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Ireland is Europe’s Most Anti-Israeli Country
By HENRY SREBRNIK Several protesters walked out during Irish President Michael Higgins’s speech at the Holocaust Memorial Day event in Dublin on Jan. 26. Representatives of the Jewish community had asked him not to give the keynote address because, they asserted, critical comments he has made about Israeli actions in Gaza made him an “inappropriate” pick for the event.
They referred to his “grave insensitivity to Irish Jews,” but the president insisted he has always stood up against anti-Semitism.
This was no surprise, because the Republic of Ireland has become Europe’s most merciless critic of Israel. Archbishop Eamon Martin, Ireland’s most senior Catholic figure, in his 2025 New Year’s message also criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “merciless” and a “disproportionate” response to Hamas’s invasion of the Jewish state.
Two weeks before that, Israel had already announced it was closing its embassy in Dublin in response to the Irish government’s repeated anti-Israel statements, its indifference to rising anti-Semitism, a great deal of it coming from its parliamentarians, and in particular its decision, formalized on Jan. 7, to join South Africa in accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, explained the Dec. 15 decision, stating that Ireland had crossed “every red line” with its actions and rhetoric. He accused Ireland of “antisemitism based on the delegitimization and dehumanization of Israel.”
Israel’s ambassador to Ireland said closing the embassy was a “tough decision” for her country to take. Dana Erlich added that Ireland has taken “a more extreme stance than any other country” against Israel.
“This is an abuse of the international multilateral system by South Africa, we were sorry to see Ireland join it, but this joins an accumulation of steps, rhetoric and initiatives that we’ve seen Ireland trying to promote this past year,” she added. The Irish government said there were no plans to close its embassy in Israel.
Since Hamas’ attack on Israel, Ireland has emerged as one of the Jewish state’s fiercest critics and relations between the two countries have frayed. Its middle classes are among the most Israelophobic in all of Europe.
Posters of Israeli hostages are defaced in public spaces, while school textbooks disseminate narratives that demonize Israel and Judaism. Vehement opposition to Israel and Zionism has seen demonstrations in Dublin that include the flying of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine flags, with chants that hurl invective at all Jews.
Reports of targeted attacks against Jewish individuals, paired with the embassy closure, have left Jewish residents and visitors without the diplomatic support they need in an increasingly dangerous climate.
On the campus of University College Dublin, a sign read, “Zionist-Free Zone.” Trinity College Dublin was one of the first universities in the world to divest from Israeli companies and the campus is a veritable sea of keffiyehs. (Boycott as a concept and a tool of direct action has its roots in British-colonized Ireland.) The students’ union declared that Zionists were not welcome on campus. Jewish students were offered a safe room if they felt they were in danger.
Yet the republic’s rulers are in denial. “I utterly reject that Ireland is anti-Israel,” declared Prime Minister Simon Harris. We’re just “pro-peace, pro-human rights, and pro-international law,” he insisted.
Harris said his country would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he landed there, following the issuance of arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court.
Shortly after, Micheal Martin, the country’s minister of foreign affairs and defence, announced on Nov. 7 that Ireland would be backing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, in a reflection of the country’s long-standing position of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. His comment came on the same day that the Irish parliament passed a motion saying that “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza.” Three days later, the Anglican Church of Ireland’s Canon David Oxley claimed that Israelis saw Jews as a “master race” — a term usually associated with Nazi ideology.
But Maurice Cohen, Ireland’s Jewish Representative Council chairperson, said the Irish intervention in the ICJ case risks “oversimplifying a highly complex and tragic conflict, unfairly isolating Israel, and undermining the integrity of the term ‘genocide.’”
Relations between the two countries have long been complex. Ireland only extended de jure recognition of Israel in 1963 and established diplomatic relations in 1975. Until recently, Ireland had refused to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, unlike most European countries.
Sa’ar alluded to Ireland’s neutrality during World War II, when anti-British Irish nationalists cooperated against Britain with the Nazis. Indeed, on May 2, 1945, then-Prime Minister Eamon de Valera visited the Nazi ministry in Dublin and sent his condolences to the German people over Hitler’s death. A woefully poor decision, his gesture was nonetheless motivated by the overzealous need to demonstrate Ireland’s anti-British, pro-neutrality position.
The island was under English and then British rule for more than 800 years (and Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom). That “has undoubtedly shaped how people from Ireland engage with post-colonial conflicts,” asserted Jane Ohlmeyer, a history professor at Trinity College.
So clearly, some of the Irish hostility to Israel derives from the anti-British, anti-imperialist perspective of Irish history: the idea that the Palestinian experience at the hands of Israel is similar to that of the Irish with the British.
“Leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people. And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes,” former prime minister Leo Varadkar explained. “A story of displacement, of dispossession, national identity questioned or denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now, hunger.” Not surprisingly, Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, agreed, maintaining that Irish support comes from a history of shared experiences.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Eddward Island.
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In Elie Wiesel’s latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust. Those conversations are now an opera.
Back in 2012, while on assignment as the Chicago Tribune’s longtime music critic, I received a phone call from my editor that would change my life.
Elie Wiesel had just accepted the newspaper’s annual Literary Prize. Would I be interested in interviewing him for the paper?
Would I?!
There was only one minor problem: I had never read a word Wiesel had written, not even his revered Holocaust memoir Night. Holocaust education was not required in the 1950s and ’60s when I was growing up – not even in Skokie, a nexus of Holocaust survivors where I lived with my family. As the son of two survivors, I considered Holocaust books, films and TV programs emotionally overwhelming and something to be avoided, if possible.
My avoidance ended abruptly in 2001, when my then 69-year-old mother began re-experiencing her unspoken Holocaust childhood in the form of delusions. This prompted me to unearth her hidden story and tell it in a Tribune article and a subsequent book and a documentary for PBS – all aptly titled Prisoner of Her Past.
I assumed that work was the reason the Tribune tapped this music critic to interview Wiesel.
After a few weeks of reading everything he wrote that I could lay my hands on, I flew to New York and found myself seated inches away from him in his Manhattan office. Within minutes, we were speaking with a degree of comfort and intimacy I had not anticipated.
Even more remarkable, after Wiesel and I held a public conversation before 2,500-plus people in Chicago’s Symphony Center — a longstanding feature of the Tribune’s Literary Prize proceedings — he suggested that we stay in touch.
That’s when I realized we had the beginnings of a book: two generations — a survivor and a son of survivors — trying to come to terms with what happened to our families and to our people. For the next four years, I visited Wiesel regularly in New York and Florida and spoke with him often on the phone. The utterly unexpected privilege of these conversations ended suddenly with his death July 2, 2016, at age 87.
In effect, Wiesel had spent the last four years of his life communing with me about the Holocaust and its apparently never-ending after-effects, my tape recorder rolling all the while. These proved to be his final thoughts on the subject, which I took as precious lessons on a fraught subject. For Wiesel had given me answers to questions I never had been able to ask my parents. To them, the Holocaust was a subject not to be discussed with me or my sister, presumably to spare us the burden of such tragedy.
Wiesel poignantly addressed what I needed and wanted to know: How does the second generation deal with feelings of guilt over our parents’ unrelieved sufferings? How do we live up to our parents’ expectations of us, without suppressing our own dreams? How do we even speak of this terrifying subject? How religious must we be? How politically active? How do we cope with the enormity of it all?
And more.
I packed the answers – and our reflections on them – into my 2019 book The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel, which is the basis of the new opera: The Dialogue of Memories, which premieres next month in Seattle.
Why an opera?
Though I was glad to have captured on paper my treasured experiences with Wiesel, I wanted to share the wealth — to let others see and feel and hear what it was like to be in the room with him. I wanted audiences to witness Wiesel explaining and illuminating my own past to me. And like Wiesel, I’ve always believed in the indescribable but unstoppable power of music to go where words alone cannot.
In 2024, the Seattle-based non-profit Music of Remembrance commissioned composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer to write Before It All Goes Dark, an opera based on my Mac’s Journey stories in the Tribune about a Vietnam vet who learns he’s heir to a priceless collection of art looted by the Nazis (I had identified and located him).
After that opera’s success, I suggested to Music of Remembrance founder Mina Miller that my years with Wiesel represented a story of profound enlightenment that could be powerful onstage. Miller wasted no time commissioning the eminent American opera composer Tom Cipullo to write the music, with libretto by me with Cipullo.
The opera features three characters: Wiesel (sung by baritone Daniel Belcher); my mother, Sonia Reich (mezzo-soprano Megan Marino); and me (tenor Dominic Armstrong). Past and present, memory and prophesy, delusion and reality intermingle in its words. And Cipullo’s music lifts those words into the realm of sublime drama as only opera can do.
I don’t know how I’ll feel watching singers portraying Wiesel, my mother and myself confronting demons that have haunted all three of us, and millions of others around the world.
But as we mark Yom HaShoah, I do know that moments once shared by Wiesel and me alone now will be available to everyone. I hope that Wiesel’s brilliant insights and my mother’s tragic experiences will help others who — like me — have long struggled with dark and enduring histories.
The Dialogue of Memories plays May 17 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle; May 20 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco; and May 23-24 at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. For details and tickets visit www.musicofremembrance.org. Howard Reich can be reached at howard@howardreich.com.
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J Street says Israel should fund its own defense
J Street, the progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace political advocacy, is shifting its stance on defensive U.S. military aid to Israel as a growing number of Democrats, including some of the congressional candidates it endorsed this year, call for ending such assistance.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the organization’s longtime president, said in a lengthy post on Monday that the organization is now advocating for phasing out direct financial support for arms sales to Israel when the current $38 billion 10-year memorandum of understanding between the two countries expires in 2028. He called it “a fundamental reassessment of the U.S.-Israel security relationship,” citing “the war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran.”
Also stressing that “the US-Israel security relationship remains a central pillar of American policy in the Middle East,” Ben-Ami added that joint research and technological investment “should continue” and that the U.S. should continue to sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense capabilities to Israel. However, “all future Research and Development agreements with Israel must include genuine cost-sharing and aim to produce defense items that both countries plan to field.”
Ben-Ami’s post includes this statement, in boldface: “The goal of this reassessment is to advance the broader American interest of a more stable and prosperous Middle East that includes both Israelis and Palestinians living in security and freedom.”
U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011. J Street’s acceptance of the position for candidates appears aimed at navigating divisions among congressional Democrats as Democratic Party voter views swing against Israel and influential progressive figures in the congressional delegation, most conspicuously Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who previously backed missile-defense funding, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, join calls to end all military aid to Israel.
Other members and candidates in the party still back Iron Dome funding from the U.S. seek to condition offensive weapons sales on Israel’s compliance with human rights and international law.
Brad Lander, a Jewish challenger to Rep. Dan Goldman, said last week he would oppose any additional U.S. aid to Israel, arguing the country is in violation of human rights and international law.
Last week, Brad Lander, a Jewish Democrat running for Congress who has described himself as a liberal Zionist, on Friday joined the calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, while adding that “Israel should have access to purchase it with their own funds.” Lander, who has been “primary approved” to challenge Rep. Dan Goldman of New York — who is the official J Street pick in the race — told the Forward he did not coordinate his announcement with the group’s, which came after his.
Democrats are already taking legislative action. The Senate is expected to vote on Wednesday on two measures — filed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont Independent and longtime critic of U.S. aid to Israel — to restrict at least $660 million in weapons sales to Israel. A record 27 Senate Democrats — a majority of the caucus — supported a similar pair of resolutions to block weapons transfers. J Streets urged members to vote in favor. In the House, the Block the Bombs Act, which would restrict certain offensive arms sales to Israel, currently has 60 sponsors.
J Street’s red line
Ben-Ami maintained that J Street’s updated stance to end grants, known as the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, aligns with calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, to gradually “taper off” U.S. military aid to Israel over the next decade until it reaches zero. “This reform would normalize the relationship and place Israel in the same category as other capable allies that purchase U.S. defense equipment without subsidy,” Ben-Ami said.
Ilan Goldenberg, J Street’s senior vice president and chief policy officer and previously an aide to former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said the organization will still support the sale of Iron Dome components and other missile defense systems as long as it’s consistent with U.S. law and aligns with U.S. policy objectives and interests.
The strategy reflects a broader shift in politics, where Israel policy and Palestinian rights have become a litmus test for progressive candidates. Recent polls showed the tensions within the Democratic Party, which loomed large in the 2024 presidential election in the wake of the Gaza war — and now opposition to the war in Iran — are likely to shape the midterm elections.
J Street PAC is backing 133 House and Senate incumbents as well as Democratic challengers running against Republican incumbents. The group has also approved several candidates competing in open Democratic primaries, allowing its donor network to support their campaigns
Speaking with the Forward during J Street’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. last month, Ben-Ami outlined the organization’s red lines for endorsements. “If you’re in favor of a complete arms embargo against Israel, and you don’t recognize that Israel should be the national homeland of the Jewish people, you won’t come anywhere near our list,” Ben-Ami said.
A recent poll commissioned by the organization found that 70% of American Jews support placing some conditions on military assistance, including 26% who favor halting aid altogether.
The departure from the long-standing bipartisan consensus backing unconditional military support for Israel has drawn criticism from some Israel supporters.
Joel Rubin, a national security expert and a former Obama administration official who was the founding political and government affairs director at J Street in 2008, called it a “major shift” that “undermines” pro-Israel organizational support for the U.S.-Israel security assistance relationship and also “puts more pressure” on Democrats to oppose aid to Israel. “J Street is playing with fire regarding the US.-Israel relationship,” he said. “It’s much easier to tear down a relationship than it is to build one up.”
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Deni Avdija might not win Most Improved Player. But he can achieve something greater.
In any other year Deni Avdija, the NBA’s reigning Israeli superstar and its most talented Jewish player in at least half a century, might be a shoo-in for the league’s Most Improved Player award. The 6-foot-8 forward inflated his scoring average from 16.9 to 24.2 — good for 14th in the NBA — as he made his first All-Star team and guided the Portland Trail Blazers to their first winning season in five years.
But in spite of his team’s social media campaigning, this year’s award seems most likely headed to the Atlanta Hawks’ Nickeil Alexander-Walker, whose 20 points-per-game more than doubled last year’s average. Sportsbooks made Alexander-Walker an overwhelming favorite to win, and while I would debate the merits — Avdija also raised his assist numbers, had a bigger role on his team and made a more difficult leap — I can’t really argue the odds.
Anyway, with the regular season over, Deni is onto more important things — starting Tuesday night, when his Blazers take on the Phoenix Suns in the biggest game of his career to date. The winner of Tuesday’s Play-In (10 p.m. ET on Amazon Prime) advances to the one place Avdija’s never been in his six seasons: the NBA Playoffs.
At stake is more than just Avdija’s drought of 425 games without a playoff appearance — the fifth longest streak of any active player. It’s also the 10 years Israeli fans watched Avdija’s Jewish countryman Omri Casspi play without seeing him in the postseason. Casspi’s 588 games with seven different teams are the fourth-most without playing in the playoffs in NBA history (and the most of any player born after 1950). An ignominious record, indeed.
As Jewish Telegraphic Agency has noted, Israeli-born journeyman TJ Leaf, who is not Jewish, made the playoffs as recently as 2021. And others have pointed out that Casspi’s team made the playoffs in 2014, but he did not play. But Avdija himself seems to regard this as a possible breakthrough.
“First taste of the playoffs — I think ever for an Israeli player,” he said — last year, before the Blazers barely missed the Play-In.
If the Blazers do end the Jewish Israeli playoff curse, it will be thanks to Avdija, who’s answered every call for the franchise this season. In two critical late-season games against the Los Angeles Clippers — their rival for the 8th playoff seed — Avdija led all players in scoring both times, including 35 points April 10 as Portland grabbed hold of the 8-seed.
Avdija’s work will be difficult against Phoenix, which in Dillon Brooks employs one of the stingiest wing defenders in the Association. Avdija was one of the best in the league at drawing fouls — he was third in the NBA in free throw attempts — and the game may depend on how closely the referees officiate contact. As for prior experience, Avdija only played one full game against the Suns this year, scoring 19 points in a 17-point loss; Portland split the other two matchups.
Because they secured the 8-seed, the Blazers will have a second chance at making the playoffs even if they lose. The winner of Wednesday night’s Clippers-Golden State Warriors matchup will face the loser of Blazers-Suns. Two chances to win one, and make (Jewish) Israeli hoops history.
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