Ireland has “selective amnesia” about the Hamas atrocities on October 7, the head of the country’s Jewish council has said.

Maurice Cohen, chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, told the Guardian that collective thinking about the conflict in Ireland had “morphed into the narrative that while the Irish fought to remove the occupiers so, too, are the Palestinians trying to remove the ‘occupiers’.”

He said that antisemitism was proliferating on social media and condemnation of Hamas atrocities tended to be perfunctory.

“Most concerning is the surreptitious shunning and remarks and collective blame in the workplace where there are Jewish people and Israelis present,” he said, adding that “a collective ‘selective amnesia’ to October 7 appears to have set in.”

He also said people forgot that the former Israeli president Chaim Herzog – father of the current president, Isaac Herzog – was born in Belfast and grew up in Dublin.

Niall Holohan, a retired diplomat, also told the Guardian that Irish people had a blind spot about Hamas, which he called a repressive and extremist Islamist organisation. “They simply don’t know enough about it.”