The massacre of Jews on Bondi Beach was the tragic, yet inevitable, result of rising Jew hatred throughout the western world, including in Ireland. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, Yoni Weider, spoke of the festering anti-Semitism targeted at Ireland’s Jewish community, as the Taoiseach Micheál Martin and senior ministers fell over themselves to proclaim support for Irish Jews. Their support in the wake of the Bondi Beach atrocity rings somewhat hollow. For two years, they effectively acted as spectators as, week after week, protesters took over Dublin’s streets expressing support for the Intifada.
This hatred has spilled over into acts of violence and abuse against Ireland’s Jews, as a yet unpublished report shows.
Just imagine the public outrage if a minority community, just over 2,300 strong, experienced 128 hate incidents in just six months. The howls of racism and moral fury emanating from parliament, dutifully reflected in wall-to-wall coverage by TV and print media, would dominate the national discourse for weeks. Tragically, we don’t need to imagine such hatred – and yet, will any of that moral outrage come to pass?
A report on anti-Semitism in Ireland conducted by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI), which will land on Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s desk sometime in the new year. Whenever he gets around to reading it, Martin should not be too surprised at the findings. The Taoiseach and other members of his government have been told repeatedly by the JRCI that Irish Jews are facing a rising tide of hate.
The preliminary results, shared with The Spectator, are grim: of the 128 incidents, 77 were recorded within the past six months, with a further 51 within a 12-week period from mid-July to October. The number of anti-Semitic incidents, relative to the size of Ireland’s Jewish community, far exceeds the 1,521 reported by the Guardian during a similar period in the UK, home to 300,000 Jewish people.
Ireland does not have a perceived anti-Semitism problem; it has an anti-Semitism problem
The JRCI report documents incidents of threats and intimidation, verbal abuse, vandalism, physical assault, exclusion, and discrimination across a wide range of settings – schools, universities, workplaces, hospitals, and public spaces. The testimonies make distressing reading. To quote a sample:
My child was chased around the classroom by boys chanting ‘from the river to the sea’. He’s now afraid to say he’s Jewish.
A nurse told my father she ‘hated Israel’ while caring for him after surgery – he was afraid to say he had a Jewish daughter.
One parent described how their children stopped getting birthday invitations after people ‘found out we were Jewish’. Another claimed that a boy in their son’s class ‘did a Nazi salute in my son’s face’. The report also recounts how ‘F*** Israel’ was ‘repeatedly’ spray-painted on the garden gate of a home belonging to a Jewish family, ‘causing fear and distress to the household’. In another incident, an eyewitness described a mental health practitioner who ‘openly said they would exclude all Jewish clients’.
Ireland does not have a perceived anti-Semitism problem; it has an anti-Semitism problem, according to this report. ‘For the first time in generations, Irish Jews are saying aloud that their homeland may no longer feel like home. We find ourselves being lectured on what anti-Semitism is, as though our own history, memory and lived experience were somehow unreliable,’ said JRCI chair, Maurice Cohen:
No other small community would be told how to feel, nor informed that its fears are imagined to slur the county. We are Irish and want nothing that harms this nation. But the first step is recognising the problem. Ireland appears to have adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism for appearance rather than action. Until it is embedded in classroom, institutions, and the public sector it remains a line in a press release rather than a tool that protects Jewish people from rising hate.
Inevitably, when the JRCI report is officially published, there will be chatter and cries of ‘we must do something’. But 12 months after the government finally endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, they have done almost nothing to ensure it is understood or applied. On the contrary, the incessant demonisation and dehumanisation of the Israeli state by government and opposition, the blanket coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict to the exclusion of all others, has fostered an environment where Jews are seen by some as fair game. When a government turns a blind eye to anti-Semitism it invites terror.
To be clear, criticism of Israel or the Israeli government is not anti-Semitic – which is the implication with which one Irish politician chose to preface this remark: ‘The crimes of Israel did not start on 7 October 2023,’ as if it were the Jewish State, not Hamas, which carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Not ‘anti-Semitic’ – just utter garbage passing as political discourse. But it’s this sort of tripe trotted out over the past two years that is lapped up by the bottom feeders, the keffiyeh-clad morons who feel sufficiently emboldened to wave Hamas flags on the street and target Irish jews.
The shameful attempt to rename Herzog Park, a tiny patch of green adjacent to Ireland’s only Jewish school in the middle of a Jewish community, to ‘Free Palestine Park’ is not merely symbolic. It is a deliberate replacement of Jewish identity with the politically-charged message that their contribution can be erased at the instigation of a handful of so-called ‘anti-Zionists’. The language is carefully couched in criticism of Chaim Herzog, the Irishman who became the sixth president of Israel, but the message to a vulnerable community is unmistakable.
During parliamentary hearings into the contentious Occupied Territories Bill aimed at banning trade with Israeli settlements, Maurice Cohen was called on to provide testimony. He recalled a friend – whose grandfather was the only Jew killed in 1916 fighting alongside Irish republicans – telling him, ‘I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know I am just a Jew living in Ireland.’
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