“I’m a reporter,” I said after a moment of hesitation.
She wanted to know for which paper. Reluctantly, I told her.
The bartender tilted her head. Then, looking between my boyfriend and me, she narrowed her eyes and said: “How does this work then?”
I feigned confusion as my heart sank.
“You know,” she said, smirking. “The issue. Do you just never talk about it?”
“We talk about it loads, actually,” my boyfriend cut in. “And it’s not a problem.”
The bartender looked at him as if she could find in his eyes a silent SOS: blink twice if the Jew is forcing your hand!
I felt unsettled for some time afterwards. I was annoyed that my apprehension over sharing my employer had been legitimised, but I was especially annoyed at the suggestion that, simply because I am Jewish and my boyfriend is Irish, we must surely hold irreconcilable views on Israel and Palestine, likely to the detriment of our relationship.
What this sour-faced bartender could not have known is that rather than exemplifying this conflict's intractability, our relationship has shown how possible it is for people on seemingly oppositional sides to make concessions as we learn and accommodate the beliefs of the other.
See, I lived in Ireland for five years. Long before October 7 an overwhelming majority of Irish people self-identified as pro-Palestine, seeing in the Palestinians’ crusade for self-determination a mirror image of their own centuries-long, culture-defining battle against British occupation. As far back as 1980, Ireland was the first EU country to officially call for the establishment of a Palestinian state - and just recently come through on its promise. The Irish government has been consistently critical of Israeli settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza blockade. Irish activist groups have been calling for cultural, academic and consumer boycotts of Israel since the early 2010s, and I witnessed many a BDS protest during my time at Trinity College Dublin, where I was troubled to note that the Jewish society on campus boasted all of about five members.
Indeed, I felt during my time in Ireland — and still feel now — that the Irish nation’s distance from the effects of the Holocaust, paired with a skeletal Jewish population and the overbearing shadow cast by the Catholic church, make Irish people somewhat limited in their ability to empathise with the Jewish need for a homeland.
But as I learned more about Irish history, discovering how British occupation, famine and sectarian conflicts impacted the people of that proud nation, creating a sense of identity through their unwillingness to submit to foreign rule, I was able to view their perspective on the Israel-Palestine issue with greater sensitivity. I was able to see their view not as evidence of their latent prejudice against Jewish people, but as an upholding of principle by a wronged nation, taking a stance to ensure the horrors inflicted upon them will not be repeated elsewhere.
Like many Jewish people, I too might’ve seen Ireland’s staunch alignment with the people of Palestine as an affront to our community had it not been for the many constructive, open-minded conversations I’ve had about Israel with Irish people, plenty of whom are glad to learn more about Jewish history and values given the scarcity of our lot in their country.
Through our dialogue, my partner has adapted his views on Israel and gained a deeper understanding of its importance to the Jewish people. He’d never call himself a Zionist, a word whose meaning has become utterly useless, but he has conceded that the Jewish nation deserves to exist, flawed as its beginnings may have been. That may sound like a small exception, but I would argue it’s the most important one.
I know we're all tired of hearing people proselytise on the virtue of open dialogue with those who hold alternate views, but I’m not sure I’ve seen many people actually put it to practice. I think if more Jewish people did, the idea that being pro-Palestine is the same as being antisemitic would lose its credibility. It has for me.
And I can’t think of any other way to overcome the kind of opposition that this particularly uncreative Irish bartender assumed must exist between me and my boyfriend simply because of our ethnic differences. The worst part is, we aren’t even that different; as the Irish writer Brendan Behan once said, “Others have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.”
What better basis is there for mutual understanding than shared psychosis?
But maybe next time I’m asked what I do for work, I’ll just say I’m a freelancer.
