Ireland may be unique among Western countries in that the entire political spectrum is hostile towards Israel. Given their history, this should be beyond satire, but mathematician and behavioural economist Michael Brainis does a masterful job of dissecting the hypocrisy. [The greatest hypocrisy though is that of the Iraqi government.] - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor, Guerre and Shalom)
In May 1169 a few hundred Cambro-Norman knights waded ashore at Bannow Bay in County Wexford. They had been hired by Diarmait Mac Murchada, a deposed King of Leinster who wanted his throne back and had crossed to Henry II to find the men who would take it for him. Within three years the King of England was at Waterford, receiving the submission of Irish kings. The Irish date their subjugation from that beach. The founding story of the modern Irish state is the story of its undoing.1
Five centuries earlier, Arab armies broke the Byzantine field army at the Yarmouk in 636. Jerusalem surrendered within two years. Egypt fell by 642, Carthage in 698, and by the early eighth century the conquest had reached the Atlantic. The Jews and Christians of the Levant became protected minorities under Muslim rule, and over centuries Arabic displaced Aramaic and Greek. That was a conquest too. Nobody in Dublin calls it one.
What Dublin does call a conquest is Israel. Ireland recognised the State of Palestine in May 20242 and joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.3 In September 2026 its Taoiseach told reporters in New York that Israel was “literally uprooting Palestinians from their homeland.”4 Officially, Ireland still supports two states. But the words it has chosen, plantation, settlers, uprooting, homeland, are borrowed from the Irish past. They do not come with a border attached.
The Irish see their own history in Palestine. They should look more closely. What they will find there is their own principle, pointing the other way.
What does Irish independence assert? That a conquest does not become legitimate by lasting. That seven and a half centuries of foreign rule, of confiscation, of settlement, of laws written in another country, did not extinguish the claim of a people to govern themselves in their own land. Time did not sanctify the conquest. It only delayed the answer.
The Irish held this principle hard. Ulster had been planted since 1609, its settlers’ descendants had lived there for three centuries, and still the Irish state refused to concede that their presence conferred title. From 1937 the Constitution claimed the whole island as the national territory. The claim stood for more than sixty years and was withdrawn only by referendum in 1998 as the price of peace.5 Three hundred years of settlement, in the Irish view, were not enough to make a plantation a homeland.
That is a serious principle. It is also the Zionist one.
The Jewish tie to the land precedes the Arab conquest by well over a thousand years. Jewish sovereignty was ended by Rome, not by consent, and the land then passed from Byzantine to Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British hands. Jewish presence never wholly ceased; Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias held Jewish communities through all of it. For nineteen centuries the dispersed remembered the land in prayer, three times a day, and ended every Passover with the same wish: next year in Jerusalem.
The Irish understand a diaspora that does not forget. Ireland grants citizenship to the grandchildren of emigrants, born in Boston or Birmingham, who may never have set foot on the island.6 Israel’s Law of Return rests on the same idea: that a people scattered by history keeps its claim on the place it came from. Ireland has a law of return. It calls it the Foreign Births Register.
Nor are the Jews of Israel newcomers. More than seven million of them live in the country, and most were born there.7 On most estimates around half descend from Jews driven out of, or pressed to leave, Arab and Muslim countries after 1948: Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Aden, Fez. They were not planted from a European metropole. They were expelled from one part of the Arab conquest into the land where it began.
So the Irish must choose. If a conquest ratified by time is not final, then the Jewish return is not colonisation. It is what Ireland did. If a conquest ratified by time is final, then the Arab states are secure, and so was the Act of Union. Then 1922 was an illegitimate secession from a settled realm, and the Irish state rests on nothing.
There is no third seat at this table. The Irishman who calls Israel a plantation has to explain why reversing Henry II was liberation and reversing Rome was theft. He has to explain why three centuries of Ulster settlement conferred no title, while thirteen centuries of Arab conquest confer an unanswerable one. He has to explain why the grandchild in Boston has a homeland and the grandchild in Baghdad does not.
Consider the two grandchildren. The first is born in Boston. Her grandfather left County Mayo in the 1950s with one suitcase and never went back. At twenty-five she posts his birth certificate to Dublin, waits, and becomes an Irish citizen. If she moves to Galway, nobody calls her a settler. She has come home.
The second has a grandfather born in Baghdad, in a community that had lived beside the Tigris since the Babylonian exile, more than a thousand years before the Arab armies arrived. In 1950 Iraq let its Jews leave on condition that they surrender their citizenship. In 1951 it froze the property of those who had registered to go.8 Within two years some 120,000 had been flown out with what they could carry. His granddaughter is born in Ramat Gan. In the language now fashionable in Dublin, she is a settler.
One grandchild has a homeland. The other, it seems, has only a plantation.
The Irishman cannot explain it. The principle that made Ireland free does not stop at the Mediterranean. It was never a principle about the Irish. It was a principle about conquest, and conquest is the same wherever it lands.
Ireland cannot keep both its principle and its rhetoric. One of them will have to go. It would be a pity if it were the principle. It built the country.
Notes
The substantive dispossession came later: the Tudor reconquest, the Plantation of Ulster from 1609 and the Cromwellian land settlement of the 1650s. “Eight hundred years” is nationalist shorthand, but the chain begins at Bannow.
Joint announcement with Norway and Spain, 22 May 2024; recognition took effect on 28 May 2024.
Government decision of December 2024; declaration of intervention filed with the Court in January 2025.
Micheál Martin, remarks to reporters at the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, reported in the Irish Examiner, 25 September 2026.
Bunreacht na hÉireann, Articles 2 and 3; amended by the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution Act 1998, in force from December 1999.
Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956, s. 27, as amended; registration through the Foreign Births Register.
Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, population estimates; the figure should be updated to the date of publication.
Iraqi Law No. 1 of 1950 (the Denaturalisation Law) and Law No. 5 of 1951. Some 120,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel in 1951–52.
👏👏👏 An outstanding short article I immensely enjoyed and that was so well-done by Michael Brainis! The Irish people’s antagonism towards Israel and love for Palestine shows the lack of proper historical education and a poor understanding of the very complex Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on the part of most Irish people. They see their own historical struggles against oppression in Palestine, but if they looked deeper they would see it’s just the opposite. Just as the indigenous Irish people were conquered and colonized by the English, so too were the Jews of the holy land conquered and colonized by the Arabs from whom the modern-day Palestinians are descended. The Irish people had lived in the Emerald Isle since the 1100s long before the English or Scottish settlers came. Likewise the Jews had lived in the land of Eretz-Israel for a millennia before the first Arab soldier or settler ever set foot in the holy land. If the conquest of Ireland by the English was not final, then why is the Arab conquest of Israel final? If it’s okay under the Foreign Births Register for ole’ Timmy McGee in Boston or Bobby O’Connell in New York City to return the land of their ancestors, then why isn’t it okay for Shlomo in Warsaw or Rivka in Baghdad to do so? This blatant hypocrisy is clear as day. I don’t know why the vast majority of Irishman can’t see it. I would argue that the Irish and Irish-Americans have more in common with the Jews and the state of Israel than they do with the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. What’s the difference between Irish nationalism and Zionism? None! They’re the same darn thing just for different groups of people! If Irish nationalism is valid, why isn’t Zionism by the same standards? The Irish and the Jews both share a long history of centuries of shared oppression. It’s crazy to me they can’t see the very clear parallels between the two!
Nice job! There are so many nice ways to say “F—- you!” (Pardon my Irish)