At Porta San Paolo, in Rome, during the procession for April 25, the Jewish Brigade threw stones at reporters, and paper bombs and cans of food at the pro-Palestine activists in the procession, alluding to the hunger to which the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip after six months of Israeli bombing and military operations. In Milan, as the banner of the Jewish Brigade passed in Piazza Duomo, about ten people who the Police Headquarters defined as “a group of agitated young North Africans” attacked the section of the procession from outside and a man from the Jewish Brigade was slightly injured in the arm with a knife. Nine people, including some minors, were eventually identified and reported for incitement to commit crimes for reasons of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination.
The Jewish Brigade was an independent military corps of the British army, i.e. not incorporated within pre-existing units: it had its own flag and its own emblem and was made up of approximately 5 thousand Palestinian Jews. It was formed in 1944 and in Italy it participated in the final stages of the Second World War. Today the Jewish Brigade is a non-profit association based in Milan that takes care of the memory of the work and the ideals of the historical one.
First battalion of the Jewish Brigade on parade, the photo was taken in an unspecified location in the Middle East on November 17, 1944 (AP Photo)
When the First World War (1914–1918) began, part of the Zionist movement, which demanded the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, first attempted to ally itself with the Ottoman Empire and then, when it refused, with the British Empire which was fighting in Palestine against the Ottomans. Thousands of Jews from all over Europe joined the British army in the so-called “Jewish Legion” which had a limited role in the war, but a certain importance in the militarization of the Zionist movement.
After the end of World War I, the United Kingdom assumed the “mandate” (i.e. control) of Palestine and other territories in the Middle East. At that point the Jewish Agency, the coordinating body between the Zionist political community and the Mandatory Power, offered the British government the full collaboration of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, also seeking to create a separate Jewish fighting force within of the British Army. The request was repeatedly rejected by the United Kingdom, which feared that this formation could become the basis of the Jewish rebellion against British rule. But in August 1944 Prime Minister Winston Churchill accepted and the Jewish Brigade was formally born. It included, voluntarily, 5 thousand Jews from the territories controlled at the time by the United Kingdom and also from Europe.
After an initial training period in Alexandria, Egypt, in October 1944 the Brigade, with its own blue-white flag and with the Star of David in the centre, was sent to the Italian front and, after further training in Taranto and Fiuggi, part of the X Corps of the British VIII Army.
The Brigade fought from 3 March 1945 in the areas of the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines: in the province of Ravenna, Rimini, Forlì, Faenza, also participating in the breakthrough of the Gothic Line on the Senio river front. The toll of 54 days of fighting was 51 deaths. As the Jewish Brigade National Study Center writes, «the function of the Jewish Brigade in Italy was fundamentally of a diversionary nature and took the form of an action to disturb and engage the enemy. According to the Israeli historian Yigal Allon, although trained to face war “on a large scale”, the Jewish Brigade was in fact employed in a static sector of the front.”
In the period immediately following the end of the war, the Brigade worked to support and assist Jewish refugees and orphans hosted in collection centers and refugee camps throughout Italy. In Milan he activated a center in Palazzo Erba Odescalchi, in via Unione 5, transforming it into a point of convergence for Jewish refugees from all over Europe and into a transit hub on the journey to Palestine, between the border with Austria and the ports of Liguria and of Southern Italy. In May 1945 the Brigade was transferred to the border of Tarvisio, in Friuli Venezia Giulia, where the first contacts took place with the refugees returning from the extermination camps. There they also organized relays to the main Italian ports, including Naples and La Spezia, for Jews who wanted to emigrate clandestinely to Palestine, providing them with false documents and military uniforms to evade controls.
Due to this activity the unit was transferred to Belgium and the Netherlands and finally, in July 1946, was demobilized by order of the British government. Some of the members of the Brigade, who did not return to Mandatory Palestine, nevertheless continued to operate in Europe and Italy to encourage the entry of refugees into what would soon become the State of Israel. It is estimated that the contribution of the Jewish Brigade to this migration affected between 15 thousand and 22 thousand people.
Soldiers of the Jewish Brigade in Cassino, 1945 (ANSA)
Parallel to this activity, an internal and clandestine formation of the Brigade dedicated itself to identifying and killing fugitive Nazis and to sending weapons to the Haganah, the name given to a Jewish paramilitary organization in Palestine during the British Mandate and which was later integrated into the forces armies of the State of Israel.
Many of the approximately five thousand soldiers who were part of the Jewish Brigade, however, returned or moved to Palestine, bringing with them the military experience acquired and using it during what the Israelis call the War of Independence, fought against a coalition of sympathetic Arab states with the Palestinian cause. At the end of the war, in July 1949, Israel controlled 72 percent of the territory of Palestine against the 56 percent established by UN Resolution 181, which provided for a plan for the division of the territories of Palestine between Jews and Palestinians. At that point around 700 thousand Palestinians from the conquered territories were forced to leave their homes and move to refugee camps in neighboring countries. This event is called “Nakba” by the Palestinians and the Arab world, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic and which is remembered every year with protests and demonstrations. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still living in refugee camps and the conditions of their “right of return” have always been one of the most complicated issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On the website of the Jewish Brigade National Study Center it is said that «the military experience obtained by the men of the Jewish Brigade proved to be extremely formative and was decisive for the fate of the War of Independence of the State of Israel, so much so that they were two veterans of the Italian campaign, Brigadiers Mordechai Markleff and Haim Laskov, to cover the role of Chief of Staff of the newly formed national army, in the 1950s, while Aaron Remez, also a veteran of the Jewish Brigade, became the second commander in chief of the ‘Israeli Air Force’. In Israel, among the veterans of the Brigade who fought on Italian territory, thirty-five of them later became generals.
Beyond the contribution to the war in the creation of the State of Israel, as the historian Claudio Vercelli wrote, «the armed Jewish militia in Palestine under the British mandate was an integral part of the building of that political community which in 1948 would then transformed into the State of Israel”. On 3 October 2018, the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella awarded the Jewish Brigade the gold medal for military valor for his contribution during the Italian Resistance.
– Read also: The chronology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
