Ireland’s radical anti-Israel drift deepens as Dublin targets Jewish history while ignoring Hamas atrocities.
US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) issued a blistering condemnation on Saturday after the Dublin City Council advanced a proposal to strip the name of Israel’s sixth president, Chaim Herzog, from the park named in his honor — a move widely seen as the latest marker of Ireland’s accelerating institutional hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people.
“When you think it couldn’t get any worse in Ireland regarding animosity toward Israel and the Jewish people, it just did,” Graham wrote, stunned that Irish officials would target a man born and raised in Ireland, who became one of Israel’s most respected presidents and whose father served as Ireland’s Chief Rabbi.
Mocking the suggestion to rename the site “Free Palestine Park,” Graham reminded critics of the central truth they ignore:
“Israel withdrew from Gaza, only for Hamas to seize it by force and unleash one of the worst terror regimes on earth — culminating in the October 7th massacre.”
Graham praised the Herzog family as “one of the great families in the history of Israel,” noting that Chaim Herzog’s son is Israel’s current president, while another served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
“What I hear from Dublin,” he continued, “is a complete inversion of history — a deliberate rewriting of Jewish suffering and Israel’s legitimacy.”
Graham concluded sharply:
“Modern Ireland is a beautiful country… but it has become a cesspool of antisemitism.”
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, deeply pained, warned that the renaming would erase a vital symbol of the once-warm Irish-Jewish connection. Even Ireland’s own Foreign Minister, Helen McEntee, condemned the plan, stating plainly that removing the name of an Irish-born Jewish leader “has no place in our inclusive republic” and urging councillors to reject the proposal.
The controversy unfolds against the backdrop of rapidly deteriorating Israel–Ireland relations. In April 2024, then-PM Simon Harris conspicuously failed to mention Hamas’s Israeli hostages in his first speech as leader. Harris later condemned Israel’s defensive strikes on Hezbollah as violations of international law.
By mid-2024, Ireland joined Spain, Norway, and Slovenia in recognizing a Palestinian state, prompting Israel to close its embassy in Dublin that December.
Matters worsened when Ireland elected far-left President Catherine Connolly, inaugurated on November 11, who openly brands Israel a “terrorist state.”
The Dublin council’s attempt to erase Chaim Herzog — an Irish-born hero who fought Nazism, defended Israel at the UN, and embodied the historic bridge between Ireland and the Jewish people — has now become the clearest symbol yet of Ireland’s slide into state-sanctioned anti-Israel activism.
