Mick Hartley

From Maurice Black – How Ireland’s Anti-Israel Obsession Became a Case Study in Collective Intellectual Dishonesty.

Long article. An extract.

In a polarized environment, complexity is the enemy. The history of Jewish indigeneity to the Levant, the existential threats faced by Jews and by Israel, and the complex nature of the conflict have all become flattened into a simple allegory of “colonialist vs. native,” mapped clumsily onto the historical template of “British vs. Irish.” This mapping requires a profound act of unseeing. To sustain the narrative that Israel is a uniquely evil colonial enterprise, Irish political discourse must unsee the violent extremism of terrorist groups such as Hamas, dismiss the security concerns of a state surrounded by hostile proxies, and even ignore the demographic reality that the majority of Israeli Jews are refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, not European “colonizers.” The Mizrahi majority in Israel, many of them descendants of those expelled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries in the twentieth century, simply does not exist in the Irish political imagination because their existence would shatter the colonial analogy.