If Ireland decide not to play Israel, it will have nothing to do with anti-Semitism

We are just over a week into the build-up to Ireland’s Nations League ties against Israel and already we have seen a League of Ireland club’s owner asking its chairperson to resign, a former FAI chief executive saying it would be a catastrophe if the games don’t go ahead and a former Ireland manager telling the FAI to “show a real bit of balls and refuse to play”. Only 31 more weeks to go.

This is going to be the drumbeat and mood music around the place for most of the next seven months. It’s unavoidable. Even if Ireland manage to qualify for the World Cup, you can be guaranteed that some slice of their time in Mexico and Atlanta in the summer will be spent talking about it. If we don’t bring it up, someone else will.

A sporting federation making an official application for another to be banned from competition is extremely rare in world sport. Even more rare is a scenario in which they are then almost immediately drawn against each other. As the snowball rolls and expands all the way to September, it’s silly to imagine this will remain a small squabble between Ireland and Israel. It will break through before long.

Playing Israel is a specific choice. Not playing Israel is a specific choice. As of now, playing the games is the official position of the FAI and, by all accounts, the most likely scenario. Pulling out would be an international news event.

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There are plenty of people within the game and the broader public who think we should just get on with it and play. They contend that it’s the height of arrogance on Ireland’s part to imagine we have any business involving ourselves in this whole mess. That Israel and Palestine is an ancient, intractable dispute whose depth and breadth we can’t possibly fathom from our rain-drenched rock 5,000km away.

All of which is fair enough. It’s a completely legitimate view to take. It’s not like we’re short of our own problems in Ireland, within football and without. If you want to have a go at somebody and accuse them of virtue signalling for Palestine while ignoring other wars or being disinterested in injustices at home, you’ll have a decent chunk of support for your stance. Even those who disagree might concede a certain kernel of truth.

But as we know, very little of the back-and-forth on Israel-Palestine is ever played out on the basis of respect for the other’s viewpoint. And the one thing we can be sure of above all is that at some stage between now and September, Ireland will be accused of being an anti-Semitic country because of its reluctance to play football against Israel. It’s a shameful tactic and it can’t be allowed to gain currency.

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The reasons for not playing against Israel aren’t complicated. The outcomes may well be complex and the consequences unpredictable but on the basic point, there’s no confusion here. As has been widely reported, Uefa themselves were close to banning Israel when the ceasefire came about last October. Since then, not only have upwards of 600 residents of Gaza been killed by the Israel Defense Forces but the death totals for the war itself have been revised and updated to more than 75,000 people.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about Irish football deciding to take a stand against that. You can call it unsporting, you can dismiss the protests as irrelevant, you can mock Irish people for getting notions about their place in the world. But throwing around accusations of anti-Semitism is dangerous nonsense.

It is, of course, a well-worn tactic of the Israeli government. “Over the past year, we have witnessed an alarming increase in anti-Israel discourse in Ireland which has frequently mutated into delegitimisation of Israel as a country and also into anti-Semitism,” wrote Dana Erlich, Israeli ambassador to Ireland in 2024. As recently as last December, the Israeli foreign minister said the Irish administration and institutions have an “anti-Semitic nature”.

And obviously, it shouldn’t be beyond us as a people to concede there are such things as Irish anti-Semites and that they should be condemned. Just as there are Irish racists and Irish fascists and Irish thugs and, to cast a wide, generalising net over them all, lowdown bad Irish people. Just as there are all of these kinds of bad people, everywhere in the world.

But the idea that anti-Semitism is a feature rather than a bug in the Irish psyche is plainly ludicrous. It’s especially egregious when applied to football, when arguably no aspect of Irish life is more open and welcoming to all creeds, colours and races than the sport of soccer. If and when this poxy rain ever lets up, go to any park on any weekend and look around you. Then try telling a story about Irish football’s innate prejudice against anyone of any faith.

In Ireland, we are self-deceivers and hypocrites about a lot of things. We talk out of both sides of our mouths about a million different things, from child poverty to immigration to Paudie on Dancing With The Stars. But on this, for once, the thrust of the argument is pretty simple.

If Ireland don’t play Israel, it will be because there is an overwhelming push from good people who couldn’t abide playing football against the country that the UN itself says carried out a genocide in Gaza. Anyone calling all of these people anti-Semitic deserves contempt.

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