Fintan O'Toole: Ireland stood up to Israel - and then left it to 26 footballers to follow through

“So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth” – Revelation 3:16The debacle of Ireland’s Nations League games against Israel illustrates the paradox that you can get burned by being lukewarm. Through no fault of their own, Ireland’s players were left in a no man’s land. When it comes to the Israeli regime, the Irish Government is (in Alexander Pope’s phrase) “Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike”.We have, as a consequence, left a group of young footballers to try to thread their passes between that impulse and that inhibition. Even if they were all called McMessi, they could never have managed it. READ MOREPan out from the football and we can see that something new has happened in the history of the State: for the first time, Ireland has consciously made itself an enemy of another country: Israel.Ireland has, of course, had a fraught relationship with the United Kingdom, with particularly heightened tensions during the second World War, periods of the Troubles and Brexit. But those frictions are part of our own history – they are as intimate as the conflicts within a marriage.Other than that, I can’t think of a time when Ireland made a point of creating a mutual antagonism with another state. To our eternal disgrace, we didn’t even antagonise the Nazis. Some of our emollience has been principled – Ireland has wanted to be, insofar as possible, an honest broker and a peacekeeper. Some of it has been mere sleeveenism: ducking, diving, keeping the head down.Last Thursday, the Taoiseach broke with this history. In a powerful speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Micheál Martin denounced the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the horrific civil war in Sudan. But there was no doubt where the heart of his passion lay: “The situation in Gaza remains an affront to all that is decent. How can we tolerate a situation where civilians are so desperate for shelter that they have to make their homes in war-damaged and unsafe buildings? Where eight children died because one of them collapsed? Where the most basic humanitarian aid – food and shelter – is deliberately impeded?,” he said. “When the full truth of what has happened – what is still happening – in Gaza is finally known, when the evidence is gathered, when the testimonies are heard, when the true horrors are finally and fully revealed, it will shame the world. Nobody will be able to say that we did not know. Let it not be said that we did not act.”This is the language not of broad-brush condemnation but urgent moral imperative. And, I think uniquely in our history, Martin in effect named a guilty individual: “the prime minister of Israel”. On behalf of the Irish nation, he was calling on the entire international community to act right now against Binyamin Netanyahu and his extremist, far-right regime. But what does “act” mean here? Whether the Taoiseach was right or wrong (of course I think he was right), the reality is that Ireland, while holding the presidency of the Council of the European Union and therefore speaking with an added weight of authority, demanded that every country subscribing to the notion of a global community of values must act immediately and unequivocally against Netanyahu and his government.Now I think I’m right in saying that this is a watershed moment in Irish foreign policy. For the first time, Ireland has not just stood up against a foreign government that enjoys the support of the United States and of many European nations, but also issued a rallying cry for the rest of the world to join us in taking this stand. “Let it not be said that we did not act” is a consciously historic pledge. It situates every one of us as Irish citizens in the long view of future reckoning. It imagines how the people of times to come will judge us as a nation and, by extension to how they react to our call, every other nation on earth. And then what? We leave it up to 26 young sportsmen, some of whom were born in England or Scotland, one of whom is 20 and another 21, to parse the meaning of “act”. We send them the Hail Mary pass: the responsibility for showing the entire world what we as a people mean when we take an absolute moral stand and demand that they follow our lead.We ask these young men, who live in the bubbles of professional sport, to go into conclave and somehow emerge with the answer to our dilemma – can you guys please tell us exactly what it means to draw a line in the sand and refuse to normalise the mass killing and maiming of children? (According to Unicef, 64,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza and the killing is still going on.) Good lads.It would be oddly reassuring to dismiss the Taoiseach’s call to action at the UN as just more blarney. But it’s not. It’s a brave and serious statement, shaped both by his personal convictions and by the work of Irish diplomats over many years. It really is an important moment in our maturing as a nation, one in which we seemed unafraid to say that basic moral principles impose obligations that we cannot and must not dodge.But this makes it even worse that what the world then sees, within two days of Martin’s UN speech, is a nation that outsources these moral obligations. The unequivocal logic of Martin’s speech was that he would then call on the Football Association of Ireland to cancel the games against Israel and give the unfortunate footballers the comfort of good authority.Those young men needed the leader of the State they represent to lift the burden off their shoulders and take it on to his own. An open goal gaped before him. He put the ball into row Z instead. A nation held its heads in its hands.