No plans to expel Israeli ambassador says Varadkar

An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said Ireland does not plan to expel the Israeli ambassador to Ireland.

The Taoiseach was responding to a question from People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett who asked during Leaders’ Questions “how many innocent Palestinian civilians does Israel have to slaughter” before Ireland places sanctions on Israel and expels the ambassador.

The Taoiseach said Ireland would not be expelling Ambassador Dana Ehrlich and said in relation to sanctions, Ireland would always act in a “multilateral” manner as he believes that individual sanctions “are not effective”.

“They (sanctions) would have no benefit for the Palestinians. They might even just do us a degree of harm. Sanctions are only effective when they’re imposed multilaterally by states acting together,” Varadkar said.

Furthermore, he said, “we have no plans to expel any ambassador.”

“We didn’t expel the Russian ambassador. And I don’t think there’s anyone in this house that has been as supportive of Ukraine’s battle for freedom as I have, but we took a very particular view that it’s important to have some line of communications open and that’s why we have ambassadors.”

“If you expel an ambassador or close an embassy, the only line of communication is minister to minister or Sec Gen to Sec Gen, and that’s if you can even get a phone call.”

“We have citizens in Palestine, we have citizens in Israel, we have citizens in Russia, it’s important that we’re able to keep those lines of communication open. It serves nothing to close them,” the Taoiseach said.

Minister Simon Coveney made similar remarks on Monday’s edition of Claire Byrne’s radio show on RTÉ, saying that Ireland and the Israeli government “need to open lines of communication.”

“I think we need to open lines of communication with the Israeli government through their ambassador here. That’s how diplomacy works. And we need to continue to talk to the Israeli Government, even if we disagree with them at times, just like we need to continue to speak to the Palestinian ambassador in Dublin.”

“So I don’t believe that when you disagree with a country you call for the expulsion of ambassadors. I just don’t think that’s how international diplomacy should work,” he said.

The role of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Ireland has come under the spotlight over the last week, with Ambassador Dana Ehrlich saying that President Michael D Higgins was “spreading misinformation” about the war between Israel and Hamas, and a deleted tweet from a senior staff member of the embassy implied that Ireland was funding Hamas.