Erin Go Blah

In June 2025, the London-based journalist Brendan O’Neill visited Ireland, the land of his ancestors. He found it consumed with one subject above all: “It’s suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you’ll see it and hear it—that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil!”

This obsession with Israel, O’Neill added, is even more striking because, he says, fads in Dublin usually are often ignored in the Irish countryside. Yet in the green hills of Ireland, Israelophobia is ubiquitous: “There were once statues of the Virgin Mother on Ireland’s roadsides, imploring you to resist evil; now, there are dire reminders of the evil Israel commits. It feels like the Jewish State has become a Satan substitute in post-Catholic Ireland. You prove your virtue through renouncing hate.”

The most recent anti-Semitic act was the attempt to erase the name of the late Israeli President Chaim Herzog from a park in Dublin. Herzog is best known for his dramatic opposition, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to the United Nations “Zionism is racism” resolution. He was also an Irish Jew; his father, Isaac Herzog, was chief rabbi in Ireland before taking the same position in the newborn Jewish state.