As President Donald Trump was seriously engaged in ending the Israel-Iran War, the Irish government was farcically engaged in initiating a war against Jewish grown dates and avocados and determined to enact the first Boycott Jews law in Europe since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
The law, which it delusionally promotes as “an important step to uphold international law” and is reflecting “Ireland's commitment to a two-state solution,” violates international law and is of no relevance to Israelis and Palestinians resolving conflict and having the capacity to or implementing a viable two-state solution.
The general scheme of what is a draft law published on Wednesday last is lugubriously entitled the “Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill. Its stated objective is to prohibit the “importation of goods originating in an Israeli settlement.” It is to apply to every type of goods, whether grown or manufactured, and to raw materials.
“Israeli settlements” are said to be “a city, village or industrial zone located in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including east Jerusalem,” the postal code of which is designated by the EU as ineligible for preferential treatment under the EU/Israel association agreement. Essentially, it is to apply to goods originating from the West Bank, aka Judea and Samaria, and east Jerusalem, and also from Gaza, despite there being no “Israeli settlements” in Gaza since 2005.
The reference to “Israeli settlements” is an intended euphemism for Jewish settlements that presents in the current era as politically more correct and less offensive than using the word “Jewish.” It does not conceal that it is Jews who are intended to be targeted by the Bill, and that is the view of the Irish government that no Jews should reside or work in the specified territories, including east Jerusalem.
Like most of the Arab world, they should be Judenrein. Immune to complexity, in its deliberations on the Bill, the Irish government has forgotten that many residents and businesses in east Jerusalem are of Muslim, Christian, and other non-Jewish Israelis, the import of whose goods the Bill will prohibit.
The law follows on from an opposition bill published by an independent Irish Senator, Frances Black, in 2018, entitled the "Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill," which the Irish government up until immediately prior to Ireland’s November 2024 general election campaign resisted enacting due to its violation of EU law, despite the wrath of anti Israel BDS campaigning political activists.
While the earlier bill applied to both goods and services, the draft law, as published, applies to goods only as promised by the government parties in their program for government. The 2018 bill, supported by all Irish opposition parties, became known by the acronym OTB. A corresponding acronym for briefly referencing the government's newly published measure is PIGS. A bill specifically targeting Jewish-originated goods, it starkly illustrates the malign incompetence, prejudice, stupidity, and lack of insight across Ireland’s political echelon and civil service when addressing Israel and Jewish-related issues.
Ireland is the world’s second largest importer of Israeli goods and services after the US due to the substantial concentration of American tech and pharmaceutical companies headquartered in Ireland, using it as both a gateway to Europe and a tax effective location for global sales, minimal imports originate from the territories to which the bill is relevant.
According to the Irish government’s own figures, the total value of such imports for the period 2020-2024 was €685,000, including just €214,000 during 2024. This sharply contrasts with the $4.15 billion total value of Ireland’s 2024 imports from Israel as detailed in the UN COMTRADE international trade database.
The obsessive focus in Ireland on the enactment of either the OTB or the PIGS Bill together with the excessive amount of parliamentary time devoted to the issue since October 7, 2023, clearly demonstrates that the Bill’s only relevance in the real world is to both demonise and delegitimise Israel, the Irish government depicting it as “symbolic”. Its obsessive BDS proponents are intent on setting a precedent for a broader boycott of Israeli imports, while ignoring that such a boycott would violate EU law, US anti-boycott laws, drive US multinationals out of Ireland, and dramatically upend hundreds of thousands of Irish jobs, Ireland’s economy, and tax income.
The PIGS Bill, linked to Ireland’s Customs Act 2015, empowers Irish customs officers at points of entry into the Irish state to stop and search an individual’s luggage and person to ensure they are not importing the offending Jewish-originated goods. Postal packages can also be opened and similarly checked. Individuals will be required to declare whether such goods are in their possession, and goods so declared are to be confiscated. Concealing such goods, transporting them, and taking possession of them within the state is also prohibited. Aiding and abetting another to import, conceal, transport, or store settlement goods is also an offence. Customs officers will be enabled to seize and confiscate goods they consider settlement goods and to raid warehouses storing them and stores, and restaurants selling them. Raids could also take place on hospitals, medical practices, schools, and houses of worship, including synagogues.
Under the customs legislation, a customs officer will be entitled, if he so determines, to simply assume any goods being imported from Israel originated in an Israeli settlement, and where such assumption is made, the onus falls on the individual to establish that they did not do so. Under existing law, Israeli goods imported into Ireland, avail of EU, preferential treatment upon production of documentary evidence of origin, and it is assumed that under the bill, such documentation will remove any possible importation barrier in relation to trade-related imports. However, there is a concern that the PIGS Bill could be used as a Trojan horse to disrupt all goods imported from Israel into Ireland by customs challenging the documentation supplied.
For the ordinary traveller or tourist returning to or visiting Ireland, having visited Israel, it is more complicated. If found to have Israeli goods in their possession, the absence of documentary evidence of origin could result in the goods being confiscated or in a prosecution.
It is not necessary that the imported goods travel directly from Israel to Ireland. They could simply be items possessed by an Irish resident or tourist visiting Ireland from any foreign state, purchased on a visit to Israel, in a home state, or received as a gift. For example, a kippah or Tallis purchased in East Jerusalem or New York, or a souvenir or a cross purchased in Jerusalem or in Bethlehem.
Draconian penalties apply to those who break this proposed law. A summary “importation” conviction before a District Judge can result in a fine of up to €5,000. Such fine and/ or up to 12 months imprisonment can result from transporting, taking possession of, or concealing settlement goods. A conviction on indictment, before a judge and jury, depending on the value of the relevant goods, can result in a fine of up to €125,000 and/or up to 5 years imprisonment. There are also circumstances in which the fine can be substantially larger than €250,000.
The PIGS Bill contains no definition of “originating,” a word open to broad application. It clearly applies to dates and avocados grown on the West Bank or any item purchased from a Jewish trader there or in east Jerusalem. As presented, it seems that it also may apply to any goods invented by an individual in what is designated an Israeli settlement, whether manufactured there or not. So a medical device invented by a resident of east Jerusalem, or a person whose laboratory is located there, manufactured in the US, or somewhere in Europe, could be classified as prohibited goods.
The bill's application to industrial parks illustrates appalling ignorance from a government that repetitively advocates a “two-state solution” that requires engagement, dialogue, reconciliation, and practical cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, not boycott and separation.
Industrial parks, such as the Barkan Industrial Park, which I have visited, provide a workplace microcosm of the former. It includes about 120 businesses and factories manufacturing plastics, metal work, food, textiles, and more, with a workforce of 20,000, half of whom are Palestinians. Prohibiting the importation of such originating goods undermines the very positive engagement essential to achieve conflict resolution and is inimical to achieving any form of two-state solution.
Goods in the PIGS Bill are said to include “both materials and products …and things of every kind ,whether animate or inanimate”. Within the category of “things of every kind," it seems that a movie or documentary filmed in east Jerusalem may fall foul of this law in a variety of circumstances and be confiscated if imported into Ireland.
Broadcast from outside Ireland and accessed in Ireland may criminalize the viewer as an illegal importer. A particularly interesting question is how that may apply should the nightly news contain actuality filmed in Jerusalem, the West Bank, or Gaza. Will it be legally kosher provided no Jewish person resident there is featured, interviewed, or among the TV station or streaming crew? Certainly, any reporter returning from there who brings a souvenir home to Ireland will have to ensure its pedigree and provenance are known and be able to confirm it is "Jew-free." An underground industry in Jew free certification may perhaps emerge?
What are other questions that may arise?
Will there be created a special Irish customs unit similar to Nazi stormtroopers to detect and confiscate criminalised Jewish produced “settlement” goods?
Will travellers be profiled to ensure all Jewish entrants into Ireland and non-Jewish travellers returning from the Holy Land are questioned and luggage searched, with members of Ireland’s Jewish community and Irish Christian groups supportive of Israel specifically targeted?
Will a customs database profiling the Irish Jewish community and Israelis living in Ireland be created to facilitate dthe etection of possible offenders?
Will those entering and leaving a synagogue be the subject of questioning and search to ensure nothing in their possession or worn originated or was purchased in East Jerusalem or the West Bank from someone Jewish?
Will a synagogue be raided to check the provenance of a Sefer Torah or of prayer books?
On the understanding that anyone who arrives in Ireland may have visited Israel at some time and purchased some such goods or could be importing them into Ireland from any location, will every traveller into Ireland have to sign a declaration that they have no such goods and be subject to a discretionary search?
Will Rabbis returning to or visiting Ireland be a particular target?
Will religious items such as a kippah, talis, siddur, or Haggadah automatically generate suspicion?
Will a kippah-wearing traveller have to prove the kippah’s provenance?
Will there be raids on Irish retail outlets to check the origin of goods being sold, and signs posted warning shoppers not to purchase tainted Jewish goods?
Will particular products like dates, avocados, hummus, tahini, olives, grapes, figs, citrus fruits, etc, particularly generate suspicion?
Will it be illegal to import into or sell in Ireland any tech or medical equipment, any part of which was produced in east Jerusalem or produced in the West Bank by a Jewish person resident or working there, or Jewish-owned company located there?
Could an Irish citizen returning to Ireland, having had a pacemaker inserted in Israel following a cardiac incident, be arrested for its importation because it originated in an operation conducted by a surgeon resident on the West Bank or east Jerusalem?
Will the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, maintained with great difficulty and EU co-operation after the implementation of Brexit, now be disrupted by the Republic’s customs officers stopping vehicles to detect whether Jewish-contaminated goods originating from any of the offending postal code areas are being imported?
The possible enactment by the Irish government of this legislation has, bizarrely, dominated proceedings in Ireland’s parliament since October 7, 2023, where demonising Israel at every opportunity has been the central competitive political game played by government and opposition and its enactment illogically presented as relevant to ending the continuing Israel-Hamas war.
For Israel’s campaigning of Irish adversaries, the PIGS Bill is just one of many BDS initiatives to which they are devoted. While they have unsuccessfully annually advocated Israel’s exclusion from the Eurovision Song Contest, they were recently successful in persuading Trinity College Dublin, Ireland’s highest internationally rated university, to cut all ties with Israeli academia, research facilities, and Israeli exchange students. Never satisfied they are now insisting that, like the 2018 Bill, the PIGS Bill should apply not only to goods but also to services.
Forsa, Ireland’s largest public sector trade union, which also represents employees in state and semi state agencies, within 24 hours of publication of the PIGS Bill, initiated a campaign to force its extension to services by encouraging Irish civil servants, who advise government, to sign an online petition with their first name and a surname initial, to preserve their anonymity. Dedicated to appeasing the anti-Israel extremists, when publishing the draft Bill, Simon Harris, Ireland’s Foreign Minister, indicated he may do so, despite previously asserting that doing so would contravene EU law.
Ireland is, of course, a member of the EU. International trade is an exclusive EU competence, and central to the EU is its Customs Union, which requires all member states to apply uniform customs rules that exclude arbitrary, unilateral national measures.
A pretence is being made that the draft Bill is a natural consequence of and required by a July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion on the Occupied Territories. But it is what it says it is- an advisory opinion, and it is EU law that governs Ireland’s international trade, free movement, and customs rules.
The offensive PIGS Bill is beyond the legislative competence of the Irish parliament and its application to either or both goods and services would simply be a gross violation of Ireland’s international law obligations resulting from its EU membership. The minimal value of the trade in goods intended to be affected also totally undermines the Irish government's claim, stated in the Bill, that continuation of such trade in any way impacts on Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory.
Proudly noting that Ireland’s government alone in the EU has published legislation banning trade “ with the Occupied Territories.” Harris, critical of other EU states, has urged them to publish their own such Bill. It hasn’t occurred to him that they haven’t done so because such legislation is inherently antisemitic, reflects Nazi era legislation, is morally indefensible, practically unworkable, contrary to encouraging engagement between Israelis and Palestinians and in violation of foundational EU trade and customs laws.
Alan Shatter is a member of the board of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and chair of MDA Ireland. He is a former Irish Justice, Equality & Defence Minister & former chair of the Irish Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee.