In November 2023, an Israeli cabinet minister suggested that Palestinians in Gaza “could go to Ireland or deserts.” The remark was a jibe, but it reflected a widely held view: that Ireland is the most sympathetic country to the Palestinian cause in the Western world. What was once a matter of rhetoric now carries material weight. When Dublin recognized the State of Palestine in May 2024, among the first Western governments to do so, and pressed ahead with the Occupied Territories Bill, prohibiting trade with illegal Israeli settlements before similar moves by other western nations including the UK, members of the U.S. Congress warned of economic and political consequences.
For an economy such as Ireland’s, that warning is not trivial. Ireland is small and open, but its prosperity rests heavily on U.S. multinational investment in pharmaceuticals, technology, and finance. In 2024, just three US multinationals accounted for 46% of corporate tax receipts. And in the first half of 2026, US firms contributed 60-65% of new foreign investments. Goodwill in Washington is not an abstraction in Dublin; it underpins the country’s economic model. If Ireland’s position on Gaza becomes a source of friction on Capitol Hill, the question of why Irish people feel so strongly stops being academic. It bears on political economy, geopolitics, and on a relationship both sides have long taken for granted.
An Outlier, Measured
Until recently, the claim that Ireland was exceptional rested largely on anecdote. To test it, we surveyed a representative sample of 1,547 Irish citizens in December 2023, working with the polling firm IrelandThinks, and compared the results with data from across Europe and the United States. The figures set Ireland apart. Roughly three-quarters of Irish respondents said the conflict mattered to them “a fair amount” or “a great deal,” some twenty points higher than Spain, and higher even than the United States. On sympathy, about 53 percent sided primarily with the Palestinians and only 11 percent with the Israelis; most of the rest sympathized with both. Elsewhere in Western Europe, Palestinian sympathy peaked at around 27 percent.
More telling still is how few Irish people held no view at all. Just 1 percent did not know how much the conflict mattered to them, and only 6 percent were unsure which side they favored. In most countries surveyed, indifference or uncertainty was the majority position. In Ireland, engagement is close to universal. This is not a public deferring to elites on a distant issue. It is one that treats the conflict, in the words of one Irish politician, almost as a domestic concern.
It Is Not Prejudice
One explanation, voiced in commentary and by Irish critics abroad, is that this sympathy masks hostility toward Jews. Our data gives that little support. Asked how comfortable they would be with neighbors of different backgrounds, a clear majority were completely or very comfortable with a Jewish neighbor, only slightly less than with a Christian one. In fact, respondents reported more discomfort with Muslims than with Jews; that is, there is more Islamophobia than antisemitism. In the open-ended answers, where people wrote freely, antisemitism and Islamophobia were the two rarest themes of all (see Graphs 1 and 2).
This is not to say that Ireland’s past is untroubled. The country has had episodes of anti-Jewish hostility, most notoriously the 1904 Limerick boycott, often called the Limerick Pogrom, when a local priest’s inflammatory sermons drove much of that city’s small Jewish community away. Éamon de Valera’s 1945 visit to the German legation to offer condolences on Hitler’s death, formally correct according to de Valera’s interpretation of neutrality but morally indefensible, remains a stain on the record. Yet the boycott was widely condemned at the time, by the Dublin press, the Catholic Church, and nationalist leaders such as Michael Davitt, and de Valera’s gesture ran against a public that filled the streets to celebrate Nazi Germany’s defeat. In comparative terms, Irish history carries none of the systematic expulsions or state-sanctioned violent persecution that scar so many other national records. That absence coupled with the patterns we observe in our survey responses illustrate why a deep antipathy toward Jews cannot explain Irish opinion today.
The Long Shadow of the Past
So, what does explain it? Part of the answer is shared with other countries: ideology. As across Europe and the United States, left-leaning Irish voters tend toward the Palestinians and right-leaning voters toward Israel. But ideology cannot make Ireland an outlier, because it operates everywhere and Ireland is not markedly more left-wing than other countries. The distinctive factor is Irish history, or how Irish people read it. Respondents who felt that Ireland had suffered historical oppression were considerably more likely to sympathize with the Palestinians. After the importance people attached to the conflict itself, this was the strongest predictor of pro-Palestinian sympathy. It also emerged unprompted. Before we asked about Irish history, nearly one in ten respondents raised it themselves, drawing direct analogies between Ireland’s experience of colonialism and the Palestinian condition. “We as Irish know what it is like to be taken over and dominated by a bigger nation,” one wrote. “It’s the same kind of colonization Ireland experienced in the 17th century,” said another.
Two things appear to be going on. The first is cognitive. A distant conflict becomes easier to read when it is mapped onto a familiar national story of dispossession, a divided island, and unequal power. The second is emotional. Groups that see themselves as having endured oppression often empathize more readily with others they see as suffering something similar. Irish identification with historical injustice sharpens both the moral urgency people feel and their willingness to sympathize with the Palestinian side. It also helps make sense of something outsiders find puzzling: the consistency of Irish opinion across the political spectrum. Even the center-right governing parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, have majorities of Palestinian-sympathetic voters. Both descend from Ireland’s independence movement before it split over the 1921 Treaty. That anticolonial inheritance seems to weigh on their supporters more than left-right ideology.
Why It Matters on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Ireland shows that a public with no ethnic tie, strategic stake, or economic interest in a distant war can still form a settled, firm position, and that national stories, not just elite cues, can shape opinion from the ground up. For the United States and Ireland, this has a practical bearing. The friction over the Occupied Territories Bill and Palestinian recognition is not a passing burst of activism that Dublin can be pressured to drop. It rests on a broad, cross-party consensus rooted in how Irish people understand their own history. Politicians in Dublin face real domestic constraints here, and anyone who reads Irish policy as posturing, or as prejudice, will misjudge both its depth and its staying power. None of this need strain the wider relationship, which is old and valuable to both sides. But it is better understood than mistaken. Ireland’s sympathy for Palestine is, at root, a story about Ireland: about a small country that once emigrated in its millions, that was itself colonized and partitioned, and that has not forgotten.
This is an abridged version of a longer research article by the authors recently published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations and accessible here.