Fintan O'Toole: Zionism is not racism, any more than Irish nationalism is sectarianism

According to Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, the Herbert Park Hotel in Dublin cancelled a booking for 70 delegates to last week’s international conference on combating anti-Semitism. The conference was held here as part of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Some of the delegates are Jewish, some are not – Ireland’s representative, Colm O’Loughlin, is a principal officer at the Department of Justice. According to Cohen, the hotel manager asked him whether the Israel Defense Forces would be involved. “Nothing I had said had anything whatsoever to do with the Israeli army, yet somehow that was where the conversation had gone.” The booking was subsequently cancelled without explanation.Whatever the intentions of the hotel (and one suspects that the cancellation was motivated more by a desire to avoid the possibility of protest than by any conscious prejudice), this should be just as upsetting to Irish people as the effective cancellation of Sally Rooney in the UK over her support for Palestine Action.READ MOREThe difference between virtue-signalling and standing on moral principle is that the latter has a price tag. It imposes obligations. In the case of Ireland’s official and popular stance against the Israeli regime, there is a double duty: we have to be completely consistent in opposing the dehumanisation of Palestinians – and we must be equally unfailing in opposing the demonisation of Jews. I know that for many readers this second claim may border on the insulting. Why, people may ask, should we have to prove that we are not anti-Semites just because we are horrified by the slaughter in Gaza and the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank? But there are, in turn, two good answers to this question. One is that the State has a duty of care to its small Jewish minority, a community that has every reason to be hypersensitive to signs of threat, of which there have been deplorably many. The other is that anti-Semitism is an ineradicable pathogen that lurks in the subsoil waiting for the right conditions in which to thrive. Those conditions exist right now.Suffering is not a zero-sum game. It does not diminish our consciousness of the Palestinian catastrophe if we recognise that Jewish people worldwide are having a terrible time. Most of the Jewish people I know have (to put it mildly) very complex relationships with Israel. But the conjunction of the Hamas pogroms, the appalling scale of the retaliatory violence and the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe has been heart-rending and head-wrecking for them. In this atmosphere, anti-Semitism is being trivialised in two contradictory ways. Binyamin Netanyahu’s regime belittles it by using it with unabashed cynicism as a moral shield: anyone who objects to the regime’s ultraviolence is an anti-Semite. But some people who take up the Palestinian cause minimise anti-Semitism, too.Ask a member of one of Australia’s indigenous nations how she feels about the Irish. It’s not overwhelming loveThey do so by parroting two stupid slogans. One is “by any means necessary” – a licence for atrocity that justifies the murder and kidnapping of Jewish civilians. Lurking within it is the ancient anti-Semitic trope: the Jews deserve it because they are collectively guilty. The other is “Zionism is a form of racism”. This is as historically illiterate as, for example, “Irish nationalism is a form of sectarianism”. There are many racist Zionists and many bigoted Irish nationalists. There are also Zionists who put their lives on the line to try to defend their Palestinian neighbours and there are Irish nationalists who believe passionately in a pluralist idea of nationhood.As Irish people, we have less excuse than most for not understanding that it is possible to be both a refugee and a colonist.The best study we have of Irish attitudes to Jewish people is one conducted in 2023 by Miceal Canavan, of Queen’s University Belfast, and Liam Kneafsey of Trinity College Dublin. It found little evidence of hostility to Jews. (Islamophobia is much more common.) But what it did find is that Irish people view the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of our own history: “Ireland’s sympathy for Palestine”, as the authors put it “is, at root, a story about Ireland.” But if that’s the case then we damn well ought to know that people fleeing persecution and discrimination build their sanctuaries on other people’s land. Have you ever asked a member of one of Australia’s indigenous nations how she feels about the Irish? I have – and it’s not overwhelming love.If Israel-Palestine is, for us, a story about Ireland, then it ought to be not a simplistic narrative of good and evil but a tragic tale in which Palestinians were made to salve Europe’s guilty conscience just as indigenous people in North America, Australia and Argentina paid for the British policies that made Ireland unlivable for so many of our own people. Jews didn’t just go to Israel because they liked the scenery – or because they fancied a bit of racism. Unthinking sloganeering obliterates the past that led to Israel’s creation. Can we blame Jewish people if some of them hear in it a call for future obliteration, too?The essential mechanism of racism is collective blame. Every bad act is attributed not to those who commit it but to all those whom they resemble. In the extreme polarisation of current politics, there is a danger that support for Palestine becomes a tribal signifier. It defines membership of “Us” and opposition to “Them”. The problem is there is a deep history in the West of “Them” being not Israel but the Jews. Not to be aware of that history is to be at risk, through ignorance and thoughtlessness, of repeating it.We should support Palestinians not because they are Palestinian, but because they are human beings whose humanity is being literally and metaphorically erased. We should oppose Israel’s government not because it is Jewish, but because it is systematically carrying through the logic of that dehumanisation. The antidote to this poison is not more poison. The worse the Israeli regime gets, the greater the urgency of standing unequivocally against anti-Semitism.