Ireland’s president has signed a bill boycotting Israeli goods and products. The Trump administration must do what it can to ensure that this rankly hypocritical and discriminatory legislation is not adopted by the European Union.
President Catherine Connolly signed the Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Act on July 23, two weeks after the country’s parliament approved it.
The law prohibits the importation of goods from “certain Israeli settlements” in what it refers to tendentiously as the “Occupied Palestinian Territory” and singles out products and businesses from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria.
The effort is part of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting Israel.
Ireland has long attempted to pass comparable measures, and U.S. administrations have consistently dissuaded the country from doing so. But in October 2025, Spain passed a similar bill, and now Ireland has followed suit.
At first glance, the legislation could be dismissed as purely symbolic. From 2020 to 2024, trade amounted to little more than $1 million worth of fruit, vegetables, and timber.
But far more is at stake than mere goods or monetary value.
The BDS movement places the onus for the lack of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel and misrepresents important facts.
The areas singled out by Ireland’s legislation are not “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” No sovereign Palestinian Arab state has ever existed. Rather, the status of the lands is, at best, disputed. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Article 6 of the League of Nations’s Mandate for Palestine called for “close Jewish settlement on the land” west of the Jordan River, and both the 1920 San Remo Conference and the 1924 Anglo-American Convention further enshrined these claims.
There is much to support those who argue that the land is properly part of Israel. This is from the point of view of both ancient and modern history. “Judea” means “land of the Jews” and was a Jewish kingdom in Old Testament days.
More recently, when Israel declared its independence in 1948, Judea and Samaria were an integral part of the remnant of Mandate Palestine left after Britain had created the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan out of three-quarters of the territory of the mandate. Under normal law of decolonization — the area of the Mandate was part of the Ottoman Empire — the entire area of the decolonized land defaults to the new independent authority, which, in this case, was the Jews.
Israeli rule in what Ireland’s bill refers to as “settlements” does not violate international law, as legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich has documented.
In the 1948 war against the newly declared state of Israel, Jordan and Egypt seized these lands, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, only to lose them in the Six-Day War they waged against the Jewish state in 1967. The Israeli government agreed not to incorporate the lands it had liberated into Israel proper only because it hoped then for a land-for-peace swap, which subsequent generations have proved Palestinians are unwilling to agree to.
Consequently, the status of the lands remains to be resolved through negotiations.
Both Jordan and Egypt have renounced their claims to these territories, but Palestinian leaders have not. Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank consider all of Israel to be “Palestine.” Both have chosen terrorism rather than negotiation. There is no compromise to be made with those who seek your destruction.
Israel not only has legal standing — its rule in those lands is the result of its enemies’ irredentism.
Yet those who seek to boycott Israel don’t let facts get in their way.
The BDS movement does not target other nations involved in unresolved conflicts and territorial disputes.
Ireland and Spain have not attempted to impose punitive economic measures on Morocco for its control of disputed territory in Western Sahara or on Turkey for its occupation of Cyprus.
Ireland, to use a phrase coined by the late Irish American New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to describe anti-Israel bias, is “joining the jackals.” It is doing so during a period of skyrocketing antisemitism.
The number of people murdered in Western countries as a result of antisemitic violence reached a record high in 2025, according to a recent study by Tel Aviv University.
In Ireland, the country’s small community of 2,200 Jews reported 143 antisemitic incidents between July 2025 and January 2026, a third of which were “triggered by cues of Jewish identity or Israeli origin,” according to the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland.
Ireland’s policymakers are contributing to an atmosphere of rising hatred. Worse may be on the way. Irish lawmakers, the heirs of those who helped Adolf Hitler in the fight against Britain and the Allies, should hang their heads in shame anew.
GROCERY STORE SOCIALISM ALREADY FAILING IN CHICAGO
The U.S. Embassy in Dublin warned Ireland to “avoid pushing similarly unhelpful initiatives” at the European Union level, adding that doing so “risks real unintended consequences.” The EU, after all, conducts far more trade with Israel than Ireland does.
The Trump administration should declare that any attempt to replicate the BDS law at the EU level will result in the United States enacting punitive economic measures of its own.