Greenwashing Hamas: Ireland fails to join the dots

Planned legislation from the Irish government responding to the situation in Gaza will prohibit goods from Israeli and other non-Palestinian companies operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It will be warmly welcomed by all Palestinian terrorist groups. Coming, as it does, from the Emerald Isle, it will be the ultimate form of greenwashing. It will overlook Palestinian terrorism and leave political space for it. That the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade cannot join the dots is astonishing. If legislation is to offer a true humanitarian response to the current situation in Gaza, it must instead be directed at what Hamas and other terrorist groups have done, continue to do and threaten to do.

The planned legislation is contrary to principle, premised on a misunderstanding of international law and represents a policy misstep. Framed as a response to the current situation, it belies the fact that similar legislation was brought forward in Ireland seven years ago, well before the response to 7 October. That timing tells us that far from being reactive, it is simply being dusted off and recycled. And that reflects a longstanding pre-disposition to target the State of Israel. It is a long-settled principle in mature democracies that a government’s stated purpose, but one which fails to articulate the true purpose or effect of a bill, is disingenuous and must not be the legislative course pursued.

At law, the Irish government already knows the legislation will run headlong into EU trade policy. If the purpose is to simply create political noise and signal virtue rather than to make actual binding law, that is an odd use of legislative time paid for by the citizens of Ireland. Beyond that entirely predictable clash, the Irish complaint is with the State of Israel but, in the absence of state level sanctions, they see producers of dates as convenient proxies, and their products (incorrectly) as low hanging fruit.

The premise for such conflation is wrong in fact and in law. A company is not complicit in the acts of a state if it simply operates in an occupied territory. This is the normative position in respect of businesses operating in occupied territories around the world. Those sponsoring the bill may choose to ignore that; the Supreme Court in the UK has not. However inconvenient it may be for them, that court’s analysis is germane to the Irish analysis.

The recycled Irish bill will likely again be justified by an assortment of advisory opinions of the ICJ, Security Council resolutions and biased reports. Quantity is no substitute for quality. The legal status of each of these sources cannot be elevated just because politically motivated NGOs decide it should be. The ICJ’s advisory opinion does not create a positive legal obligation to stop trade with businesses operating in the West Bank. The Security Council is not a court or a tribunal and is not mandated to determine whether something is or is not illegal under international law. Nor is it, as a political body, positioned to undertake impartial fact-finding missions.

The OHCHR database of companies has been wholly discredited not only by pro-Israel NGOs but, somewhat embarrassingly, by the OHCHR itself. In 2024, its “research” sources were civil society organizations (88%), states (10%) and “other stakeholders” (2%). No investment bank would base its research on a stock using such methodology. No serious government would formulate legislation based on a report that is so heavily reliant on second-hand information, particularly where the overwhelming majority of submissions are from NGOs with an anti-Israel agenda. It simply fails to adhere to any recognised objective standards for empirical research.

On the legal analysis, upon which human rights rest, the document accepts that it “does not, and does not purport to constitute, a judicial or quasi-judicial process of any kind, nor does it provide any legal characterization of the listed activities or business enterprises’ involvement therein.” In the light of these very real shortcomings, the nebulous catchphrase “human rights concerns” is used. To the unsuspecting Irish government minister, this readily invites the leap to “human rights breaches” and ignores the economic benefits these companies provide to Palestinian families. It is an odd policy choice for the Taoiseach to hang Ireland’s global reputation on legislation which validates such causal reductionism.

The Irish government is rightly moved by the suffering of people. But whatever the Irish government may think of Israel or the IDF, BDS-style legislation which targets companies the Irish government considers to be complicit implicitly delegitimises the one state standing up to Hamas. That has a singular consequence: it leaves political space for terrorists. And that, Taoiseach, harms the very people the Irish government thinks it is standing up for.