Dublin City Council to vote on renaming Herzog Park after anti-Israel campaign

Irish Jewish activist blasts ‘blatant attempt to erase Irish-Jewish history’; office of his son, current Israeli president, says move ‘would be a regrettable and shameful act’

The Dublin city council is set to vote to rename a park named after Israel’s Irish-born sixth president, Chaim Herzog, following a campaign by anti-Israel groups amid a swell in anti-Israel sentiment in Ireland since the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre that sparked the war in Gaza.

A city council report dated Monday said the council approved a report on “Herzog Park — removal of existing name and consultation on a new name,” which has referred the decision to the city council after Dublin’s 11-member Commemorations and Naming Committee “agreed, with one objection, that the name ‘Herzog’ should be removed.”

The report did not say what the new name might be or when the 63-member city council will vote on the motion. Herzog’s son Isaac, Israel’s current, expressing concern over the move, indicated he understood that the park could be renamed “Free Palestine” park.

Sharing a copy of the report on X, Irish Jewish pro-Israel activist Rachel Moiselle said the city council “has made an antisemitic decision to change the name of Herzog park, a blatant attempt to erase Irish-Jewish history.”

“Ireland is an institutionally antisemitic country,” she said. “To deny it in the face of such overwhelming evidence is pure folly.”

The south Dublin park, which houses a tennis club and 10 tennis courts, was named in Herzog’s honor in a 1995 ceremony marking the tri-millennium of Jerusalem, according to the Dublin City Council website. It was previously called Orwell Quarry Park, according to the website.

At least one online petition, created in April 2024 by the Irish Sport for Palestine organization, community soccer team 1915 FC and Irish nationalist group 1916 Societies, calls for the park to be renamed after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was reportedly killed by Israel in Gaza City in January 2024 along with five of her family members and two medics who had gone to save them. The petition has attracted over 3,400 signatures.

The petition noted that Herzog had served in the Haganah, the IDF’s forerunner, attained the rank of major general in the military, and served as Israel’s ambassador to the UN, where he famously tore up the General Assembly’s “Zionism is Racism” resolution in 1975.

It also noted that his son, Isaac, Israel’s eleventh and current president, had been seen signing an artillery shell launched at Gaza during the war.

“The Herzog family has been complicit in the oppression, displacement, murder and genocide inflicted on the Palestinian people since before the 1948 Nakba to the present genocide in Gaza,” said the petition, using the Arabic term for “disaster” to describe the exodus and expulsion of Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.

“We aim to permanently rename the park in solidarity with the Palestinian people, in rejection of racist Zionism, long supported and espoused by the Herzog’s [sic],” said the petition.

Chaim Herzog, who served as Israel’s president from 1983 to 1993, was born in Belfast in 1918 and raised in Dublin, where his father, Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog — later the State of Israel’s first Ashkenazi chief rabbi — served as chief rabbi of the fledgling Irish Republic.

The rabbi’s strong support for Ireland’s republican leaders in their fight against British domination led him to be known as “the Sinn Féin rabbi,” after the Irish nationalist faction that founded the republic, according to the Irish Jewish Museum.

Reacting to the move, President Isaac Herzog’s office said Saturday it was “following with concern reports about plans to undermine the legacy of… Chaim Herzog, of blessed memory, and the symbols expressing the historic bond between the Irish public and the Jewish people.”

The President’s Residence stressed that the elder Herzog was “one of the heroes of the campaign to liberate Europe from the Nazis, a figure who dedicated his life to strengthening the values of freedom, tolerance and the pursuit of peace.” It noted that Chaim Herzog’s father, Isaac Herzog, was the first chief rabbi of the Free State of Ireland, “and left a significant imprint on the life of the Irish nation.”

“Erasing Herzog’s name, should this indeed occur, would be a regrettable and shameful act,” said the President’s Residence. “We expect that the legacy of a man who stood at the forefront of the struggle against antisemitism and tyranny will receive the respect it deserves even today.”

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said that “Dublin has become the capital of antisemitism in the world.”

“The Irish antisemitic and anti-Israeli obsession is sickening,” said Sa’ar.

Though Dublin may be removing the name of Chaim Herzog from the park, he wrote on X, “what cannot be removed is the disgrace of the Irish antisemitic and anti-Israeli obsession.”

Israel’s relations with Ireland, one of the European Union’s most pro-Palestinian members, have cratered amid the war in Gaza. Sa’ar announced last December that Israel would shutter its Dublin embassy after Ireland joined Norway and Spain the previous May to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Israel says Ireland’s anti-Israel stance has frequently veered into blatant antisemitism. Recent research has also found disturbing levels of antisemitic beliefs among large swathes of the population.

Last month, Ireland elected as president far-left lawmaker Catherine Connolly, who has referred to Israel as a “terrorist state.”