Published in the Jerusalem Post, 3 November 2025
On October 26 the people of
Ireland voted overwhelmingly for Catherine Connolly as their new
president. Receiving 63% of
first-preference votes, she broke a record in Irish presidential election
history and won a landslide victory.
Connolly, a left-wing politician
with a history of pro-Palestinian advocacy and anti-Israel invective, is one of
Europe’s most outspoken critics of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. She has labelled Israel “a terrorist state”, asserted
that “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza”, and has pledged to “stand in
solidarity with the Palestinian people as long as I have breath in my body”.
In speeches before her election she
condemned Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel as a war crime, but criticized the
Irish government and EU institutions for “standing idly by” and failing to
enforce the Genocide Convention against Israel. She called for sanctions.
Approving the recent recognition
of Palestinian statehood by a clutch of governments, she disagreed with those
who insisted that Hamas should be excluded from the future governance of
Gaza. She said it is “not for” foreign
leaders like UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to dictate who governs
Palestinians, maintaining that “Hamas is part of the fabric of the Palestinian
people”, having been “democratically elected”.
Her stance on Gaza, Hamas and
Israel featured prominently during her presidential campaign. It led, inevitably, to strong opposition from
Jewish and pro-Israel voices. Even some political allies distanced themselves
from her comments.
Those opposing her views clearly had only a minimal effect on the result of the election. What Connolly’s overwhelming victory clearly demonstrates is the overwhelmingly strong pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel current in Irish public opinion.
The Irish people
and their leaders have for decades seemed fixated on the idea that the situation in what was once Mandate Palestine is a sort of reiteration
of their own struggle for independence.
Most Irish politicians and commentators
on the subject seem blind to the historic and inextricable connection of the
Jewish people to the Holy Land, and the fact that on July 24, 1922 the Council
of the League of Nations voted unanimously in favor of establishing a national
home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Nor that on November 29, 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to divide
Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab.
Majority Irish opinion regards the
Palestinian Arabs as a Middle East version of themselves, struggling against ruthless
colonialist settlers – the English in their case, Israel as regards the
Palestinians. Their own unhappy history bolsters their myopic and misguided view
of the situation, devoid as it is of any sort of empathy with the centuries of
persecution suffered by the Jewish people, the consequent rise of Zionism, and
the UN-endorsed establishment of Israel after two thousand years of the Jewish
people’s stateless exile.
Ireland recognized the State of
Israel shortly after its creation in 1948, but was cautious in establishing
formal diplomatic relations. It was 1993 before it allowed Israel to open an
embassy in Dublin – the last EU member to do so.
On the other hand Ireland was the
first EU country to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) officially. It did so in 1980, ignoring the indisputable
fact that by then the PLO and its affiliates were deeply mired in sometimes
horrific acts of terror across the world including airline hijackings, hostage
killings and the Munich Olympics massacre. 1980 itself witnessed cross-border
attacks, bombings, and assaults on civilian targets in Israel and the occupied
territories.
This aspect of the situation may
have registered less of an impact in Ireland than it would have done elsewhere
because by 1980 terrorism had been a norm on the Irish political scene for some
twenty years.
Back in 1920, longstanding
religious, political, and cultural differences in Ireland between the Catholic
majority and the Protestant minority living mostly in its six north-eastern
counties had led to the Government of Ireland Act, which partitioned the
island into what was later to become an independent Republic, and Northern
Ireland which remained part of the UK.
Civil rights movements in Northern
Ireland in the 1960s sought equal rights for Catholics. They were met with a violent
backlash from Protestant groups loyal to Britain, and harsh policing by the
Protestant-dominated government. The old
Irish Republican Army (IRA) split apart, producing the Provisional IRA, which
adopted armed struggle as a means to defend Catholic communities and force
British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
There is documented connection
between the IRA together with its Provisional offshoot and Palestinian
terrorist organizations, particularly the PLO. The IRA and PLO established contact in the
late 1960s, with IRA members reportedly receiving training alongside
Palestinian militants in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The PLO provided the Irish militants with expertise
in guerrilla tactics, explosives, and urban terrorism strategies, later put to
use when the Provisional IRA spread its terrorist activities to mainland
Britain.
The Provisional IRA’s campaign of bombings, assassinations, and guerrilla warfare peaked during the 1970s and early 1980s. This was the height of “The Troubles,” as violence spread between republicans, loyalists, and British forces, leading to hundreds of deaths.
Sinn Fein, the political arm of
the IRA, active in both parts of Ireland, has for decades expressed support for
the Palestinian cause, and Irish-Palestinian solidarity is regularly invoked in
public discourse across Ireland. Nevertheless, as the conflict gradually
subsided in the 1990s due to exhaustion on all sides, the Sinn Fein party
dedicated itself to pursuing Irish unity through negotiation. Effective British counterterrorism and
declining public support for violence culminated, after many months of
painstaking negotiation, in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which established
power-sharing in Northern Ireland and effectively ended the armed campaign.
UK opinion formers often suggest
that this Republican-Loyalist détente should act as a template for resolving
the perennial Israel-Palestine dispute. The factor that differentiates them is
that neither side in Northern Ireland ever aimed to destroy the other’s people
and occupy its territory, as both Fatah and Hamas have historically sought with
regard to Israel.
If the Trump peace plan, which all
sides have nominally accepted, manages to bypass that obstacle, a pathway to a
permanent resolution of the dispute may yet emerge.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872442
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