“IRELAND MAYBE BE ABOUT TO BUD LIGHT ITSELF:” Ireland has brought a diplomatic disaster on itself.
As everybody knows, the Irish Times is about as close as it gets to being the house journal of official Ireland, which makes this paragraph of its breaking news story this afternoon about the Israeli decision to close the Dublin Embassy particularly hilarious:
“To date, Israel has not applied similar measures to other countries, including Egypt, Spain, and Mexico, which also joined the petition accusing Israel of genocide..”
The subtext is obvious: The perfidious Israelis have unfairly singled out little old Ireland again. Why, we’ve been unfairly treated!
In reality, the reasons why Ireland would be treated differently to those three countries are obvious and self-evident to anybody with a working brain.
In the case of Egypt, the public hostility of the Egyptian dictatorship towards Israel is matched only by its private determination to work with the Israelis towards shared goals. Egypt is the only other country on earth to share a border with the Gaza Strip, and has assiduously kept that border sealed for years, including via the construction of a massive wall. Egypt might protest in public to keep the Arab street quiet, but throughout the current war it has persistently refused to allow its territory to be used as an escape valve by Hamas. It knows – though Ireland does not – that the people who run Gaza are as much a threat to Egypt as they are to Israel.
Then there’s Spain: Spain undoubtedly has a Government that is hostile to Israel. But that Government, the most left-wing since the civil war, is unpopular. It is likely to be replaced in time by a Government of the Spanish right, which will take a very different approach to relations with Israel. The Israelis are happy to wait out the natural course of democracy. In Ireland, by contrast, the hysterical hostility to Israel is so great that at a recent debate every single political party committed itself to sanctions on Israel. We might also mention here that Spain is larger and more geopolitically relevant.
And Mexico? Like Spain, it has just elected a radical leftist as President. But like Spain, there is a wide network of opinion in Mexico that is much more friendly to Jerusalem. There is value to a diplomatic outpost there, in the long term.
In Ireland, the Israelis have clearly decided that there is no value whatsoever to maintaining a diplomatic presence. Further, they have decided that there is value in publicly denouncing Ireland and severing diplomatic relations. These decisions are not emotional, but logical and a direct response to the policy choices of the Irish state. The Israelis know what too many people in Ireland appear to have been willfully blind to: That we have much more to lose from this than they do.
Found via William Jacobsen of the Legal Insurrection blog, who adds:
