[Salon] Fwd: Haaretz: "When Israelis Find Out I'm From Ireland, They Ask: 'Why Do You Hate Us?" (5/9/24.)

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-05-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-israelis-find-out-im-from-ireland-they-ask-why-do-you-hate-us/0000018f-5cf6-d0ec-a9cf-deff36c10000

When Israelis Find Out I'm From Ireland, They Ask: 'Why Do You Hate Us?' -

Paul James Kearns May 9, 2024

In recent months there has been no shortage of news stories, some more newsworthy than others, some frankly quite bizarre, on the deteriorating, often publicly antagonistic relationship between Ireland and Israel.

Just last month Ireland announced that it would intervene in South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and seek to widen the definition of genocide to include blocking humanitarian aid.

As a journalist working in Israel writing for the Irish media, the increasingly combative relationship has provided multiple sources for "storylines" of direct interest to an Irish audience, whether its Ireland's increasingly vocal criticism of Israel's war on Gaza, or the widespread ridicule in Israel and the UK of Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadakar, when he welcomed the release of 9-year Emily Hand, after 50 days of being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, as having been "lost" and then "found". It's as if she "went missing during a stroll in a forest, then gets discovered by a friendly hiker" the Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy caustically responded at the time.

There is a widespread perception in Israel, that Ireland takes a strongly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has been doing so for decades. Certainly, Ireland has in recent years taken a very public stand against Israel. In 2019, the Irish parliament voted in favor of a bill to ban the purchase of goods and services from Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.

In November about 600 Irish academics signed a letter calling on Irish universities to suspend ties with Israeli institutions.

A Palestinian flag hangs Monday from a window of the Trinity College, which is currently closed due to a protest by students in support of Palestinians in Gaza, in Dublin, IrelandCredit: Damien Eagers/ REUTERS

But it is the more recent public comments, and official statements on the current conflict from the Irish political establishment that appear to confirm a pro-Palestinian bias in the eyes of many Israelis.

Prior to the prime minister's lost and found comments, his characterization of Israeli actions as "something approaching revenge" was widely reported and criticized in Israel. The biting comments of the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald, and if opinion polls are to be believed, the Irish prime minister in waiting, raised eyebrows in diplomatic circles when addressing her national party conference, she described Israel's actions in Gaza as "barbaric, hateful, cowardly"

As a citizen of Ireland and now also of Israel, with close family members and longtime friends in both countries, navigating those Irish-Israeli tensions for me goes beyond journalism, it is at times, deeply personal and at times fraught with difficult choices.

There was a time not so long ago, when Israelis first learned I was from Dublin, they would appear pleasantly intrigued. Not so much now. Some even ask: "Why do you hate us?" I usually mumble something about it being complicated, that's it's not quite true, and if I am feeling brave, that the Irish identify with the Palestinian underdog because of our colonial past and their opposition to 56 years of Israeli occupation.

It is an undeniable fact that Ireland has increasingly become a vocal critic of Israeli policy. The condemnation of Israel's war in Gaza in Ireland extends from the political far left to populist nationalist right. There is, what seems to be, near unanimous public revulsion and condemnation against it.

I am however often asked, at least by those who consume international media, why the graphic descriptions of that horror in Gaza are, for some in Ireland, just never enough, why there is some inexplicable need to go that one step further, whether it was the ghoulish accusation by the progressive veteran columnist Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times that for Israeli leaders "the killing of children is the ultimate _expression_ of power", or the words of Richard Boyd Barrett a populist far left member of the Irish parliament, who called Israel a "filthy" and "psychopath" state.

Those genuinely probing, sometimes uncomfortable questions of course cut both ways.

One question I am regularly asked in Ireland, and one that I am admittedly uncomfortable to share here, is a variation of "Are they [Israelis] still talking about October 7?". There are few Israelis who would be not appalled by that question.

I have tried to communicate to friends and family in Ireland, and of course in the articles I write for an Irish readership that it is hard to exaggerate the impact of the Hamas terror attack on October 7 on the Israeli psyche. How those atrocities triggered an inherited historical trauma. That this is a nation consumed by the terror that if 1,200 fellow Jews can be massacred by Hamas in eight hours, what might happen if they were given the opportunity to do so for, say 80 hours or 80 days?

But the most common question I get from Irish friends and family, and by far the more challenging and troubling to answer, is why ordinary Israelis are seemingly so indifferent to the harrowing imagery of suffering in Gaza. My short answer - and one that I like to think explains that seeming indifference is that they simply don't see it. That is invariably met with incredulousness and the question: "What do you mean -- why don't they see it?"

The answer to that question is indeed difficult to answer.

But the undeniable truth is that Israelis simply do not see what the rest of the world sees, what Irish television viewers see night after night since October 7. They don't see, on their television screens at least, the screaming and traumatized faces of infants covered in dust and blood, the lifeless bodies of toddlers, including most recently, those killed from the Rafah operation. The nightly news coverage of Gaza in Israel simply does not show these images to an Israeli audience. Knowing what my family and friends see on Irish or British television, I have grown particularly weary here watching those nightly clips of silent black and white grainy, video-game-like footage of IDF bombing, all at a distance from the air. It's as if there are no civilian victims.

But the images and accounts, no matter how graphic, simply cannot convey the immediacy and visceral horror of the harrowing sight of infants in body bags, toddlers with amputated limbs and of course the dead sometimes strewn in the street after an Israeli strike.

When I ask Israelis that same question, why do they think they are not shown the suffering in Gaza I am usually greeted with a mix of denial and equivocation, followed almost immediately by a handful standard Hasbara talking points. Among them, "The IDF does not target civilians'', "Hamas uses the Palestinians as human shields'' or perhaps most disturbing of all, variations of, "I don't concern myself with military strategy, I fully trust the IDF." And these are self-professed left-wingers speaking.

One cannot help but wonder if the global surge in antisemitism serves as a psychological crutch upon which Israelis lean upon, an almost willful prism of perspective with which to view the world that helps them avoid looking at, or asking the most difficult questions about the reality of the human catastrophe in Gaza.

Given the undeniable, undisguised vileness of much of that antisemitism, perhaps such a prism of perspective is understandable or simply inevitable. It's of course also relatively easy to look the other way, at times, arguably necessary to preserve some momentary sanity.

To lay all blame at the decisions of the broadcasting editors, news presenters and television pundits is to infantilize a highly educated population in an era of almost instantaneous global media communication. But whether fed by willful ignorance or denial, history is unlikely to be kind to the seeming indifference of the Israeli public to the destruction and death in Gaza.

But just as there will always be those in Ireland who are "content" to invent ghoulish or grubby caricatures of Israelis, many others, including almost all of my Irish friends and family genuinely struggle to gain some insight as to the deafening silence of the Israeli public on the human catastrophe in Gaza.

As a journalist, I talk to Israelis all the time to try to shed some light on that silence. But I too struggle to gain better insight. And too often I hesitate to talk with my own Israeli friends and Israeli relatives about it. As an Israeli citizen, now raising two young Jewish daughters in Tel Aviv, I also look the other way, afraid to ask those relatives and friends questions, fearful of what I may hear, indeed have heard. .

But as the world's journalists gain access to a post-apocalyptic Gaza, the scale of devastation is revealed and the depth of human suffering is recounted, I do not expect Israeli media to have a day of reckoning anytime soon and start showing Israelis the uncomfortable truth of what has been done in their name – and mine.
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Paul James Kearns, Dublin born, now living in Tel Aviv is a freelance journalist writing about Israel-Palestine since 2002. He is the co-author of "Seamless Neighbourhood - Redrawing the City of Israel "