Have you ever heard of Bethel Solomons, Louis Bookman, or Joseph Abrahams? No? Well, many Irish people seem to have never heard these names either, even though these three represented Ireland a long time ago.
I was reminded of these stories because in Ireland, in many circles, it has become fashionable again to act out anti-Semitism against Jews in this country and the state of Israel as a Jewish collective. For someone who has studied Irish history and walked through Cork following the traces of the Civil War upon arriving here, it is a slap in the face to see how little most people in this country know their own history.
When our national football team captain says „we know the difference between right and wrong,“ he reveals an ignorance that can only be described as idiocy—and a breathtaking hypocrisy. Nobody in Irish football called for boycotts or staged moral protests when playing against Qatar or Afghanistan, regimes where fundamental human rights are systematically crushed. But when it comes to the Jewish state, the moral outrage is suddenly weaponized. It buries the footprints that Zionism left in this country during its fight for independence.
But he isn’t the only one, and I must confess, I would be embarrassed to make a fool of myself in front of a wide international public. As a trained historian, Micheál Martin ought to know that the definition of genocide requires the specific intent to physically destroy a people. The demographic facts and the actual structure of chronic lifestyle diseases on the ground stand in stark contradiction to this claim. Anyone who dilutes the concept of genocide in this way is not practicing legal policy; they are stripping international law of its meaning. I enjoyed reading his book on Cork in 1918, but his current views are shaped by historical suppression. And that is the problem in this country: people are more interested in creating a warm-and-fuzzy feel-good history than in finally clearing up these myths.
There is no deep-rooted bond with the Palestinians. Palestine never existed as a state. The imperialists who brought the Levant under their control never referred to the Levant as Palestine—neither the Byzantines, nor the countless Islamic conquerors, and certainly not the Ottomans. Recent academic analysis of Ireland’s foreign policy discourse—such as studies published in SAGE Journals
—demonstrates how the Irish political establishment projects its own historical myths onto the Middle East. It is a self-referential performance designed for domestic consumption: a cheap moral currency used by Dublin’s political class to signal virtue while evading the uncomfortable realities of their own history and the systemic failures of their own state. The concept of „Palestinians“ has only existed since the 1960s, and Irish „support“ began in 1967, when the IRA trained alongside the PLO in terror camps and Sinn Féin, as the political wing of the IRA, discovered its affection for the PLO. As academic research from Dublin City University (such as John Doyle’s work on Irish Nationalism and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict) confirms, the alignment of Irish politics with the Middle East has long functioned as a mirror for domestic anxieties and posturing. It reduces a deeply complex regional reality to a simplistic badge of identity for local political consumption, while systematically ignoring the contradictory facts of Ireland’s own history. this country also didn’t care that the Stasi and the KGB abused Ireland as a gateway to wage their Cold War against the West.
The appetite of Irish intellectuals for romanticizing authoritarian regimes under the banner of anti-imperialism has a long genealogy. As Fergal Lenehan highlights in his analysis of Elizabeth Shaw’s East German memoirs (Back in the GDR), western expatriates could comfortably enjoy the status and privileges of East Berlin’s cultural elite while remaining willfully blind to the brutal realities of the SED police state. It is the same selective myopia that allows today’s political establishment to champion autocratic movements abroad while ignoring the totalitarian nature of their rule.
When Irish anti-Zionists talk about a deep solidarity with Palestine reaching back into history, these people don’t even know their own history—yet they want to lecture the world? Irishmen who joined the Allies to fight the Nazis were persecuted and ostracized by the Irish government. This moral „superiority“ was also displayed toward ‚A‘ Company under Pat Quinlan; they were mocked in this country as „Jadotsville Jacks“ by people who didn’t even have the guts to join UN missions as Irish soldiers themselves. People who failed to understand what Quinlan and his men accomplished just to hold a vital position.
Instead of acknowledging the truth, a monument stands in the middle of our capital city dedicated to a man who, in May 1940—while the Wehrmacht was rolling over France—was in Berlin colluding with the National Socialists. The fact that this statue is defended by republicans to this day and restored every time it is damaged shows just how willing people are to whitewash a pact with fascism, as long as the perpetrators belong to „their side.“
Irish citizens like Esther „Etti“ Steinberg Gluck, Wojteck Gluck, Leon Gluck, Isaac Shishi, Ephraim Saks, or Lena Saks don’t interest even our former President, who enjoys playing the moralist while unironically comparing Gaza to the Holocaust. Any self-respecting democracy would have removed such a person from office, but the Irish establishment celebrates this outrage because it has no clue about its own history—and doesn’t want to have any.
For decades, Ireland was a minion of the Vatican, implementing everything the Vatican told the Irish government line by line, without question. Following the contributions of Jews to this nation, the country blindly followed Catholic doctrine, refusing diplomatic recognition to Israel. Ireland only followed suit after Israel and the Vatican signed agreements on diplomatic relations. Nobody ever asked why both the Vatican State and the Republic of Ireland formally recognized Israel at that specific moment.
By the way, when it comes to Irish heroes who were murdered in German concentration camps, people prefer to stay quiet or look away. In the library at UCC, the book by Constantin Zureiq is readily available. Zureiq was an Arab nationalist at the American University of Beirut who laid out in that very book who was to blame for the Nakba. But our historians aren’t interested in that; they are more interested in feeding an anti-Zionist mob the fairy tale that Ireland has always been on the „right side of history“—even if they don’t give a damn about Sudan, the Congo, or any other tragic conflict.
Even on the rare occasions when Yemen enters the Irish activist consciousness, the narrative is instantly sanitized. As noted in coverage of Dublin demonstrations (Cassandra Voices), the focus is selectively narrowed to Saudi Arabia’s state intervention—primarily because it fits a familiar anti-Western template—while the brutal, anti-Semitic, and totalitarian reality of the Houthi regime is ignored. The suffering of civilians is never the primary concern; it is merely an instrument, weaponized only when it targets a pre-approved adversary.
This government has ruined the youth of this country because it never had the courage to teach them history comprehensively. Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.
I feel Irish! I feel more Irish than these hypocritical politicians. I have internalized Irish history, absorbed the history of this country with every fiber of my being, and I am furious about the hypocrisy running rampant here. People are working full-time and ending up homeless, while the Left shamelessly exploits their misery to give themselves a warm feeling of „doing something,“ all while supporting measures against the poor so as not to upset the establishment. I am furious at this country because people who don’t live in cities like Dublin, Cork, Limerick, or Galway are exploited for a centralized policy run by an elite—where deaths caused by a missing ambulance are simply dismissed as „regrettable.“
I suffered a stroke in CUH, and it was blamed on me because nobody in this country is willing to take responsibility. I nearly died in a irish hospital, and that is precisely the core problem in this country. No one is willing to take accountability.
Take responsibility for once, damn it, and stop hiding behind feel-good attitudes! You carry the responsibility for this country and its people!
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