In this extract from his 1951 article, author J. J. W. Murphy (CSsR) provides an historical background to early Irish involvement in peacekeeping efforts in Palestine; specifically during the years immediately preceding the formal establishment of the State of Israel – throughout the 1947-1948 civil war – and immediately after, at the beginning of the 1948 Palestine War.
A large part of Murphy’s focus within the article is with regards to the book Cordon and Search: With the Sixth Airborne Division in Palestine by English Major-General R.D. Wilson, which itself provides a history of the Division’s experiences while posted as a mobile peace-keeping force in the region.
J. J. W. Murphy, ‘Irishmen in Palestine: 1946-48’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 40, No. 157 (March, 1951), 81-82. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30100365
Palestine has been described as being the size of a county with the problems of a continent. Its size is rather more: “from Dan to Beersheba,” the traditional limit of its inhabited area, is roughly equal to the combined area of Kerry, Cork and Tipperary. The description of its problems is nearer to the mark: it has problems of race, religion, language, politics, economics, defence, concentrated within its narrow borders and complicated beyond description. It may sound incredible, but the census of 1931, the last taken under the British Mandate, gave forty-one distinct religious bodies and sixty different language groups in Palestine. This concentration and complication does make understanding difficult, but it also tends to produce what may be called laboratory conditions for the observation of so many human impulses acting and reacting within such a small space.
Irishmen are generally interested in the problems of nationalist politics wherever they meet them. There were several hundred Irishmen in Palestine during the troubled years of 1946-1948. Some had been there for many years in the service of the Palestine Government; most of them were in the police, where they were strongly represented at all levels. The newcomers were nearly all in the British Army, most of them in three Irish regiments, the Irish Guards, the Irish Fusiliers, the Ulster Rifles, who were stationed in Palestine after the 1939-45 war. There they came into close contact with a nationalist problem unique in history. Two peoples, differing from each other in everything except their intense patriotism, were contending bitterly for possession of the same country which each claimed as its native land.
It was not easy to judge between them. The pattern of nationalist politics familiar to the Irish was very little help here. The Jewish writer Arthur Koestler has said with some truth that one’s view of the ethical basis of Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine depends on what date in history one decides to start from. The country was Jewish for some fifteen centuries until 135 A.D., when the bulk of its Jewish population was massacred or deported; it then became a province of the Roman Empire. It was not always Jewish: the Jews invaded it and took it from the native Canaanites in the fourteenth century B.C. The Jews maintain that they did so at God’s command. Christians and Muslims agree, but they point out that God gave Palestine to the Jews on certain conditions which have not been fulfilled. Religious Jews, who are a small minority in the Zionist party, admit that they lost Palestine because the law of Moses was not kept in the second century A.D.
Christians believe that the loss was a punishment on the Jews for their rejection of our Saviour. Muslims agree with Christians on this point; their religion honours our Lord Jesus Christ as a great prophet, somewhat as Christians honour St. John the Baptist, that is, as the forerunner of Mohamet, whom they believe to be the last and greatest prophet. About one in ten of the Palestinian Arabs are Christians; the rest are Muslims.
The historical arguments were as inconclusive as the religious. The Jews’ case was that they were trying to get back their own country from which they were driven by force in 135 A.D. The Arabs answered that it was not Arabs but Romans who drove out the Jews; the Arabs did not come to Palestine till the seventh century; racially they claim they are akin to the ancient Canaanites dispossessed by the Jews and that they had then at least as good a claim as the absentee Jews; they have been living in Palestine now for thirteen centuries, which is longer than most modern states can claim to have occupied their present territories.
There was also the economic argument that the Arabs had let the land go to waste; from being, as it is described in the Bible, a land flowing with milk and honey, it had been reduced to a collection of malarial swamps, barren sand-dunes, and denuded hills. Jewish enterprise and money and modern methods of land-reclamation were bringing back fertility and prosperity; the Arabs were a feudal community utterly out-of-date and doomed to perish; the Jews were the pioneers of western civilisation in the Middle East. The Arabs answered that western civilisation seemed to have some serious drawbacks which might well out-weigh its advantages, and that in any case they did not admire the version of it presented by Jews from Polish ghettos and Russian small towns, whence came the great majority of Palestinian Jews since the beginning of this century.
As for the ad misericordiam plea that the Jews had no country of their own and that they must go somewhere from the danger of such persecution as they had recently suffered in Germany, the Arabs replied that it was the Jews’ own fault if they had no country. In 1903 the British Government had offered them British territory in Africa, nearly four times the size of Palestine, as a refuge from persecution and a foundation for an independent Jewish state. There was a similar offer in 1938. In so far as there was an urgent need to find a home for Jewish refugees from Europe, the Arabs declared that they were ready to do their fair share and admit their quota, provided other countries with larger territories than Palestine would do likewise.
By the time the arguments on both sides had got so far, the average soldier and policeman, whether officer or other rank, was feeling rather lost. Probably the Irish followed them farthest before losing themselves. But there was more to come. They had still to hear the Jews explain how vital it was for British strategy to build up a strong friendly Jewish state in the Middle East, and they had to listen to Arab warnings that it would be fatal for Britain to do anything of the kind. The Communists and fellow-travellers had also to say their piece, which consisted in the usual acts of faith that the Jewish-Arab conflict was entirely artificial, worked up by Britain for her own sinister ends, and that if the British were out of Palestine, the Jewish and Arab working-class would liquidate their differences, and also their capitalist and imperialist bosses, and settle down peacefully under a progressive regime.
All this by no means exhausted the subject in debate, but it was enough to point firmly to the practical conclusion that the case of Jew versus Arab in Palestine was a case for settlement, if ever there was one, and not a plain issue of right against wrong to be fought out to a finish without compromise on either side. The British Foreign Office had come to that conclusion long ago, but had failed to get the Jews and Arabs to see it their way. The Irish could have told them why: they knew what passionate nationalism can do to a people. But here were two peoples, both intensely conscious of their nationality, both absolutely convinced of the justice of their conflicting claims, both full of the folk-lore and martyrology of their respective national struggles in the past – the Palestinian equivalents of ’98 and Easter Week, of Robert Emmet, Michael Dwyer and Kevin Barry. It was difficult for Irishmen to be impartial and equally difficult to know which side to take. So the soldier turned with relief to obey his orders, which were plain enough: to keep the peace in Palestine between Jew and Arab impartially.
In his book Cordon and Search, Major R. D. Wilson tells how the 6th Airborne Division carried out those orders from its arrival in Palestine, September, 1945, till April, I948, the date of its departure. This Division had no Irish unit on its establishment. It had under its command, for brief periods only, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards and the 2nd Battalion Ulster Rifles. But for some reason Irishmen seem to have been attracted to it, and the proportion of Irish in its ranks was higher than is usual in a unit with no special Irish connection…Major Wilson leaves to his last chapter the answer to a question which civilians would probably ask first: Did the troops really know the purpose for which they were in Palestine? His answer is worth quoting in full:
Whatever the political complications, and they were many, all knew what the object was. It was the reverse of war; it was simply ‘to keep the peace’. As time went on and the situation became more tense and obscure, this object grew in importance. Moreover, the simplicity of its meaning (though not always of its attainment) contrasted strongly with so many of the issues that were mainly political, and often beyond the understanding of officers and soldiers alike.
It became therefore the guide to which all who had to make decisions turned, and those decisions were much those of the lance-corporal on patrol as the senior commander in his headquarters. The degree of impartiality which was achieved was reflected in the lamentations of both Jews and Arabs that they were the victims of biased treatment. Had one side shown itself satisfied, it would probably have been a true indication that the Security Forces had not been acting impartially.
Major Wilson quite rightly does not claim that complaints from both sides in such a case necessarily prove a just impartiality: he only says they reflect the degree to which impartiality was achieved. Edmund Burke said about governmental neutrality in religion, “Equal neglect is not impartial kindness.” Neither would equal oppression of Jew and Arab have been impartial justice. Major Wilson says that when the Division was on its way to Palestine:
It was noticeable how open-minded – ignorant might be more truthful – were the troops on the Palestine question…As far as their sympathies went at the time, these probably lay in favour of the Jews, as a result of what these troops had seen in North-West Europe earlier that year…this attitude was put severely to the test during the following two and a half-years, and in the majority of cases failed to stand up to the strain.
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…One must know the Jewish political set-up, at least in outline. First, it is necessary to distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Most Zionists are Jews, but not all Jews are Zionists, except in the religious sense. The Arabs insisted that they had no quarrel with religious Zionists: their enemies were the political Zionists who wanted to take over Palestine and make it a Jewish state. The Zionists of Palestine were legally under the Palestine Government, but actually their internal affairs were regulated by a body elected by themselves which dealt with the Palestine Government on behalf of all the Jewish Zionists in Palestine.
In close cooperation with this body was the “Jewish Agency” a statutory body under the Mandate, which according to Mr. Albert Hyamson was from 1937 on “an undisguised alias for the Zionist Organisation” all over the world…The duty of the Jewish Agency, as laid down by the Mandate, was to co-operate with the Government in establishing a “National Home” for Jews in Palestine. But the Palestine Government had also a duty to safeguard the rights of the native Arabs which clashed with the Jewish Agency’s ideas of what a “National Home” meant. To Zionists it meant a Jewish State comprising the whole of Palestine, with the Arabs reduced to a minority by means of unrestricted Zionist immigration. When refused this, the Jewish Agency secretly encouraged certain Zionist groups to acts of sabotage and terrorism in the hope that the Government might be frightened into acquiescence. There were three of these groups, the Hagana, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and the Stern Gang. All were secret organisations determined to attain political ends by violence.
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It was natural for Irishmen, as their fight with the Jewish underground developed during the subsequent year and a half, to compare it with what they knew of their own country’s troubled times some twenty-five years before. Few of them were old enough to have taken any active part on either side in the struggle of the LR.A. with the Crown Forces in 1920-21 and with the Free State Army in 1922. The R.I.C. Auxiliaries who had been enrolled in the Palestine “British Gendarmerie” in 1922, had, as far as I know, all retired from its successor, the Palestine Police, by this time – one of them at least, Mr. Douglas Duff, to write some interesting memoirs. But all the Irish, soldiers or police, were old enough to have heard first-hand accounts of the fighting in Ireland; some had been in the Irish Army and had either taken part in the 1920-22 fighting or known those who had, so all had a fairly good idea of what it was like.
For the great majority it was rather disconcerting to find themselves at the “receiving end” of underground operations. They knew the Irish fighting from the underground angle: they had heard of flying columns, ambushes, attacks on barracks, rescues from jail, men on the run, all told as the thrilling story of how a small nation was said to have stood up to an Empire’s might. Now they were on the same side as the Empire’s might was supposed to be, and they made sarcastic jokes about it as they saw the Jews in new high-powered cars flying past them while they repaired once again some worn-out Army vehicle that had broken down on the road in hostile territory…Many an Irishman then in Palestine thought of Black-and-Tan reprisals in his own country and wished that the same restraint had been exercised there as he now saw exercised towards the Jews in face of worse provocation. At the same time he now realised, as never before, what the strain of conflict with an underground enemy can do to human nature, and while not in the least condoning Black-and-Tan methods of reprisal, he knew how strong can be the temptation to resort to them in extremity…
…In theory the Army had received from the Government ample legal powers to deal with terrorist activity as it thought fit, but “in practice the demands of political expedience often decreed otherwise!”. In defence of the Palestine Government it may be said that it had to take its policy from the British Foreign Office ruled by Mr. Ernest Bevin, the successful Trade Union leader who had assured the British electorate that he could solve the Palestine problem.
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…I do not think a dozen Irishmen in Palestine agreed with Major-General Stockwell’s decision to withdraw British troops from no-man’s land in Haifa, where these had been for three months holding Jews and Arabs apart under fire from both sides. That was done on 21 April 1948. The Mandate had a little over three weeks to run. While it lasted British troops were bound to maintain law and order to the limit of their resources, and the British Government had given United Nations an assurance that they would. To withdraw at that time meant practically handing Haifa over to the Jews, and Haifa was the most important place in Palestine. Major Wilson believes that the available troops were no longer equal to the task of holding back the rising tide of civil war and that therefore the duty of maintaining order to the limit of resources had fairly been fulfilled.
A British Government’s promise to United Nations sat lightly on the Irish conscience. As the situation got quickly worse after the U.N.O. decision in November 1947 to partition Palestine, a mocking couplet went the rounds:
“For how can man die better than facing fearful odds
For the honour of old UNO and a lot of clueless bods!”
Most of the troops were past caring whether Jew or Arab won, and the order to abandon no-man’s land was at first a welcome relief. But next day they paid the price when they saw Arab women and children falling under deliberate Jewish fire, and all through the following week when they met the silent reproach of thousands of Arab refugees homeless and hungry trying to get away anywhere out of Haifa and away from the Jews.
The Irish Guards came to Haifa from North Galilee the week after the withdrawal from no-man’s land. They had been protecting Jewish settlements from Arab attack at some rather heavier cost in killed and wounded than the troops in Haifa had suffered during the same period, They did not like what they found had been done in Haifa, and when some of them said so, they found few to contradict them.
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