One Catholic-majority country where Eberstadt’s message is sorely needed is Ireland, where anti-Semitism—usually in anti-Israel guise—is widespread, and has reached terrible proportions since October 7, 2023. Yet it was not ever thus: the Irish republican journalist Michael Davitt (1846–1906) was an ardent supporter of Zionism who did much to bring information about the Kishinev pogrom to the English-speaking world. Matt Austerklein, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, recalls such better times, and discusses some of Ireland’s great cantors. He also notes the encounter between the Irish and Jewish immigrant communities in America:

Together, they built an expanded definition of what it means to be American beyond its majority Protestant heritage. Jean Schwartz and William Jerome captured the creative partnership between these two great groups of American newcomers in building a shared society in their 1912 hit—“If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.”

You can listen at the link below, and encounter some other pieces of Hiberno-Judaic music. Here is Austerklein singing an Irish sea shanty with Yiddish lyrics:

But Austerklein also reflects on what went wrong with Irish-Jewish relations, citing the research of Abby Bender:

Ironically, the earliest iterations of Irish nationalism played a distinctly Hebraic tune, looking to the Israelites and the Exodus for inspiration. . . . Bender demonstrates that the Exodus form of Irish nationalism exhausted itself as independence drew nearer, replaced by the New Testament-inspired, sacrificial Irish nationalism of Patrick Pearse and the [1916] Easter Rising.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.