Ireland’s Herzog Park moment: When the colonized learn to erase
צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף / זָכוֹר אַל תִּשְׁכַּח
The controversy around a small park in Rathgar is almost painfully symbolic. A Dublin City Council committee proposes to strip the name of Chaim Herzog from it. The Irish government – the same government that now ranks among Europe’s harshest critics of Israel – suddenly has to say: this is a step too far.
Herzog Park was named in 1995 after Chaim Herzog, the sixth president of Israel, born in Belfast, raised in Dublin, educated at Wesley College. His father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was the first chief rabbi of independent Ireland and was known, not by accident, as “the Sinn Féin rabbi” – he openly supported Irish independence at a time when that was neither convenient nor safe.
Today, some councillors want to “de-name” the park, because Chaim Herzog is associated with the State of Israel. Proposals have appeared to rename it “Free Palestine Park,” “Gaza Park,” or to give it the name of a Palestinian child killed in Gaza. In the background circulates a petition with thousands of signatures, fitting perfectly into the repertoire of symbolic politics.
The government in Dublin is trying to stop this move. Foreign Minister Helen McEntee – hardly sympathetic to the current Israeli government – calls it what it is: removing “the name of an Irish Jewish man” has no place in “our inclusive republic.” The Chief Rabbi of Ireland warns that this would erase a key piece of Irish-Jewish history and send a signal of isolation to a community now numbering barely three thousand people.
On the surface, this is a dispute over one park, one name, one war being fought elsewhere. But Ireland’s reaction to Herzog Park reveals something deeper: a long apprenticeship in the art of erasure – first as the object of it, now as the practitioner.
Ireland, more than most, knows what it means when someone else draws the map and writes the names. For centuries, the British Empire named, renamed, partitioned, planted and “pacified” the island. The border in the north was not a line of justice but of convenience. Names, jurisdictions, loyalties – all imposed from outside.
You would think that such a history would make any Irish municipal authority instinctively allergic to symbolic deletion. Instead, parts of Dublin are starting to practice a well-known skill acquired from the former oppressor: take a figure who complicates the story – an Irish Jew, a Zionist, a president who fought Nazism – and treat his name on a park sign as a replaceable decorative element. The colonized have absorbed not only the language of moral outrage, but also the colonial habit of simplifying and sweeping uncomfortable minorities under the rug.
The irony is almost too sharp. Chaim Herzog’s father stood with the first Dáil when doing so carried real risk. Like many others, he could have stayed silent and invisible. He chose otherwise. A century later, part of Dublin plans to “repay” his family by wiping the son’s name from the city’s public space – in the name of another liberation cause.
And this is not happening in a vacuum. In recent years Ireland has eagerly cast itself in the role of moral tribunal on Middle Eastern affairs. It has condemned Israel’s response to October 7 as disproportionate, joined South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and Israel has responded by closing its embassy in Dublin. At the same time, the Football Association of Ireland has called for Israel to be suspended from UEFA competitions.
In such a climate, treating an Irish-Jewish president as “collateral damage” in a symbolic war no longer looks like solidarity, but like a classic European reflex: when tensions rise, the first instinct is to remove the Jew from the public square. It is cheaper than changing one’s own policy, and morally more flattering.
Selective amnesia
The problem, however, is not only antisemitism. It is also about Ireland’s own memory.
For decades, Irish politics has lived with a domesticated memory of its own violence. Bombs, kneecappings, abductions, “punishments” in dark alleyways – all this is now often squeezed into a heroic, smoothed-out narrative of resistance. Civilian victims who do not fit the legend remain blurred in the background. The Good Friday Agreement brought a necessary and fragile peace, but it also enabled a particular kind of selective amnesia: we remember noble motives and speak only vaguely of those who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Northern Ireland remains a constitutional compromise: a fragment of the island that is simultaneously British and Irish, with its own hard border history and its own ghosts. No one in Dublin is currently proposing a mass renaming of streets there to “Free Belfast” or “Free Derry from London.” The continuing presence of a foreign sovereign on part of the island has been normalized because facing it head-on would be politically costly.
Gaza, by contrast, is a convenient stage for a clean conscience. Going to The Hague, closing embassies, pressuring UEFA, changing the name of a park in Rathgar – these are actions far cheaper than deep work with one’s own history of violence, compromise, and peninsulas of memory. It is easier to be brave on someone else’s battlefield.
That is precisely why Herzog Park matters. It exposes a habit: the tendency to export evil outward and import innocence inward. The hidden message sounds like this: our own history of terror and counter-terror is complicated, tragic, “on both sides.” Israel? Simple. One perpetrator, one victim, one easy way to show that we stand on the right side: remove a Jewish name from a sign.
There is another pattern as well. Renaming the park “Free Palestine” will not free a single Palestinian. It will, however, free its authors from the burden of complexity. It will erase the fact that Chaim Herzog was not a cardboard cut-out on a placard, but a man who fought the Nazis in the British Army, helped shape Israel’s defense, later sharply opposed the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution at the UN, and as president became one of the symbols of Jewish survival and statehood after the Shoah.
Ireland, which once demanded that London recognize it as a particular, complex people with its own history, is now increasingly tempted to treat Jews as a convenient sign: if you are a Jew linked to Israel, your story can be flattened into the role of “oppressor.” This is not anti-colonial politics. It is a new form of ideological imperialism: imposing one’s own simplified script onto other people’s histories.
None of this means Ireland must stop criticizing Israeli policy. It means that the line between legitimate criticism and the erasure of Jewish presence is thin – and it runs straight through Herzog Park. If Dublin cannot see the difference between opposing a government in Jerusalem and removing the name of an Irish Jew from a local park, then the problem no longer concerns the Middle East, but Ireland’s own moral compass.
There are other possibilities. Dublin could keep the name Herzog Park and add a second plaque – commemorating children killed in Gaza and children killed on October 7 in Israeli towns. Anyone entering the park would have to confront, even briefly, the discomfort of multiple histories coexisting in one space. That would be a gesture worthy of a country that claims sensitivity to complexity and suffering.
Instead, the committee chooses the simplest move: remove the name that disturbs the current mood, forget the deeper story, and call it justice.
The Irish government – and this deserves recognition – is trying to say “no” to this: not us, not in our name. But it should go one step further. It should say openly: you do not fight colonialism by erasing the memory of a minority who stood on your side when you were colonized. You do not honor Gaza by repeating the same techniques once used against Ireland: editing maps, changing names, deciding whose trace of presence may remain visible. (Ní féidir leat cuimhne a chosaint trí hí a scriosadh – You cannot protect memory by erasing it.)
Herzog Park is a small place. A few tennis courts, trees, a quiet neighborhood. But the choice being made around it is large. Either Ireland remembers that it once begged the world not to erase its own story, or it becomes yet another European country that has learned to enjoy the eraser.
The question is simple, and it is not about one park: Will Ireland stand with the oppressed by remembering – or by deleting?
