Israel may shut down its embassy in Dublin

Dublin placed on potential closure list of seven. Israel is considering closing its embassy in Ireland as part of a cost-cutting plan.

Irish foreign Minister Simon Coveney arrived in Israel on Monday for a three day visit. says he hope to persuade Israel not to call a closure to it Embassy in Ireland.

Earlier this month, the Israeli foreign ministry announced that following budget negotiations with the finance ministry it planned to close seven diplomatic missions over the next three years. Israel’s 100 remaining missions would receive an overall budget increase of about $50 million (€41 million) to compensate for the loss of the seven offices.

The statement said it had not yet decided which missions to close, with a committee due to submit recommendations by the end of the month. A previous working document had proposed 22 mission closures and severe job cuts.

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Dublin said in a statement that no decision had been made “regarding the identity of the Israeli missions that might be closed”.

The spokesman said in the course of 2018 the foreign ministry would compile a list of recommendations and submit it to Mr Netanyahu.

“Only after the prime minister’s approval will we know which missions might be affected.”

So lets look at Ireland's relationship with Israel: During her formative years, Israel received significant support in Ireland. Having experienced religious persecution themselves, the Irish identified with Jews. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, according to Professor James Bowen of the National University of Ireland at Cork.

So who is Professor Bowen and i there any bias in his statements??? Surprise, surprise look what I found and its shocking:

Bowen, who serves as national chairman of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). IPSC does not see itself as merely an interested party trying to support both sides. The group and its national chairman have taken a prominent role in promoting the Boycott-Divestment-and-Sanction (BDS) movement in Ireland against Israel. In fact, Irish academics have been particularly adamant in their efforts to have Israeli academic institutions boycotted.

In a letter to the Irish Times dated September 16, 2006, 61 Irish professors signed a petition urging academic institutions throughout the world to adopt a policy of boycotting Israeli institutions of higher education.

The IPSC does not even make a show of being even-handed. When asked by the Jerusalem Post about Hamas’s charter and inflammatory language, including calls for the extermination of Jews in Israel, Bowen dismissed even the possibility of his group’s considering a boycott of Palestinian academic institutions as well.

“The accusation of genocide against Hamas is libelous. The responsibility for ending the conflict lies with the aggressor. Israel is the aggressor,” he said.

The IPSC’s hypocrisy was pointed out by Alexander Yakobson, a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It is obvious that there is no universal norm [in the call for boycott], only discrimination,” he said. “The petitioners don’t call for a boycott of academic institutions in every country with whose policies they disagree. They don’t demand a boycott of the Sudan or of China, which has tremendous academic ties to Europe. And they don’t want to boycott the United States or Britain over Iraq. There is no universal norm; they’re just anti-Israel.”

More significantly, he said, the IPSC professors “don’t demand of any Palestinian academic even to disavow terror.” Yakobson found this especially curious in the face of sanctions imposed by Europe. “Even when Europe imposed sanctions on the Hamas government, it did not impose them on Palestinian universities. Nobody has even suggested doing this,” he said.

Yakobson’s conclusion was to suggest that the Jewish state and her supporters contact the IPSC “to ask what it is about Israel that upsets them.”