“What a despicable person, what twisted policy,” said Israeli foreign affairs minister Gideon Sa’ar yesterday evening, in reference to a speech by President Michael D Higgins at the Holocaust Memorial last Sunday night in Dublin. And with that pointed and highly undiplomatic personal criticism, arguably a new low has been reached in Irish-Israeli diplomatic relations.
The reaction to the President’s speech and the footage of Jews being forcibly ejected from a Holocaust memorial event was widely condemned here in Israel and unsurprisingly made national news. Two days later, the rift and war of words continues to drag on.
As an Irish-Israeli citizen living in Tel Aviv I do not doubt that for some – perhaps many – in Ireland, including plenty of people in politics and media, the President’s references to what he called the “attempted genocide” of the Holocaust and to the “rubble of Gaza” at the Holocaust Memorial event in the Mansion House were entirely appropriate, arguably even bold and brave.
Presumably the President thought so.
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Simon Harris, Tánaiste and Minister of Foreign Affairs, clearly does too. On Monday, Harris was quoted as saying the President “rightly mentioned the situation in the Middle East”. The dryness of even those words has also raised eyebrows here. Perhaps the President was emboldened to inject references to Gaza into his speech – despite prior pleas not to do so – by the flurry of articles in recent weeks praising his outspoken criticism of Israel.
But for Jewish and Israeli ears his words were not only profoundly inappropriate in that he deliberately politicised the memory of the Holocaust in a way that poisoned the event for some in attendance, but that he seemed to some to draw equivalence between the industrialised murder of six million Jews and the horror of the last 15 months of war in Gaza following the Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023.
There is genuine anger and revulsion in Israel at the politicisation of the event.
Yet I have spoken to close friends and family members in Ireland in the past few days who are equally perplexed that Israelis are so offended in light of what they see on their television screens night after night from Gaza for months on end. Those genuine differences of opinion speak to the chasm that separates many in Ireland and Israel.
It was not just the words of the President that offended; the sight of Jews being bundled out of at a Holocaust Memorial in Ireland event has also provoked outrage in Israel. Lior Tibet, a tutor in the school of history at UCD who teaches the Holocaust as part of courses on Nazi Germany and modern European History, who silently protested at his choice of words and who was forcibly removed from the event, was interviewed on the main evening Israeli news last night. The footage showing Tibet and others being dragged out was aired widely across Israeli television.
“I feel I have no right to protest ... they won’t allow our side of the story to protest in this country,” Tibet said, on Israel’s Channel 11 national broadcaster. She added: “The Irish media is ignoring us, for the past 15 months we are going through a very difficult period.”
Some day – relatively soon for an eight-year-old, living in Israel – I will need to explain the reality of the Holocaust and tell the story of Eva, their great-grandmother, and Yerahmiel, their great-grandfather
As an Irish person living in Israel it’s not uncommon for Israelis to ask me to justify this or that statement by Irish politicians. I try – most of the time- to provide context, and find myself invariably returning to the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children, have been killed by IDF military strikes since the beginning of the war. Of course, few Israelis in my experience will readily talk about this. Many, in fact, either dispute or quite simply refute the numbers that are widely accepted in the international media.
This week, I have been inundated with reactions from Israelis, some more printable than others. The words of Mark Sofer, who served as ambassador to Ireland from 1999-2002 sum up the tenor or tone of many: “The fact that Higgins chose to inject his rabidly anti-Israel prejudice at a non-political Holocaust memorial event shows a lack of moral fibre, frightening bigotry, unbridled obsession or all three together.”
Meanwhile, there is a widespread view in Israel that the Irish political establishment never fails to take advantage of an opportunity to criticise Israel or unintentionally offend Israelis. After 15 months of war the list of occasions for offence is now very long and seemingly ever growing, including Richard Boyd Barrett’s grotesque use of the word “filthy” to describe the Israeli state, or the bizarre “an innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned” choice of words of then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar to describe the release of nine-year-old Irish-Israeli citizen Emily Hand by Hamas after being held for 50 days in captivity in Gaza. President Higgins’s use of “attempted genocide” not once, but twice, at a Holocaust memorial event also left many in Israel flummoxed. It was perhaps a clumsy attempt to indirectly reference Gaza, but as one informed friend said to me, a poet chooses his words with great precision.
Perhaps what gets lost in all this diplomatic war of words, accusations and counteraccusations are the personal stories.
Watching the ceremonies on television from Auschwitz last night I was struck by the words of one commentator that soon there will be very few survivors to tell their story, and that the Holocaust is fading into history. This of course is undoubtedly true. But I couldn’t help but think while listening to those words that our two daughters, Ella and Mia, now just aged two and eight, have three great-grandparents who were imprisoned and survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
And that some day – relatively soon for an eight-year-old at least, living in Israel – I will need to explain the reality of the Holocaust and tell the story of Eva, their great-grandmother, and Yerahmiel, their great-grandfather.
Yerahmiel was born in Poland in a “Shtetl” – a religious Yiddish small town. Yerahmiel survived imprisonment in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. At the end of the war, he left for Israel. Eva was born in Hungary. She was also a survivor of Auschwitz, having previously been interned in one of Hungary’s ghetto camps. Eva’s mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers in 1945. Eva died in Tel Aviv in 2001. Yerahmiel died in 2016, just a few months before the birth of Ella.
Those who use an occasion like the Holocaust memorial event to make political points might do well to remember that the Holocaust continues to intimately touch not just our family, but the lives of millions of Israelis.
Paul Kearns is a freelance journalist from Dublin living and working in Tel Aviv
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