Donald Trump’s new ambassador to Ireland, Ed Walsh, is a man with a mission: to combat the anti-Semitism allegedly rife here. At his confirmation hearing, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jim Risch, told Walsh to convey the message that Ireland is “very much out of step with the United States” in its criticisms of Israel. Walsh replied that this “will be a big part of my conversations” in Dublin.
Risch has since claimed that Ireland “is on a hateful, anti-Semitic path that will only lead to self-inflicted economic suffering”. He has warned that the Trump administration will retaliate against the Occupied Territories Bill which seeks to ban trade with illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza: “If this legislation is implemented, America will have to seriously reconsider its deep and ongoing economic ties. We will always stand up to blatant anti-Semitism.”
Ambassador Walsh said at his hearing that he would be seeking a detailed briefing on alleged Irish anti-Semitism. It might, then, be useful to inform him of the history of Irish solidarity with the Jewish people and help him understand a concept that Risch seems incapable of grasping: Ireland’s horror at the collective torture of Gaza springs from the same moral outrage that made Irish leaders such powerful opponents of anti-Semitism.
The ambassador might ask his officials to brief him on the two figures whose achievements – Catholic Emancipation and the transfer of the land of Ireland from the Ascendancy to the tenant farmer – did most to shape the nation we have become. They might tell him how (and more importantly why) Daniel O’Connell and Michael Davitt raised their voices against the systemic injustices inflicted on the Jewish people.
Those who experience collective oppression can react in one of two ways. The first is to imagine themselves as unique victims whose exceptional status entitles them to use any kind of violence against those they perceive to be their enemies. The second is to develop a deep disgust at all oppression. It is to say that what happened to us should happen to no human being.
In the first, victimhood is hoarded as a special form of entitlement. It closes down all compassion. In the second, victimhood is shared. To know what it’s like for yourself is also to know what it must be like for others. To claim justice for your own people is to uphold it for everyone.
An important moment in the history of this second kind of response is a letter O’Connell wrote in 1829 to Isaac Goldsmid, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in England. O’Connell had just forced Catholic Emancipation on the British government and been elected as the first Catholic allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons.
Goldsmid wrote to congratulate him on his victory. O’Connell’s replied: “I entirely agree with you on the principle of freedom of conscience, and no man can admit that sacred principle without extending it equally to the Jew as to the Christian ... With these sentiments you will find me the constant and active friend to every measure which tends to give the Jews an equality of civil rights with all the other King’s subjects ... I think every day a day of injustice until that civil equality is attained by the Jews.”
O’Connell’s point was simple but potent: there are no rights that are not universal rights. Liberation for one group is a mere concession that can be withdrawn at any time – unless it extends equally to all.
In 1903, Davitt travelled from Ireland to Kishinev (now Chisinau, capital of Moldova). He went there to investigate a pogrom fomented by the Tsarist authorities against the Jewish population of the city. His reports for the Hearst newspapers in the US and his book Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia still stand among the most powerful accounts of the systemic terrorisation of a defenceless population by a cruel and cynical state.
Davitt went into the houses where Jewish families had been massacred: “I saw blood spattered on the walls of the rooms and yard, and picked up a child’s schoolbook on which some murderer had wiped his hands.”
Today, of course, he would pick up bloodied schoolbooks in southern Israel after the Hamas massacres or in shattered homes in Gaza. It is striking that much of what Davitt writes about the treatment of the Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia is so eerily redolent of the status of Palestinians now. Jews are “confined by law within a kind of economic concentration camp”. They are “routed from their dwellings as if they were so many noxious animals”.
Davitt quoted with approval a letter from the English Catholic cardinal Henry Manning on the position of the Russian Jews: “so hemmed in and hedged about” that “they are watched as criminals”. This system constituted “both a violent and a refined injustice”. And it created a duty of protest: “The public moral sense of all nations is created and sustained by participation in [the] universal common law; when this is anywhere broken, or wounded, it is not only sympathy but civilisation that has the privilege of respectful remonstrance.”
The question the ambassador might ponder is this: should the Ireland of his ancestors now abandon the tradition of O’Connell and Davitt? They believed that anti-Semitism, both in its “refined” forms (legal discrimination in Britain) and its “violent” expressions in the Russian pogroms, was a breach of universal law. They abhorred such smooth and rough abuses, not because they were inflicted on Catholics or Jews or Irish people, but because they were perpetrated against human beings. They believed that there is a duty to speak out when that law is “anywhere broken or wounded”.
Respectful remonstrance about Gaza is part of our heritage of opposing anti-Semitism. For the best part of our political tradition, the rights of Jews and of Palestinians to live without persecution are not in binary opposition. They are the same human rights – and their violation demands the same protest.
