It is very hard to overstate what a lucky country Ireland is in geographic political terms, at least in recent times, leaving aside the 800 years that preceded the past century. That is because Ireland, in the modern era, and unlike an awful lot of other countries on earth, is surrounded by diplomatically friendly, democratic, broadly liberal states, and has no obvious or plausible military enemies beyond her own island. This is a pure accident of geography: Being a relatively remote island on the edge of Europe makes us strategically irrelevant to the battles on the continent. Being an ocean away from North America renders us irrelevant to the enemies of the Americans. The Chinese likely barely know where we are, and so on.
This does not only make us different to the Israelis – it makes us different to a great preponderance of the other democratic nations on earth. Japan and South Korea, for example, live with the looming threats of China and North Korea. The Indians and Pakistanis live with, well, each other. The Americans almost brought the world to an end under Kennedy because, in part, they live next door to the Cuban regime. The British, in living memory, had to defend their own citizens in the Falkland Islands from invasion. Most of the eastern half of Europe lives in the shadow of the Russians. The Greeks and the Turks are openly hostile to each other, which is one reason why the Greeks have an air force of over 200 modern fighter jets, while Ireland lacks even one.
What’s my point? It’s this: In the very early hours of Sunday morning, footage circulated online of what is not confirmed as, but seems to be, an Iranian missile being intercepted outside the earth’s atmosphere by the Israeli Arrow-2 missile defence system, as you can see below.
Footage of an Israeli ABM (likely Arrow 2 or 3) achieving an exoatmospheric (space) kill on an Iranian ballistic missile somewhere east of Israel tonight. pic.twitter.com/jKihty4GR0
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) April 14, 2024
Israel has a population of about 9million, making it just a little larger than Ireland in terms of people, even as it remains substantially smaller in terms of land area. The two countries are broadly similar, however, in terms of social values, economy, popular culture, a shared history of oppression and having had to fight for our independence (from the British in both cases, as it happens), and indeed in many other areas. The biggest way in which they differ, I would argue, is that the Israelis have been forced to invent the technology to shoot down ballistic missiles outside of the earth’s atmosphere and the Irish have not.
This, in turn, impacts political culture and attitudes: There are few things that would be less popular for an Irish Government to do, domestically, than to significantly increase defence spending. That is because in the mind of the average Irish voter – understandably – defence is a folly and a vanity exercise. To the Israelis, by contrast, defence is a necessity: Without it, few Israelis doubt that they would be invaded and slaughtered wholesale within weeks, if not days. They know this because attempts to do it have been made on multiple occasions, even with their defences as comprehensive as they are.
This difference between the two countries extends beyond matters of defence to matters of diplomacy as well: One of the ways that the Irish establishment is most fond of flattering itself is to talk of Ireland as a kind of diplomatic superpower – that our influence and charm and commitment to peace is respected around the world. In contrast, many Irish people would scorn Israeli diplomacy, arguing that the Israelis are disliked, if not openly loathed, by much of the world.
Yet when is diplomacy tested? Over the weekend, it has been widely reported that both the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia came to Israel’s aid by supplying intelligence and, in Jordan’s case, actual firepower to intercept Iranian missiles bound for Israeli cities. Ireland has never, since independence, needed the diplomatic skills to convince two of its (until very recently) sworn enemies to defend it from an attack by a third sworn enemy. Ireland has never required the diplomatic skills to keep an American President onside in an election year while your defence of your country (as the Israelis see it) causes him political problems at home. Speaking objectively, what the Israelis are accomplishing diplomatically is much more impressive than what Ireland accomplishes, precisely because, as many people scorn, they are so loathed by so many.
None of that is to criticise Ireland: Our national security and national interests evidently rest on our diplomatic skills, and this country has been adept at mobilising friendly nations to support our interests, as Brexit showed. But there’s a difference between convincing the French to oppose a hard border near Dundalk, and convincing the Jordanian Air Force to take up arms against Iran.
It is this gulf in “lived experience”, to use a term the kids will understand, that largely explains the mutual despair that Ireland and Israel experience when they look at each other. To many Irish people, the Israelis are a harsh people who are too quick to reach for the sabre and not quick enough to sit down and talk it out with their neighbours. To many Israelis, the Irish are a coddled and foolish people who have absolutely no appreciation of the lengths to which Israelis must go simply to stay alive. There has never, in the history of Ireland, been an air raid siren over Mullingar, as one Israeli said to me not very long ago.
That is true. It is also true that many things outside of a country’s direct control influence its destiny: The aforementioned Saudis did not cause oil to spring from their desert sands. The Japanese did not cause the Korean Civil War, or choose to live next door to a country run by Kim Il Sung’s descendants. And we Irish did not physically tow our island into one of the safest places on earth, geopolitically speaking. We should be more grateful for that accident of history and geography than we probably are.