Letter leads to sacking of embassy press officer

THE press officer of the Israeli Embassy in Dublin has been fired following her public condemnation of an Israeli air attack on Gaza City in a letter to the Irish Examiner.

Dr Noreen O’Carroll wrote the letter in July saying she wished to add her voice to that of Israel’s President Katsav in condemning what she called a horrific attack.

She wrote the letter after an Israeli F-16 warplane bombed a building in Gaza, killing the military chief of Hamas with his bodyguard and 13 civilians, including nine children on July 22. The letter, published in the Irish Examiner on July 25, was written on Embassy headed paper, and signed by Dr O’Carroll in her capacity as press officer.

Yesterday, Boaz Rodkin, charge d’affairs at the Israeli Embassy, confirmed a decision to sack Dr O’Carroll had been taken by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem at the end of August.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided on August 28 to terminate her employment,” he said, adding Dr O’Carroll had now been presented with a short letter outlining how her job became untenable.

Dr O’Carroll said yesterday she did not want to comment on the Foreign Ministry’s decision to sack her. “I have absolutely no comment to make. I’d rather stay out of it all together,” she said.

In the published letter, Dr O’Carroll wrote: “I am sick at heart of this, as I am at each and every attack on Israeli citizens but a missile attack on an apartment building, after midnight, when children and adults are asleep in their beds, is no more justifiable than a suicide bombing. “I am appalled and ashamed of the current Israeli Government for sanctioning this and other operations.”

I am also appalled and ashamed of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s cold-hearted response to it, stating that it was ‘one of out greatest successes. Has he any heart, any moral sense at all?”

Dr O’ Connell also said that just as there was a huge divergence of opinion in Israel about the policies of the government, there was also significant divergence among the local staff of Israeli embassies.

Speaking to newspapers after she wrote the letter Dr O’ Carroll said she was very much a supporter of Israel’s right to exist and the right of Palestinians to a state of their own.

She said that she had been revulsed by suicide bombings but did not think state force should be used against civilians. “Error is too benign a word to use in a context like this,” she said recalling the words of the writer, Primo Levi, “Silence is complicity.”