Mark O’Connell, The Irish Times:
For Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, speaking in the wake of his country’s decision this week to close its embassy in Dublin, it’s all very straightforward: the Irish government’s policies toward Israel – its recognition of a Palestinian state, and its intervention at the International Court of Justice in South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, requesting a broadening of the court’s interpretation of genocide – are intolerably “extreme”, and our taoiseach Simon Harris is “anti-Semitic”.
No intellectually or morally serious person could view this claim with anything other than contempt; it reflects a grotesque effort, by a state on whose prime minister the International Criminal Court has placed an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes, to smear anyone who dares point out the obvious. And this, in turn, reflects a grim historical irony of our era: the global norms in which criticisms of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are based exist because of the recognition of the lethal danger of anti-Semitism, and of the Shoah as a crime that must never again be countenanced. That edifice of global norms (international law, human rights), built in the aftermath of the second World War and the Holocaust, is now collapsing into smoking rubble in Gaza, buried beneath the silence and complicity of what used to be called “the international community”.