Flickr/Rain Rannu. Some rights reserved.
The other day I spotted a tweet about an episode in the history of the British Mandate in Palestine known as 'The Sergeants Affair'. The tweet didn't call it that; I only learned its name and details when I looked it up, but it piqued my interest because it referred to British army casualties in the creation of the Israeli state, a fact I'd never thought much about.
I discovered that Mervyn Paice and Clifford Martin, two British NCOs charged with gathering intelligence about the activities of Jewish terrorist gangs, were kidnapped by Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group run by Menachem Begin who would go on to become Israel's sixth prime minister more than 30 years later. The group hoped threatening the lives of the NCOs would stop the British from executing three Irgun members who had been arrested for terrorising Arab civilians. They were wrong: the men were executed, so Irgun killed Paice and Martin, later hanging their bodies in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya.
