You couldn’t help wondering, when Israel unexpectedly singled out Ireland’s criticisms of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians by closing its embassy in Dublin this week, about the private thoughts of Isaac Herzog, Israel’s state president.
Herzog’s post, though high profile, is largely ceremonial and he has been a staunch defender of his country’s 14-month military onslaught in Gaza. But his family connections with Ireland are strong. His father, Chaim, also Israel’s president for a decade, was born in Belfast and raised in Dublin. And his grandfather, Yitzhak, who was such a supporter of Irish independence from Britain that he was known at one time as the “Sinn Féin rabbi”, became the chief rabbi of Ireland until he was appointed to the same job in Israel in 1936.
Did Herzog think that it was helpful of Israel’s government to take this rare diplomatic step just because Ireland had recognised Palestinian statehood and intervened in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case on Gaza, brought by South Africa under the Genocide Convention? Or because Ireland had promised to conform with international law by adhering to both the International Criminal Court’s issue of arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the ICJ’s separate ruling that states should prevent trade fostering illegal settlement growth in the Occupied Palestinian Territories?
Either way, Israel had not acted similarly against the many other governments which had done all or some of these things.
And did Herzog really think it was wise of Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, to denounce Irish policies as “antisemitic”? This canard about any criticism, including by many prominent Jews both inside and outside of Israel, of the most right-wing Israeli government ever, is now so routine that it passes almost without comment.
Sensibly perhaps, Simon Harris, the Irish Taoiseach, did not even give it houseroom, while “utterly” rejecting Saar’s baseless claim that Ireland was “anti-Israel” and pointing out that Ireland favoured a two-state solution.
It’s not yet clear whether this is part of what Israel intends to be a pattern. Saar said it would now be promoting bilateral relations according to “priorities that are… derived from the attitude of the various countries towards it”, like Israel-friendly Moldova, where it is opening a new embassy.
But it is clear that Israel was acting from what it regards as a position of strength. In military terms, that self-image is not without foundation.
Netanyahu’s claim of responsibility for Bashar al-Assad’s fall in Syria needs to be treated with caution – in some ways the “cold quiet” with Syria suited Israel as it consolidated its grip on the Golan Heights, seized and occupied in the 1967 war.
But its success against Hezbollah in Lebanon – reportedly unexpected by both the US and Israel’s own intelligence agencies – left the depleted Shia militia incapable of saving its dictatorial ally in Damascus. And at a time when his Russian patrons were increasingly focused on Ukraine.
All of this was a severe blow to Iran, of whom Hezbollah is a proxy. And this was compounded by Israel inflicting serious damage on the Iranian military facilities it struck on 26 October.
The so-called “Axis of Resistance” to Israel has been severely weakened, but it may be too early to talk of a new “Israeli order” in the Middle East.
But certainly externally, Israel is now looking stronger than it has since Hamas’s attack on 7 October last year – a strength underlined by the impunity with which it has now bombed sites in post-Assad Syria and created a buffer zone beyond the Golan Heights.
Internally, however, the picture is different. One one hand, notwithstanding the spectacle of Netanyahu now testifying in his criminal trial on three corruption charges, which he denies, he is doing somewhat better in the polls.
He prolonged the war in Gaza and Lebanon, primarily, to forestall threats to his premiership and allowed him to wait for Donald Trump to become US president. This may have paid off – within severe limits – since the latest Maariv poll shows Netanyahu’s Likud party gaining three extra Knesset seats. On the other hand his current coalition would still only win 50 seats in an election now – well below what would be needed to form a government.
This illustrates the deep divisions in Israeli society. No one who has seen Alexis Bloom’s powerful documentary, The Bibi Files, can fail to understand the underlying reasons for his unpopularity outside his own increasingly right-wing base. This goes beyond the astonishing leaked footage of the police interrogations of Netanyahu and his wife Sara – he showing convenient and stubborn amnesia about alleged bribery, and she naked aggression.
The film also helps to show how his (now resumed) assault on Israel’s Supreme Court and then the prolonging of the war in Gaza – which even US officials were saying privately by the autumn had achieved all the military gains it could – were the product of the Faustian bargain Netanyahu struck for his own survival with the two extreme racist ministers in his coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Netanyahu’s autocratic tendencies have since become even more exposed. A police force now bending to Ben-Gvir’s will, routinely detaining Palestinian citizens of Israel who criticise the Gaza war, and arresting anti-government demonstrators with increasing violence; the banning of Al Jazeera and the Orban-style boycott of the fine liberal newspaper Haaretz; and the increasing impunity with which Israeli settlers carry out violent attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, are all evidence of this.
Then there is Gaza. Almost 45,000 Palestinians – over half of them women and children – have been killed and the rest are facing a second desperate winter, many crammed half starving into tent cities with a severe lack of water, food or sanitation.
After 7 October, Israel’s devastating retaliation has been largely popular – though that has been complicated by the failure to reach a deal to release the 100 hostages still being held in Gaza, and the view among many of their families that Netanyahu was obstructing it.
Now there are hints again that a deal could be close – even though doubts remain about whether Netanyahu is really ready to halt the war.
Because of Israel’s increasingly commanding regional role, anything is now possible. Maybe Trump can engineer the real diplomatic prize for Netanyahu – an accord with Saudi Arabia, without the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, or at least without the “process” towards a Palestinian state that the Saudi de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman says he wants and Netanyahu has hitherto opposed.
As Salman put it in a conversation in January with the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken leaked to The Atlantic: “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do.”
But the second of these two illuminating sentences is rather the point. For publics, not only in the Arab world but across much of the West, the stain left by Israel’s destruction of Gaza, let alone its de facto annexation of the West Bank, is unlikely to be removed any time soon. This cannot benefit Israel’s long-term reputation.
Perhaps Ireland’s real crime was to underline that, however welcome the severe blow Israel has inflicted on Iran’s regional power, all is far from well in its own backyard.
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