State Papers

Binyamin Netanyahu lobbied for embassy during visit to Ireland as a rising star politician in 1990

Future Israeli prime minister defended opposition to Palestinian statehood and downplayed settlements and occupations

Then Taoiseach John Bruton introduces his wife, Finola, to Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, on their arrival at Dublin Airport in 1996. Photograph: Eric Luke
Then Taoiseach John Bruton introduces his wife, Finola, to Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, on their arrival at Dublin Airport in 1996. Photograph: Eric Luke
Sun Dec 29 2024 - 00:00

In February 1990 the Department of Foreign Affairs was preoccupied by a visit to Ireland by an up-and-coming politician in Israel named Binyamin Netanyahu.

At the time Netanyahu was the deputy foreign minister in the Likud government and an unknown in international circles. Ireland held the presidency of the European Community during the first half of 1990.

Files in the Department of Foreign Affairs show a brief resumé of Netanyahu’s career to that date was included so officials could familiarise themselves with a man who continues to dominate Israeli politics to this day.

The meeting between Netanyahu and the Minister for Foreign Affairs Gerry Collins took place in Dublin on February 21st, 1990.

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Taoiseach Simon Harris indicated last month that Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in Ireland today following the issue of an International Criminal Court warrant.

Collins suggested at the time there was a “natural feeling of sympathy towards Israel among the Irish people”.

Collins added though that relations had not been helped by Irish soldiers who had been killed in the Lebanon while serving with Unifil. Many of these attacks had been blamed on Lebanese militias supported by Israel.

Netanyahu told Collins that 95 per cent of the Israeli people were against Palestinian aspirations for an independent state because Israel was effectively at war with the Arab world.

He gave a robust defence of Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the territories it had occupied since 1967. If it did so, the country would face an enemy as large as Nato within 10 miles of its border.

He was also questioned about Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and responded by stating that just half of one per cent of all recent Jewish immigrants to Israel lived there. He maintained they were not being incentivised or encouraged to live there.

[ Israeli foreign minister calls Taoiseach Simon Harris ‘antisemitic’ ]

Collins, in turn, cited a statement by the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir in the Knesset in the previous week in which he stated that he would strengthen Jewish settlements through “Judaea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan”. Judaea and Samaria are the names Israelis use for the West Bank, while the Golan is a stretch of plateau occupied from Syria in 1967 but under de facto Israel control. The report of the meeting stated that when Shamir’s statement was put to Netanyahu, “he made no reply”.

At the time of the meeting Ireland was one of the few states in Europe which did not have an Israeli embassy and did not have an embassy in Israel either. This was the subject of much correspondence between the Israeli embassy in London, which included Ireland, and the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Ireland, Netanyahu said, was important to Israel not just as a result of the EU presidency which it then held. Soon Israel would have embassies in all the newly formed Eastern European states and he did not want Ireland to “lag behind either in the intensity or intimacy of diplomatic contacts with Israel”.

The absence of an Israeli embassy in Dublin was a source of concern for Ireland’s small Jewish population at the time. The issue was raised by Joe Briscoe, the son of Robert Briscoe who had been involved with smuggling guns into Ireland during the War of Independence.

[ Loyalist paramilitaries’ increased professionalisation in early 1990s concerned Dublin, State papers reveal ]

In 1992 Collins met the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland. Joe Briscoe told him that the Jewish community was being seen as a “proxy for an official Israeli presence” in Ireland and it was being blamed for many of the actions of Israel.

An Israeli embassy in Ireland was eventually opened in December 1993 and an Irish embassy in Israel was opened three years later.

Israel announced this month that it intends to close its embassy in Ballsbridge, citing Irish policy towards it and a desire to focus diplomacy on more positively disposed countries.