In Belfast, there is a large mural dedicated to the story of the Jewish Legion, which fought with the British army during World War I and was led and organized by a philo-Semitic Irish officer named J.H. Patterson. (You can read about his fascinating story at the link below.) The mural brought Kyle Orton to reflect on the strong feelings so many Irish have about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and how they came to see it through the lenses of their own history of bloody internecine warfare:

[T]he battle lines are very clearly drawn: the Protestant Unionists support Israel and the Catholic (at least by background) republican nationalists support the Palestinians, including their most radical and murderous groups. Why is it that such a distant conflict—involving religiously, ethnically, and linguistically different peoples—resonates so powerfully in Northern Ireland?

The Irish Republican Army (IRA), . . . was  a component of the Soviet global terrorist apparat, which brought [its members] into close contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Kurdish PKK, the African National Congress (ANC), the Basque ETA, and many other Moscow-loyal “national liberation movements,” as well as the clerical regime in Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), specifically the Lebanon-based IRGC unit, Hizballah. The public face of the Republican movement reflected the milieu in which the IRA/Sinn Fein was covertly moving. (It still does: Ireland has been among the most vocal in supporting the ANC’s political warfare against Israel at the International Court of Justice.)

It was not always like this. Despite anti-Semitism having always been unusually strong and visible in Ireland—Jews in Ireland suffered a boycott 30 years before Jews in Germany—the pre-state Zionist movement supported the Irish republicans. . . . The change came in the 1930s, when Éamon de Valera rose to the leadership of the Free State. De Valera had been a leader of the republican rejectionists, those who opposed the treaty that granted Irish independence at the price of partition, and provoked sectarian tensions by declaring Eire a Catholic state.

When the Zionist leaders, in the face of the escalating horrors of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, accepted the Peel Commission’s recommendation to partition the Palestine Mandate in 1937, De Valera turned on the Jews: no longer were they the equivalent of Irish Catholics, freedom fighters against British imperialism; now, they were akin to the Ulster Protestants, colonists under British protection.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.