On Monday, the Israeli government announced that it was making the “tough decision” to close its embassy in Ireland. Explaining the move, Israel’s ambassador to the country, Dana Erlich said Ireland has taken “a more extreme stance than any other country” against Israel. Ireland has recognized a Palestinian state and recently backed South Africa’s action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, asking the court to “broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state.” In other words, it is looking to redefine genocide itself in order to condemn Israel.
Where does all of this come from? The best explanation we’ve read comes from historian and Free Press contributor Simon Sebag Montefiore, in a story that originally ran in The Spectator in 1997. (You can see Simon talk about Jerusalem—the city and his excellent book of the same name—with Bari Weiss in New York next month; get your tickets before they sell out.)
Here, with a new prologue to his original article, he introduces a much-neglected episode of Irish history—and his own family story.
When I was young, my Irish aunt used to talk about a long-distant childhood trauma in Ireland. I never quite understood what she was talking about—but when she was happy, she had quite a strong Irish accent.
Much later, I started to research the story of my family: the escape of my great-grandparents and their children from Vilna, in what is now Lithuania and was then a province of Tsar Nicholas II’s Romanov Empire. From there, their short stay in Limerick, where they were attacked and forced to leave for England, and what it all meant.
Now, more than 25 years after I researched this history—which is also my own—the Irish government has become the most active and noisy critic of the Jewish state in the entire Western world. It is much more hostile than much of the Arab world itself.
