Zionism and the British Military Officer: Colonel Richard Kemp and Rear Admiral Chris Parry

Britain's foremost pro-Zionist retired military officers: Colonel Richard Kemp (left) and Rear Admiral Chris Parry.

The ongoing conflict in the Gaza strip between the armed forces of Israel and several Palestinian militias, most prominent of which are the al Qassam Brigades of Hamas, has elicited such a high level of intense public debate in both national and international spheres that it may be comfortably designated as the foremost moral issue of the age. This discourse is a continuum of the divide in global opinion between those who consider that the Jewish people have an inviolable right to a homeland in the Levant and those who decry the modern state of Israel as a racist colonial settler state guided by the ideology of Political Zionism which is inextricably predicated on the objective of purging indigenous Palestinians from what its adherents designate as the Land of Israel. Britain was intimately involved in the build up to the establishment of Israel because it originated the Balfour Declaration and subsequently administered Palestine under the auspices of the League of Nations. While the British administration during the early period of the Mandate era facilitated mass immigration to Palestine by mainly eastern European Jews and cooperated with Jews in combating Palestinian insurgencies, the latter stages of the Mandate were dominated by the efforts of the British to curtail Jewish immigration, as well as its having to contend with terrorist attacks and threats by Jewish insurgent groups directed at British statesmen and members of the security apparatus. Britain was also on the receiving end of hostile acts after the establishment of the State of Israel. This experience of been at the receiving end of Zionist terror makes it all the more remarkable to discover the uncritical support of two retired British military officers for the Zionist State of Israel.

The legacy of the relationship between the British military and Zionism is a mixed one. At first it was based on cooperation. This was most pronounced during the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 when the Special Night Squads (SNS) established by Captain Orde Wingate were used to put down the insurgency. Comprised of British infantry soldiers and the Jewish Supernumerary Police (JSP), Wingate’s lessons in the strategy and tactics of waging an often brutal counterinsurgency were well taken by JSP members who included Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, both of whom became pioneer figures of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

Jews in Palestine would also benefit from the British military by joining each of the branches of the British armed forces during World War 2. Many did so while having misgivings about British state policy which as World War 2 approached was decidedly turning anti-Zionist. The White Paper of 1939, a policy paper on future British steps proposed limits on Jewish immigration for five years after which any further immigration would be determined by the Arab majority. The objective was to realise an independent state of Palestine within which Arabs and Jews would have their interests protected.

This was unacceptable to the Zionist Jews whose leader in Palestine David Ben Gurion stated: “We will fight with the British against Hitler as if there was no White Paper and fight the White Paper as if there was no war.” The latter part of this statement hinted at Zionist resolve to defy Britain over its immigration policy, as well as to delay a reckoning over the long-term British goal of establishing an Arab majority state in Palestine.

Ben Gurion’s reservations were not reflected by another key Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, who wrote to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in September 1941 beseeching him to approve the formation of Jewish fighting units within the British Army. In return, Weizmann pledged to work towards employing the support of American Jews in facilitating the intervention of the United States on Britain’s side in the war against Nazi Germany. American Jews, he reminded, had “effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain” during the First World War.

The positions of Ben Gurion and Weizmann stood in contrast to that of far right Zionists such as Avraham Stern, leader of the terror group known as Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), in short Lehi, and which is better known by the British designation ‘The Stern Gang.’ Formed in 1940 after Stern’s release from British custody, the group broke away from the Irgun which decided to suspend its anti-British activities.

Stern refused to suspend anti-British operations unless the British recognised the claim for a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. He was contemptuous of liberal democracy and sought alliances with Britain’s wartime enemies Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany because he believed that only the defeat of Britain in the Middle East by an outside power would bring about a Jewish state. After being rebuffed by Italy, he proposed a pact with the Nazis in which he offered to “actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.” The objective would be he stated the “establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis” in a new order in which there would be “cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed Volkish-national Hebrium.” Written in 1941, the document was found among files in the German embassy in Ankara after the war. Also, documents found in the Haganah archives revealed that members of the group had been collecting information on British military dispositions which were intended to be passed over to the Axis if Rommel’s forces had prevailed against the British in North Africa. Stern was killed in February 1942 by a member of the British CID. His gang’s activities initially consisted of carrying out robberies and bombings, but it came to specialise in targeted assassinations.

The onslaught of Israel’s armed forces on Gaza following the operation by Palestinian militias to take Israeli captives from bordering kibbutzim has elicited polarising responses in Britain, the state which issued the Balfour Declaration 1917. Many self-described British nationalists and patriots have adopted a pro-Israeli stance regarding the present Hamas-IDF conflict, preponderantly basing their views on a predisposed animus towards Islam. The rationale of this line of thinking is that the Israel-Palestine conflict is based not on the central issue of land dispossession, but on the perception that Israel is a Western-like state which is the first line of defence against Islamic jihadism and terrorism. Moreover, the presence of many Muslim protesters at rallies held in cities around Britain, although mirroring widespread global protests against the slaughter in Gaza, has only served to underscore their predisposition to anti-Muslim immigrant sentiment.

The irony of course is that as the British Mandate drew to a close in Palestine, the face of terrorism was not Islamic but in fact Jewish, for as World War 2 began to near its end the levels of Zionist terrorism intensified and began to be directed at the British state. This resulted in the deaths of a total of 748 British security personnel and civilians in Palestine, as well as the issuing of threats and the actual commission of acts of terror on British soil.

Despite this blood-filled, anti-British context, it is noteworthy that among the uncritical and strenuously pro-Zionist stances are those taken by two retired military figures: Colonel Richard Kemp, a British Army infantry officer, and Rear Admiral Chris Parry, a naval warfare officer.

Kemp, who served for 29 years in theatres such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Afghanistan, is the head of the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers (UK-AWIS), the British branch of an Israeli organisation managed by the Israel Defense Forces, while Parry, a veteran of the Falklands War who served from 1972 to 2008, is a strategic forecasting consultant who frequently ruminates on culture wars issues on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and GB News. He has also written for the Jewish Chronicle. Despite each man’s background, the dark history of Zionist assassinations of British servicemen does not feature in any of the discourses entered into by both men.

This was apparent when Britain commemorated Remembrance Day in November 2023, just over a month after the Hamas’ attack. Both Kemp and Parry joined the largely pro-Israel British media in denouncing the "insensitivity" of protesters organising marches in response to the developing Gaza genocide, while conveniently forgetting that it commemorates all fallen servicemen in Britain's major wars and British-directed counterinsurgencies, the latter of which include the hundreds of British security officials killed while on active duty in Mandate era Palestine.

While not calling for a ban on the march, Parry opined that it included supporters of Hamas and what he termed “noxious” activists. Writing in an article published in the Daily Express on November 16th, Kemp expressed his frustration that in the preceding weeks “we have seen hundreds of thousands protesting against Israel’s defence of its people from murderous terrorist gangs”.

In the 1940s, the “murderous terrorist gangs”' were of the Zionist stripe and were targeting the British military and state officials. While Lehi had continued its anti-British violence for the duration of the war, those belonging to Irgun had their ranks bolstered by the return to Palestine of Jews who had fought in British units against Nazi Germany. The spate of reports which reached MI5 as the World War drew to a close that the Irgun and the Stern Gang would not limit their activities to Palestine but would launch attacks in Britain would come to pass. The enemy was now Britain which they perceived as being committed to denying the Jews a state. The result was the nightmare come true for those who had been reluctant to absorb Jews from Palestine into the British military because of fears that they would use the combat and technical skills acquired to facilitate a rebellion against British rule in Palestine.

Among the more notorious acts of terror were the murder by Lehi assassins of Lord Moyne, Britain's Middle East Envoy, in Cairo in 1944 and the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun in Jerusalem in 1946 which claimed 91 lives. Then in 1947, the Irgun hanged two NCOs of the British Army intelligence corps, Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice. Their booby-trapped corpses were left hanging from trees in a eucalyptus grove near the town of Netanya which meant that the already darkened and bloodied bodies were mutilated by the detonating of the hidden incendiaries. After news of the murders was received, British troops and policemen rioted in Tel Aviv, killing five Jews and injuring others. The deaths of the sergeants also sparked off anti-Jewish rioting in some British cities.

But the Jewish terrorists would take the fight to British soil. According to files released by the National Archives in 2011, MI5 discovered that one of Lord Moyne’s assassins proposed following up the deed by assassinating a number of “highly placed British political personalities, including Mr. (Winston) Churchill.”

Mainstream press coverage of the 2023 Remembrance Day commemoration failed to mention that 77 years earlier in November 1946, security had been bolstered at the state opening of Parliament because of threats made by Lehi to assassinate the British Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, War Minister and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Extra precautions were taken to protect King George VI and his family. One typical headline was one run by the Australian Goulburn Evening Post on Tuesday, November 12th, 1946, which read BIG PRECAUTIONS TAKEN TO GUARD KING AND QUEEN. It was subtitled “Threats of Jewish Violence Prompt Security Measures.”

The reason Montgomery had been earmarked for assassination was that he had resisted the calls from British Zionists to remove Lieutenant General Evelyn Barker from his position as the General Officer Commanding British Forces in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Barker had been inside the King David Hotel at the time of the atrocity but was uninjured. Enraged, he issued an order which designated all Jewish establishments as “out of bounds” for all British soldiers who were also forbidden from conducting any form of “social intercourse” with Jews. He also stated that Britain would punish the Jews by "striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them." Decades later, it was discovered that an Irgun cell had sought to assassinate Barker in 1947 by placing a mine in the road outside his home in England. Among the conspirators was Ezer Weizman, the future head of the Israeli air force. The group aborted their plans after attracting the suspicions of Scotland Yard.

That year, 1947, the Zionist terror gangs endeavoured to bring terror to the streets of Britain. They planted a bomb at the Colonial Club near St. Martin's Lane in London, which injured several servicemen. After that attack, the Colonial Office building in London was fortunate not to suffer the fate of the King David Hotel when an enormous bomb failed to explode. There was even a plan later in the year to drop bombs on London. Rabbi Baruch Korff, a confederate of Lehi and Irgun, hired Reginald Gilbert, a decorated American pilot, to drop 10,000 Zionist propaganda leaflets over London which was to be followed by the dropping of bombs.

Korff, a community activist who later became a confidant of President Richard Nixon, was among many American Jews who were sympathetic to the orchestrators of the deadly campaign. The Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht who supported the anti-British terror groups wrote the following in May 1947:

Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.

Twenty-nine British soldiers were killed in February 1948 after Lehi detonated a bomb on the Cairo to Haifa train at Rehovot. Three months later, Britain  relinquished its Mandate over Palestine on May 15^th, 1948.

Even after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, British military personnel have at certain junctures been killed directly or indirectly by Israel. For instance in January 1949, 22-year-old Pilot Officer David Crossley Tattersfield was one of two RAF personnel killed by Israel while flying reconnaissance missions between Egypt and Palestine.

Some decades later, the State of Israel supplied Skyhawk fighter jets, weapons (including air-to-air missiles and missile radar alert systems), spare parts and long range fuel tanks to Argentina during the Falklands War, a conflict in which Parry had participated as a young naval lieutenant. The prime minister at the time was the ex-Irgun leader Menachem Begin, the man who masterminded the King David Hotel bombing and the execution of the intelligence corps sergeants. Begin had also been prepared to sell signals intelligence for use on Argentinean spy planes. Begin, who at one time had been top of the British wanted list in Palestine, was motivated by the idea of revenging the British clampdowns during the Mandate era, as well as the execution of his close friend Dov Gruner in regard to whom Lieutenant General Barker had signed a death warrant in 1947.

The systematic murder by Israeli forces on April 1st, 2024, of three British ex-servicemen charity workers while working in Gaza as a security team for World Central Kitchen (WCK) exposed the limitations of the patriotism and objectivity of both Parry and Kemp. Each man, James Kirby, an ex-army sniper; James Henderson, an ex-Royal Marine; and John Chapman, an ex-naval special forces operative, was along with the other four dead, systematically picked off by an Israeli drone on a route which they had agreed on with the Israelis and on which they were travelling in clearly marked vehicles. Three WCK vehicles sustained consecutive hits along a 1.5 mile stretch of road in the Deir al-Balah area. Survivors of the first attack had attempted to take cover in a second car, but this was also bombed. They moved to a third car which was destroyed by a precision hit.

But Parry and Kemp readily accepted the Israeli explanation that the killings had been a mistake conducted under the fog of war. When asked in an interview on Talk TV on April 3rd, 2024, whether Israel’s explanation that it had been a “tragic mistake” was “plausible”, Parry replied that it was “more than plausible” and in fact “entirely correct”. He also took it upon himself to assert that the IDF was bound to undertake drastic actions because they were fighting what he termed “pretty sub-human, sub-state actors.” On April 6th, Kemp told a gathering at St. John’s Wood Synagogue that while it had been a terrible event, “war is hell…war is complicated.”

Kemp’s views are not surprising since he effectively works as a quasi-spokesperson for the IDF. In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle in a January 2020 article titled “The British soldier who won't stop defending Israel”, Kemp described himself as a Christian and a Zionist “but not a Christian Zionist”. Yet, it is difficult to differentiate his conduct from those whose attitudes have been shaped by Christian Zionist beliefs.

He doubtless believes that he is doing the work of God as much as did the aforementioned Orde Wingate, the fervently pro-Zionist army officer who organised the counterinsurgency which quelled the Arab revolt in the 1930s. However, the British authorities came to view him as a security risk and after being posted out of the region, his passport was stamped “NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER PALESTINE.”

No such restrictions of course apply to Kemp but there are those who feel that when he is introduced as an expert on military affairs and terrorism, his associations with Israel and the IDF should be brought to the attention of the reading, listening and watching public.

Kemp frequently lauds the IDF for being the “world’s most moral army” which goes at great lengths to preserve innocent human life even though the overwhelming evidence points to the contrary. Israeli military doctrine has been perpetually embedded with the objective of targeting civilians, something that has been alluded to by successive political leaders, high-ranking military officers and military analysts.

It was Ben Gurion who in his Independence War Diary that Israel "must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the action is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.” This fundamental approach to warfare has been underscored by the utterances by the likes of Menachem Begin, Abba Eban, and Lieutenant General Mordechai Gur. It has also been enshrined in the doctrines governing the conduct of war with Lebanon (the Dahiya Doctrine) and Gaza (Mowing the Grass).

It is a merciless approach which has been adapted to Israel’s methods of policing and has cost the lives of Western civilian volunteers providing help to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. These victims have included Rachel Corrie, an American, and Tom Hurndall, a Briton, both of whom were killed in 2003. It was while explaining to The Times in November 2023 how the methods employed by Israel’s security forces succeed in killing innocent people that Hurndall’s father stated that Israel will lose Western support if it continues its “fundamentally unethical and inhuman attitudes.”

The views and stances of Kemp and Parry in many ways mirror the evolved thinking of the British political establishment among whom a large percentage belong to the “Friends of Israel” lobbies all of which have the stated objective of maximising support for the State of Israel within the major political parties of Britain.

While Kemp has argued that the British Foreign Office still retains what he terms as an “institutional opposition” to Israel, the overall policy attitudes of both Conservative and Labour leaderships have been unreservedly supportive of Israel’s conduct during the Gaza conflict. Criticism by senior politicians in relation to the statements of genocidal intent by Israeli leaders and the deliberate massacres of innocent Palestinian civilians by the IDF have been muted or non-existent.

The reluctance or even fear of criticising Israel on the part of British government officials was reflected in the reaction to the killings of the WCK workers which quickly evolved into a non-newsworthy event. Indeed, so beholden to Israel do British politicians appear to be that it is difficult to foresee the sort of reactions made by the British state in the past when the Zionist perpetrators of British deaths have been given state honours.

Back in 1975, the British government protested at honours bestowed by the Israeli state on Lord Moyne's assassins Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri (who had entered Egypt under the names Moshe Cohen and Itzak Charles Salzmann). Both men were buried with full military honours at Mount Herzl. James Callaghan, then the Foreign Secretary, ordered his ministry to issue a formal protest "to make it clear to the Israeli government that the British government very much regretted that an act of terrorism be honoured in this way." And in 2006, 64 Members of Parliament tabled a motion condemning Israel for celebrating the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel. The event was attended by many prominent members of the Knesset including Binyamin Netanyahu.

While criticism of Israel and its guiding ideology, Political Zionism, is most appropriately founded on its abrogation of the universal moral order, it is nonetheless perplexing to note the unquestioning support given to Israel by both Colonel Kemp and Rear Admiral Parry given the legacy of violence directed at the British military by Zionist terror groups. It is after all the unspoken reason why Queen Elizabeth II, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces while both Kemp and Parry were in service, never visited Israel during her over 70-year reign.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.