“To announce in advance that you will break international law and to do so on an innocent population, it reduces all the code that was there from second world war on protection of civilians and it reduces it to tatters.” - Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland, November 2023

When this statement drew the ire of the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, there were calls from the public to expel the ambassador. Interestingly, Irish parliamentarians rarely debate whether Israel is in the right or not, they debate whether Israel can be allowed to continue to exist or whether it must be dissolved. The Irish have a history of using what the British portrayed as terrorism to achieve their own independence and have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians who they see as being in a similar situation, under the thumb of a stronger power. Apparently nobody is arguing that Hamas's attack on civilians was justifiable, and everybody there condemns it.