This week, Ireland accepted the appointment of a full Palestinian ambassador for the first time.
The Irish parliament on Thursday passed a non-binding motion saying that “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza,” continuing Ireland’s fierce hostility toward the Jewish state since the latter was attacked by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas last year.
As the measure passed, Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin said that the government intends to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) before the end of the year.
“The government’s decision to intervene in the South African case was based on detailed and rigorous legal analysis. Ireland is a strong supporter of the work of the court, and is deeply committed to international law and accountability,” Martin said in a statement.
“We are also committed to supporting and promoting a strict interpretation of the Genocide Convention to ensure the highest level of protection possible for civilians caught up in situations of armed conflict and to apply the highest standards of conduct on those engaged in conflict,” he added. “The government has insisted that both Israel and Hamas be held accountable for violations committed.”
Since December, South Africa has been pursuing its case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
In January, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations — which Israel and its allies have described as baseless and may take years to get through the judicial process.
Israeli officials have strongly condemned the ICJ proceedings, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Pro-Israel advocates welcomed the ICJ ruling because it did not impose a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza and called for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas last Oct. 7.
Rather than declare that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and order the Jewish state to stop its military campaign in the Palestinian enclave, the court issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide.
Last week, South Africa filed the bulk of the relevant material to support its allegations.
In Europe, Ireland has been among the most vocal critics of Israel since Oct. 7 of last year, when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded the Jewish state from neighboring Gaza.
The terrorists murdered 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and abducted over 250 hostages in their rampage, the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign in Hamas-ruled Gaza aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling the terrorist group’s military and governing capabilities.
This week, Ireland accepted the appointment of a full Palestinian ambassador for the first time, confirming that Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid would step up from her current position as Palestinian head of mission to Ireland.
In May, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, prompting outrage in Israel, which described the move as a “reward for terrorism.”
According to The Irish Times, Ireland is due to have its presence in Ramallah in Judeana d Samaria upgraded from a representative office to a full embassy.
Israel’s Ambassador in Dublin Dana Erlich said at the time of Ireland’s recognition of “Palestine” that Ireland was “not an honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
She warned that Ireland’s hostility toward the Jewish state was sending the wrong message about Ireland as a tech hub and worrying Israeli investors in the Irish IT services sector.
More recently, Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris last week called on the European Union to “review its trade relations” with Israel after the Israeli parliament passed legislation banning the activities in the country of UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, because of its ties to Hamas.
Wahba Abdalmajid told The Irish Times in a new interview this week that the UN should suspend Israel from the global body over the UNRWA ban.
“There must be accountability,” she said, claiming that a failure to suspend Israel would create “a vacuum in international law.”
This week, anti-Israel activists began a three-day sit-in protest in front of the US Embassy in Dublin to demand that the US stop funding “Zionist war crimes.”
The latest round of anti-Israel actions in Ireland came shortly after the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se), an Israeli education watchdog group, on Monday released a new report revealing Irish school textbooks have been filled with negative stereotypes and distortions of Israel, Judaism, and Jewish history.
Antisemitism in Ireland has become “blatant and obvious” in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, according to Alan Shatter, a former member of parliament who served in the Irish cabinet between 2011 and 2014 as Minister for Justice, Equality and Defense.
Shatter told The Algemeiner in an interview earlier this year that Ireland has “evolved into the most hostile state towards Israel in the entire EU.”
Just last month, an Irish official, Dublin City Councilor Punam Rane, claimed during a council meeting that Jews and Israel control the US economy, arguing that is why Washington, DC does not oppose Israel’s war against Hamas.