Imagine a silver cup, beautifully engraved, sitting in the home of a young Israeli family in the nineteen forties. The inscription reads, to my beloved godson Yonatan from Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson. Now, most people today know the name Yonatan Netanyahu as the hero of Entebbe, the legendary commando who gave his life to rescue hostages in nineteen seventy-six. He is a pillar of Israeli national identity, the brother of the current Prime Minister. But how many people realize that his godfather was an Irish Protestant from County Tipperary who essentially built the first Jewish fighting force in two thousand years? Today's prompt from Daniel is about the life of John Henry Patterson and the almost surreal contrast between his legacy as the godfather of the Israeli Defense Forces and the current state of Ireland-Israel relations.
It is one of those historical anomalies that feels like it belongs in a movie, Corn. I am Herman Poppleberry, and I have been falling down this rabbit hole all morning. If you look at the headlines today, on March sixteen, twenty twenty-six, you see a relationship that has reached a freezing point. Ireland recently boycotted the twenty twenty-six Eurovision Song Contest specifically over Israel's inclusion. We saw Ireland formally join South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January of last year. Israel even closed its embassy in Dublin in December twenty twenty-four because the diplomatic climate became so toxic. It feels like this monolithic wall of opposition. But then you have Patterson, a man born in Dublin in eighteen sixty-seven, who is buried in an Israeli military cemetery with full state honors because he is considered the architect of modern Jewish military agency.
It is a massive cognitive dissonance. You have a man who is a hero of Zionism, yet back in Belfast in twenty seventeen, his memorial was defaced with the words scum and Nazis. It is a strange fate for a man who spent his entire military career fighting the very antisemitism that those vandals were supposedly protesting. He was born in eighteen sixty-seven in Ireland, and he died in California in nineteen forty-seven, just one year before the state he helped dream into existence was born. But before we get into the heavy geopolitics of twenty twenty-six, we have to talk about the lions, Herman. Because before Patterson was a Zionist, he was the man who killed the man-eaters of Tsavo.
The back-story there is incredible and it really sets the stage for his character. In eighteen ninety-eight, the British were building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Two man-eating lions started picking off the workers, dragging them out of their tents at night. They killed something like one hundred and forty people over several months. The project was paralyzed. Patterson was the engineer sent in to handle it. He wasn't just a soldier; he was a hunter and an author. He eventually hunted them down, and those lions are still on display at the Field Museum in Chicago today. He wrote a book about it called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, which was a huge bestseller. Theodore Roosevelt actually called it the most thrilling story of its kind. It made Patterson a celebrity adventurer, a rugged, Edwardian hero figure.
So he is already a world-famous figure by the time the Great War breaks out in nineteen fourteen. He is this rugged, capable leader. But this is where his life takes this radical turn from big-game hunting to nation-building. How does an Irish Protestant engineer end up in a room with Vladimir Jabotinsky planning a Jewish army?
The timing was the catalyst. Patterson was stationed in Egypt in nineteen fifteen, and that is where he met Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor. Jabotinsky was this brilliant, firebrand Russian-Jewish journalist who was convinced that if the Jews wanted a seat at the table after the war, they had to fight for it. They couldn't just be victims or refugees; they had to be soldiers. He wanted a Jewish Legion to help the British liberate Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. Trumpeldor was equally impressive; he had already lost an arm in the Russo-Japanese War and was a legendary figure of Jewish courage.
And the British military establishment was not exactly thrilled about that idea, right? They were deeply skeptical of the idea of Jewish combat units.
Beyond skeptical, they were often openly hostile. The British War Office didn't want to arm Jews in the Middle East for fear of upsetting the local Arab populations or complicating their own colonial interests. The compromise they offered was the Zion Mule Corps. It was a transport unit, not a front-line infantry unit. The idea was that Jewish volunteers would handle the logistics, the mules, and the supplies. Most of the volunteers were Jewish refugees from Palestine who had been expelled by the Turks and were sitting in camps in Alexandria.
I love the technical details of this. You have five hundred and sixty-two Jewish volunteers and seven hundred and fifty mules. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. And Patterson, this Irish officer, is told, here, go lead these guys at Gallipoli. Why did he take it? Most British officers would have seen that as a career-ending insult, leading a mule corps of refugees.
This is where Patterson's background becomes the defining factor. He was a devout Protestant who grew up with a deep, literalist understanding of the Hebrew Bible. To him, the Jewish people weren't just another ethnic group; they were the people of the Book. He saw the restoration of Israel not as a political movement, but as a biblical prophecy being fulfilled in real-time. When he met these volunteers, he didn't see refugees. He saw the descendants of Joshua and King David. He actually wrote that since the days of Judas Maccabeus, such a thing as a purely Jewish unit had not been known. He felt honored to lead them. He saw himself as a modern-day Nehemiah.
It is a fascinating technical challenge, though. You are taking people who have never been allowed to bear arms in the Russian Empire or the Ottoman Empire, and you are trying to turn them into a disciplined military force in a matter of weeks. And he is doing it while fighting his own superiors who keep trying to undermine the unit.
The bureaucratic struggle was almost as intense as the fighting at Gallipoli. Patterson had to fight for everything, from the right to have kosher food to the right to have a Star of David on their insignia. The British officers in Cairo were constantly making antisemitic cracks, calling them the Jew-boys or mocking the idea of them under fire. But then they got to Gallipoli on April seventeen, nineteen fifteen. They were landing supplies on the beaches while being shelled by the Turks.
And that is where the narrative shifts. Because the Zion Mule Corps actually performed under fire. Trumpeldor, who was Patterson's deputy, was leading men through absolute carnage. There is a story from Gallipoli where a mule was killed by shrapnel, and the Jewish soldiers just kept moving, carrying the supplies on their own backs under heavy fire.
Patterson was constantly writing reports back to London, essentially saying, you told me these people couldn't fight, but they are showing more courage than your regular transport units. He became their fiercest advocate. He realized that if he didn't stand up for them, the British military bureaucracy would just crush the experiment and bury the results. He was essentially the shield for the unit. But the Zion Mule Corps was eventually disbanded in nineteen sixteen, which led to the bigger goal, the Jewish Legion.
This is where Patterson really puts his career on the line. The Jewish Legion, specifically the thirty-eighth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, was the real deal. This was a combat infantry unit formed in August nineteen seventeen.
This time, they weren't just hauling supplies; they were going into the trenches in the Jordan Valley. Patterson was the commander. This was the first organized Jewish fighting force since the Bar Kochba Revolt in the second century. We are talking about a gap of roughly eighteen hundred years. And again, Patterson found himself at war with his own side. The British administrative staff in Palestine was often deeply anti-Zionist. They saw the Balfour Declaration as a nuisance that was going to ruin their relationship with the Arab world.
So Patterson is in this incredibly lonely position. He is an Irish officer leading Jewish troops in a British army that doesn't really want them there, in a territory where the local administration is trying to sabotage the mission. He must have been incredibly stubborn.
He was famously difficult when it came to defending his men. He would bypass the chain of command to write directly to the War Office. He would demand court-martials for officers who used antisemitic slurs. He essentially sacrificed any chance of becoming a General because he refused to play the game. He chose the Jewish soldiers over his own career advancement. He once said that he had more in common with the spirit of the Jewish people than with the cold-blooded bureaucrats in London. He was witnessing the birth of a military tradition, and he knew it.
That connection went beyond the military, though. After the war, he stayed involved. He didn't just go back to Ireland and retire. He became a full-blown activist for the Zionist cause, especially in America during the nineteen thirties and forties. And that is where the Netanyahu connection comes in. This is the part that I think blows people's minds when they hear it for the first time.
It really is a small world moment in history. In the nineteen thirties and forties, Patterson was living in California, but he was traveling constantly to advocate for a Jewish state. He became very close friends with Benzion Netanyahu, who was the secretary to Jabotinsky. Benzion was a historian and a hardline Revisionist Zionist. He and Patterson were working together in the United States, trying to pressure the American government to support the creation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis during World War Two. They were basically the two-man lobby for Jewish defense.
And this wasn't just a professional relationship. They were genuinely close. When Benzion's first son was born in New York in nineteen forty-six, he named him Yonatan. And the John in Yonatan was a direct tribute to John Henry Patterson.
Patterson was actually at the circumcision. He was the godfather. He gave the baby that silver cup we mentioned earlier, engraved with a message to his godson. Think about the symmetry of that. This Irish Protestant, who led the first Jewish unit at Gallipoli, is holding the baby who would grow up to lead the most famous hostage rescue in history at Entebbe. It is like the torch of Jewish military self-reliance was passed directly from Patterson to the Netanyahu family. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister, has spoken many times about how his parents always spoke of Patterson with immense warmth and reverence.
And then you have the tragedy of it. Patterson dies in nineteen forty-seven, just a year before the State of Israel is actually established. He never gets to see the formal IDF. He dies in California, but his dying wish was to be buried in Israel alongside the men he commanded in the Jewish Legion.
And for decades, that wish went unfulfilled. He was buried in a plot in Los Angeles. It wasn't until twenty fourteen that his remains, along with his wife's, were brought to Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu was the Prime Minister then, and he spoke at the reburial ceremony. They buried him in the Avihayil cemetery, which was founded by veterans of the Jewish Legion. It was a moment of profound closure. The Irish Ambassador to Israel actually attended that reburial in twenty fourteen. It was a moment of shared history.
But if you fast forward to today, March sixteen, twenty twenty-six, that relationship has almost completely evaporated. The contrast is jarring. Ireland has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel on the global stage. We mentioned the Eurovision boycott and the ICJ case. Ireland also recognized the State of Palestine in May twenty twenty-four alongside Spain and Norway.
The shift is massive. Ireland was actually the last European Union country to allow an Israeli embassy to open, which didn't happen until nineteen ninety-three. But even before that, Ireland was the first EU member state to endorse Palestinian statehood back in nineteen eighty. There has always been this deep-seated hesitation or skepticism in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. Today, Ireland contributes ten million euros annually in aid to Palestinian organizations, including UNRWA, even when other countries were pausing their funding over security concerns.
Why do you think that shift happened? Because if you go back to the early twentieth century, there was actually a lot of mutual sympathy between Irish nationalists and Zionists. They both saw themselves as small nations struggling against the British Empire.
That is the big historical irony. In the nineteen twenties, Irish republicans and Zionists often looked to each other for tactics. There was a sense of a shared struggle for self-determination. But as the decades went on, the narrative in Ireland flipped. After the Troubles, the Irish republican movement started identifying strongly with the Palestinian cause. They began to view the situation through the lens of colonialism, where Israel was the colonial power and the Palestinians were the indigenous oppressed group.
It is a total reversal of how Patterson saw it. He saw the Jews as the indigenous people returning to their home, and the British and Ottomans as the occupiers. He saw Zionism as a decolonization movement before that word was even popular. He saw the restoration of the Jewish people to their land as an act of justice.
And that is why his legacy is so contested in Ireland now. If you are a modern Irish activist who views Israel as a colonial project, then an Irishman who helped build the Israeli army is a traitor to those values. That is why you see his memorial in Belfast defaced with the word Nazis. It is an incredible projection. They are taking a man who literally fought to create a safe haven for Jews fleeing the actual Nazis and labeling him with that same slur. It shows how the historical memory has been completely overwritten by modern political frameworks.
It also speaks to the danger of these monolithic national narratives. The idea that Ireland has always been anti-Zionist is just factually wrong. It is a relatively modern development. We have talked about this in previous episodes, like episode nine hundred and seventy-two, where we looked at why Jews are leaving Ireland. The shrinking Jewish community there is a direct result of this increasingly hostile atmosphere.
There is also a theological shift. Patterson's Zionism was rooted in a very specific type of Protestant biblical literalism. As Ireland became more secular, or as the Catholic identity became more focused on social justice frameworks that prioritize the underdog, that biblical connection to the land of Israel lost its resonance. The Irish identity today is very much tied to being a moral voice for the oppressed, and they have firmly placed the Palestinians in that category.
It makes the story of Patterson feel even more like a lost chapter. If you go to the moshav of Avihayil in Israel, he is a hero. There is a museum there dedicated to the Jewish Legion. They have his uniforms, his letters, the whole history. But in his own birthplace in Tipperary or in Dublin, he is almost an unknown figure, or worse, a villain.
It is the tragedy of historical fluidity. A person's legacy is often held hostage by the politics of the people who come after them. But you can't erase the technical reality of what he did. He didn't just give speeches; he built the infrastructure of the Jewish military. He taught the first generation of Jewish officers how to lead. He proved to the world that Jewish soldiers could be just as disciplined and courageous as any other unit. Without that proof of concept in nineteen fifteen and nineteen seventeen, the road to nineteen forty-eight would have been much, much harder.
I think the most poignant part of the whole story is that silver cup. It is such a personal, domestic item. It isn't a treaty or a map or a weapon. It is a gift from a godfather to a godson. It represents a bond of trust and shared vision between an Irishman and a Jewish family. And the fact that Yonatan Netanyahu died at Entebbe, leading a mission that was the pinnacle of Jewish military self-reliance, feels like the ultimate fulfillment of what Patterson was trying to achieve.
It really does. Patterson wanted the Jews to be able to protect themselves, to never have to rely on the whims of foreign empires again. At Entebbe, they did exactly that. They flew thousands of miles to rescue their own people. It is a legacy of agency. That is what Patterson gave them. He was an outsider who stepped in and said, I will help you find your own strength.
It is a shame that modern Ireland can't find a way to be proud of that specific kind of Irish contribution to history. Instead of seeing him as a colonialist, they could see him as a man who helped a displaced people regain their dignity and their ability to defend themselves. But that requires a level of nuance that is currently missing from the Irish political discourse on this topic.
I agree. He was a man of immense character. To be a hunter of man-eating lions is one thing, but to be a defender of a marginalized and often despised group of soldiers against your own superiors is a much rarer kind of courage. He was a man who lived by a code that was older than the British Empire and certainly older than modern Irish foreign policy.
So what is the takeaway for us? I think it is the importance of individual agency. History isn't just these massive, slow-moving tectonic plates of national policy. It is also individuals like Patterson who decide that their personal convictions are more important than their career or the prevailing winds of their own culture.
It is a reminder that even in the most polarized times, there are these threads of connection that run deeper than current politics. The silver cup still exists. The grave in Avihayil still exists. Those are the hard facts of history that no amount of graffiti in Belfast can change.
Well, I think we have covered the lion hunter, the Zionists, and the Netanyahus. It is a lot to process, but it is a fascinating lens on the current moment. We should probably wrap it up there before we start talking about the technical specifications of the mules.
I could go on for another hour about the mules, but I will spare the listeners. It was a fascinating dive, Corn.
Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the show running smoothly. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power this show. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you are enjoying these deep dives into the weird corners of history and technology, find us at myweirdprompts dot com for all the ways to subscribe.
Until next time.
See ya.
