Ireland teams up with agency promoting Israel's drones

The Dublin government takes a much weaker stance on Palestine than ordinary Irish people. (Annabelle Hamil / ZUMA Press)

Is Ireland sincere when it claims to be a strong defender of Palestinian rights?

By joining a new project alongside the Israel Innovation Authority, the Dublin government has proven that its posturing is hollow.

Ireland’s agriculture ministry is among the participants in a major European Union-backed scheme with the stated aim of reducing farming’s environmental impact and helping it adapt to climate change.

Those goals may look laudable. Yet the involvement of the Israel Innovation Authority in the project raises fundamental questions.

That authority is working in tandem with Israel’s military on artificial intelligence at a time when the same military is still obliterating Gaza.

The authority also enables Israel’s weapons industry to expand its reach.

Drones have long been a tool of oppression against Palestinians.

With the authority’s assistance, Israel’s drone makers have been hyping up the surveillance potential of their products with less than subtle messages about how they can be used to monitor protests and quell dissent.

Ireland and Spain were the first countries in the EU to recommend any steps towards accountability for Israel after the war against Gaza began. So why is Ireland heavily represented in the EU’s new project on making farming greener?

Titled Agriculture of Data, the project has an overall budget of almost $115 million. The EU is providing $34 million of that sum.

Asked for a comment, Ireland’s agriculture ministry said it “cannot dictate which organizations are allowed to be participants” in Horizon Europe, the EU’s scientific research program.

The reply is misleading. The ministry is fully entitled to withdraw from the Agriculture of Data scheme in protest at Israel’s involvement.

Together with the Irish agriculture ministry, the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation and the state agency Research Ireland are all taking part in the aforementioned project.

Halting Ireland’s scientific cooperation with Israel was a core demand of the encampments set up by students at various locations last year.

Following a freedom of information request, University College Dublin (UCD) sent me a censored version of the agreement it reached with students to end one such encampment. The agreement says that “UCD is committed to sustaining an anti-racist and anti-apartheid university culture.”

The commitment is evidently superficial.

In a 2005 call, Palestinians urged a boycott of Israeli goods and institutions so that Israel would come under pressure to dismantle its apartheid system. Rather than respecting that call, UCD has continued entering research projects with the Technion, a university serving as a laboratory for Israel’s weapons industry.

Although the 2024 encampment has ended, a separate protest camp was set up at the entrance to UCD in September this year and is still being maintained.

Róisín McAleer from the group Social Rights Ireland is one of the participants in the camp. The police and the university’s security guards have been harassing protesters frequently, she told me.

“If I go to the toilet, they [the security guards] follow me,” McAleer said.

Orla Feely, UCD’s president, has not responded to repeated requests I made for comment about cooperation with the Technion.

Yet in an interview with The University Observer, a campus newspaper, she recently defended the Technion links by invoking the concept of “academic freedom.”

The quotations attributed to Feely in that interview did not contain any reference to how Israel has destroyed or damaged more than 90 percent of university and school buildings in Gaza. So much for “academic freedom.”

Lenient towards war crimes

Feely is not known to have voiced any views about Dan O’Brien, a colleague who has, in effect, been arguing that Ireland should be lenient towards Israel’s war crimes.

O’Brien doubles up as a research fellow in UCD and chief economist with the Dublin-based Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA). He is an outspoken critic of the Occupied Territories Bill, legislation on banning imports from Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.

In his efforts to torpedo that law, O’Brien has jeopardized the image of respectability and moderation which the IIEA has cultivated.

In September, the institute hosted a seminar – chaired by O’Brien and featuring the hardcore Israeli settler Eugene Kontorovich. Not only does Kontorovich live in an illegal settlement, he advocates the relentless colonization of the West Bank – a war crime under international law.

After years of blocking the Occupied Territories Bill – originally introduced to the Oireachtas (Ireland’s parliament) in 2018 – the Dublin government is finally moving towards accepting it. The government has, however, indicated that the ban will be restricted to physical goods, suggesting that services could not be included for legal reasons.

The government has not given a convincing explanation for why it wants the legislation to be weakened.

A ban on services would mean that people in Ireland could not book accommodation in Israeli settlements listed on the Airbnb website.

Airbnb has its European headquarters in Dublin. Yet when I made two separate freedom of information requests inquiring if Airbnb or any other corporation was pushing for services to be excluded from the Occupied Territories Bill, Ireland’s foreign ministry replied it had no such records.

The general business lobby in Ireland has nonetheless made plain that it is opposed to a ban on goods or services from Israel’s settlements unless one is imposed by the EU collectively. The business lobby has tried to whip up fear about how the bill could harm Ireland’s relationship with the US.

Ireland is not a trailblazer on the issue of Palestine. While the Dublin government dithers over the Occupied Territories Bill, Spain has gone ahead and actually banned imports from Israel’s illegal settlements.

The Spanish ban covers both the importation of goods and the advertisement of services. A similar measure has been proposed by Belgium’s ruling coalition.

As Ireland has experienced a famine and many other hardships inflicted on it by an occupying power, its people tend to identify strongly with Palestinians. The affinity of ordinary folk is at variance with the cowardice and duplicity displayed by the Dublin establishment.