When does Ireland’s passionate support for Palestine spill over into anti-semitism?

I should begin this blog with a declaration of interest. My father was a Czech Jew, a political refugee who arrived in Ireland in 1948, and my mother was an Ulster Presbyterian. So I am not a typical Irish person, far from it, and I am not writing on this occasion as an objective observer. Having said that, I have regularly stood behind a ‘Grandfathers for Justice for Palestine’ banner, as part of the Grandfathers against Racism group, protesting US support for the genocidal Israeli war in Gaza outside the American embassy in Dublin, and on pro-Palestine demonstrations.

However I found the latest, much commented upon issue of Dublin city councillors trying to ‘dename’ a small park and memorial in the Rathgar area of the city named after Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised son of the chief rabbi of Ireland, and from 1983 to 1993 president of Israel, disturbing. The area is home to Ireland’s only Jewish primary and secondary schools (Stratford College), and many members of that small community in Dublin.

The city council’s cross-party commemorations committee had voted by nine votes to one to recommend to the council the removal of the Herzog name from the park. The only dissenting voice was the veteran, independent-minded Labour councillor Dermot Lacey. The name debate had begun in June, when a Sinn Fein councillor, Kourtney Kenny, submitted a motion to rename the park after a five year old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces last January along with six of her relatives.

The chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder, wrote: “To remove the name ‘Herzog’ from the park would be a shameful erasure of Irish-Jewish history and would send a painful message of isolation to a minority already experiencing rising hostilities.”¹

Both the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin and the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, called for the proposal to be withdrawn. Mr Martin called it “divisive and wrong” and said it would “erase the distinctive and rich contribution to Irish life of the Jewish communities over many decades, including actual participation in the Irish War of Independence and the emerging state.” He said the move was “a denial of our history and will without any doubt be seen as anti-Semitic.”²

In the event, the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, announced that he would be withdrawing the item from the council’s agenda for its meeting last week and referring it back to the commemorations committee because the correct legislative procedures had not been followed, with “administrative mis-steps” in those procedures. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ray McAdam of Fine Gael, said the council’s executive had “completely messed up” by allowing the item onto the agenda.

However the issue has not gone away, and it led to ructions at home and internationally, with Israeli and US politicians berating Dublin and Ireland for alleged anti-semitism. But was this really an example of Irish anti-semitism? Was it Ireland’s passionate support for Palestine and opposition to the Israeli government and army’s horrendous excesses in Gaza and the West Bank spilling over too far in that ugly direction? Former Tánaiste, Senator Michael McDowell, thought so. “Ireland has unfortunately a history of anti-Semitic subculture at social and, at one time, political levels,” he wrote in the Irish Times.³

He pointed, in particular, to Sinn Fein’s past record in this area. Mary Lou McDonald had delivered orations at the statue in Fairview Park to Sean Russell, who in 1940 travelled to Nazi Germany to seek help for the IRA in its campaign of violence in Britain and Northern Ireland. In the same year the IRA issued a statement hailing the Nazis as “friends and liberators of the Irish people” and the IRA publication, War News, welcomed the ‘cleansing fire’ of the Wehrmacht driving Jews from Europe.

However it wasn’t only the IRA. In 1946 the head of the Department of Justice, Thomas Coyne, issued a memorandum arguing against allowing 10 Jewish refugee families (around 40 people) into the country. He wrote: “Although the Jewish community in Ireland is only 3,907 persons, according to the 1946 census, there is a fairly strong anti-Semitic feeling throughout the country based, perhaps, on historical reasons, the fact that the Jews have remained a separate community within the community and have not permitted themselves to be assimilated, and that for their numbers they appear to have disproportionate wealth and influence.”⁴

Later that year, after chief rabbi Isaac Herzog – Chaim Herzog’s father – had interceded with him, the Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, allowed 100 orphaned Jewish children, survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to come to Ireland. However the Department of Justice continued to object, claiming that Jewish refugees “do not assimilate with our own people but remain a sort of colony of a worldwide Jewish community. This makes them a potential irritant in the body politic and has led to disastrous results from time to time in other countries.”

In 1978 Father Michael McGreil, in his landmark study Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland, concluded there was “a moderate degree of anti-Semitic prejudice in Dublin. The pattern of this prejudice is along classical lines, i.e. the negative monetary and religious myths are still believed by a significant percentage of Dublin adults.” Nearly 60% of those surveyed agreed that Jews were over-represented in the control of money matters. In a follow-up survey in 1996 McGreil found a relatively high level of prejudice towards Jews in more rural areas, with 20% of people regarding Jews as being responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.

In the past 30 years there has been little or no evidence of anti-Semitism in Ireland. But is it back in response to the genocide in Gaza? Certainly two Jewish school principals interviewed on RTE’s Liveline last week thought we were moving in that direction. Nathan Barrett of Stratford College felt that the proposal to dename Herzog Park, and anti-Semitic abuse more generally, had added to the Jewish community’s sense of vulnerability. “Students and young people feel they can’t express their identity when they leave the school,” he said. Simon Lewis, a thoughtful commentator on educational matters, recognised that Chaim Herzog was “part of the Zionist story of Israeli occupation.” However he went on: “The other side is it’s one of the very few places in Ireland that was named after someone who was Jewish. The action of removing a Jewish name is quite a big thing.”

This is dangerous territory. Removing Jewish names from signs, memorials and shopfronts was one of the things the Nazis did when they came to power in Germany. And as one friend put it, tongue only half in his cheek, why should we stop at Jewish names? What about all the English aristocratic oppressors whose names still adorn street signs all over Dublin?

The Irish left, with their fervent support for Palestine and antagonism to Zionism, may be particularly susceptible to the charge of anti-Semitism. There is a warning in how it infiltrated the British Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. When one looks at the Israeli government’s brutal apartheid-style repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and the monstrous racism of far right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich, with his belief that it is “just and moral” to starve two million Palestinians in Gaza, it is sometimes difficult not to sympathise with them.

There is a more Ireland-specific point here, of particular relevance as we move – as many of us hope – towards some kind of unity. It is about who is really Irish. Are Jewish-Irish people really Irish? James Joyce certainly thought so since he made the most famous Irishman in 20th century world literature, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, a Jewish Irishman. Can the new immigrant Irish – the Africans, Indians, Brazilians, Poles, Ukrainians and others who have come to live among us – be really Irish? The people waving tricolours in working class areas of Dublin clearly don’t think so. Are the 800,000 Northern Protestants, the great majority of whom don’t even want to be citizens of an Irish state, really Irish? Or do many people in this republic, despite all the huge social changes of the past 30 years, still believe that to be really Irish, you have to be culturally (not theologically) Catholic and Gaelic, and maybe republican and anti-British into the bargain?

¹ ‘Chief Rabbi: Move to erase Chaim Herzog’s name and history is cruel hammer blow’, Irish Times, 1 December

² ‘Proposal to dename Herzog Park ‘divisive and wrong’, Taoiseach says’, Irish Times, 1 December

³ ‘Dublin city councillors, cop yourselves on’, 3 December

⁴ Dermot Keogh, Jews in 20th Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Cork, 1998), p.222