We think we are ‘worldly’, but we are ignorant of one country, Israel

WE don’t get out as much as we should. Not that you would know it from the notions we have.

Sophisticated is our signature aura: well-travelled, well-informed, know our wines and our way around several Continental cities; so there, we’re the cheese.

A great sign of national resilience is the magnetic pull towards airports. As they become ever more unpleasant, queues become longer; as the amount of apparel that has to be taken off to get through security increases, the more we love it. I admire the patriotism of those who, in the teeth of deepest recession, still took off on a sun holiday; maybe several. It was a morale boost for us all.

Whatever its faults, Ireland is full of cosmopolitan people. We have relatives all over the English-speaking world. Given the chance, we are never off the beaches in the Mediterranean, and some of us are even further afield. There is a class of Irish person that knows Oxford Street better than they know Offaly.

Strangely, in certain ways Ireland is un-cosmopolitan. Our sense of the world, and even our interest in it, is strictly limited, and very naive. Beyond holidays, shopping and relatives, we don’t take much of an interest at all. It’s hard to know if we are genuinely happy with ourselves, or just self-satisfied.

The odd thing about Ireland’s interest in the world is that, for all its enthusiasm, it’s largely defined by antagonisms. Anti-Israel is a case in point. Where did mass solidarity with Hamas come from? Is it anti-Semitism? Disturbingly, there is that around the edges, but it’s not the core — I hope.

Elsewhere, in places with substantial Jewish populations, it’s worryingly different. I have a Jewish friend in France — and he is very very clear about that. Maybe an Irish Jew would tell me I am naïve, and perhaps I am. The simplistic, auto-reflex, all-purpose, anti-Israeli default position was disturbing. It told very little about the complexity of the situation there. It told a lot more about the crass over-simplification of the situation here.

We do know better. We are, after conspicuous initial success, still in the early phase of our own peace process (as history will view it). We know that isolating, demonising, and dehumanising don’t work. So why the anti-Israeli hysteria, the denial of a nation’s right to self-defence?

It can’t be sympathy or solidarity with the oppressed people of Gaza; and they are oppressed. There are multiple layers of oppression from the blockade, the military attacks from without, the poverty and unemployment within, and not least their own autocratic, kleptocratic government.

This is a regime that puts paper bags over people’s heads and shoots them, for being collaborators, as the faithful leave Friday prayers at the mosque. But they are flavour of the month here. Across Europe, pro-Palestinian solidarity marches feature Hamas flags. They are the green ones, you see. But not to worry, it’s important to have something to march about, something to be against, all the better that it’s far away. It makes things curiously simpler; more morally relaxing.

The anti-Semitism that is prevalent here is paradoxically anti-Arab. I don’t mean rich, race-horse Arab, of course. That’s different. Never mind that those petro-dollars are only recently dry-cleaned of the stink and sweat of the mainly south-east Asian underclass who do all the real work, in stultifying heat, to build air-conditioned cities in the sand. No, not at all. We are delighted to have that cash manure the plains of Kildare. Less pleasing, however, are Arab neighbours. For the purposes of prejudice, which ironically is indiscriminate, include Muslims in general. You know, and I know, how unwelcome they are on most streets, or, worse, as next-door neighbours. There is not much of a céad mile fáilte for out-front, in-your-face, hijab-wearing women, nor for their men. The limits of Irish liberalism are coterminous with the comfort zones of its inmates. Cosmopolitan, but only up to a point, and not a point you would stretch very far. Its main feature is a sense of cosiness, centred on shared contempt.

It’s strange — the default position of the habitually protesting left and their lesser-spotted cousin, the caring liberal.

How do they pick their causes? They cluster like vast populations of gulls on the most morally precarious of cliffs; fly away en masse to who knows where; and swoop again on another cause, having ignored a hundred others in between. Christians in the Middle East, overwhelmingly Arab, excite little by way of on-street marches or online spleen. More harm is being done to more oppressed people by climate change, but that’s too complicated. Anyway, effective action would require changing your own lifestyle, not somebody else’s. So there is no fun in that. Off-season, when Gaza isn’t busy, wind farms and fracking are always good for a fill-in march or two — just to keep in practice.

But not to worry. That’s life. Nought so queer as folk, as they say. If Israel serves as a whipping post, what’s the harm? There was a reason there was a whipping post in most well-run towns. They served a purpose.

But that was all by way of digression, something I wanted to get off my chest. I think it was the boycott campaign that boiled me, in the end. Being naturally selfish, it wasn’t the Jaffa oranges I was most concerned about. You can get nice oranges elsewhere. But the intellectual boycott, the arts boycott, that really boiled my blood.

To think there are people in this world, so arrogant, so self-possessed of righteousness that they would presume to channel even the conduct of human conversation and connection.

Anyone, and everyone, is free to avoid, condemn, and excoriate Israel. That is as it should be. But we invented the boycott. We know what it means in practice, as distinct from the theory. The boycott, properly organised, is not a gentle invitation. It is not subtle.

The boycott, properly organised, is the mass intimidation, the shunning-out-of-society, at least out of a circle of society, of those who, because they are cowards or gombeens, cannot find the strength to cooperate, or of those who are heroes who will not be cowed into cooperating with the crowd.

There are people who like crowds, who are only comfortable travelling with them. Our history, in this country, is mainly the history of the crowd. Few stood up, or stood out.

Maybe Israel is partly in the wrong. But it is, at least, partly in the right. What is wholly wrong is the gang of gombeen men selecting their causes, working themselves up into a state of self-righteous indignation, and presuming to tell another human being what to think. How horrible, how Hamas!

The anti-Israeli default position was disturbing. It told little about the complexity of the situation there