Defence Forces Review 2008

Defence Forces Review 2008
By then, of course, Major Haddad had turned up at Bayt Yahum with his second-in-command
and two Israeli officers – apparently on the orders of Yitzhak Shamir, the then Israeli Foreign
Minister – to meet the Irishmen whom he had so often derided. One of the Irish soldiers present
at this extraordinary gathering recorded for me what Haddad said. ‘I have been instructed by
Mr Shamir’, Haddad began, ‘to make peace with the Irish. We are Christian, you are Christian
– why can’t we be friends’
At-Tiri, it turned out, had proved a vital point, even if UNIFIL headquarters didn’t want
to acknowledge the lesson. An attempt to discredit the Irish battalion had taught the UN’s
antagonists to respect it. Force could be answered with force if this was necessary, and even
the subsequent murders of Smallhorne and Barrett provided sufficient international anger
and embarrassment for the Israelis to exercise their quaint ‘influence’ upon Haddad’s militia.
It was an event which the Irish were able to build upon in the coming years, the knowledge
that potential militia opponents could face gunfire rather than compromise if they pushed
too far. With this example in mind, UNIFIL itself could show resolve, even at great risk
to its personnel. UNIFIL soldiers would not allow their armoured vehicles to be examined,
either by Haddad militiamen, Israelis or Palestinian guerrillas. When UNIFIL was told by the
Israelis that Haddad need to give permission for UN helicopter medical-evacuation flights
across southern Lebanon, the Israelis were informed that UNIFIL was taking its wounded out
of the area of operations where and when it chose, and that Israel would be held to account for
any attack by Haddad’s forces on a UNIFIL helicopter.
In retrospect, this provides a startling contrast with the later UN operations in the Balkans.
From the start of its mission in Bosnia, UNPROFOR gave the Serbs permission to search its
helicopters, to stop and search its armoured vehicles, even to take personnel from the vehicles.
Once you have made those compromises, they cannot be unmade. And I suppose that the
lesson is a simple one: when a UN mission goes wrong at the start, it’s doomed to go wrong
for the rest of the mission. Too late did UNPROFOR show its teeth; by 1994, after two years
of procrastination and pretence that Sarajevo was ‘strategically disadvantaged’ rather than
surrounded, air strikes were a disaster. Faced with the taking of their own soldiers as hostages,
UNPROFOR backed down again. For UNIFIL, the battle of At-Tiri, though puny compared
to the titanic war in Bosnia, came early enough to have a seminal effect on the mission in
southern Lebanon.
In Israel, the campaign against the Irish continued for several months after the At-Tiri conflict.
Israeli newspapers suggested that Irish troops were anti-semitic, recalling the 1905 Limerick
Pogrom against its Jewish citizens, the brief popularity of O’Duffy’s Blueshirts in the 1930’s
and deValera’s 1945 visit of condolence on the death of Hitler to the German Minister in
Dublin. The Irish, it was frequently said, allowed PLO infiltrators through their checkpoints:
they were accused of being pro-Palestinian, a remark which contained the hidden code that
the Irish supported what the Israelis called ‘terrorism’.
In fact, an examination of the non-accidental casualties in Irelands thirty five Infantry
battalions over the seventeen years of their service in UNIFIL suggest that the Irish have
suffered in equal proportions from all parties to the conflict in southern Lebanon. Although
the UN does not provide such statistics – nor I think does the Irish army – my own figures
40