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On March 5th Ireland’s parliament decided to hold a debate on the Middle East. Those are words which are never good to read because nothing good has ever come of the Irish parliament making that decision, nor of the Department of Foreign Affairs making that decision.
As regular readers will have guessed the debate was supposed to be about the region but, as is traditional in Ireland, it became a competition to see who could say the worst thing about Israel. Bonus points, as is again traditional, were rewarded for doing it in the most theatrical way possible.
Helen McEntee, our Minister for Foreign Affairs, kicked it off. She noted that the US and Israeli strikes against Iran didn’t have UN backing, because that is the sort of thing some people – presumably most of them children who we should not judge too harshly as they really are trying their best – think is important. She said Iran treats its own people badly and is shipping weapons to Russia. Super. Then we got:
“I condemn the missile attacks by Hezbollah on Israel…these are utterly unacceptable and must stop.” she said, as we all eagerly awaited to hear the ‘but’. And then it appeared, resplendent in its most political dress ‘however’ – “However, I must equally condemn Israel’s military response.”
A fabulous display of moral equivalency between Israel and a terrorist militia that exists to destroy Israel. Hezbollah, which is again a terrorist militia and not a country, fired rockets at towns, towns historically being a place where civilians gather, and the minister’s position is that the country defending those towns is equally condemnable. Hezbollah – which again I must stress is not a state, let alone a democracy, and certainly not accountable to anyone except Tehran – gets the same moral weighting as a nation trying to stop its people being killed. That was the opening. Things went downhill from there so quickly one half expected Helen to announce she was about to go off-piste.
The opposition were worse, obviously. One called the Israeli government a “genocidal regime.” Another called Netanyahu a “genocidal monster” driven by “insatiable bloodlust.” They did not follow that on by suggesting that he eats babies, which showed admirable restraint.
These are words that mean things, or at least used to mean things. Genocide is a specific crime with a specific legal definition and nobody using the word in the Dáil that day appeared to have the faintest interest what that definition actually was. But boy I bet it felt good to say. It probably felt righteous. That was enough.
There were calls to suspend the EU-Israel association agreement. Calls to ban joint sporting events.
And then they moved on to Iran for all of a paragraph. Perhaps two. It was acknowledged, in the way you acknowledge a parking fine or a moderately tiresome weatherman reporting that ‘it looks like light raid today’, that Tehran is maybe up to no good through proxy groups and maybe has a nuclear programme that, if you squint at it in the right/wrong light, is a bit worrying.
It seemed as if TD had forgotten, or had never known, that Iran is, and has been for long enough that even the slow students should know about it, a theocracy that hangs homosexuals people from cranes, responds to the protests of women’s with live ammunition, and has become the centre of sex change surgeries because that is apparently somehow less offensive to them than being gay. Oh, and also a place which has spent forty years building a network of militias whose stated purpose is the annihilation of Israel.
Nobody in the chamber, interestingly, seemed to realise that Iran is a concern to nearly every country in the region, or that its growing power had led the Arab countries to increase cooperation with Israel, quietly, or that some of those Arab countries are now very quietly telling Israel to do whatever it wants to Iran because Iran is not considered to be, what one might call, good neighbours. Nobody, frankly, seemed to have any idea what the hell they were talking about.
One would be tempted to ask if any of these people could have found Iran on a map, but that would be unfair to them as Ireland’s foreign policy establishment, for the last 20/25 years, has been filled with the sort of people who mistook the map for the territory.
The, moderately, amusing thing here is that the Taoiseach himself, a few days before this debate, outright admitted that the semi-mythical, at this point, ‘rules-based international order’, has “not been working well for quite some time.” The Security Council cannot hold repressive governments to account. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; the best lack all conviction; Iran continues to be a destabilising force in the region. And so on.
The ECR put out a statement on February 28th which named Iran as the primary source of regional instability and placed responsibility where one would generally expect it to be placed.
Ireland went the other direction. And the result was a debate that had almost nothing to do with the actual security situation in the region and almost everything to do with the domestic political incentives of the people speaking. Calling Netanyahu a genocidal monster plays well in certain constituencies. Polling of the Irish public, which one would imagine the TDs have seen, shows us that it plays well. Ireland has a lot of feelings about Israel, it doesn’t have a lot of feelings about demanding a serious assessment of Iran’s nuclear timeline. So TDs have a lot of thoughts on the first thing and not a lot on the second.
McEntee could have used her time to actually put forward something useful. Although, actually, it might be faired to say that McEntee could not have done that, as she has never, in a political career of plum positions, demonstrated any capability to actually say, or do, anything that diverges from her parties lines. A better politician, a better person, could have. McEntee could not.
This is not a new pattern. Go back through the Oireachtas records on any Middle East debate, over at least the last fifteen years and it is the same every time. Israel is held to a standard that no other country in the debate is held to. The forces attacking Israel are acknowledged but contextualised, and the whole thing wraps up with everyone feeling very moral about themselves while having contributed precisely nothing to our understanding of the region or of the question of how to actually make the region safer.
The Taoiseach called the Iranian regime evil. His own word. And then we held a debate in which the value of being termed an evil regime rapidly decayed until it was treated as a secondary concern and Israel became the real issue. If that does not tell you everything about how the Irish political class processes the Middle East, nothing will.
And so the Irish parliament continues to behave, as someone once put it, with a student union with better heating and a pension scheme. Its debates are, as they have been for rather a long time, tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
But the pension is very good, you do have to give them that.