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Article: What the chaplain saw in Palestine: dwelling on the past won't advance the cause of peace, but neither will rewriting history. (Commentary).
- Article from:
- Presbyterian Record
- Article date:
- November 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Presbyterian Record. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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My father died on the Western Front during the First World War when I was five months old. My uncle, Wilfred Johnson, was a soldier in Edmund Allenby's army that captured Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917. Without Allenby's victory, there would be no Palestine and no Israel. One of my favourite cousins was killed in the Second World War on June 6, 1944. I filled a Church of Scotland spot as an Irish Presbyterian parachute chaplain with the Sixth Airborne and was in Palestine from the spring of 1946 to midsummer 1947. So I am sensitive to the adverse remarks about the British army by Gerda Huisman (Letters, September).
I was raised in a Hebraic branch of the ...