Israel closing their embassy in Dublin *Read OP for Mod Warning added 19/12/24*

And yet there's a forest, in Israel, planted by the Dublin Jewish community, named after Dev.

I'm not going to excuse Dev's signing of a book of condolences. And I personally hate that I have to defend the bastard at all. But trying to say he was antisemitic is stupid. If her had any reason for doing it, it was his hatred of the British.

There was never a book of condolences to sign

Good post and completely agree.

What's particularly ironic as well is that the portrayal of Ireland as an antisemitic country to explain its position on Palestine belies the reality that concens about Muslim migration and straight-up Islamophobia are far more prevalent and encountered multiples of times more commonly in discourse here. I'd certainly say that a Palestinian Muslim living in Ireland is far more likely to be hassled in some way on account of perceptions about their religion and motivations as a migrant / asylum seeker than a Jewish person. The problem of course is that the Israelis tend to set as low a bar as possible for antisemitism and any video of someone being heckled about a supportive stance for Israel would be doing the rounds as evidence of virulent antisemitism — when really in Ireland the opposition to Israeli actions is a political one for the vast majority , not a religious or racial one.

Was he never asked why he did it?, especially after the horrors of the Holocaust came to light. I mean he lived till 1975 did any politician, journalist, layman ever confront him?

Opposed to the Israeli government and armies ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or hostile to Jews because of their religion?

The UN figures tally. You've no grounds to accuse that poster of anti-semitism.

He definitely messed up. Whatever Dev's intentions, it was always likely to be misinterpreted by those hostile to him and to Ireland's neutrality during the war : he showed considerable naivety with the gesture.

But to spin this that Dev or his government or the Irish public were pro-Hitler or pro-Nazi Germany is an outrageous thing to be claiming.

He actually liked Jewish people and had several Jewish friends, including the Chief Rabbi. I wouldn't even be a fan of Dev's but he was no anti-Semite, far from it.

Not that I heard of, seems odd now but may have been seen back then for what it was back then, misguided and not representative of the person or of Ireland.

I don't believe it even came up when Develera visited Israel at the invitation of chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog back in 1950 (who himself was a supporter of Irish republicanism).

Here's the thing about Dev, as bad as giving his condolences about Hitler, it was far from the worst thing he did. He pretty much started a civil war (or at teh very least played a large part in it's creation).

And he got off scot free. I don't think he was ever held responsible for anything he did. I don't think he was even even confronted about most of it.

I agree with all of that except the reason why Israel reacted as it did. It's not about "hatred of Palestinians" - it's a belief, rightly or wrongly, that such attacks have the possibility to be a existential threat to them, and because of their own history and trauma, they are not prepared to take the risk of not fighting back. Non-Israelis can disagree with that, but that's how they see it, and that is not going to change. Maybe if the Irish had been the subject of repeated pogroms and an organised attempt to exterminate us, all within living memory, just about, we'd understand that better. But think how Irish people still feel about the famine, nearly 200 years later, and then multiply that by a factor which is knowing that it wasn't just "accidental" starvation, but deliberate extermination, and not just one country that was responsible, but that most of the world was ready to cooperate with that extermination.

The reason I say it's not hatred of Palestinians is that Israel gets on fine with several countries with whom they've even been at war in the past. They signed the Abraham Accords which normalised their relationship with UAE and Bahrain, and were on the point of signing similar agreements with various other Muslim states. They normalised their relationships with Jordan and Egypt years before that.

Israeli Arabs, who are the same Arabs as those living in the West Bank and in Gaza, live relatively normal lives as Israeli citizens despite there being some risk of terrorism from a number of them. They certainly have rights that no Christian Palestinian had in Gaza under Hamas.

So there's every reason to think that Israel would be prepared to live peacefully with Palestinians if they were convinced that they posed no significant risk to them, no more than, say, the average Israeli Arab does.

But they need to feel that they are safe from attacks, whether rockets from Lebanon, bomb and knife attacks from the West Bank, or kidnapping and murder from Gaza. And all the shouting Ireland does from the sidelines won't change that. Because it goes far deeper than "just" hatred of others. For Israelis, they feel it's about their survival.

South Africa holds the presidency of the G20 and has invited Ireland to be a guest at the G20 during that presidency.

https://g20.org/about-g20/invitees/

That begs the question: Is Ireland's intervention in South Africa's case at the ICJ really about the Palestinians?

You realise that almost every Israeli party is committed to maintaining the "majority" - ie ensuring a Jewish majority by not absorbing more Palestinians?

I've read some amount of blinkered shite here on Boards over the years but this has got to take the biscuit for something not an obvious troll.