An Open Letter to President Connolly: Ireland, Israel and a Handshake
I recently sent the following letter to President Catherine Connolly after Ireland’s footballers declined to exchange pre-match handshakes with their Israeli opponents:
Dear President Connolly,
I am writing about what I see as a disturbing hostility towards Israel in Irish public life, the readiness to embrace accusations of genocide, and the way these attitudes are extending to individual Israelis.
The Irish football team’s refusal to exchange pre-match handshakes with Israeli players on 27 September brought these concerns into sharp focus. It also raises an uncomfortable historical question.
In October 1951, only six years after the Holocaust, Ireland welcomed West Germany’s football team to Dublin. The FAI’s archive catalogue records that Lord Mayor Andy Clarkin said he would be “honoured to receive the German party at the Mansion House.” President Seán T. O’Kelly’s attendance at the match was also confirmed.
By then, the world knew about the Final Solution: six million Jews murdered, mass shootings, deportation trains, gas chambers and extermination camps. Yet German footballers could be welcomed with dignity. Why is ordinary sporting courtesy now withheld from Israelis?
The distinction between the Nazis’ deliberate extermination of the Jewish people and Israel’s war against Hamas is fundamental. Israel’s military campaign followed the Hamas-led massacres of 7 October 2023, when civilians were murdered and hostages dragged into Gaza. The IDF then faced an enemy operating among civilians and using an extensive tunnel network. In November 2023, the European Union itself explicitly condemned Hamas’s use of hospitals and civilians as human shields.
John Spencer, a retired US Army officer and chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, argued in January 2024 that Israel had implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history. His assessment deserves consideration by those who so readily embrace the genocide accusation.
Israeli authorities have issued advance warnings and evacuation instructions, coordinated humanitarian aid deliveries, and agreed to pauses enabling international agencies and Palestinian health workers to vaccinate Gaza’s children against polio. These concrete actions deserve serious weight in any judgment of Israel’s conduct and intentions.
Palestinian suffering is real and devastating. But treating that suffering as sufficient proof of a policy of extermination, while overlooking Hamas’s responsibility and Israeli measures intended to protect civilians, is neither fair nor serious.
Against this background, the refusal of handshakes was more than bad manners. It made individual Israeli athletes the targets of political condemnation. A handshake would not have endorsed a single Israeli military action. It would simply have recognized the opposing players as fellow human beings.
Ireland was capable of extending that recognition to German athletes in 1951. Its failure to do so towards Israeli athletes today strikes me as a disgraceful double standard.
I ask you to speak against this conduct and to encourage a public discussion that gives proper weight to the atrocities of 7 October, Hamas’s tactics and Israel’s efforts to protect civilians. Above all, I ask you to affirm that political disagreement never makes Israeli people undeserving of ordinary respect.
Yours sincerely,
Lisa Shatz
Brookline, MA
USA
