# Posted 7:14 PM by Patrick Belton  

Call it the plastic leprechaun view of Irish history, fairy tales that could only be swallowed by the most gullible foreigners. Robert Fisk, long-time Middle East correspondent for the London Independent wrote recently, "When the IRA used to cross the Irish border to kill British soldiers - which it did - did Blair and his cronies blame the Irish Republic's government in Dublin? Did Blair order the RAF to bomb Dublin power stations and factories? Did he send British troops crashing over the border in tanks to fire at will into the hill villages of Louth, Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal? Did Blair then demand an international, NATO-led force to take over a buffer zone - on the Irish, not the Northern Ireland side, of the border?"

Fisk, whose views on America and Israel are so agreeable to Osama bin Laden that the Al Qaida leader personally offered to guide his conversion to Islam, seldom passes up a chance to bash the Jewish state. However, this spurious analogy fails to take into account the profound differences between Lebanon and Northern Ireland, which is probably why voices from Northern Ireland, such as Mark Durkan, leader of the Irish nationalist SDLP in the province, have rejected it.

In the first place, the critics of Israel’s military operations in Lebanon blithely ignore the fact that Britain always has had, namely full control of the ground. At the height of the troubles, nearly twenty thousand British soldiers garrisoned province of 1.6 million people, supplementing and motivated equivalent to a force some 325,000 in present-day Iraq. The majority of the local population favoured maintaining the link and manned a large and well-trained local police force. With an overwhelming weight of numbers, the security forces blanketed Northern Ireland with troops and police, eventually smothering terrorist activity in urban areas. Day-to-day interaction with the population by the security forces led to agents being recruited even within the highest levels of the IRA. The IRA’s deputy head of counter-intelligence was revealed to be a British agent; now, even the IRA’s “military” chief, Martin MacGuinness has come under suspicion of spying for the British.

In contrast, Israel, voluntarily and without a peace agreement, relinquished its security zone in Lebanon six years ago, a decision that appears folly in hindsight. Without this presence in the ground, anti-terrorist and human intelligence operations are virtually impossible: Nobody suspects Hassan Nasrullah of working for the Mossad.

Unlike Lebanon, the Republic of Ireland has consistently had both the strength and the will to crush terrorists within its borders, meeting the most basic obligation that a sovereign nation owes its people and its neighbours. Many terrorist leaders, like MacGuinness, Michael McKevitt, leader of the Real IRA, or Seán Mac Stíofáin, founding chief of the Provisionals, were only imprisoned under the laws of the Republic, not by the UK. Ireland also pioneered aggressive action against the racketeering funding terrorism, with the British following suit last year with their own agency to seize criminal assets.

Hizbollah’s barrage, up to two hundred missiles fired at Israel each day cannot be compared with the IRA campaign on the British mainland; by the time of the ceasefire in 1997, the IRA this was aimed at inconvenience as much as at terror, by cancelling the Grand National, Britain’s most popular horse race, or bringing traffic chaos in London through hoax bomb warnings. The operational core of the IRA’s “English Department” was swept up soon afterwards.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been forced into spending weeks in air raid shelters or evacuating to safer areas. The bombardment has made normal working and family life impossible in its second city, Haifa. The apt comparison is with another part of Britain’s history, the bombardment of by Nazi Germany’s V1 and V2 rocket “Vengeance Weapons” in the last phases of World War II.

In spite of being hardened by years of war and the capital’s massive network of shelters, nearly a million people fled London. The British response was to bomb the rockets’ launch sites concealed within residential areas of occupied Holland, killing some 500 Dutch civilians in one raid alone. Was this “disproportionate”? A war crime?

The driving impulse for British intervention in Ireland has been fear that her regional enemies would gain a foothold there, exactly as revolutionary France and the Kaiser succeeded in doing. The IRA chief during WWII, Sean Russell, even died of natural causes while returning to Ireland on board a Nazi U-boat. In Lebanon, Israel has a neighbour playing host to its deadliest enemies, the Iranians. They bring millions of dollars, sophisticated missiles and the troops to man them to bear on their openly-declared joint goal of the annihilation Jewish State and its people.

We should draw the proper lesson from the Irish experience. The IRA’s turning to more democratic means came about through a decisive military victory, not because of any sudden attack of conscience - after all Gerry Adams and Martin MacGuinness have led the IRA since the early seventies. Instead, with Israel embroiled in a war of national survival, it should be afforded the latitude same means that Britain and Ireland have used in similar situations in the past.