Finto 23

In a must-read op-ed in today's Irish Times, consultant paediatrician Ed Abrahamson (@abrahamson_ed) describes how Jews are being held to account for an Israeli government many of them openly criticise. He condemns the Jewish extremists who attack Palestinians. He states openly how much the images from Gaza distress him. But he also realizes these nuances will make little difference to those people who will hate and blame him anyhow, just for being Jewish. It's an irony that Ireland, of all places, has embraced this logic of collective blame. In the 1970s and ’80s, Irish people in Britain were regarded with suspicion and hostility over a bombing campaign most of them abhorred. The Guildford Four and Birmingham Six spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit, just because they were Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time. Irish people understand what this kind of sectarianism does: it concludes from an accent or a surname or an address what a person must believe and how they deserve to be treated. Abrahamson does end on a hopeful note. While acknowledging that Ireland's media, sporting, academic, and political institutions are dominated by an "obsessive, cult-like anti-Israel fervour," he observes that many people outside those bubbles hold a different view. "I have come across so many who are neither anti-Semitic nor against the Israeli people, while of course sympathetic to the plight of innocent Palestinian civilians caught up in this war, as anyone with compassion and empathy must surely be," he writes. He is correct. Thankfully, even after three intense years of bullying and cajoling, many Irish people can still make up their own minds. irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/…

The Ireland–Israel fixtures are finally over. Ireland won the "away" leg 3–0 in Hungary, and the "home" leg ended with a 1–1 draw last night, behind closed doors, in an empty stadium in Serbia. Before both games, the Irish players wore black armbands, declined to shake hands, and bowed their heads during the Israeli national anthem. For months, the FAI, the players, and the staff were subjected to a vicious and relentless "Stop the Game" campaign that tried to have the fixtures cancelled entirely. The campaign collapsed rather spectacularly when a mere 15 protesters turned out to meet the Irish team bus at the Aviva Stadium on Thursday. In the end, the Irish public rejected the agitators and refused to brand their own national team as traitors. Both matches went ahead, albeit contentiously, and post-match allegations of racist abuse, spitting, and intimidation of journalists continue to be investigated and debated. That makes it all the more worthwhile to pause on a piece of writing that cuts through the din of accusation and counter-accusation. Published in the Irish Times on the eve of the second match, it reads like a post-mortem, and it is among the most perceptive and lucid we are likely to get. It comes not from a politician, pundit, or sports journalist, but from Yoni Wieder, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland. There is an irony in that. Those whose job it is to make sense of football and politics spent a whole seven months doing little else but stoking antagonism. A religious leader shows us how to think differently. Wieder says that when the draw was made, he pictured thousands of Israelis in Dublin, meeting Irish people the way strangers do, over football, work, and family. Such encounters, he says, reveal the tensions and sympathies that headlines cannot: an Israeli dad who dreads his children's military service yet knows Israel needs an army to keep his family safe; the position of Finn Azaz, half-Israeli but proud to play for Ireland; that Palestinian citizens of Israel play in the Israeli squad, a fact Irish reporters scarcely mentioned. Only by talking with people who see the world differently, he writes, do we find "something deeper, more nuanced and more human behind the label." His prescription is disarmingly simple: "Meet Israelis. Talk to them. Listen to them." Challenge them, too, if you like, about Gaza or the IDF, but be willing to hear their perspective. Agreement is not the point. Even if both sides walk away holding the views they arrived with, something human has passed between them. But instead, the home fixture was moved abroad and played in an empty stadium, and with it went what he calls "the possibility of encounter." His final image is the one that should stay with us: "the door was shut long before a ball was even kicked." I would add one thing to the Chief Rabbi's argument. Ireland's Jewish population numbers only a couple of thousand, and many Irish people have never knowingly met a Jew, let alone an Israeli. My own experience is different. Having lived in the USA and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, I came to know many Jews and Israelis, and they remain my friends and colleagues. So I know, from experience, that they are not the evil, genocidal baby-killers of the caricature that has taken hold in our public conversation. Caricatures can survive only where no actual person exists to contradict them, which is why encounter matters. Now that the fixtures are over, we need to take a longer view, and this applies not only to the conflict between Ireland and Israel but to the standoff between nationalists and loyalists on the Garvaghy Road as well. The aim cannot finally be to win the argument, to stop the game, or stop the march. If it is, we will keep lurching from one short-term pitched battle to another. The longer view has to be reconciliation: between Irish people and Israelis, between Israelis and Palestinians, and among the bitterly divided camps at home as well. That should be everyone's long-term goal, and in a season of frantic noise, the Chief Rabbi has laid it out more clearly than anyone. irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/…

"Fans' reaction at Aviva Stadium could make Ireland players think again about Israel match," runs a headline in today's Irish Times, which reports that the Stop the Game campaign will protest outside Marian College this afternoon to "let the players know they betrayed the people of Ireland" in advance of their match this evening with Austria. "Betrayed." These young men have already tried to appease the protesters. During their first match against Israel on Sunday, they wore black armbands, declined the customary handshakes, bowed their heads during the Israeli national anthem, and pledged their fees to Gaza. Then they beat Israel 3–0, the team's biggest winning margin in years. For this, they are to be met at their own stadium as traitors, with the goal of pressuring them not to travel to Serbia for the return leg against Israel next Sunday. But the replies under the Irish Times tweet are withering, and not only from the usual quarters. At the time of writing, the tweet has over 20,000 views and just 40 likes. The public mood is shifting: people have had their fill of the non-stop Paddystinian bullying. Recently, this has included breaking through barriers at the team hotel to chant at players over dinner, as protesters did in Castleknock last week, and branding individual footballers as "collaborators." A line has been crossed. Note one detail at the bottom of today's report: the FAI has finally provided the squad with a psychologist. Its manager, Heimir Hallgrímsson, asked for one more than a year ago and was told there was no budget. The money has been found now, and not because of Israel. What is wearing the players down is the relentless campaign at home that is trying to shame them into toeing the party line. The protesters claim they are standing up for human rights. But in August, when Ireland played Afghanistan in cricket, a regime that bars women and girls from sport and education, nobody besieged the cricketers' hotel or told them they had betrayed the people of Ireland. And when Stop the Game protesters disrupted the Qatar friendly in May by throwing tennis balls onto the pitch, their target was not Qatar, another country with a horrendous human rights record, but Israel, the only democratic and LGBT-friendly country in the Middle East. That selectivity runs through the Irish Times's coverage elsewhere too. Yesterday a pilot on a FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv stabbed his colleague and tried to bring the aircraft down in an apparent 9/11-style terror attack. His plan was foiled when the wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door and Israeli passengers and crew overpowered the attacker. Two other pilots on-board landed the aircraft safely. The Irish Times first ran it as a report about pilots "fighting in the cockpit." Whoever gathers at the Herbert Road roundabout this afternoon, it will not be "the people of Ireland." The Castleknock crowd was counted in dozens, not thousands, and I expect this will be the same. The real people of Ireland will be inside the Aviva tonight, supporting their team -- both against Austria and the bullies at home. #COYBIG