The Taoiseach took to the Dáil chamber yesterday to perform one of his signature headmaster-like moments of moral clarity. Not to be outflanked by Sinn Fein and the left wing opposition, he made the following statement: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Of course, one should not take Mr. Martin’s statements on Israel too literally. Last week, in not one but two official communications from his office, the Irish Government declared that 14,000 Gazan babies were about to die (“within 48 hours”) from malnutrition and starvation. This was a lie. It was in fact a lie at the time the statements were issued, because the United Nations, from whose official the claim had been sourced, had already withdrawn it.
In reality, it should not have been necessary to see the United Nations withdraw a claim that was absurd on its face. It was the kind of lie that, in order to believe, you needed to be pre-disposed to believing. Rational people simply do not believe things like 14,000 babies dying of starvation in 48 hours without strong supporting evidence. People who really want to believe the very worst of those they hate, believe that kind of thing.
It is not too strong a word to describe the official Irish attitude to Israel as hatred. That is what it is: An old, cold, burning hate. There is no wrong of which Israel is incapable, and no right with which it may be credited. If somebody somewhere claims that 14,000 babies are about to die, no fact-checking or caution is needed before the condemnations are issued, because the official Irish position is that the Israelis are monsters who, even if they do not starve the babies, probably desire their starvation. The facts are less important than the narrative.
In the matter of genocide, the facts are simple: Legally, the Irish Government is so convinced of the existence of a genocide that it is asking the International Criminal Court to expand the definition of a genocide to include Israel’s actions. That is our position as a sovereign state: If Israel is not guilty of a genocide, the precise legal meaning of the word must be changed in order to make them guilty of one.
The reality of course bears no relationship to Ireland’s hatred: It is a strange thing, you might agree, for Israel to be both deliberately perpetrating a genocide – that is, the eradication of the Palestinian people – and at the same time going to great lengths to feed them. Hours before the Taoiseach gave his speech, the Hamas Interior Ministry of the Gaza strip issued a statement urging Gazans not to accept food from the Israel “occupation” forces. Imagine a genocide in which the government of the starving people is telling them not to eat – and then imagine blaming those supplying the food. That’s where Ireland is at.
As Brendan O’Neill wrote yesterday in Spiked Online:
In these people’s eyes, everything Israel does is a crime. If it bombs Gaza, in pursuit of the Jew-hating militants that attacked it, that’s a war crime. But if it pleads with civilians to flee before it drops its bombs, that’s a war crime, too – the war crime of ‘forced displacement’. If it enforces a siege on Gaza, to try to suffocate Hamas’s army of anti-Semites, that’s ‘genocide’. Yet when it lifts the siege and brings in truckloads of necessities, that goes against ‘humanitarian principles’, too. That also ‘endangers lives’. If Israel takes lives, it’s a crime. If it tries to save lives, it’s a crime. If it cuts off deliveries, it’s a crime. If it lets deliveries in, it’s a crime. No one should be in any doubt now: Israelophobia is a libellous monstrosity underpinned less by an opposition to war than by a frothing, post-truth hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation.
Of course, this latest calumny against the Israelis was not issued on just any day. Yesterday was the 600th day since October 7th 2023 – the 600th consecutive day in which the Government of the Gaza strip has, contrary to every law of war and human rights, held Israeli civilians hostage. It is even holding the bodies of those hostages who died in its care, denying their families the right to bury their dead in return for some imagined concession. It was the 600th day since the Government of the Gaza strip – Hamas – started the current round of hostilities with the most brutal terrorist attack in living memory. An attack, we now know, thanks to documents released last week, designed to prevent rapprochement between Israel and other Arab states. This was a war started with the objective of torpedoing peace.
It is also a war in which the objective of the Government of Gaza has been to maximise the death of its own civilians. Yesterday, the Israeli Government confirmed that it had killed Muhammed Sinwar, the most senior leader of the Hamas Government. It did so by striking a hospital, albeit a hospital under which Sinwar was hiding in a tunnel. The laws of war are clear and unambiguous on this: Civilian targets like hospitals lose any protection from military action when they are turned into military bases. Sinwar had turned his own people’s health clinic into a military base, calculating that Israel would sooner let him live than take the bad PR of hitting the hospital.
A Government that deliberately places its own civilians between it, and the enemy, is evil. Not least because it is attempting to maximise the death of its own civilians for propaganda purposes.
None of that matters to the official Irish mind, which sees only Palestinian victims and Israeli oppressors, with absolutely no room whatsoever for nuance or reality if that nuance or reality threatens our hatred of Israel. This country, for years, pitched itself as a peacemaker in the Middle East – a country whose experience in solving its own intractable conflict might have lessons to teach the Palestinians and the Israelis. But what have we taught them?
First, we taught Hamas that the way to make progress was to kill Jews. For years, Palestinians demanded Irish recognition of a Palestinian state, and for years, we said no. Until, that is, Hamas crossed the Israeli border and raped, murdered, and shot. That action – that – was the catalyst for getting their “state” recognised by Ireland. Our diplomatic contribution has been to signal to the world that killing Israelis gets things done, at least in this country. It is contemptible.
Second, we have taught Hamas that putting their own civilians in harm’s way is a good way to wage war. Nothing brings the wrath of the world down on Israel more than a dead Palestinian child – so why would we be shocked when Hamas puts military installations in schools? The corpses of their children are their weapons, and Ireland encourages that every day, in every way.
Third, we have taught the world’s Jews that we are the least fair minded country on earth towards the only Jewish state in existence.
Just over 1,000 miles south of Gaza – a two hour flight – the war in Sudan rages on. Since October 2023, the death toll in Sudan is three times greater than the combined military and civilian death toll in Gaza. A famine doesn’t just loom, but has already taken hold. Eight and a half million people have been displaced. The murderers on each side of that conflict rape, maim, and kill at will. And the position of Ireland? Almost complete silence.
Consider Mr. Martin’s word: Relentless. “The focus must relentlessly be on Israel”. To the exclusion of all else, is what that means. Even the starving children of Sudan, or the bombed out civilians of Ukraine. Or the homeless in his own country.
This is not rational. It is a form of mania – one that can only be explained by the almost maniacal hatred this country has for the Israeli state. It has now been compounded by the Taoiseach’s third libel of Israel in a week.
I recognise that many of my readers, and many of our people, will be just fine with this. Some of my colleagues also will have different views. But a great many of us in Ireland are utterly disgusted and repulsed by it. Shame on you, Mr. Martin.
Shame.