The lice even infested their eyelashes. So writes Anne Berest in her roman vrai bestseller, The Postcard, describing the camp conditions her grand-aunt and grand-uncle endured on their way to their deaths in Auschwitz, followed by their parents. It is the incidental detail – the image of parasites crawling in the eyes of the doomed – that can haunt a mind all too familiar with the facts of the Nazis’ barbarity. Jacques, the younger of the siblings, was 16 when he entered the gas chamber to join six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Noémie, an aspiring novelist aged 19, died days later.“If we’d been born back then, we’d have been turned into buttons,” Berest’s mother, Lélia, tells her. Or soap, she could have said. Or slippers and socks for German soldiers.Only a heartless or brainless reader could dismiss Berest’s fact-based account of the hell her family suffered as mere fiction, or propaganda, or – most pervertedly – just deserts for being Jewish. Yet, even as Irish booksellers restock their shelves to satisfy customers’ requests for The Postcard, Ireland and its people stand accused by some prominent commentators of being anti-Semitic. It is a vile accusation, and as effective a tactic as the one that claims we’re all racists now. The guilting of Ireland is in full throat.“It’s what most people think,” ventured a friend, more out of worry than conviction, after Bertie Ahern intimated that African immigrants – specifically, those from Congo – are unwelcome here. If we are racists, why did nearly one million of us elect Catherine Connolly, an advocate of dignity for all immigrants regardless of their origin, to be the head of our State? Fourteen years of Michael D Higgins’s denunciations of injustice did not diminish the majority’s desire for a human rights champion in the Park. Last weekend, when President Connolly opened the Roger Casement summer school in Dún Laoghaire, she warned against loose language, recalling how the demonisation of Casement had created the atmosphere that facilitated his execution. “The use of propaganda is very much to the fore today,” she added. Congolese delegates were among those attending, as they do every year, in honour of Casement’s landmark investigation of human rights abuses in their country under Belgian imperialism more than 100 years ago. As Connolly spoke, news was breaking that Yves Sakila, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, had been pronounced dead after being physically held on the ground by shop security personnel in Dublin. His death has become another tragic moment for the nation to examine its conscience.Post-Catholic Ireland has not lost its capacity for guilt. It’s a propensity that can make a country extra-sensitive to accusations of hatred. Ireland knows what hatred does. It knows about sectarianism, from the mass rocks in penal times to the discrimination that culminated in the bloodshed of the Troubles. To typecast a people with these cultural memories as anti-Semitic is a collective punch to the stomach. Ascribing an obsessional hatred of Israel is to ignore the myriad counter-indicators that Ireland’s motivation in criticising Israel is its abhorrence of injustice, no matter who perpetrates it.Like any country, Ireland has its racists and anti-Semites but they are not the majority. They do not define this country and they should not be allowed to.The work of Irish missionaries, peacekeepers, NGOs and individuals such as Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and singer Delia Murphy, who helped many Jews escape Hitler’s death camps, have given cause for Irish pride. Writer Samuel Beckett was a lieutenant in Gloria SMH, a French resistance network founded by Berest’s grand-aunt. “An eminently trustworthy man and skilled translator,” is how she describes the Dubliner in The Postcard.When Russia invaded Ukraine, Irish people queued to offer refugees beds in their homes. Protesters gathered daily outside Vladimir Putin’s embassy in Rathgar. Ireland consistently features among the planet’s most generous countries in the World Giving Index. When this became the first country to decide by referendum to legalise same-sex marriage, the compassion was palpable.Evil triumphs when good people say nothing but, when good people are accused of acting out of hatred, it can intimidate them into silence. It can also paralyse a Government’s stated intention to introduce the Occupied Territories Bill.The j’accuse squad needs to be reminded of some facts. Israel has been operating a system of apartheid against Palestinians since long before Hamas’s murderous rampage in October 2023; it has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza since then; it has introduced a death penalty exclusively for Palestinians; it continues to breach agreed ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon; it has been waging an unprovoked war on Iran; its prime minister and its former defence minister are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity; when the court’s prosecutor applied for an arrest warrant for its finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, he ordered the demolition of a Bedouin Palestinian village; Israel has built about 160 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, seizing Palestinians’ homes and lands in the process and often violently.Israel is the author of its own bad name. When Irish people are maligned as bystanders for, allegedly, not denouncing Hamas and Hizbullah enough, you have to wonder: who are the real bystanders? Those who cannot turn a blind eye when a state commits crimes against humanity – or those who try to warp that concern into an expression of hatred? It is instructive that, when – for instance – Muslims have been targeted for attack in Ireland or plotters were prevented from burning down a mosque, the mantra did not go up that Ireland is Islamophobic; a puzzling inconsistency if the Irish really are indigenously and rampantly prejudiced. What those branding the Irish as anti-Semites need to recognise is that protests against Israel’s barbarity are motivated by humanity, not hatred. Not because we have forgotten, but because we remember.