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Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan
(JTA) — Israel’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be a blowout birthday party for its supporters, but that was before the country was convulsed by street protests over the right-wing government’s proposal to overhaul its judiciary. Critics call it an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy, and supporters of Israel found themselves conflicted. In synagogues across North America, rabbis found themselves giving “yes, but” sermons: Yes, Israel’s existence is a miracle, but its democracy is fragile and in danger.
One of those sermons was given a week ago Saturday by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressing his “dismay” over the government’s actions. Hirsch is the former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, and the founder of a new organization, Amplify Israel, meant to promote Zionism among Reform Jews. He is often quoted as an example of a mainstream non-Orthodox rabbi who not only criticizes anti-Zionism on the far left but who insists that his liberal colleagues are not doing enough to defend the Jewish state from its critics.
Many on the Jewish left, meanwhile, say Jewish establishment figures, even liberals like Hirsch, have been too reluctant to call out Israel on, for example, its treatment of the Palestinians — thereby enabling the country’s extremists.
In March, however, he warned that the “Israeli government is tearing Israeli society apart and bringing world Jewry along for the dangerous ride.” That is uncharacteristically strong language from a rabbi whose forthcoming book, “The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History,” includes a number of essays on the limits of criticizing Israel. When does such criticism give “comfort to left-wing hatred of Israel,” as he writes in his book, and when does failure to criticize Israel appear to condone extremism?
Although the book includes essays on God, Torah, history and antisemitism, in a recent interview we focused on the Israel-Diaspora divide, the role of Israel in the lives of Diaspora Jews and why the synagogue remains the “central Jewish institution.”
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You gave a sermon earlier this month about the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, which is usually a time of celebration in American synagogues, but you also said you were “dismayed” by the “political extremism” and “religious fundamentalism” of the current government. Was that difficult as a pulpit rabbi?
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The approach is more difficult now with the election of the new government than it has been in all the years of the past. Because we can’t sanitize supremacism, elitism, extremism, fundamentalism, and we’re not going to. Israel is in what’s probably the most serious domestic crisis in the 75-year history of the state. And what happens in Israel affects American Jewry directly. It’s Israeli citizens who elect their representatives, but that’s not the end of the discussion neither for Israelis or for American Jews. At the insistence of both parties, both parties say the relationship is fundamental and critical and it not only entitles but requires Israelis and world Jews to be involved in each other’s affairs.
For American Jewry, in its relationship with Israel, our broadest objective is to sustain that relationship, deepen that relationship, and encourage people to be involved in the affairs in Israel and to go to Israel, spend time in Israel and so forth, and that’s a difficult thing to do and at the same time be critical.
American Jews have been demonstrating here in solidarity with the Israelis who have been protesting the recent judicial overhaul proposals in Israel. Is that a place for liberal American Jews to make their voices heard on what happens in Israel?
I would like to believe that if I were living in Israel, I would be at every single one of those demonstrations on Saturday night, but I don’t participate in demonstrations here because the context of our world and how we operate is different from in Israel when an Israeli citizen goes out and marches on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It’s presumed that they’re Zionists and they’re speaking to their own government. I’m not critical of other people who reach a different perspective in the United States, but for me, our context is different. Even if we say the identical words in Tel Aviv or on West 68th Street, they’re perceived in a different way and they operate in a different context.
What then is the appropriate way for American Jews to express themselves if they are critical of an action by the Israeli government?
My strongest guidance is don’t disengage, don’t turn your back, double down, be more supportive of those who support your worldview and are fighting for it in Israel. Polls seem to suggest that the large majority of Israelis are opposed to these reforms being proposed. Double down on those who are supportive of our worldview.
You lament in your book that the connections to Israel are weakening among world Jewry, especially among Jewish liberals.
The liberal part of the Jewish world is where I am and where the people I serve are by and large, and where at least 80% of American Jewry resides. It’s a difficult process because we’re operating here in a context of weakening relationship: a rapidly increasing emphasis on universal values, what we sometimes call tikkun olam [social justice], and not as a reflection of Jewish particularism, but often at the expense of Jewish particularism.
There is a counter-argument, however, which you describe in your book: “some left-wing Jewish activists contend that alienation from Israel, especially among the younger generations, is a result of the failures of the American Jewish establishment” — that is, by not doing more to express their concerns about the dangers of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for example, the establishment alienated young liberal Jews. You’re skeptical of that argument. Tell me why.
Fundamentally I believe that identification with Israel is a reflection of identity. If you have a strong Jewish identity, the tendency is to have a strong connection with the state of Israel and to believe that the Jewish state is an important component of your Jewish identity. I think that surveys bear that out. No doubt the Palestinian question will have an impact on the relationship between American Jews in Israel as long as it’s not resolved, it will be an outstanding irritant because it raises moral dilemmas that should disturb every thinking and caring Jew. And I’ve been active in trying to oppose ultra-Orthodox coercion in Israel. But fundamentally, while these certainly are components putting pressure on the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, in particular among the elites of the American Jewish leadership, for the majority of American Jews, the relationship with Israel is a reflection of their relationship with Judaism. And if that relationship is weak and weakening, as day follows night, the relationship with Israel will weaken as well.
But what about the criticism that has come from, let’s say, deep within the tent? I am thinking of the American rabbinical students who in 2021 issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the “violent suppression of human rights.” They were certainly engaged Jews, and they might say that they were warning the establishment about the kinds of right-wing tendencies in Israel that you and others in the establishment are criticizing now.
Almost every time I speak about Israel and those who are critical of Israel, I hold that the concept of criticism is central to Jewish tradition. Judaism unfolds through an ongoing process of disputation, disagreement, argumentation, and debate. I’m a pluralist, both politically as well as intellectually.
In response to your question, I would say two things. First of all, I distinguish between those who are Zionist, pro-Israel, active Jews with a strong Jewish identity who criticize this or that policy of the Israeli government, and between those who are anti-Zionists, because anti-Zionism asserts that the Jewish people has no right to a Jewish state, at least in that part of the world. And that inevitably leads to anti-Jewish feelings and very often to antisemitism.
When it came to the students, I didn’t respond at all because I was a student once too, and there are views that I hold today that I didn’t hold when I was a student. Their original article was published in the Forward, if I’m not mistaken, and it generated some debate in all the liberal seminaries. I didn’t respond at all until it became a huge, multi-thousand word piece in The New York Times. Once it left the internal Jewish scene, it seemed to me that I had an obligation to respond. Not that I believe that they’re anti-Zionist — I do not. I didn’t put them in the BDS camp [of those who support the boycott of Israel]. I just simply criticized them.
Hundreds of Jews protest the proposed Israeli court reform outside the Israeli consulate in New York City on Feb. 21, 2023. (Gili Getz)
You signed a letter with other rabbis noting that the students’ petition came during Israel’s war with Hamas that May, writing that “those who aspire to be future leaders of the Jewish people must possess and model empathy for their brothers and sisters in Israel, especially when they are attacked by a terrorist organization whose stated goal is to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State.”
My main point was that the essence of the Jewish condition is that all Jews feel responsible one for the another — Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. And that relationship starts with emotions. It starts with a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people, and a feeling of concern for our people who are attacked in the Jewish state. My criticism was based, in the middle of a war, on expressing compassion, support for our people who are under indiscriminate and terrorist assault. I uphold that and even especially in retrospect two years later, why anyone would consider that to be offensive in any way is still beyond me.
You were executive director of ARZA, the Reform Zionist organization, and you write in your book that Israel “is the primary source of our people’s collective energy — the engine for the recreation and restoration of the national home and the national spirit of the Jewish people.” A number of your essays put Israel at the center of the present-day Jewish story. You are a rabbi in New York City. So what’s the role or function of the Diaspora?
Our existence in the Diaspora needs no justification. For practically all of the last 2,000 years, Jewish life has existed in the Diaspora. It’s only for the last 75 years and if you count the beginning of the Zionist movement, the last 125 years or so that Jews have begun en masse to live in the land of Israel. Much of the values of what we call now Judaism was developed in the Diaspora. Moreover, the American Jewish community is the strongest, most influential, most glorious of all the Jewish Diasporas in Jewish history.
And yet, the only place in the Jewish world where the Jewish community is growing is in Israel. More Jewish children now live in Israel than all the other places in the world combined. The central value that powers the sustainability, viability and continuity of the Jewish people is peoplehood. It’s not the values that have sustained the Jewish people in the Diaspora and over the last 2,000 years, which was Torah or God, what we would call religion. I’m a rabbi. I believe in the centrality of God, Torah and religion to sustain Jewish identity. But in the 21st century, Israel is the most eloquent concept of the value of Jewish peoplehood. And therefore, I do not believe that there is enough energy, enough power, enough sustainability in the classical concept of Judaism to sustain continuity in the Diaspora. The concept of Jewish peoplehood is the most powerful way that we can sustain Jewish continuity in the 21st century.
But doesn’t that negate the importance of American Jewry?
In my view, it augments the sustainability of American Jewry. If American Jews disengage from Israel, and from the concept of Jewish peoplehood, and also don’t consider religion to be at the center of their existence, then what’s left? Now there’s a lot of activity, for example, on tikkun olam, which is a part of Jewish tradition. But tikkun olam in Judaism always was a blend between Jewish particularism and universalism — concern for humanity at large but rooted in the concept of Jewish peoplehood. But very often now, tikkun olam in the Diaspora is practiced not as a part of the concept of Jewish particularism but, as I said before, at the expense of Jewish particularism. That will not be enough to sustain Jewish communities going into the 21st century.
I want to ask about the health of the American synagogue as an institution. Considering your concern about the waning centrality of Torah and God in people’s lives — especially among the non-Orthodox — do you feel optimistic about it as an institution? Does it have to change?
I’ve believed since the beginning of my career that there’s no substitute in the Diaspora for the synagogue as the central Jewish institution. We harm ourselves when we underemphasize the central role of the synagogue. Any issue that is being done by one of the hundreds of Jewish agencies that we’ve created rests on our ability as a community to produce Jews into the next generation. And what are those institutions that produce that are most responsible for the production of Jewish continuity? Synagogues, day schools and summer camps, and of the three synagogues are by far the most important for the following reasons: First, we’re the only institution that defines ourselves as and whose purpose is what we call cradle to grave. Second, for most American Jews, if they end up in any institution at all it will be a synagogue. Far fewer American Jews will receive a day school education and or go to Jewish summer camps. That should have ramifications across the board for American Jewish policy, including how we budget Jewish institutions. We should be focusing many, many more resources on these three institutions, and at the core of that is the institution of the synagogue.
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Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother.
Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: “If you come home with sidelocks, I’ll understand.”
It was a joke, and a very Jewish one. Gershkovich grew up in a secular family of Soviet émigrés, where being Jewish had more to do with family history and dark humor than with religious practice. His mother was ribbing him that a few weeks of kosher prison food might send him home looking like a yeshiva boy.
Sitting across from the investigator building his espionage case, Gershkovich grinned. His mother, he realized, still had her sense of humor, and that was exactly what he needed.
The kosher food wasn’t a joke. That night, with Passover days away, a local rabbi sent him stacks of matzo.
The scene appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, his 16 months behind bars and his release in the most elaborate U.S.-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War. The book was published Tuesday.
Most of the coverage is about the prison. But Jewish history runs through the book from its first pages. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested during Stalin’s purges and vanished. His mother was laughed out of a journalism school application once the clerk saw her passport. And when he moved to Moscow as a young reporter, a Russian coworker needled him with an old stereotype about Jews and money.
The family that left
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey in 1991, two months before the Soviet Union fell apart. His parents had come over in 1979. Thousands of Soviet Jews were leaving at the time, helped by a U.S. law that linked trade with Moscow to whether its citizens were allowed to emigrate.
His mother flew out of Leningrad with her mother and ended up in Detroit. His father’s family came from Odessa and settled in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood people call Little Odessa. In those years, his father later joked, Soviet Jews who ran into each other on the street skipped the hellos and just asked where the other was going.
For his father’s side, the decision was easy. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and never seen again. His grandfather Mark spent years moving from city to city, afraid of being targeted next, and later dreaded the day his own son would be drafted into the Soviet army.
A Jew on paper
Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, was born in 1957, a few years after the “doctors’ plot,” a Stalin-era campaign that accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. One of the doctors caught up in it had been a neighbor in her family’s communal apartment.
Her father had wanted to name her Etya, after his late sister. Worried that an obviously Jewish name would draw attention, her mother pushed for Ella instead. It didn’t matter. The family name Milman gave her away, and Soviet passports listed each citizen’s ethnicity. Hers said “Jew.”
Ella dreamed of becoming a writer. When she applied to the journalism department at Leningrad State University, the woman taking her application glanced at her passport and laughed. She studied shipbuilding instead, listened to the Rolling Stones, and heard rumors that the Kremlin planned to deport Jews to Birobidzhan, a remote Soviet region near the Chinese border that had apparently been set up as a Jewish homeland.
When she finally emigrated to America at 22, she sewed a pair of gold earrings from her late father into her skirt’s waistband to get them past customs. Once the plane took off, she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.
A generation later, her son became the journalist she wasn’t allowed to be, and then a prisoner of the state that had turned her away.
Ella and her husand settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister spent Saturday mornings with a Russian tutor, and holidays meant trips to the Russian groceries and Uzbek grills of Brighton Beach. Gershkovich came to think of himself as Jewish-Russian-American. Russia’s war in Ukraine later forced him to ask why that label had never included Ukraine, given that his father’s family came from Odessa.
The empty chair
In 2017, Gershkovich moved to Moscow to report for The Moscow Times. On one of his first days, he asked a colleague when staff got paid. She laughed and told him his Odessan roots were showing, a jab about Jews and money that served as his introduction to Russian workplace culture.
On a later trip to Odessa, he visited a Jewish museum that displayed a 1953 Soviet propaganda article from the doctors’ plot era. It claimed that the Joint, the New York-based Jewish relief organization, was a front for American intelligence. Gershkovich recalls thinking that Moscow was getting paranoid again, while hoping things hadn’t gotten that bad. A few years later, Russia accused him of spying for the United States.
Gershkovich’s arrest came a week before Passover. That spring, many American Jews left an empty seat for him at their Seders, and activists later sent him letters for Rosh Hashanah. Both gestures deliberately echoed the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the same campaign that had helped free his parents. Natan Sharansky, the most famous Soviet Jewish dissident, who was himself released in a 1986 prisoner swap, advocated publicly for his release.
In July 2024, two weeks after a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a maximum-security prison, he was freed in a prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey. Jewish groups celebrated, and the Orthodox Union posted the traditional blessing thanking God for freeing captives.
His great-grandfather was taken in 1937 and never came home. Eighty-seven years later, his great-grandson did.
The post Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus appeared first on The Forward.
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More Michigan Jews sign a petition pressuring El-Sayed on Israel. Will it matter?
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – The activists on the Zoom supporting Abdul El-Sayed knew they faced an uphill climb when it came to persuading their fellow Jewish Democrats to overcome their concerns about the Michigan Senate candidate and vote for their party’s nominee despite his strong disapproval of Israel.
Two progressive Jews, former Biden administration appointee Sam Bagenstos and Detroit Jews for Justice co-founder Hayley Sakwa, made the Jewish case for the candidate to a sometimes skeptical, sometimes combative crowd of around 30 people on Sunday night.
Sakwa and Bagenstos urged voters to prioritize the chance to put a check on the larger Trump agenda – including heavy immigration crackdowns and the rightward tilt of the federal judiciary – given that the Michigan seat could help determine who controls the legislative chamber.
But their appeal wasn’t enough for several of the people on the call, who less than two days later would sign on to the “Nonnegotiables” petition. Spearheaded by a group of Michigan Jewish clergy, the open letter calls for El-Sayed to moderate his views on Israel and affirm more vocal support for Jews in politics as a condition for earning their votes.
The 17 new names to the petition, shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of their release on Tuesday morning, include state Rep. Noah Arbit, the founder of the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus.
Arbit recently gave a speech denouncing antisemitism on the floor of the Michigan House and has been critical of El-Sayed publicly: After progressive Jews recently hosted the candidate for a Rosh Hashanah dinner at their house, the representative accused them of “tokenism.” (Arbit declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.)
Other new names on the list include an elected University of Michigan regent and prominent local attorney, as well as several board members of the Jewish Democratic caucus, which itself is not endorsing a candidate in the race.
Concerns raised on the Sunday night Zoom call included El-Sayed’s opposition to Iron Dome funding for Israel and his earlier campaigning with anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker, whom he has since distanced himself from. Some said they were worried he could open a door to a more hostile Democratic Party for Jews.
“With Abdul it sort of feels like letting a fox into the henhouse,” one said.
“I refuse to be anyone’s dhimmi,” another wrote in the chat, referring to a term for non-Muslims living under Islamic rule.
Yet any pressure Jewish Democratic critics of El-Sayed hope to place on the candidate are partly balanced out by the work of those such as Sakwa, who along with other Jewish liberals has to date secured 900 signatures pledging to vote for El-Sayed. A competing letter of Jewish voters pledging to back his Republican challenger, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, has picked up 524.
At the same time, the broader Democratic Party has ramped up its efforts to get elected officials in line behind the nominee. The El-Sayed campaign has yet to respond publicly to the “Nonnegotiables,” and with little more than a month to go before Election Day, it might not need to.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with El-Sayed last week in Detroit, and the liberal-leaning editorial board of the Detroit Free Press, the state’s largest daily newspaper, endorsed the former county health director over the weekend.
The Free Press wrote that its own endorsement was against an “extremist” — referring to Rogers and President Donald Trump — in language that one bloc of Jewish voters also used to refer to their own decision to vote for Rogers over El-Sayed.
In addition, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has fiercely criticized El-Sayed for his past comments about Jews and Israel, endorsed and appeared with the candidate on a local liberal podcast hosted by a Jewish woman to project unity.
“There is no choice,” Nessel said.
But the conversation demonstrated that tensions still remain even with many Jewish Democrats who have thrown in their lot with El-Sayed.
“Is there space for a Jewish Zionist like myself?” she asked him. “Is there space for us in the big tent of the Democratic Party?”
“I believe in a big tent,” he answered. “I am committed to having a tent where we march in lock step on the 95% of issues that we agree on.”
But the attorney general, who cited the risk of antisemitic threats as the reason she skipped the party convention earlier this year, wasn’t done.
“The question many of us have is: Are you seeking our votes?” Nessel asked El-Sayed. “Do they matter to you?”
“Yes,” the candidate responded. “If you trust that I’ll lead well for the community, even if there’s an issue on which we deeply disagree, then I hope I can earn your vote.” Later, El-Sayed said, “I look forward to working” on the Jewish American Security Act, a bipartisan bill to institute new Jewish security measures, including in synagogues and on college campuses.
“We’ve had an uptick in antisemitism, and it is critical to protect Jewish Americans,” El-Sayed said.
As with Nessel, El-Sayed’s candidacy is pushing other Jewish Democrats to perform a difficult two-step: pushing for the party platform and against Trump, without getting too close to the candidate himself.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, whose CEO, Halie Soifer, is a Michigan native, is also not endorsing in the race. Yet Soifer told JTA, “Jewish voters will support Democrats in large numbers in the midterms, including in Michigan.” She predicted that Rogers wouldn’t earn more than one-quarter of the Jewish vote.
“Jewish voters recognize that a vote for any Republican in 2026 is a vote for Donald Trump,” Soifer told JTA over text. “We know Jewish voters are a critical component of a winning Democratic coalition.”
Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus, pointed to consistently high Democratic voting records for Jews in arguing that Jews still matter to the party’s coalition. She also favorably noted the Democratic National Committee’s recent announcement that it would establish a “Jewish American Council,” to convene in 2027.
“We can’t be distilled down to one vote or one idea,” Alexander told JTA.
One part of the state’s Jewish Democratic bloc unlikely to support El-Sayed: members of Temple Israel, the country’s largest Reform congregation. Speaking to the national publication The Free Press last week, several members, including a preschool teacher who was in the building when it was attacked in March, said El-Sayed’s apology for his earlier remarks about the temple was insufficient and that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him.
“No thinking Jew could vote for Abdul El-Sayed,” a former temple president told The Free Press.
None of the synagogue’s clergy signed the “Nonnegotiables” letter, or any other Jewish letter circulating about El-Sayed. But one of the temple’s rabbis told congregants in a Kol Nidre sermon that they had a say in drafting it, stating, “Our full participation in American political life is also non-negotiable.”
“No one should have to pass a test about Israel to be welcomed into a coalition on a campus or in a political party,” Rabbi Josh Bennett told his congregation, which had convened in the Temple Israel building for the High Holidays for the first time since the March attack. Rabbi Jen Lader, also of Temple Israel, recently testified before Congress to advocate for the Jewish American Security Act.
As Rogers has looked to win over dissatisfied Jews to his campaign, he has also moved toward El-Sayed on at least one issue tangentially related to Israel: opposition to the war in Iran. Initially a supporter of the war, Rogers in recent days has said he thinks it should “end quickly.”
El-Sayed, meanwhile, has raised eyebrows of his own in recent days. He dithered on denouncing the Iranian regime when urged to by an Iranian Christian college student, and appeared at a Dearborn fundraiser with Osama Siblani, a local Arab-American activist and newspaper publisher who once stated at a rally, “We are not going to be intimidated by staying silent when they say Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
The “Nonnegotiables” petition was launched earlier this month by a group of more than a dozen Michigan Jewish clergy after a series of apologies by El-Sayed to Jewish audiences for past comments he had made about the Temple Israel attack. The candidate needs to do more to earn the community’s confidence, the campaign’s organizers have told JTA.
“A large number of Jews haven’t decided how they will vote,” David Kramer, the caucus’s vice chair and one of the new signers, told JTA about the letter’s potential influence. “I speak to these people every day. Regardless of how they vote, Michigan Jews want and deserve to feel safe and have a seat at the table.”
As the Zoom call wrapped, some of the assembled Jews said they would vote for El-Sayed, even if reluctantly. Alexander of the state’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, who signed the letter supporting him, told the crowd the candidate has nothing to hide, even if they don’t like what he says.
“He’s basically stated what he believes,” she said. “And you have to decide if that’s the word for you.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post More Michigan Jews sign a petition pressuring El-Sayed on Israel. Will it matter? appeared first on The Forward.
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Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win
(JTA) — It only took 25 minutes of play for the Irish national soccer team to build a 3-0 lead over Israel in the countries’ UEFA Nations League B match on Sunday. But there were decades of bad blood that preceded Ireland’s shutout victory in a game dominated more by the geopolitics of the Gaza war than about sports. One soccer writer described it as “arguably one of the most contentious football matches of this century.”
At the match, held in a mostly empty stadium in the neutral site of Debrecen, Hungary, the Irish players wore black armbands and bowed their heads in protest during the Israeli national anthem. There were no pre- or postgame handshakes, and one Irish player declined to participate altogether, citing his “personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong.”
Ireland’s soccer federation did not reserve tickets for its fans, and the country’s public broadcaster scaled back its coverage of the game. The teams are set to meet again on Oct. 4 in Serbia, this time with Ireland as the “home” team.
Ireland and Israel have a long history of icy relations. Ireland became the first member of the European Union to call for an independent Palestinian country in 1980, and was among the first of the Western European countries to recognize an official Palestinian state in 2024. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin in response. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has rejected claims that his country’s sharp criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
In the months leading up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football governing body faced intense pressure to boycott the match. At a meeting in July, the Football Association of Ireland voted 75-32, with three abstentions, in favor of proceeding with the match, “while acknowledging the strength of feeling regarding support for Palestine.” The motion also noted that a boycott would come with UEFA sanctions, both financial and competitive: In League B matches, mid-tier nations seek to advance to the top division and boost their chances of qualifying for the quadrennial World Cup tournament. The Irish team itself also held a last-minute vote over whether to participate.
Earlier this month, more than 160 Irish athletes and sports figures signed an open letter calling on the national team to pull out of the match. The signatories included former Irish national team head coach Brian Kerr — who had led Ireland to a 2-2 draw against Israel in a 2005 match in Dublin that also took place amid protests.
Former Irish national team star Kevin Kilbane also authored a column in The Irish Times, writing, “Ireland should not play Israel. Not in Dublin, not in Hungary, not in Serbia. Not when Israel is committing genocide.” Israel denies the charge of genocide.
There were also a number of public barbs exchanged between leaders of the two countries and their football associations.
At a press conference last week, Irish coach Heimir Hallgrímsson replied to questions about the match by saying, “We are not playing with genocide, we are playing against genocide. We are playing against Israel; we are not playing with Israel.”
Israel’s football association responded to that comment with a post on X, writing, “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by the @IrelandFootball team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity. We’re playing against the coach who embodies them.”
That drew a rebuke from Martin, who told reporters, “They are unacceptable remarks and should be withdrawn.”
And on Sunday, the morning of the match, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted a lengthy tweet referencing the 1939 Irish squad that gave a Nazi salute before a game against the German national team.
“Almost 90 years have passed. Ireland’s unique talent for finding itself on the wrong side of history remains intact,” Sa’ar wrote. “Back then, they gave the Nazi salute. This time, they stand on the side of Palestinian terrorism. Above the black armbands the Irish players will wear tonight flies the black flag of jihadism.”
After the match, Israeli captain Manor Solomon said the Irish players who bowed their heads during the Israeli anthem “don’t interest me.”
“We have a country 10 times better than theirs, stronger, an amazing country with amazing people,” said Solomon, who plays in the English Championship league. “We are proud to wear the team shirt and to be Israelis. We are proud of our state and of our soldiers. [The Irish] can play all their tricks. We are Israelis and love the country. And that will always be the case.”
The post Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win appeared first on The Forward.
