‘An Oriental Ireland’: Thinking about Palestine in Terms of the Irish Question during the Mandatory Era *

This chapter focuses on how a representative selection of members of the British foreign policy elite, as well as Zionist participants in the Palestine conflict and their Arab opponents, drew on the Irish analogy in thinking about the Palestine problem. It examines how the Palestine issue loomed large in the Irish consciousness from the time of the Balfour Declaration until the establishment of Israel in 1948. The chapter explores how the Irish viewed events in Palestine in terms of their own experience during the mandatory era. The Irish problem, and the British preoccupation with it, not only survived the war and the postwar settlement but took on an even greater centrality with the outbreak of a full-scale anti-British rebellion between 1919 and 1921. It is true that various strands of the Zionist movement, most notably the extremist Irgun and Stern Gang, drew regularly on the Irish precedent in their deliberations.