Last week, this newsletter linked to articles  on the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Australia and Canada. Following Israel’s announcement yesterday that it will shutter its embassy in Dublin in response to the Irish government’s diplomatic campaign against the Jewish state, it seems necessary to focus on the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere on the Emerald Isle.

Oliver Sears, in his examination of the subject, cites the example of a former senior Irish diplomat, who was asked to explain why his country is so hostile to Israel. The diplomat observed that there are many fewer Jews in his country than in Britian or France, which has “given us a hand to take what we consider a more principled position.” Sears comments:

So easily the mask slips, endorsing the worst kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory; that Jews act as a cabal influencing governments and economies and (therefore) Ireland with its minuscule Jewish population is “freer” to govern itself independently. Here is a reflexive anti-Semitism which blindly sees all Jews as a monolith tied duplicitously to Israel.

But unlike most European countries, Ireland’s relationship with its Jews does not represent the undulating line on a heart monitor with the occasional flatline that has been the tragedy of European Jewry for a millennium. The story is a little happier. Over the last 150 years, since the first wave from Lithuania, Ireland’s Jews have mostly kept a low-profile, with the exception of lord mayors in Cork and Dublin and a handful of TDs (members of parliament). The pogrom in Limerick in 1904, instigated by Redemptorist priest John Creagh, is an anomaly. . . . Eamon de Valera, Ireland’s prime minister, ensured that Jews were protected in the Irish constitution in 1937.

Hatred for Jews and Israel, Sears explains, has now permeated the country’s culture as well as its politics, with a popular folk singer producing a song called “Palestine” complete with references to Jewish avarice. Right-thinking people widely blamed an anti-immigrant riot in Dublin on Zionists. And the country’s president couldn’t give a speech for Holocaust Memorial Day without talking about the suffering in Gaza.

Careful as Sears’s diagnosis is, it is unlikely that his suggested remedy—“for education courses on anti-Semitism to be mandatory in schools, in universities, and the workplace”—will do much good.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.