Ireland, the President and Government have all had to contend with the label of anti-Semitism recently.
The accusation has been made repeatedly as tensions between Dublin and Tel Aviv have grown sharply.
Last November, Ireland joined South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel, under the Genocide Convention, over the war in Gaza. Israel responded by closing its embassy in Dublin.
The Government has committed to implementing the Occupied Territories Bill – which would also ban trading with Israeli firms operating in occupied Palestinian territory – though it will be extensively revised under new legislation.
Even as the violence in Gaza abates and hostages are returned, the question of whether Ireland is hostile to Jewish people remains contentious.
This is despite Ireland’s adoption of the working definition of anti-Semitism as put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) last month.
When endorsing the definition, Michéal Martin, then tánaiste, said he was “deeply concerned” with the global rise in anti-Semitism and that the Government took the issue seriously.
Examples of anti-Semitism, the IHRA says, include applying ‘double standards’ to Israel “by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”. The threshold is also reached, it says, if Israeli policy is compared to the actions of the Nazis.
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland welcomed the Government’s endorsement of this definition – which is not legally binding.
“Criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic, but it can become so when it uses anti-Semitic tropes, applies double standards or denies Jewish self-determination,” says Maurice Cohen, who chairs the council.
“This is directly from the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to which the Irish Government has just endorsed. These double standards abound daily in the rhetoric from our TDs and Senators and elements of the media.
“While the consequences in Gaza are horrendous, we have totally lost sight of the fact that this war was started on October 7th by the organisation that rules there and of course that has consequences.
“No democratic or sane government would consider bringing these horrendous ramifications on its own citizens, which is surely the first obligation of any governing body.”
IHRA’s definition, first suggested in 2016, has many critics.
Organisations such as B’Tselem, which is Israel’s largest human rights group, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union have said that the definition can be used to shut down legitimate criticism of the Israeli government – and that more accurate definitions have since been devised.
More than 100 civil society organisations wrote to the United Nations in 2023 urging against its adoption, saying it was used to “wrongly label criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism, including in the US and Europe”.
Its advocates say the definition is merely guidance and does not apply in all circumstances.
Remarks by Michael D Higgins at the Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration in Dublin last month reignited claims from Israel that Ireland is becoming a hostile place for Jews.
While the bulk of his speech concentrated on the horrors of the Holocaust, it was his inclusion of a reference to the situation in Gaza that led to the Israeli backlash.
“The grief inflicted on families by the horrific acts of October 7th, and the response to it, is unimaginable,” the President said, “ ... the loss of civilian life, the majority women and children, their displacement, loss of homes, the necessary institutions for life itself. How can the world continue to look at the empty bowls of the starving?”
Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich, said Mr Higgins had consciously chosen to draw an analogy between the conflict in Gaza and the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. She said he had made no reference to any other terrible conflict.
The fallout from this garnered international media coverage.
But Aidan Regan, a professor of political economy, describes as “all smoke and mirrors” the claim that Ireland and its President are anti-Semitic.
“It is part of a smear campaign to shut down critique and criticism of Israel’s abhorrent violence in Gaza. They [the Israeli government] know Ireland is a soft power and they want to damage it. The worst thing the government can do is start caving in,” the University College Dublin academic says.
The attacks have unnerved some officials. This is a sensitive moment for Ireland as it attempts to build a relationship with the Trump administration.
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with strong advocates for Israel – including the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Mr Trump’s first White House invite to a foreign leader was extended to Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who arrived there this week for a visit.
Former Irish diplomats have spoken about the need for Ireland to stick to its principles and foreign policies despite the pressure to win favour with the new US president.
Deborah Lipstadt was United States special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism under Joe Biden’s administration. She travelled throughout Europe extensively over the past 18 months and says some comments by Irish officials about Israel and Gaza have “raised eyebrows”.
Lipstadt rejects the idea that opposition to Israeli policy is inherently anti-Semitic – pointing out that this would make hundreds of thousands of Israelis anti-Semites. She says the “national sport” in Israel is not football but kicking the government.
But she is highly critical of the speech given by Mr Higgins.
“When you are giving a speech on Holocaust remembrance day in front of people who may have direct family members who were affected by the Holocaust – a community which lost one out of every three of its members in the course of the Holocaust – it’s highly insensitive, if not, inappropriate, to reference Gaza,” she says.
“That’s not to suggest that there have not been terrible tragedies in the war, but it suggests that there is an equivalency between the Holocaust and the tragedies in Gaza. And there’s not.”
Lipstadt is unsure, however, whether mention of Gaza constitutes actual anti-Semitism.
“If it is not anti-Semitism, it comes pretty close to it. It suggests there is a parity between the two – what we call Holocaust inversion. There have been many conflicts since the second World War, but they are not all genocides.
“The best one can say about it is that it was highly inappropriate and insensitive. It was also unnecessary: you have people with an open wound and you are throwing salt in that wound with vim and vigour”.
Mr Higgins’s spokesman said the President had been a lifelong opponent of anti-Semitism – as evidenced in his 50-year career as a public representative – and said he had drawn no equivalence between the Holocaust and other atrocities.
Instead, Mr Higgins had said that the Holocaust stood alone as a “horrific nadir of human thought and action”.
“In his address, the President reflected on this appalling atrocity of the Holocaust – the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish people – and how such dehumanisation came to be so prevalent, institutionally facilitated, indeed how it faced such little resistance,” the spokesman said.
He drew attention to the parts of the President’s speech which highlighted how Holocaust Memorial Day presented an important opportunity to ensure the message it taught must never be lost with the passage of time.
I don’t think that anti-Semitism is widespread in Ireland, but there has been a noticeable rise in incidents of hatred towards Jewish people
— Ireland’s chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder
When it comes to measuring anti-Semitic views in different countries, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League provides its own global ranking.
That places Ireland firmly in the middle ground of Europe – along with the likes of Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Italy – and at the lower end of that group of countries when it comes to harbouring “elevated levels of anti-Semitic attitudes”.
The organisation says it believes that anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic and that it “will not tolerate anti-Semitism dressed up as a foreign-policy critique even when it comes from people – Jewish or not – who claim to be our allies”.
The views from within Ireland’s Jewish community are nuanced.
“I don’t think that anti-Semitism is widespread in Ireland,” Ireland’s chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder, says. “Generations of Jewish families have thrived here and have contributed so much to so many parts of Irish society.
“But at the same time, there has been a noticeable rise in incidents of hatred towards Jewish people in Ireland since October 7th.
“This does not mean that anti-Semitism has become a day-to-day issue for all Jews in Ireland. It hasn’t. But it means there are pressing concerns that need to be dealt with.”
He says those concerns have been “ignored” to date.
“If Ireland is an outlier on anti-Semitism, it is for the lack of it rather than an exceptional amount,” says Jacob Woolf, a Dublin Jewish man who supports an independent Palestinian state.
“This is reflected in our relative lack of historic discrimination and violence towards Jewish people,” he says.
“This does not mean anti-Semitism doesn’t exist or have a history here, but to the extent it does today it is spreading in Ireland primarily through online anti-Semitic propaganda created in America and Europe – the exact same way it’s gaining popularity elsewhere.”
While the current ceasefire in Gaza provides for some political respite, challenges for the new Government could yet re-emerge.
Trump’s support for a plan to “clean-out” the Palestinian enclave, for example.
When asked about this recently, Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Harris noted that the ceasefire agreement talked about Palestinians returning to their home and there had to be “consistency” in the approach taken.
How this is conveyed to Trump come the St Patrick’s Day events in Washington DC next month will be closely watched.
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