I should begin this blog with a declaration of interest. My father was a Czech Jew, a political refugee who arrived in Ireland in 1948, and my mother was an Ulster Presbyterian. So I am not a typical Irish person, far from it, and I am not writing on this occasion as an objective observer. Having said that, I have regularly stood behind a ‘Grandfathers for Justice for Palestine’ banner, as part of the Grandfathers against Racism group, protesting US support for the genocidal Israeli war in Gaza outside the American embassy in Dublin, and on pro-Palestine demonstrations.
However I found the latest, much commented upon issue of Dublin city councillors trying to ‘dename’ a small park and memorial in the Rathgar area of the city named after Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised son of the chief rabbi of Ireland, and from 1983 to 1993 president of Israel, disturbing. The area is home to Ireland’s only Jewish primary and secondary schools (Stratford College), and many members of that small community in Dublin.
The city council’s cross-party commemorations committee had voted by nine votes to one to recommend to the council the removal of the Herzog name from the park. The only dissenting voice was the veteran, independent-minded Labour councillor Dermot Lacey. The name debate had begun in June, when a Sinn Fein councillor, Kourtney Kenny, submitted a motion to rename the park after a five year old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces last January along with six of her relatives.
The chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder, wrote: “To remove the name ‘Herzog’ from the park would be a shameful erasure of Irish-Jewish history and would send a painful message of isolation to a minority already experiencing rising hostilities.”1
Both the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin and the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, called for the proposal to be withdrawn. Mr Martin called it “divisive and wrong” and said it would “erase the distinctive and rich contribution to Irish life of the Jewish communities over many decades, including actual participation in the Irish War of Independence and the emerging state.” He said the move was “a denial of our history and will without any doubt be seen as anti-Semitic.”2
In the event, the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, announced that he would be withdrawing the item from the council’s agenda for its meeting last week and referring it back to the commemorations committee because the correct legislative procedures had not been followed, with “administrative mis-steps” in those procedures. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ray McAdam of Fine Gael, said the council’s executive had “completely messed up” by allowing the item onto the agenda.
However the issue has not gone away, and it led to ructions at home and internationally, with Israeli and US politicians berating Dublin and Ireland for alleged anti-semitism. But was this really an example of Irish anti-semitism? Was it Ireland’s passionate support for Palestine and opposition to the Israeli government and army’s horrendous excesses in Gaza and the West Bank spilling over too far in that ugly direction? Former Tánaiste, Senator Michael McDowell, thought so. “Ireland has unfortunately a history of anti-Semitic subculture at social and, at one time, political levels,” he wrote in the Irish Times.3
He pointed, in particular, to Sinn Fein’s past record in this area. Mary Lou McDonald had delivered orations at the statue in Fairview Park to Sean Russell, who in 1940 travelled to Nazi Germany to seek help for the IRA in its campaign of violence in Britain and Northern Ireland. In the same year the IRA issued a statement hailing the Nazis as “friends and liberators of the Irish people” and the IRA publication, War News, welcomed the ‘cleansing fire’ of the Wehrmacht driving Jews from Europe.
However it wasn’t only the IRA. In 1946 the head of the Department of Justice, Thomas Coyne, issued a memorandum arguing against allowing 10 Jewish refugee families (around 40 people) into the country. He wrote: “Although the Jewish community in Ireland is only 3,907 persons, according to the 1946 census, there is a fairly strong anti-Semitic feeling throughout the country based, perhaps, on historical reasons, the fact that the Jews have remained a separate community within the community and have not permitted themselves to be assimilated, and that for their numbers they appear to have disproportionate wealth and influence.”4
Later that year, after chief rabbi Isaac Herzog – Chaim Herzog’s father – had interceded with him, the Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, allowed 100 orphaned Jewish children, survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to come to Ireland. However the Department of Justice continued to object, claiming that Jewish refugees “do not assimilate with our own people but remain a sort of colony of a worldwide Jewish community. This makes them a potential irritant in the body politic and has led to disastrous results from time to time in other countries.”
In 1978 Father Michael McGreil, in his landmark study Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland, concluded there was “a moderate degree of anti-Semitic prejudice in Dublin. The pattern of this prejudice is along classical lines, i.e. the negative monetary and religious myths are still believed by a significant percentage of Dublin adults.” Nearly 60% of those surveyed agreed that Jews were over-represented in the control of money matters. In a follow-up survey in 1996 McGreil found a relatively high level of prejudice towards Jews in more rural areas, with 20% of people regarding Jews as being responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.
In the past 30 years there has been little or no evidence of anti-Semitism in Ireland. But is it back in response to the genocide in Gaza? Certainly two Jewish school principals interviewed on RTE’s Liveline last week thought we were moving in that direction. Nathan Barrett of Stratford College felt that the proposal to dename Herzog Park, and anti-Semitic abuse more generally, had added to the Jewish community’s sense of vulnerability. “Students and young people feel they can’t express their identity when they leave the school,” he said. Simon Lewis, a thoughtful commentator on educational matters, recognised that Chaim Herzog was “part of the Zionist story of Israeli occupation.” However he went on: “The other side is it’s one of the very few places in Ireland that was named after someone who was Jewish. The action of removing a Jewish name is quite a big thing.”
This is dangerous territory. Removing Jewish names from signs, memorials and shopfronts was one of the things the Nazis did when they came to power in Germany. And as one friend put it, tongue only half in his cheek, why should we stop at Jewish names? What about all the English aristocratic oppressors whose names still adorn street signs all over Dublin?
The Irish left, with their fervent support for Palestine and antagonism to Zionism, may be particularly susceptible to the charge of anti-Semitism. There is a warning in how it infiltrated the British Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. When one looks at the Israeli government’s brutal apartheid-style repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and the monstrous racism of far right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich, with his belief that it is “just and moral” to starve two million Palestinians in Gaza, it is sometimes difficult not to sympathise with them.
There is a more Ireland-specific point here, of particular relevance as we move – as many of us hope – towards some kind of unity. It is about who is really Irish. Are Jewish-Irish people really Irish? James Joyce certainly thought so since he made the most famous Irishman in 20th century world literature, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, a Jewish Irishman. Can the new immigrant Irish – the Africans, Indians, Brazilians, Poles, Ukrainians and others who have come to live among us – be really Irish? The people waving tricolours in working class areas of Dublin clearly don’t think so. Are the 800,000 Northern Protestants, the great majority of whom don’t even want to be citizens of an Irish state, really Irish? Or do many people in this republic, despite all the huge social changes of the past 30 years, still believe that to be really Irish, you have to be culturally (not theologically) Catholic and Gaelic, and maybe republican and anti-British into the bargain?
1 ‘Chief Rabbi: Move to erase Chaim Herzog’s name and history is cruel hammer blow’, Irish Times, 1 December
2 ‘Proposal to dename Herzog Park ‘divisive and wrong’, Taoiseach says’, Irish Times, 1 December
3 ‘Dublin city councillors, cop yourselves on’, 3 December
4 Dermot Keogh, Jews in 20th Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Cork, 1998), p.222
2 Irelands together 
The issue for the local soccer groups who use the park’s facilities has nothing to do with Judaism or anti-Semitism, and everything to do with not wishing to be associated with ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
And Irish Jews support the de-naming. Jews for Palestine – Ireland fully supported the de-naming.
How can something supported by Jewish people be “anti-Semitic”?
The best thing to do with the park is to name it after another Irish Jewish person. Just for once commemorate an ordinary decent Irish-Jewish person, and not some guy associated with colonial violence against Palestinians. And in that way puncture the hasbarah b/s being propagated by these kinds of articles, wherein any opposition to Israel’s murderous colonialism must be negated by cynical bleating about “anti-Semitism”.
Chaim Herzog was a leading ember of an Israeli terrorist organisation involved in murders and ethnic cleansing. I see no distinction between terrorism carried out on behalf of Ireland and terrorism carried out on behalf of Israel. Terrorism is terrorism. You can argue all you like about how “necessary” it was or was not; but perhaps, as civilised people, we should all at least agree that nobody involved in acts of terrorism should thereafter be publicly commemorated in a shared public space.
In 1949, Chaim Herzog was Director of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Military Intelligence Branch.
On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors.
This is just one instance (out of many more I could tell you about) carried out by the organisation that Herzog occupied a senior position in.
On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing.
Why would anyone wish to commemorate a man in a senior position in such an organisation?
Prior to that, Herzog was a member of Haganah, an organisation that on occasion carried out acts of terror (both against the British and against the Palestinian natives), and who, on many other occasions, provided supplied weapons and munitions to other terror groups, such as Irgun and the Stern Gang.
Ostensibly formed to defend early Jewish settlements in Palestine, by 1939 Haganah was helping to organise illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Post WW2, it joined with two extremist splinter groups, Irgun and Lehi (“the Stern Gang”) to form the “Jewish Resistance Movement”. It was the Stern Gang which murdered Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, in 1944. The Haganah and its elite Palmach commando unit, along with the Stern Gang and Irgun, carried out numerous terrorist acts against British governmental installations across Palestine between 1944 and 1947.
Although strenuous efforts have been made to distance the Haganah from the more-overtly terrorist actions of the Irgun and Stern Gang, Robin Corbett claimed that “Zionist armed resistance… included the much larger, but more moderate, Haganah self-defence force [sic]” in his 1986 book Guerrilla Warfare. David Ben-Gurion “insisted” to the British and US governments that “his Jewish Agency and the Haganah were opposed to the Irgun and its terrorism.”
According to Alan Hart in Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, though, this was plainly not true: “The truth was not only that the Haganah and so the Jewish Agency were colluding with terrorists. After initially saying ‘No’ to Operation Chick — the codename for the plan to blow up the King David Hotel [in 1946] — the Haganah ordered the Irgun to execute it.”
In a foretaste of what was to come, Hart points out that money was donated “by organisations… across America to support illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine and to raise funds for Zionist terrorism.” He also gives a detailed account of the circumstances which led to the Haganah supplying weapons and ammunition to the Irgun and Stern Gang to use in the assault and massacre of Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948. According to a report by the International Red Cross, 254 Palestinians, of whom 145 were women (and 35 were pregnant at the time), were murdered by the Zionist terrorists.
Deir Yassin was but one of many massacres committed by “Jewish terrorists” (as Corbett calls them) in the months before the state of Israel came into being, and Haganah personnel were involved in many of them. “The Haganah, the Palmach and the Irgun were the forces that actually occupied the [Arab] villages” prior to the expulsion (or worse) of their residents, writes Pappe. “The Haganah would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (for which read ‘Arab volunteers’) … Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended up with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers.” The Haganah was well-schooled in such tactics. British officer Orde Wingate “had instructed the Haganah in the use of this terrorist method against Palestinian villagers in the 1930s.”
One Palmach commander — the elite of the Haganah, remember — sent his troops into Khisas, a mixed Muslim and Christian Palestinian village, in December 1947 and “randomly started blowing up houses at the dead of night while the occupants were still fast asleep. Fifteen villagers, including five children, were killed in the attack.” At first, Pappe records, the Haganah denied responsibility, but “eventually admitted it.”
And objecting to public commemoration of a man involved in groups like that in a shared public space is somehow “anti-Semitic”?
Sure, if a pro-Israel Islamophobic group wished to commemorate Herzog in their private grounds, that is their right and, legally, I’d support that.
But publicly commemorating violent figures who were members of groups which carried out atrocities and acts of terrorism is an odd position for anyone with civilised values to adopt.
Let’s instead re-name the park after a modern Irish Jewish person.
Not Wed ighstan