Sir, - It is not clear from Quidnunc (April 27th) whether Ben Briscoe recalls the connection between his father, the Old IRA and the Irgun Zvai Leumi with pride or not. However, he might like to reflect more carefully on the fact that he uses it to suggest that the present day Provisional Sinn Fein have short or faulty memories, when they protest at the recent Israeli bombardment of South Lebanon.
The ironies of history have a difficult tendency to cut in more than one way at once. After all, the major Israeli incursion into Lebanon in the period 1982-1984, Operation Peace for Galilee, was launched by a government of which Menachim Begin was the Prime Minister. it was at the time of this Israeli action, ostensibly with the purpose of destroying the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and its "terrorists", that Hizbollah appeared for the first time.
The irony must then be that Mr Begin had himself been a "terrorist" in his time, and had personally presided over the Deir Yassin massacre, in which approximately 250 Palestinian civilians were killed by Irgun guerillas. This took place in 1948, the year that Mr Briscoe says Irgun was put in touch with the IRA by his father. But this means that within a couple of years of violent and ruthless suppression of the IRA by a wartime Fianna Fail government, Mr Briscoe (Snr) linked Zionist militants with an organisation that his own party had tried to destroy while in government. Lest he get too enthusiastic in his bets on the memory stakes, Mr Briscoe should remember that elements of the Old IRA had attempted to liaise with the Nazi regime during the Emergency. Not only that, but the Stern or LEHI group - a radical offshoot of Irgun which rejected. any truce with the British authorities in Mandate Palestine during the war with Germany and was led after Stern's death by Yitzhak Shamir - had actually proposed to the Nazis the founding of a totalitarian Jewish state in Palestine, extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, in alliance with the Reich. In return for recognition from the Berlin regime of the nationalist aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement, the Stern group had offered to take part in the war on the German side.
Thus Mr Briscoe should look to his own "sense of history", before he presumes to lecture others on theirs. Yours, etc.,
De Vesci Court, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.