Ireland’s political class loves to parade its progressive credentials, recognising a Palestinian state, condemning “illegal occupations,” and delivering soaring declarations about human rights, but look beyond the speeches and into the trade figures, and the a much darker picture emerges. Despite being widely viewed as Europe’s most “pro-Palestine” country, Ireland is, per person, the single largest economic supporter of Israel on Earth. In 2024 alone, it imported $3.2 billion in goods and services from Israel, over $600 for every resident. Most of that was dual-use electronics: components that power both consumer tech and military drones. Shockingly, that’s more than 12 times the U.S. import figure per capita. While the Irish government speaks the language of justice, its material role in Israel’s genocide is among the most substantial in the world. Far from practising what they preach, Ireland’s ruling class, by the logic of the free market and the parasitic nature of its economy, simply practices what they leech.

The Occupied Territories Bill (OTB), first introduced in 2018 by independent Senator Frances Black, sought to ban the import and sale of goods and services originating in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories. It marked a historic moment: Ireland was poised to become the first EU country to legislate against complicity in Israel’s violations of international law. The bill received widespread public and cross-party support, positioning Ireland as a moral leader on the international stage. Yet, behind the scenes, successive Irish governments quietly obstructed its progress and dramatically scaled up their economic ties with apartheid-Israel. What followed was a tragic irony: instead of severing Ireland’s complicity in illegal occupation, Ireland instead did the opposite, massively scaling up its trade relationship with Israel. Between 2018 and 2024, Irish imports from Israel skyrocketed, particularly in high-tech goods and dual-use components, technologies that serve both civilian and military purposes, while key sectors of Ireland’s own economy, from pharmaceuticals to surveillance tech, became increasingly entangled with Israel’s war economy.

The Irish government, elected on the back of deceitful campaign promises to implement the original OTB, finally passed a watered-down version on 28^th of May 2025, banning only goods, not services which make up the bulk of Ireland’s relationship with Israel. By this time, Ireland had already entrenched itself in the networks the original bill aimed to sever, perhaps deliberately so. The same day the government passed the bill, they voted down a motion which sought to prevent the Central Bank of Ireland from facilitating the sale of Israeli government bonds, which, according to Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald “pay for the weapons used to slaughter men, women and children in their tens of thousands.”

This is emblematic of the Irish Government’s deeply cynical posture on Palestine, performative solidarity in rhetoric to feed off of the unwavering support of the Irish population, and active collaboration with the Zionist regime in practice. It reflects a broader pathology within centrist liberalism itself: where moral gestures are used to mask material alignment with violence and domination. Social concessions are granted to preserve legitimacy, while state power quietly reinforces the very systems it claims to oppose. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contradiction at the heart of Ireland’s socially liberal, materially neoliberal regime. While referendums on gay marriage and abortion have been held up as signs of progressive change, these symbolic victories coexist with record homelessness, a deepening cost of living crisis, a disillusioned working class, and a generation pushed into precarity or forced to emigrate, with homeowners own 97% of all wealth, while renters, around 30% of the population and rising, hold just 3%. Citizens are told to celebrate record GDP growth, most of it from profit-shifting multinationals, even as the state claims it cannot afford to guarantee housing, healthcare, or public infrastructure. This liberal order trades real material security for spectacle, and masks wealth extraction in performative gestures.

Two States, One System: Capitalism, Complicity, and the End of Memory

At first glance, few “states” appear more different than Ireland and Israel. One is a “post-colonial” nation still under British occupation, with a deep cultural memory of forced starvation, settler-colonialism, land theft, genocide, invasion and occupation; the other, a settler-colonial state founded through British imperialism, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and maintained through military domination. Irish cultural memory is steeped in solidarity with the oppressed, shaped by the trauma of land theft, hunger, domination and exile. Israeli society, by contrast, is built on domination, militarism, and expansionism, with overwhelming public support for the genocide unfolding in Gaza. Irish people identify with Palestine not just sentimentally, but historically and structurally, the oppressors were once the same, and yet, in one of the clearest betrayals of principle in recent memory, the Irish state has materially aligned itself with Israel, deepening economic, technological and logistical collaboration in the very years that Israel’s apartheid system has grown more openly genocidal.

This dissonance is not a failure of morality; it is a feature of capitalism. In the world-system framework of Immanuel Wallerstein, both Ireland and Israel function as semi-peripheral rentier states: advanced enough to host tech clusters, weapons industries and financial flows, but fundamentally subordinate to the U.S.-led core. Ireland acts as an “onshored tax haven,” hosting Apple, Google, and Pfizer while extracting intellectual property rents and exporting tech services. Israel, meanwhile, survives on billions in U.S. aid while exporting weapons, surveillance software, and battlefield-tested tools of repression. Both economies are extractive, speculative, and deeply embedded in U.S. geopolitical strategy, conduits for capital accumulation and imperial enforcement. They may differ in history and values, but they are unified in function: serving the architecture of global domination.

Under capitalism, there are no real values, no culture, no memory, no connection to each other of the web of life. There is only exponential growth and linear “progress”, bought at the price of exponential sacrifice: famine, eviction, war, ecological collapse. Indigenous culture is replaced with consumer culture. Community and care gives way to competition, debt, and enclosure. Life becomes a competition of accumulation, where each cycle of competition widens the gulf between privilege and precarity. From the homeless in Dublin to the ruins of Gaza, the system disciplines all who fail to comply with its singular logic: endless accumulation. Those who serve capital, whether corporations profiting from spyware, states facilitating genocide, governments paving the way for transferring public wealth into private riches, or individuals choosing a corporate career, are rewarded. Those who resist, whether an activist, an ethical business, or a nation, are punished. Human rights are reduced to PR campaigns. Whether it’s Israeli arms, Congolese cobalt, or Amazon rainforest beef, the imperial mode of living demands that suffering be externalised for the benefit of the few.

In this global order, Ireland’s complicity mirrors that of the Gulf monarchies and authoritarian Arab regimes that also prop up Israel while claiming to stand for Palestine. All act as nodes in the capitalist world-system, serving U.S. hegemony while repressing their own people and enriching elites. In Ireland’s case, this means enabling arms shipments through Shannon, certifying Israeli war bonds, deepening economic ties and voting down sanctions, even as the vast majority of its population demands the opposite. What once passed for a politics of values has become a mask for a politics of extraction, and beneath the rhetoric lies the reality: solidarity ends where profit begins.

Booming Trade, Hollow Solidarity

Ireland’s trade figures tell the tale. In 2018, the year the original Occupied Territories Bill (OTB) was first introduced, Ireland ran a trade surplus with Israel of about $1 billion (exporting over $1.2 billion, mostly pharmaceuticals and machinery). By 2024, that picture had flipped entirely. The Israeli embassy in Dublin, now closed after Israel accused the Irish government of “antisemitic rhetoric,” had proudly noted that bilateral trade exceeded €4 billion that year, concentrated in high-tech sectors. The irony is hard to miss: this same Irish government, while being smeared as antisemitic for mild criticism of Israeli war crimes, has, due to significant lobbying, simultaneously pushed to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a move widely criticised for equating legitimate critique of Israel with hate speech. Even Israel’s accusation focused on “rhetoric” alone, a telling reflection of where Irish state action begins and ends.

In material terms, Ireland bought vastly more from Israel than it sold. Al Jazeera reports that Ireland imported $3.2 billion worth of Israeli goods in 2024, making it Israel’s second-largest export market after the U.S., and per capita, the single biggest economic supporter of Israel on Earth. That translates to over $600 per person, more than 12 times the U.S. equivalent. Strikingly, €3 billion of that was integrated circuits and microelectronics, dual-use computer chips and components that can serve both civilian and military purposes. These are the same chips that power everything from medical devices and smartphones to surveillance systems and armed drones. The “dual” in dual-use is not incidental, it is the hinge that connects Ireland’s greenwashed tech economy with Israel’s machinery of war.

While Irish officials publicly postured against Israeli apartheid, a deeper material alignment was taking shape one that may not be fully explained by market forces alone. Between 2018 and 2024, Ireland’s total trade with Israel increased by over 617%, a sixfold surge in the exact period when Israel was expanding illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank at record pace. In 2023 alone, Israel advanced plans for over 24,300 new settlement housing units, the highest annual figure since monitoring began in 2017. These expansions, illegal under international law and widely condemned by the UN, coincide with multiple findings from international bodies that Israel is practising apartheid, and yet, while international law deems settlement expansion a war crime, Ireland was ramping up its economic integration, not scaling it back.

The timing in the scale-up of the Irish-Israeli economic relationship is striking: Ireland’s trade with Israel surged dramatically following the introduction of the Occupied Territories Bill (OTB) in 2018, a measure that was intended to limit complicity in illegal settlement expansion. Instead, economic ties deepened. Given that U.S. tech giants like Apple, Intel, Microsoft and Amazon dominate the Irish economy, and are among the main consumers of Israeli dual-use microelectronics, it’s reasonable to ask whether this sudden expansion reflected something deeper than just market forces. These corporations are closely linked to U.S. foreign policy and have substantial leverage over Irish policy via their investment and tax arrangements. While direct evidence is scarce, the scale and speed of this integration raise the possibility of coordinated pressure, formal or informal, between U.S.-based capital, Israeli trade interests, and Irish state actors. If true, this would help explain how Ireland’s moral posturing coexists with some of the highest per capita material support for Israel’s war economy in the world.

All of this amounts to deliberate complicity, with people and companies knowingly making huge profits from Israel’s economy of genocide. The betrayal of Ireland’s supposed neutrality and anti-colonial solidarity is profitable, deliberate, and, in many cases, export-licensed. Between 2023 and 2024, at least four Irish firms exported components directly to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, the same firm building drones, targeting systems, and battlefield surveillance for the assault on Gaza. These include Acra Control (based in Clonskeagh), which shipped drone control systems; Powell Electronics in Kildare, supplying parts for F‑35 and F‑16 fighter jets; Synopsys Ireland, providing encryption software used in Elbit’s cyberwarfare platforms; and Novachem in Meath, exporting UV adhesives for aerospace use. Meanwhile, the Irish state itself has purchased €14.7 million worth of Israeli military goods over the past decade, much of it from Aeronautics Defence Industries, a major drone producer. In 2023 alone, Irish firms exported over €70 million in so-called “dual-use” technologies to Israel — electronics, telecom systems, and specialty chemicals that serve both civilian and military applications. This is the architecture of material complicity. These aren’t exceptions or loopholes, they are features of Ireland’s economy, embedded in state policy and quietly blessed by the warmongers in Brussels and Washington. Taoiseach Micheál Martin, who travelled to occupied Palestine on an Israeli-government propaganda tour designed to provide justification for the Gaza genocide just days after the October 7th assault began, publicly delayed the Occupied Territories Bill under the guise of legal caution. But leaked U.S. diplomatic cables later revealed this “caution” followed direct pressure from the American ambassador. Former Foreign Minister Simon Coveney went further, openly admitting the government had blocked the bill.

Even Irish institutions tasked with financial oversight have joined the pipeline: IDA Ireland, the state’s investment arm, continues to promote bilateral tech and pharma collaboration, despite overwhelming public opposition. Multinational firms who make up the majority of Irish corporate tax, like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, all with major hubs in Dublin, have a vested interest in maintaining this status quo. Apple’s top Irish executive reportedly met with ministers to soften OTB language, concerned about disruptions to U.S.-Israeli tech supply chains and fallout from American anti-boycott laws. These are also industries which Trump, using tariffs as geopolitical weapons, has threatened the Irish government with to ensure they toe the line.

What emerges is a class of beneficiaries, defence contractors, software firms, political fixers, state institutions – all profiting from what can only be described as the commodification of genocide. This is the “complicity dividend”: the financial rewards harvested by Irish and international elites for playing by the rules of empire. Meanwhile, the public pays the price in austerity, emigration, and global disgrace.

By contrast, Ireland’s exports to Israel remain relatively modest. Official CSO data (cited in Oireachtas records) show goods exports to Israel only about €821 million in 2021 (rising to €1.049 billion in 2022), while goods imports exploded to €4.8 billion by 2022. Moreover, service exports – almost entirely computer and digital services – have ballooned. In 2021 Ireland sold €4.35 billion in services to Israel (95% of it IT services). This means Ireland’s economy is financing Israel’s economy to the tune of billions each year, even as Dublin officially feigns support for Palestinian rights. In effect, Irish taxpayers and companies are underwriting Israeli development (and military procurement) through this trade imbalance.

Ireland’s political elite strains to reconcile this with its rhetoric. It claims the new “Occupied Territories Bill” (intended to ban goods from Israeli settlements) is a moral stand. In reality, it is largely symbolic, and still does not even comply with International Law. The legislation strategically removed services, even though the services trade dwarfs goods trade. This loophole guts the law. The government’s own tactics show the priority: first they blocked the 2018 bill under EU trade rules, then revived a minimalist goods‑only version only after international pressure, selectively applying what should be universal, admitting Israel is committing genocide and are illegally occupying Palestinian land, but that some trade, the most profitable parts, with these illegal settlements was in fact ok, ensuring Ireland continues full speed with high-value services and tech exports to Israel (much of which flows ultimately into weapons production and the economy of genocide.

In short, Ireland’s “support” for Palestinian rights is being watered down into a feel‑good gesture designed to mislead Ireland’s population, that leaves its real economic ties with Israel intact, and only made to seem significant insomuch as somehow, other EU countries are worse. Exports of microchips and software continue, while a largely symbolic ban on a few agrifood products from the West Bank is touted as a stand for justice. Ireland’s stance is “anti-Israel” in rhetoric only – in practice, they send more money per person to the Israeli war machine than any other country on Earth.

Financing the War: Bonds and Bombers

Nor does Ireland stop at trade. Its financial sector actively channels funds to Israel’s war machine. Dublin’s Central Bank is by EU designation the authority approving Israeli government bonds sold in Europe. These bonds, officially “Israel Bonds”, are now openly marketed to finance the Gaza war (multiple websites boast “supporting our soldiers” or “operation” of Gaza). In May 2025 Sinn Féin TDs proposed a bill to give Ireland the power to refuse participation in the sale of these “war bonds.” The response from the coalition was as expected when money is involved, disgraceful. The government called the proposal “unworkable” and blocked a vote. The politicians who voted it down are listed here. Taoiseach Micheál Martin accused Sinn Féin of trying to “drive a wedge” between government and people and that people should just be happy with the immaterial concessions granted by the government, despite them being miles away from what the Irish population as a whole demand. In short, Ireland’s Central Bank still rubber‑stamps loans to Israel knowing some of the proceeds underwrite what they now even admit is genocide. This, combined with subsidies in trade, amounts to a significant Irish contribution to Israel’s war economy – a far cry from any solidarity with the occupied Palestinians.

At the same time, Ireland has shown shockingly casual complicity with U.S. and Israeli military logistics. Independent investigations (notably by The Ditch and civil society groups) have documented numerous violations of Irish neutrality:

Military Equipment and Personnel via Shannon – Ireland’s official neutrality is a fiction. Shannon Airport has functioned as a de facto U.S. military base for over two decades, facilitating the transit of nearly 3 million American troops since 2002. In 2024 alone, Ireland allowed undisclosed military shipments to pass through or over its territory, including a two-ton F-16 jet engine and explosive munitions sent from Israel to the U.S. via Silk Way West Airlines. The Department of Transport later admitted it had not granted permission for these flights. Despite legal obligations, the Irish state refuses to inspect U.S. military aircraft, even when credible concerns are raised. Gardaí declined to search a U.S. Navy plane at Shannon in May 2025, continuing a long-standing policy of non-interference. In serving Washington’s imperial logistics, Ireland has forfeited both legal oversight and moral credibility.

Israeli military cargo over Irish airspace – Ireland’s neutrality is further compromised by the unauthorized use of its airspace for transporting weapons to Israel. Between January and March 2024, at least three Challenge Airlines Israel cargo flights, carrying over 24 tonnes of munitions, including sniper ammunition and detonators, traversed Irish sovereign airspace en route from the U.S. to Tel Aviv. These flights lacked the necessary permissions from the Department of Transport, constituting potential violations of Irish law. Additionally, in April 2024, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster, transporting General Erik Kurilla to Israel, landed at Shannon Airport without undergoing any inspection. This aircraft type is commonly used for transporting munitions, yet Irish authorities did not inspect it, highlighting a continued policy of non-interference with U.S. military operations. Even commercial airlines are implicated. Shannonwatch and The Ditch revealed that Lufthansa jets (officially “civilian”) have been hauling U.S.-made F-35 fighter jet components to Israel and transiting Irish airspaces. (Transporting munitions through EU airspace requires a ministerial permit, which never appears to have been sought.) These incidents underscore a troubling pattern: Ireland’s infrastructure and airspace are being utilized to facilitate military operations that contradict its stated policy of neutrality, without appropriate oversight or adherence to legal protocols.

These findings are not fringe rumours but documented facts. Yet the official response has been silence or obfuscation. Even when exposed, ministers have issued weak statements or ignored questions. Ireland’s airports and skies have thus become part of the US–Israeli war machinery supply chain, all done in the name of “neutral transit rights.” Just as during the Irish Famine, when food exports continued while people starved, the state today aids mass killing abroad while hiding behind bureaucratic technicalities and diplomatic subservience. As James Connolly wrote of that period, “England made the famine by a rigid application of the economic principles that lie at the base of capitalist society”, a sentence as applicable to Gaza today as to 1848. He continued: “There was food enough in the country to feed double the population were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights elevated to their proper position.” Two centuries later, human rights have not yet been elevated to their proper position, with the logic of profit and accumulation still sitting atop the list, with the Irish government still only serving its capitalist class.

These revelations further prove that one cannot be friendly to capitalism and principled in opposition to its higher form, or rather, its twin and enforcer in a globalised capitalist world system, imperialism. The Irish government’s role today mirrors the very forces its revolutionary past condemned, enabling slaughter, protecting capital, and cloaking complicity in the language of neutrality.

The Price at Home: Austerity and Social Collapse

All of this colonial double-dealing occurs against a backdrop of severe neoliberal pain at home. Under 100 years of centre-right governments, and in particular since the global neoliberal shift of the 1970s and 80s, Ireland has embraced austerity, privatization and real-estate speculation to ensure it aligns with the demands of US Multinationals. The slogans of “progressive,”,” solidarity”, “social justice” and “anti-colonial” are at odds with reality on the ground:

Housing Crisis – Ireland simultaneously has the highest GDP and highest homelessness it has ever recorded. As of March 2025, some 15,418 people (including 4,675 children) were in state emergency accommodation – up 11% in a year. This is just the tip of the iceberg: independent researchers estimate nearly 75,000 Irish people are unhoused when “hidden” homelessness (couch-surfing, overcrowding, etc.) is counted. Draconian evictions, often supported by British paramilitary groups, to jack up rents have become routine. Housing Charity Threshold calculated that almost nine times as many homes are being offered as short-term lets across Ireland compared to those available for long-term rental, further highlighting those human rights, just like during the famine, are still subservient to the profits of the capitalist class.

Housing Policy – These woes have been decades in the making. Since the 1980s Ireland followed Thatcherite reforms: public council housing stock was sold off, tenant-purchase schemes expanded, and local authorities were hobbled. By 2007 councils built ~6,000 homes annually; by 2014 that figure was just 102. The post-2008 “recovery” strategy was grotesque: the state prioritized bailing out banks and boosting property values so developers’ equity would recover. The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), set up to clear bad loans, infamously sold huge tracts of land and housing at fire-sale prices to global property funds – even social housing that was supposed to go to low-income families. One recent example: a US investment firm bought a €75 million portfolio of 156 apartments (originally for social housing) and leased them back to the state. This essentially privatizes the housing stock and extracts profits, while ordinary Irish people sleep on the streets, reinforcing the extractive logic of neoliberalism.

Economy and Emigration – Despite a booming GDP headline (driven by multinationals), median home prices now top €350,000 and wages lag far behind. In 2024 about 34,700 Irish citizens emigrated, versus 30,000 returning, leaving a net outflow of 4,700. Young professionals and tradespeople flee the housing nightmare and increasingly neoliberal conditions at home as spaces used by young people are converted into hotels, and head abroad, continuing the long tradition of the Irish government displacing their failures elsewhere through emigration. Meanwhile, corporate profits flow out in a net income surplus, reinforcing the rentier dynamic.

In sum, the economy is geared toward exponential growth in the narrow sense: property prices, corporate balance sheets, and financial sector profits. The human, cultural and historical foundations of Irish society – from solidarity to the memory of colonial struggle – have been sacrificed to “the market.” New prisons, big office towers, and tech campuses go up, even as rents spiral. People living on the same island where politicians invoke anti-colonial pride find themselves out-colonized by capital: turning to foodbanks or a tent on the canal, while ministers jet off to Davos or Washington to lure still more investment.

Capitalism’s Logic: Exponential Growth and Sacrifice

These contradictions are not accidental. They flow directly from the logic of global capitalism. As Wallerstein’s world-systems theory predicts, states like Ireland and Israel serve as intermediaries – semi-peripheral economies that facilitate the core’s demands, in return for rents and investment. Their political elite therefore must subordinate any other value (solidarity, historical justice, even basic humanity or compliance with international law) to the imperative of accumulation. This is why Ireland’s anti-colonial rhetoric is hollow: when push comes to shove, what matters is those growing trade surpluses, bond profits, or multinational pay-checks.

The same dynamic plays out in the Gulf Arab “rentier” monarchies. Decades ago, many Gulf regimes used anti-imperialist language to resist European powers. Today they host U.S. bases, buy American arms, prop up US Dollar hegemony and intervene in wars for oil and influence. Shared histories of colonization mean nothing when money and strategic contracts are on the table. Ireland’s rulers are no more immune to this than Saudi or Emirati rulers: all bow to “the market.”

In the end, capitalism erases culture and morality. It replaces them with a cold math: GDP, debt levels, stock indices, percent growth and elite accumulation. Under this regime, solidarity is just another input cost, history a branding exercise, and ethics a luxury. Anyone, Irish or Palestinian, who stands in the way of exponential growth and endless accumulation will be punished, those who uphold it, will be rewarded. The masks of liberal values slip to reveal the underlying truth: political decisions are now made on balance sheets, not on principles. Ireland’s decolonial identity and its supposed commitment to justice have been sold to the highest bidder, and as long as endless accumulation remains the unquestioned goal, more culture, more history, and more morality will be consumed as collateral damage.

The contradiction between public sentiment in Ireland the actions of their government, like in most countries to varying degrees, suggests that the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, and the Earth, is above all, a struggle for direct democracy and true sovereignty, two things impossible within the world capitalist structure, whereby every decision is really made at the market, where every dollar has a vote, rather than at the ballot, where every human has one. This results in the prioritisation of what has exchange value in service of profit – private property, oil, technology, over what has intrinsic value – dignity, freedom, solidarity and the sanctity of life itself.

As we enter a period of environmental breakdown, rising conflict, far-right extremism and the normalisation of genocide, we can’t let the market dictate who gets what, where and how; the Irish famine and the Gaza genocide teach us as much. We must completely sideline the spectacle of tokenism, rhetoric and blah blah blah that have been preyed on our ignorance over the past 600 days of genocide and focus instead on what is material. The system does not care about getting its feelings hurt. It cares about the continuation of endless accumulation, which requires our resistance to genocide to target this directly, and ensure that our demands are no less than breaking every material link possible with the Zionist regime and work consciously, prefiguratively and disruptively to break the necropolitical global system of capitalism which cannot avoid the violence embedded into the competitive and extractive structure of the system itself.

We must work to decommodify life’s essentials and strive for an end to domination in all its forms, starting with the hierarchical and exploitative systems of capitalist business models, landlordism and the undemocratic nature of the modern nation state – all have proven to be incompatible with human dignity, where even the highest GDP per capita on Earth isn’t sufficient to prevent mass homelessness complicity in genocide. The Irish movement for Palestinian liberation has begun to accept this reality, with groups such as Palestine Action Eire, Mother Against Genocide and Action for Palestine Ireland starting to speak in the only language our ruling elite understands – profits. As long as genocide is profitable, capitalist logic dictates it will likely continue. The OTB was passed shortly after brave escalations at Shannon Airport, and elsewhere throughout the country. These actions will have to continue escalating until the Irish government completely ends its relationship, and the Irish people’s complicity, with the genocidal Israeli regime.

As the old saying goes “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty”.

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