Beyond the Flag: Is Irish Nationalism’s Obsession with Israel Actually Antisemitism?

What if the latest flag controversy – the decision by nationalists to fly the Palestinian flag over Belfast city hall – is not actually about Northern Ireland? What if it’s not even about Palestine? It is difficult to find any pro-Israel voices within Irish nationalism – North and South – but what if the flag incident in Belfast or the attempted removal of Chaim Herzog’s name from a park in Dublin are taken at face-value?

I suggest that viewing Irish nationalism’s obsession with Israel as a symptom of anti-unionism misses the possibility that it could actually be an underlying condition. More accurately, the symptom of Israelophobia has become the condition of antisemitism.

Nationalism and Israel

There is an argument that the Irish obsession with Israel was a product of competitive victimhood: Liam Kennedy’s Most Oppressed People Ever syndrome acted out in a way to minimize Jewish suffering. Another way of thinking about the fixation has been that it is a proxy for the old Green/Orange divide – Nationalism identifying with the subaltern Palestinian population and Unionism with the besieged Israeli state.

Increasingly, nationalists and leftists have used the language of postcoloniality to justify the fixation with the region. People Before Profit, for instance, tend to view Israel as a settler colony, a neo-imperial project that ultimately or fundamentally reflects capitalist political economy. Thus, Gerry Carroll, MLA, has been consistent in arguing that he is not antisemitic but anti-Zionist.

Since day one and before its inception, Israel has been backed by Western imperial powers. It continued the sorry trend of settler colonialism — a project that has caused devastation worldwide and that would collapse without the military and financial support that it has.

It is not antisemitic to oppose Israel, runs this argument because a state based on religion and ethnicity can seemingly only exist if it is based on ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

The SDLP, for its part, avoids Carroll’s Marxian-inflected rhetoric and views the situation as an ethical imperative. Matthew O’Toole, for instance, recently told the Assembly that ‘Israel’s genocide in Gaza … scarred the moral conscience of the entire planet’.

Perhaps it is this type of thinking that inspired the novelist Sally Rooney’s plea to the High Court last week. Her decision to donate to the proscribed group Palestine Action would possibly mean that she could not sell her books in the UK. It might also explain the resort to sentimentality by the SDLP’s Cara Hunter who decried how Israel’s war against Hamas has made it into ‘a state that has engaged in the relentless and wholesale destruction of Gaza and that has killed innocent women and children’.

Understandably, perhaps, Unionism has tended to interpret these incidents and arguments as virtue-signalling, political theatre, or simply manifestations of an anti-Unionist, anti-Union agenda. However, the Unionists’ arguments that flying the Palestinian flag represented an ‘overtly hostile’ message to the Jewish community were rejected by BCC’s solicitor.

What Doesn’t Follow

The assessment seems subjective and will be contested; but it accurately reflects the limitations of the nationalist position in that it is perfectly legitimate to support Palestinians and criticize the Israeli government, while avoiding the political implications. These are rarely mentioned because, most likely, they are too awful to articulate. They result in an in/direct antisemitism that has evacuated nationalism of any sense of purpose outside of constantly criticising Israel.

I would suggest that direct antisemitism involves the idea that nationality is somehow more legitimate than religion in defining statehood simply because it works to delegitimize the only Jewish state – as if it’s fine to have a French state for the French but not a Jewish state for Jews. This is isn’t just double-standards, it is a rhetorical strategy that evades problems of why nationalism and not religion or where the population of Israel would go. (And the one state solution doesn’t answer either.)

The threads of the anti-Israel stance begin to unravel once an explanation is sought as to how a genocide could occur when intentionality is missing – given Israel’s agreement to the Trump peace plan. Or what kind of genocide sees a population double (since 2005) and continue to grow (at 1% – Northern Ireland’s figure is 0.4%)? Or how is the IDF only ever killing ‘Palestinians’ (as O’Toole kept reporting to the Assembly) when fighting a war against Hamas terrorists?

Nationalist antipathy to Israel is a symptom of the inability or reluctance to follow these threads. As a result, nationalism has become pathological – the abnormality of supporting a group whose leader called for a ‘tsunami’ of ‘al-Aqsa floods’ (the Hamas codename for the 7 October 2023 massacres) has become the norm. The failure to think through the consequences for Jews for any of this isn’t a failure of thought – it’s a product of obsession.

Conclusion

Unionists aren’t necessarily wrong in saying nationalists are anti-Unionist (it’s their right after all) and the Middle East may still be a proxy for the old Orange/Green division. But that does not explain why not one nationalist voice has spoken up to as much as question the language of genocide and demonization. The univocality, the very lack of any kind of dissonance, isn’t politics – it’s fundamentalism.

Sartre remarked that a defining feature of antisemitism is that it’s about ‘more than a mere “opinion” about the Jews … it involves the entire personality’ and, as such, you cannot be an antisemite alone. Irish nationalism has worked its way into this corner and is now living with the consequences.