Ireland’s football snub of Israel was more than a political protest - opinion

I watched the Republic of Ireland football team’s treatment of Israel in Debrecen with mounting disbelief, and then with fury.

The bowed heads during “Hatikvah.” The refusal to shake Israeli hands. The captains’ failure to exchange pennants, one of football’s simplest gestures of mutual respect. The black armbands. 

This was not a spontaneous act by a lone protester. It was a calculated, collective humiliation of Israel’s national team, performed before an international audience. What breathtaking chutzpah.

Criticism of Israel is legitimate. Israelis themselves engage in it loudly and relentlessly. But the Irish players were not debating government policy. They were publicly shunning individual Israeli footballers, as if merely representing Israel rendered them contaminated.

They shook hands with the match officials, yet withheld that elementary courtesy from their Israeli opponents.

That distinction tells us everything: This was not an appeal for peace. It was an exercise in national ostracism.

Had I been responsible for the Israeli team, I would have seriously considered walking off the pitch the moment the Irish players turned our anthem into a prop for their political theater.

Israel should not have to beg for the courtesies routinely extended to every other nation. If our flag, anthem, and players are considered beneath basic respect, why lend legitimacy to the spectacle by participating in it? Play someone whose hand you are prepared to shake.

The Football Association of Ireland (FAI) and the players will undoubtedly insist that their actions concerned Gaza, not Jews or Israelis as people. But intentions do not erase consequences.

When Israelis alone are treated as untouchables, when their anthem is singled out, their hands refused, and their national symbols ostentatiously rejected, the performance crosses from political criticism into collective condemnation.

Arab Israelis in Israel's national team

And here is another inconvenient detail for Ireland’s moral dramatists: Our so-called “genocidal” Israeli football team contains Arab citizens of Israel.

Anan Khalaili, an Arab Israeli from Sakhnin, was in the starting lineup against Ireland. Other Arab footballers have represented Israel at every level.

So how does that work, exactly? Were the Irish players nobly refusing to shake the hands of “oppressors,” even when one of the men in the Israeli shirt was himself an Arab?

Was Khalaili transformed into a suitable object of Irish contempt because he chose to represent the country of his birth? Does inclusion suddenly become apartheid when it appears in an Israeli uniform?

The reality of Israel is considerably more complicated than the cartoon version promoted by those who regard every Israeli as guilty before kickoff.

Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Circassians play in Israeli football. Yet the Irish protest reduced every player to a single supposedly shameful identity: Israeli. That is not solidarity. It is prejudice disguised as virtue.

That cannot simply be waved away as harmless activism. It carries the unmistakable stench of antisemitic exclusion, whether every participant understands that or not.

What makes this sanctimony particularly galling is Ireland’s own history.

I remember precisely where I was when the Provisional IRA detonated its enormous bomb in central Manchester on June 15, 1996. It was a Saturday morning, and I was in a synagogue less than three miles away. I heard and felt the blast.

Over 200 people were injured, and the commercial heart of the city was devastated. To some extent, it has never recovered.

That bombing did not emerge from some remote medieval conflict. It happened within living memory.

There was also the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, an attempt to murder British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and members of her government while they slept. Five people were killed.

In 1974, IRA bombs in two Guildford pubs killed five and injured dozens. The Troubles brought kneecappings, punishment shootings, abductions, bombings, and grotesque acts of intimidation, including tar and feather attacks, against those accused of fraternizing with the “wrong” people.

None of this means that “the Irish” collectively were responsible. The Irish state did not speak for the IRA, and countless Irish people rejected republican terrorism.

Britain and loyalist paramilitaries also have blood on their hands. Historical honesty requires those distinctions.

But that is precisely the point.

A country with Ireland’s history should understand better than most the moral necessity of distinguishing a population from an armed organization, a footballer from a government, and a national community from those committing violence in its name.

Irish people rightly objected when IRA atrocities were used to smear every Irish citizen. Yet the Irish team has now participated in precisely that kind of collective stigmatization against Israelis.

Where was this ostentatious moral clarity after Hamas murdered, raped, and kidnapped Israelis on October 7? Where was the insistence that Israeli victims be seen as human beings rather than inconvenient obstacles to a fashionable political narrative?

Why is Irish outrage so often thunderous when Israel fights back, but strangely qualified when Jews are slaughtered?

Black armbands for “all lives lost” sound admirably universal. Yet universalism that cannot name the aggressor who began the war, cannot acknowledge the hostages, and cannot extend a handshake to an Israeli footballer is not universalism at all. It is selective morality dressed in ceremonial black.

The argument is not that Ireland’s troubled past permanently disqualifies Irish people from criticizing anyone. That would be absurd. Nations are entitled to learn, change, and speak.

But moral authority demands humility, consistency, and some awareness of history. It does not permit a football association to transform a sporting fixture into a public ritual of Israeli degradation while presenting itself as the conscience of Europe.

The FAI had choices. Its officials and players could have issued a statement supporting civilians on both sides.

They could have called for peace, condemned terrorism, mourned Palestinian suffering, and remembered the Israeli victims of October 7. They could have competed fiercely while treating their opponents as human beings.

Instead, they selected the politics of the snub.

And let us be clear: Refusing a handshake does nothing for a Palestinian child. Bowing one’s head through “Hatikvah” does not end a war. Denying a pennant to Manor Solomon saves no life. 

These gestures cost the Irish players nothing, achieve nothing, and enlighten no one. Their only tangible purpose is to make Israelis feel despised.

Ireland has nothing to teach Israel about surviving terrorism. Israelis have endured suicide bombings, rocket attacks, massacres, and hostage-taking while much of Europe lectures them about the etiquette of self-defense.

We do not require moral instruction from people who treat our existence as something shameful.

Perhaps we should not be entirely surprised: In May 1945, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera personally visited Nazi Germany’s representative in Dublin to offer condolences following Hitler’s death, an act defended as diplomatic protocol but remembered as a stain on Ireland’s wartime record.

Ireland won the match 3 to 0. Congratulations to its players on their football.

But before a ball was kicked, they lost something more important. They surrendered the sportsmanship that makes international competition possible and the moral seriousness their protest purported to display.

So yes, I am angry. Israelis should be angry. Decent football supporters should be angry.

If Irish football wants respect, it should begin by showing some. Until then, the FAI can keep its sanctimony, its theatrical gestures, and its chutzpah.

Israel should accept criticism. It should never accept humiliation.

The writer is a rabbi and physician. He writes and teaches on Jewish ethics, leadership, and resilience. His work appears on rabbidrjonathanlieberman.substack.com and youtube.com. @rabbidrjonathanlieberman