Netanyahu has rarely looked stronger in the Middle East – and weaker at home ...Middle East

Herzog’s post, though high profile, is largely ceremonial and he has been a staunch defender of his country’s 14-month military onslaught in Gaza. But his family connections with Ireland are strong. His father, Chaim, also Israel’s president for a decade, was born in Belfast and raised in Dublin. And his grandfather, Yitzhak, who was such a supporter of Irish independence from Britain that he was known at one time as the “Sinn Féin rabbi”, became the chief rabbi of Ireland until he was appointed to the same job in Israel in 1936.

Either way, Israel had not acted similarly against the many other governments which had done all or some of these things.

Sensibly perhaps, Simon Harris, the Irish Taoiseach, did not even give it houseroom, while “utterly” rejecting Saar’s baseless claim that Ireland was “anti-Israel” and pointing out that Ireland favoured a two-state solution.

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But it is clear that Israel was acting from what it regards as a position of strength. In military terms, that self-image is not without foundation.

But its success against Hezbollah in Lebanon – reportedly unexpected by both the US and Israel’s own intelligence agencies – left the depleted Shia militia incapable of saving its dictatorial ally in Damascus. And at a time when his Russian patrons were increasingly focused on Ukraine.

The so-called “Axis of Resistance” to Israel has been severely weakened, but it may be too early to talk of a new “Israeli order” in the Middle East.

Internally, however, the picture is different. One one hand, notwithstanding the spectacle of Netanyahu now testifying in his criminal trial on three corruption charges, which he denies, he is doing somewhat better in the polls.

This illustrates the deep divisions in Israeli society. No one who has seen Alexis Bloom’s powerful documentary, The Bibi Files, can fail to understand the underlying reasons for his unpopularity outside his own increasingly right-wing base. This goes beyond the astonishing leaked footage of the police interrogations of Netanyahu and his wife Sara – he showing convenient and stubborn amnesia about alleged bribery, and she naked aggression.

Netanyahu’s autocratic tendencies have since become even more exposed. A police force now bending to Ben-Gvir’s will, routinely detaining Palestinian citizens of Israel who criticise the Gaza war, and arresting anti-government demonstrators with increasing violence; the banning of Al Jazeera and the Orban-style boycott of the fine liberal newspaper Haaretz; and the increasing impunity with which Israeli settlers carry out violent attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, are all evidence of this.

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After 7 October, Israel’s devastating retaliation has been largely popular – though that has been complicated by the failure to reach a deal to release the 100 hostages still being held in Gaza, and the view among many of their families that Netanyahu was obstructing it.

Because of Israel’s increasingly commanding regional role, anything is now possible. Maybe Trump can engineer the real diplomatic prize for Netanyahu – an accord with Saudi Arabia, without the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, or at least without the “process” towards a Palestinian state that the Saudi de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman says he wants and Netanyahu has hitherto opposed.

But the second of these two illuminating sentences is rather the point. For publics, not only in the Arab world but across much of the West, the stain left by Israel’s destruction of Gaza, let alone its de facto annexation of the West Bank, is unlikely to be removed any time soon. This cannot benefit Israel’s long-term reputation.

Perhaps Ireland’s real crime was to underline that, however welcome the severe blow Israel has inflicted on Iran’s regional power, all is far from well in its own backyard.

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