Sawt Falasteen - Ireland support for Palestinians has country's Jews on edge

Ireland has been among the most outspoken critics of Israel's response to the October 7, 2023 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants that sparked the war in Gaza.

Polls since the start of the war have shown overwhelming pro-Palestinian sympathy in Ireland.

A survey in June by the news site The Journal found that 76 percent of Irish people believed the EU should impose economic trade sanctions on Israel over the conflict.

Protesters at rallies in Dublin told AFP they feel empathy with Palestinians due to Ireland's centuries-long history resisting British rule.

"Ireland has also suffered... repression," one marcher, 27-year-old Eoin Ross, told AFP shortly after the war began.

- Online abuse -

Although incidents of violence remain very low, "we've seen a lot of upsetting graffiti, things like 'kill Jews' or 'Zionists out of Ireland', and horrific anti-Semitism online," Ireland's chief rabbi Yoni Wieder told AFP.

Speaking at his Dublin synagogue, he said "at the rallies you'll also see people parading with Hamas and Hezbollah flags, but nothing is said about that".

Among Ireland's small community of about 3,000 Jews are families who laid down roots here as far back as the late 1800s.

Before October 7, "the amount of anti-Semitism was very, very low", said Maurice Cohen, who leads the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI).

"The community felt really, really safe."

But the fraught Irish-Israeli relationship in recent months has strained nerves.

In May, Dublin joined several other European countries in recognising Palestine as a "sovereign and independent state".

It then joined South Africa's International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza -- charges angrily denied by Israeli leaders.

In December, Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar ordered the closure of its Dublin embassy, blaming Ireland's "extreme anti-Israel policies".

Ireland is "pro-human rights and pro-international law," replied then-prime minister Simon Harris.

- 'Anti-Semitic tropes' -

The Hamas attack in October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP of official Israeli official figures. The militants also took 251 hostages.

Israel's retaliation aimed at eliminating Hamas has killed more than 48,000 people in Gaza.

After the October 7 attack, posters in Dublin sympathising with the Israeli hostages were quickly defaced.

Only one explicitly anti-Semitic incident in Ireland has been recorded since the war began -- a pub bouncer who made discriminatory remarks against a Jewish customer -- according to the Irish Network Against Racism (INAR) group.

But INAR head Shane O'Curry told AFP that "under-reporting" by the Jewish community is likely.

In a statement to AFP, the Irish government said it "condemns racism and anti-Semitism in all its forms".

But it acknowledged "concerns about rising instances of anti-Semitism here, with online anti-Semitism being a particular problem".

- 'Unseen, unheard' -

In an art gallery he runs in Dublin, Oliver Sears, a British-born son of a Polish Holocaust survivor, told AFP that political rhetoric should be urgently dialled down.

"It doesn't take much. Somehow, one attack historically leads to another," said the 58-year-old who moved from London to Ireland in 1986, later setting up a "Holocaust Awareness Ireland" advocacy group.

The Dublin embassy closure was also a psychological blow, Sears told AFP.

"I'm not Israeli, but always had a sense that if they have an embassy here it can't be that bad," he said. But now, many Jews in Ireland are "for the first time ever thinking about where to go, just in case".

Cohen refutes claims by some in Israel that Ireland is a world leader in anti-Semitism.

"There is a nuanced anti-Semitism rather, one that is not understood by Irish people: demonisation of Israel gets to our core," he said.

At an address by Irish President Michael Higgins at a Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration, several audience members turned their backs in protest when he mentioned Gaza.

One of them, Lior Tibet, a tutor at University College Dublin, was dragged from the venue.

"Being physically removed from a Holocaust memorial event was shocking for me as a Jewish person," she told AFP.

"In other countries you listen to a minority, but Ireland doesn't listen to us at all, we feel unheard and unseen," she added.

Q.Jaber--SF-PST