How a Small Dublin Park Exposed a Big European Problem

From the President’s Desk
The Anti-Semite Corner of the Week

There is a small, quiet corner of the world – a neighborhood park in Rathgar, a leafy suburb in south Dublin, that was never meant to be part of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

By: Anat Vidor, WIZO President

There is a small, quiet corner of the world – a neighborhood park in Rathgar, a leafy suburb in south Dublin – that was never meant to be part of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

No checkpoints, no sirens, no security barrier. Just grass, a slide, a tennis club and a recycling point.

For decades, this little park was exactly what a park should be: invisible. Children learned to ride their bikes, dogs dragged their humans through the mud, and the biggest drama was over who kept leaving bottles next to the recycling containers.

It’s called Herzog Park.

Then October 7 happened, and suddenly every European institution seemed desperate to prove it was the most “pro-Palestinian” body in the room – and that it could fight for Palestine without ever leaving its own zoning committee.

Miraculously, somebody at Dublin City Council discovered that the park was named after a Jew.

Worse: a Zionist Jew.

Even worse: a Zionist Jew with a biography that refuses to stay safely locked in the Holocaust museum.

Almost overnight, this quiet park became the latest “front” in the war over Israel – not with stones or Molotov cocktails, but with agendas, motions and something called the Commemorations and Naming Committee. This park was not born as a logo at the bottom of an arms deal or as a piece of Israeli hasbara.

It began life as a small local park on a former quarry, laid out in the mid-1980s as Orwell Quarry Park. In 1995, Dublin City Council itself chose to rename it Herzog Park, as part of the “Jerusalem 3000” celebrations.

The idea was theirs, not Israel’s. The city decided to honour Chaim Herzog – born in Belfast, raised in Dublin, the son of Ireland’s first Chief Rabbi, and later a major-general and the sixth President of the State of Israel. The Lord Mayor came, the new sign went up, and a Jewish boy from Rathgar who became an Israeli president was written, quite literally, into the city map.

The geography makes the symbolism hard to miss. Herzog Park sits beside Stratford College and Stratford National School, the only Jewish schools in Ireland, in what was once the heart of Dublin’s Jewish neighborhood. Across the road is Herzog House. It is a small, physical memory of a community that helped build modern Ireland – on the same streets where the young Chaim once walked to shul.

For thirty years, nobody complained. Nobody claimed the park was “triggering”, or that Irish children were being radicalized by a Jewish plaque next to the swings.

In 2024, a campaign led by Irish Sport for Palestine and its allies began calling to “de-name Herzog Park” – to scrub the word “Herzog” off the sign as an act of protest against Israel. On paper, of course, this was not “against Jews”, heaven forbid; it was only about “military roles”, about “genocide in Gaza”, about Israel’s crimes. Left-wing parties such as Sinn Féin and People Before Profit framed it as a pure “gesture of solidarity” with Palestinians.

Alongside them appeared a group with a perfect media brand: Irish Jews for Palestine. A very small cluster of Jews – I’m not sure they have the numbers for a minyan, but they are more than enough for PR and for a headline that says: “Jews themselves say it isn’t antisemitic.” They provide the magic sentence everyone is waiting for: “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”

The campaign worked. In 2025, the city’s Commemorations and Naming Committee adopted a recommendation to “de-name” the park – to remove Herzog Park and revert to something neutral, or to choose a new name that would be more politically “appropriate”. Among the ideas floated were “Free Palestine Park”, “Gaza Park”, and, even better, naming it after Hind Rajab, the Palestinian girl killed in Gaza who became a powerful symbol of the war.

It sounds moving. Who doesn’t want to identify with a child?

There was just one small detail left out: under Dublin City Council’s own rules, you cannot name a street or park after a person for 20 years after their death (or 100 years after their birth). Hind Rajab cannot, at this point, legally have a park named after her. What you can do, it turns out, is reopen the question of whether the existing Jewish name should remain there at all.

So the only concrete “gesture for Palestine” available right now was not to honor a Palestinian child but to take a Jewish president off a sign next to a Jewish school. The surprise in this story is who ended up explaining to the council that, yes, this was antisemitism. It wasn’t an Israeli ambassador. It was Ireland’s Prime Minister, Micheál Martin.

For a leader of a country often cast as one of Israel’s harshest critics and one of the first in Europe to rush towards recognising a Palestinian state – this was not the obvious move. But Martin could see what the activists would not admit: turning a local Jewish park into a punishment for Israel would hurt a tiny Jewish community at home and leave Ireland looking strangely relaxed about erasing Jews from its own history.

He said bluntly that the move was a “denial of our history” and would “without any doubt” be seen as antisemitic, divisive and wrong, warning it would erase the “unique and rich” contribution of Ireland’s Jews. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, Yoni Wieder, called it a “shameful erasure of Jewish history in Ireland”, and President Isaac Herzog warned that de-naming the park would send a harsh message to an already tiny community about how welcome their story is in Europe.

On the Israeli side, the foreign minister helpfully upgraded Ireland to “the capital of antisemitism” – clumsy diplomacy, yes, but easier to understand when the big symbolic gesture for human rights on the table is taking a Jewish name off a park sign.

How to make a bad gesture worse

The council didn’t say: “We were wrong.”

It said: “We have a procedural issue.”

Suddenly there is “no clear statutory framework” for changing park names, the report is “flawed”, the process “insufficient”. The chief executive politely recommends taking the whole thing off the agenda and sending it back for “further consideration” – not because erasing a Jewish name might be wrong, but because the paperwork is messy.

And, of course, as in every good story, those who lost the vote quickly find a more comfortable villain: not antisemitism, not their own misjudgment, but the “Zionist lobby”. The very fact that Jews and Israelis protested against deleting a Jewish name from a park becomes, itself, proof of a conspiracy.

It is a neat diagram of how the new version of an old hatred works: insist it’s “only about Israel, not about Jews”, target a specifically Jewish symbol with deep communal meaning, and treat any Jewish objection as evidence that “the lobby” controls everything.

Why a tiny park matters to a tiny community?

For a large Jewish community, a park name is a nice gesture.

For a tiny one, it is oxygen.

Ireland’s Jews number only a few thousand at most, and many of their institutions have already disappeared: synagogues closed, shops gone, families emigrated. A Jewish school plus a Jewish park with a Jewish name is not just nostalgia; it is a statement that the community is still inside the national story.

Herzog Park tells Jewish Dubliners something very simple: you were here, and you still count. It says that the Jewish boy from their streets who became President of Israel is not an embarrassment to be airbrushed out, but part of the Irish narrative – as legitimate as any patriot or poet whose name appears on a bridge or a square.

Herzog Park is a tiny place. It will not decide the future of Gaza or Jerusalem. But it is a precise little test of a bigger question: does Europe see its Jews as part of its living story – messy, political, sometimes in uniform or only as ghosts to be honored in museums and school ceremonies?

In Dublin, a small group tried to answer that question by quietly taking a Jewish name off a metal pole and calling it solidarity. It took a Prime Minister, a Chief Rabbi, a president and a handful of worried neighbors to point out the obvious: if your great act of human rights is erasing a Jewish presence in your own neighborhood, you are no longer talking about Palestine.

You are talking about Europe’s oldest habit – this time played out between a slide, a tennis court and a pile of empty bottles by the recycling bank.