By Seán Kavanagh
A vote to rename Herzog Park in Rathgar was withdrawn from the Dublin City Council’s agenda on Monday Dec. 1 as it was deemed not “legally sound”.
Chaim Herzog was an Irish-born Israeli soldier, lawyer and politician who served as President of Israel from 1983 until 1993, and the Dublin park was renamed in his honour in 1995.
The campaign to remove his name from the park was launched in early 2024 by Irish Sport for Palestine as they believed that “the legacies of Chaim Herzog and his family should not be associated with a public park in Dublin.”
“After consultation with Dublin City Councillors, we submitted a motion to the Council to ‘Remove the name Herzog Park, located in Rathgar, Dublin 6 and rename the park to Gaza Park’,” Rebecca O’Keeffe, a spokesperson for Irish Sport for Palestine, said.
The proposed renaming of the park caused great controversy amongst Jewish leaders around the world and many deemed the proposal to be “antisemitic”.
“The attempt to erase the name of a Jewish person from a public space is something that happened thousands of times in Nazi Germany,” Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, host of The Jewish World Podcast, said.
“In the broader context of the war being waged on the Jewish people today around the world, removing Herzog’s name is deeply unsettling,” Poupko added.
Taoiseach Michéal Martin echoed Poupko’s sentiments in a press release and urged Dublin City Council to reconsider their “divisive” proposal.
Irish Sport for Palestine strongly rejects the idea that the name change is antisemitic and says that many Jewish communities support their proposal, including Irish Jews for Palestine.
“We would like to point out the claims and accusations that have been made as part of the backlash are false and dangerous. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and equating the two is wrong. We reject this conflation and refute these accusations in the strongest manner,” O’Keeffe said.
Irish Sport for Palestine also claim that the backlash from Irish, Israeli and US governments were a “blatant and coordinated attempt to undermine due process” by interfering with the Councils vote.
“Renaming the park is not erasing history, rather it is refusing to honour and commemorate the violent colonial legacy of Chaim Herzog and his family. We believe our motion is a chance to promote a much more inclusive, representative and accurate view of history,” O’Keeffe said.
Members of Dublin City Council’s Commemorations and Naming Committee agreed to the removal of Herzog’s name in July and Dublin City Councillors were set to vote to confirm or reject the name removal on Monday.
The process of approving name changes in public parks was amended following a legislation change in 2019, and Councillors must now agree to all name changes via a ballot.
According to Minister for Housing and Local Government, James Browne, the regulations that govern this ballot have not yet been implemented and thus Dublin City Council currently does not hold the authority to authorise name changes
Despite this setback, Irish Sport for Palestine said that they will continue to fight to have Herzog Park renamed.
“We will absolutely continue our campaign to Rename Herzog Park. We maintain that a park in Dublin being named after a man who engaged in a campaign of colonisation as a part of the creation of the Zionist state is wholly wrong and inappropriate,” O’Keeffe said.