A Palestinian question, an Israeli case

Conor McCarthy, a founding member of the Irish Palestianian Solidarity Campaign, finds a new book on Irish-Palestinian relations by Rory Miller's 'important at the documentary level, but flawed and even grossly biased at the interpretative level'

Miller starts off with the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948: Ireland was not a member of the UN at this time, and so had had no part in the debates at the General Assembly or on the deliberations of the UN Special Commission on Palestine. Nevertheless, as early as 27 May 1948, Sean MacBride, then Minister for External Affairs, received a telegram from his Israeli opposite number, Moshe Sharett, seeking Ireland's "official recognition" of Israel and of its provisional government. No action was taken on this matter until February 1949, when Ireland, shortly after Britain, accorded "de facto" recognition to the new Jewish state. Irish attitudes to partition were negative, given Ireland's own experience, and as early as 1937, the year of the Peel Commission's recommendation that Palestine be divided into Jewish and Arab Palestinian states, figures as different as De Valera and Owen Sheehy-Skeffington had publicly warned that partition would create more complex problems than those which it seemed to solve.

Foremost in Irish government minds in the initial years of the existence of Israel was the safety and accessibility of the Holy Places in Jerusalem. Irish diplomatic attitudes to Israel were shaped, therefore, in accordance with what Conor Cruise O'Brien mordantly dubbed "the Vatican Factor"'. The Vatican (and the UN) favoured the internationalisation of Jerusalem, and Irish governments took this line also.

In 1955, Ireland finally entered the UN, but by this time the matter of Jerusalem was off the agenda. Ireland's arrival at the UN was welcomed by the Arab states, which saw in Ireland a neutral country and one with an anti-imperialist history. In 1957, Frank Aiken became Minister for External Affairs, and the great phase of Irish foreign policy began. In regard to Israel/Palestine, Aiken concentrated on the status of the Palestinian refugees. Ireland made donations to the UN Relief and Works Agency, and notably Aiken suggested that the solution to the refugee crisis was a prerequisite for a wider peace, not vice versa. Aiken took a similarly strong stand on the Six-Day War of 1967: what was necessary for a settlement was "the withdrawal of Israeli forces to 4 June lines and [the requirement] that any treaty should be legally and firmly guaranteed by the UN and a majority of the permanent members of the UN Security Council". While Israel had the right to defend itself, it "ha[d] no right whatever to annex the territory of [its] neighbours". Indeed, Aiken saw the Israeli action as a threat to the entire international state system.

Aiken was, however, roundly criticised at home for taking these positions. Yet this mood altered over the coming years, with Irish opinion on Israel/Palestine becoming particularly radicalized during the participation of Irish soldiers with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) after 1978. A number of Irish soldiers were killed by the Israeli-trained, armed and supported "South Lebanon Army", and this put a severe strain on Irish-Israeli relations. Brian Lenihan, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, made a major speech in Bahrain in 1980, in which the Irish Government recognised "the role of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in representing the Palestinian people", and called once more for "the withdrawal of Israel from all territory occupied since the 1967 conflict".

Israel was finally permitted to open a residential embassy in Dublin in 1993, at the time of the Oslo accords. Following the outbreak of the second intifada, Ireland's defence of the Palestinians has stood out in the EU context chiefly in its rhetoric; at the level of enacted policy, Ireland has partaken of the general ambivalence and inefficacy of its EU partners.

Turning to the bibliographical underpinnings of Rory Miller's book, however, the impressiveness of this narrative begins to pall, as one must first note the fact that it is overwhelmingly a history of Irish relations with Israel, thereby confirming the effective erasure of historical Palestine that Israel has achieved. Diplomacy being principally a matter of inter-state relations, and the Palestinians lacking territorial sovereignty, this may be inevitable, but it creates a structural bias from the start. Further, Miller's sources are skewed in Israel's favour: he lists only six sources that could reasonably be called Palestinian; he lists only one Palestinian newspaper, and no Palestinian archives (the Israel Defence Force [IDF] stole the archives of the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in 1982); he does not explain if he translates Hebrew sources himself, let alone Arabic sources; he lists sources that most modern Israeli scholars would think laughable, such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Alan Dershowitz and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Looking at the wider narrative of Middle Eastern history, Miller's book is severely vitiated by a series of extraordinary elisions and rhetorical slips. He criticises the Palestinians for their rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, without explaining the grossly uneven and unjust disposal of land to population it embodied. He implies that the Palestinian refugee problem only emerged as a result of the invasion of Israel after 15 May 1948, but modern Israeli scholarship, famously that of Benny Morris, has shown that the Palestinian exodus commenced when the Haganah began to clear corridors between the territorial blocks allotted to the Jewish state under the UN plan, as early as March 1948. Indeed, the notorious Dayr Yasin massacre of 120 Palestinian civilians by Menachem Begin's Irgun guerrillas took place in April, a month before the Arab invasion.

Moving forward to the Six-Day War, Miller asserts that the war broke out "because Israel (corrrectly) believed that the various Arab states" were about to attack, but he nowhere argues for the correctness of that opinion. In fact, figures as diverse as Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Begin are all on record as admitting that the decision to go onto the offensive was Israel's, and as late as May 1967, the CIA was telling Israeli officials that the IDF could easily defeat any combination of Arab armies.

Even more flagrant and repellent is Miller's attempt to exculpate Israel for the massacres of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at Sabra and Chatila, in south Beirut, in 1982. He reminds us that the killings of at least 800 and perhaps as many as 2000 people were committed by the Lebanese Phalange, but he seems to have forgotten that Elia Hobeika and his killers were sent into the camps by Ariel Sharon; that IDF soldiers watched the slaughter for three days from observation positions around the camps; and that they even fired flares into the night sky to permit the grisly work to continue.

He has forgotten too the findings of Israel's Kahan Commission, that Sharon was culpably negligent in sending the Phalange into the camps in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, and was forced to resign as Defence Minister.

We can say therefore that Rory Miller's book is important at the documentary level, but flawed and even grossly biased at the interpretative level. He has laid down a benchmark in the field, but it is one whose longer-term value will almost certainly be to function as a foil to more impartial research.

Conor Mc Carthy is a founder-member of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign