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History, Politics, and Nationalism in Ireland and Israel: Legacies of 1922 and 1948

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Book cover The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public

Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

Abstract

In 2004, David Cesarani wrote: ‘history weighs more heavily on Israel and plays a greater role in public life than is probably the case for any other country.’ This chapter focuses on the relationship between nationalism, academic history, and popular understandings of history regarding the founding myths of the Republic of Ireland and the State of Israel, contained in the histories of the Irish War of Independence and the Israeli War of Independence. Two important incidents happened during the conflicts which have since become symbolic: the ‘massacres’ that happened in the Bandon Valley in 1922 and Tantura in northern Israel/Palestine in 1948. This chapter brings to light the unexpected symmetry of the controversies and the complex and usually fraught relationship between nationalism and historical research that continues to shape public debate on history in both Dublin and Tel Aviv.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    David Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal, and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism (London, 2009).

  2. 2.

    David Cesarani, “Coming to terms with the past: Israel”, History Today, 54, 2 (2004), p. 16.

  3. 3.

    Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2004), 3–4.

  4. 4.

    Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Shulamit Eliash, The Harp and the Shield of David: Ireland, Zionism and the State of Israel (Oxford, Routledge, 2007), Rory Miller, Ireland and the Palestine Question, 1948–2004 (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2005), Dan Lainer-Vos, Sinews of the Nation: Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), Aidan Beatty, Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

  5. 5.

    Stephen Howe, “The Politics of Historical ‘Revisionism’: Comparing Ireland and Israel/Palestine”, Past and Present, 168, 1 (2000), 227–253.

  6. 6.

    “Historians clash over Protestant massacre”, The Sunday Times, May 13, 2012.

  7. 7.

    Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom (Dublin, 1924), Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Dublin, 1949).

  8. 8.

    Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923 (London, Allen Lane, 2015), 18–19.

  9. 9.

    John M. Regan, Myth of the Irish State: Historical Problems and Other Essays (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2013).

  10. 10.

    Regan, one of Hart’s most trenchant critics, notes: ‘In living memory few books on modern Irish history excited more attention or drew closer scrutiny than Hart’s study of the IRA in Cork in 1916–1923.’ John M. Regan, “The Bandon Valley Massacre as a Historical Problem”, History, 97, 325 (2012), 75.

  11. 11.

    The Irish War of Independence was a small-scale conflict in which very small numbers were killed or wounded in any engagement. The Kilmichael Ambush stood out as an event in which seventeen British soldiers were killed in a single incident. Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 36.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 277.

  13. 13.

    Regan, “The Bandon Valley Massacre”, 93.

  14. 14.

    Eoghan Harris, “In memory of Peter Hart, honorary Irish man of history”, Irish Independent, July 25, 2010.

  15. 15.

    Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, 63, 95, 132, 196.

  16. 16.

    Charles Townshend, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence (London, Penguin, 2013), 371.

  17. 17.

    Regan, “The Bandon Valley Massacre”, 70, 75, 90, 91.

  18. 18.

    Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, 280.

  19. 19.

    Regan, ‘The Bandon Valley Massacre’, 79.

  20. 20.

    ‘President calls for re-examination of “imperial triumphalism”’, Irish Times, March 28, 2016.

  21. 21.

    Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910–1922 (London, Faber and Faber, 2013), 10.

  22. 22.

    Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (London, Oneworld, 2004), and idem, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  23. 23.

    Benny Morris, “The Tantura ‘Massacre’ Affair”, The Jerusalem Report, February 4, 2004, 21.

  24. 24.

    Batya Ungar-Sargon, ‘In 2000, a newspaper headline opened a wound in Israeli society. It still hasn’t healed.’ The Tablet, May 19, 2014.

  25. 25.

    Yoav Gelber, Nation and History: Israeli Historiography Between Zionism and Post-Zionism (London, Valentine Mitchell), 257. The index of the book refers to the ‘Tantura blood libel.’

  26. 26.

    Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  27. 27.

    Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (London, Yale University Press, 2008), 12–15.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 21.

  29. 29.

    Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 247.

  30. 30.

    Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford, Clarendon, 1990), 110, 213.

  31. 31.

    Morris, 1948, 164.

  32. 32.

    Gelber, Nation and History, 257, 259.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 260–261.

  34. 34.

    Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (London, 2009), 55, 60. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 6.

  35. 35.

    Shlaim, Israel and Palestine, 59.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 60.

  37. 37.

    Ilan Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, 127.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 134.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 133.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 135.

  41. 41.

    Quoted in Ibid., 136–137.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 210.

  43. 43.

    Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (London, 2004), 137.

  44. 44.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67.

  45. 45.

    Dalia Shehori, “One Man’s History is Another Man’s Lie”, Haaretz, May 3, 2004.

  46. 46.

    Ian McBride, “The Truth about the Troubles”, in Jim Smyth (ed.), Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 12.

  47. 47.

    Cesarani, “Coming to terms with the Past: Israel”, p. 18. Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine, p. 1.

  48. 48.

    A dispiriting example of how this can backfire: when in 2011 Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, publicly dismissed as a matter of personal opinion his ‘right to return’ to his birthplace in present-day Israel he was furiously denounced by his Gaza-based political opponents in Hamas for compromising on Palestinian national aspirations (Harriet Sherwood, ‘Mahmoud Abbas outrages Palestinian refugees by waiving his right to return’, The Guardian, November 4, 2012).

  49. 49.

    Alon Confino, “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, a History of 1948”, Israel Studies, 17, 2 (2012), 27.

  50. 50.

    “‘Nakba Bill’ passes Knesset in third reading”, Jerusalem Post, March 23, 2011.

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  1. Independent Researcher, London, UK

    Shane Nagle

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  1. Shane Nagle
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Correspondence to Shane Nagle .

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  1. University of Derby, Derby, UK

    Larissa Allwork

  2. King’s College London, London, UK

    Rachel Pistol

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Nagle, S. (2019). History, Politics, and Nationalism in Ireland and Israel: Legacies of 1922 and 1948. In: Allwork, L., Pistol, R. (eds) The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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