because the Irish Government knew full well that a formal break in diplomatic relations with Israel would send a signal to the US and the EU and Israel’s other powerful allies around the world that Ireland is a fundamentally unreasonable place that cannot be trusted to be an honest broker when it comes to the world’s only Jewish state.
The Taoiseach’s response this afternoon gives you some idea of the fear in Government buildings. Note that now, with the election over, he feels the need to assert that Ireland is not, in fact, “anti-Israeli”. But ask yourself, other than the Irish obsession with needing everyone to like us, why does he feel the need to deny what has been blatantly obvious for years? If we’re not anti-Israeli, then perhaps he could specify even one pro Israeli thing his Government has said or done:
Israel is a powerful country, with one of the world’s most advanced and capable militaries. It is one of the most important allies on earth for the United States, with deep intelligence sharing and technology sharing agreements that give the US an unparalleled advantage in the middle east. It has close ties with the EU, the UK, India, Australia, and even (though strained in recent years) Russia. It has a global diaspora with immense financial power, which is the foot of all those conspiracy theories about “the jews” that are so popular on the extreme left and right of the Irish internet. Though of course, our own Irish diaspora is apparently a source of strength for us, and there’s nothing conspiratorial about that.
The point here is this: Ask the Americans or the Indians or even most Europeans to choose between Ireland and Israel, and they’ll choose Israel every time. We have, for most of our existence, pretended that we can say or do what we like on the international stage because everybody loves us. The truth is that we’ve been able to be liked because we are irrelevant. Nobody has ever had to choose between Ireland and a powerful ally.
In our utter folly, we have now decided to put this country in a position internationally where people who are our natural friends have to take a side: Ireland, or Israel.
The Israelis know who’s going to come out on top there. That’s why they’ve closed the embassy.
We are governed by utter fools.
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