Ireland is taking a risk with its stance on Gaza, but someone has to

At the United Nations general assembly, countries are seated in alphabetical order, which means that Ireland usually finds itself stuck between Iran and Iraq on the one side and Israel on the other. It is not the worst place to be right now: holding open a space between competing fanaticisms.

In 1957, when Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez crisis, our minister for external affairs Liam Cosgrave made a speech at the UN calling on “the Jews and the Arabs to settle their differences according to Christian principles”. Conor Cruise O’Brien, who was then a senior Irish diplomat, told me years later that he had suggested to Cosgrave that this was not likely to go down very well with either the Jews or the Arabs. “No”, Cosgrave replied, “but it will go down very well in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown.”

Irish diplomacy, like that of every other country, can often play to the domestic gallery. A cynic might say that Ireland’s willingness to be much more critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza than our friends in the United States and in most of the European Union is domestic politics writ large. Our leaders know where Irish public sentiment lies and do not want to give the opposition parties exclusive access to it.

Yet there are good reasons not to be so cynical. Ireland is taking real risks by trying to stand up, not for Christian principles, but for universal ones. The language used by the Taoiseach when he said that Israel’s actions resemble something “approaching revenge”; by the Tánaiste when he calls those actions “disproportionate” and by the President when he calls the violence against civilians on both sides “horrific” is careful and responsible. But it carries a level of jeopardy.

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Those risks are well worth taking. When Irish foreign policy is decent it revolves around a simple idea: consistency. What that means is attempting, in a world of double standards, to insist on a single standard.

That may seem futile when, after Hamas’s murderous assault on Israelis, Russia, even while killing Ukrainian civilians on a daily basis without compunction or conscience, put forward a resolution at the UN that “firmly condemns all violence and hostilities against civilians”. Jesus, I am reliably informed, wept.

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The president of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said a year ago that “targetted attacks on civilian infrastructure with the clear aim to cut off men, women, children [from] water, electricity, and heating with the winter coming, these are acts of pure terror and we have to call it as such”. She was in no doubt that such attacks are war crimes. But only because she was talking about Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. When Israel announced that it was doing the same things to the population of Gaza, she was fully behind these “acts of pure terror”.

And no one could doubt that, if Gaza were part of Ukraine and Israel were Russia, the United States would be at the forefront of international outrage. The only consistency we get is the dreary persistence of shameless inconsistency.

It is all too easy to despair in the face of this cynicism. All moral statements, all declarations of compassion and indignation, become mere sound and fury, signifying nothing but the opportunism of the given moment. No atrocity is innately bad – it is monstrously evil when the people we don’t like are doing it, at worst a regrettable necessity when the people we do like are carrying it out.

Why, then, should a small country like Ireland, with much less influence on world events than we sometimes give ourselves credit for, bother to stick its neck out at all? Especially when doing so puts us at odds with the US and even leaves us relatively isolated within the EU? Would it not be better to stay silent or to hide behind blandly inoffensive cliches?

Perhaps. But even in parochial terms, we have our own very good reasons to fight against selective outrage. Our own island has been up to its neck in the toxic overflow of double standards about atrocities.

We had – and still have – plenty of people who judge an act of inhumanity according to whether they did it to us or we did it to them. In this woeful kind of whodunnit, the identity of the perpetrator determines the morality of the act. You calibrate the level of righteous anger – from zero to infinity – according to whether our side was giving or receiving the fatal blows.

Even if we did not have that grim local history to contend with, however, we know that Ireland simply can’t have an independent foreign policy if it merely echoes whatever the US or the EU wishes to say about any particular abuse of human rights. We would end up as nodding dogs in the back window of a Chevvy. We might as well abolish the Department of Foreign Affairs and simply employ a subeditor to put our own green gloss on statements from Washington or Brussels.

But if a small country does have an independent foreign policy, it is actually much safer for that policy to be consistent. There is, paradoxically, less pressure when your approach is predictable and constant. Sticking with the universality of human rights makes for difficult moments with friends and allies but it is, in the long term, easier than twisting in the wind.

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There will, sooner or later, be a reckoning with the current violence and those who condone or enable it. For the Biden administration in particular, it will not be possible to sustain opposition to Russia’s war on Ukrainian civilians while continuing to support Israel’s open-ended war on Palestinian civilians.

As these contradictions unravel, the US is going to need some safe ground to retreat to. The only possible ground from which a political process of peacemaking will be possible is that of international law and the equal sanctity of all innocent life, Jewish, Palestinian or merely human.

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