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“We had families and friends of years that turned on us. I explained that I can only share the Israeli perspective because that’s my life. My family is being evacuated from the north and one of my childhood friends is one of the hostages that is still there [in Gaza].”
McConnon, who is on maternity leave after giving birth to her youngest son, said she experienced discrimination while in a maternity hospital in Dublin.
“The stress and anxiety ended up with me having a very high risk pregnancy with a lot of complications and I was told I needed a C section within 48 hours to bring the baby out a month early,” she said.
“One of the doctors that came in for the consultation decided to completely and utterly smash into me with her political views. This was my doctor and I was in a high-stress environment. I demanded that she be removed from the team and I received an apology letter from the hospital.”…
Orli Degani, 45, moved to Dublin with her husband and two children in 2018 from Haifa in northern Israel. She said many Israelis in Ireland were afraid to leave their homes.
“Some people have left Ireland to go back to Israel but most who have left went to other countries in Europe with different views,” she said.
“A lot of Jewish people have removed any symbol that might identify them as Jewish or Israeli, they just don’t want to be identified. A lot of people, including myself, at some point in the last year rarely left the house or they didn’t leave the house by themselves.”
Degani, who ran as an independent candidate in the local elections in June in Dun Laoghaire, said she regularly received antisemitic messages and comments online. She was dropped from the ballot by the Social Democrats in April, who felt her stance on the war in Gaza was no longer compatible with the party’s.
“My business suffered because of it somewhat. I deleted all the messages, but a lot of them were about claiming I was a genocide supporter,” she said.
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