You couldn’t help wondering, when Israel unexpectedly singled out Ireland’s criticisms of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians by closing its embassy in Dublin this week, about the private thoughts of Isaac Herzog, Israel’s state president.

Herzog’s post, though high profile, is largely ceremonial and he has been a staunch defender of his country’s 14-month military onslaught in Gaza. But his family connections with Ireland are strong. His father, Chaim, also Israel’s president for a decade, was born in Belfast and raised in Dublin. And his grandfather, Yitzhak, who was such a supporter of Irish independence from Britain that he was known at one time as the “Sinn Féin rabbi”, became the chief rabbi of Ireland until he was appointed to the same job in Israel in 1936.

Did Herzog think that it was helpful of Israel’s government to take this rare diplomatic step just because Ireland had recognised Palestinian statehood and intervened in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case on Gaza, brought by South Africa under the Genocide Convention? Or because Ireland had promised to conform with international law by adhering to both the International Criminal Court’s issue of arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the ICJ’s separate ruling that states should prevent trade fostering illegal settlement growth in the Occupied Palestinian Territories?

Either way, Israel had not acted similarly against the many other governments which had done all or some of these things.

And did Herzog really think it was wise of Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, to denounce Irish policies as “antisemitic”? This canard about any criticism, including by many prominent Jews both inside and outside of Israel, of the most right-wing Israeli government ever, is now so routine........

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