The IRA has its roots in the Easter Rising of 1916 when Irish nationalists fought to throw off the yoke of British colonial rule. That effort failed, but agitation for freedom continued, culminating in a declaration of independence from Britain in 1919.
The resulting conflict, with troops of the new IRA battling British soldiers and native “loyalists”
(mostly Church of England Protestants) dragged on until 1921, climaxing with partition of IRELAND
into its present form, while the six counties of Ulster remained British under the name of NORTHERN IRELAND. That disappointment sparked a brutal civil war within Ireland itself that lasted until 1924. The IRA hung on as a dissident organization, pledged to liberating Northern Ireland from British rule, until President Eamon de Valera banned the group in 1936.
Driven underground by de Valera’s edict, the IRA carried its fight to Britain with a series of bombing campaigns and other armed actions in England and IRISH Republican Army
The southern wing of the King David Hotel, which was the headquarters of the British army in Palestine, was blown up by the Zionist terrorist organization Irgun in 1946.
British personnel disregarded a telephoned warning; as a consequence, 92 people died. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
Northern Ireland. Sporadic activity, chiefly raids on arsenals, continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s while the IRA’s political wing (Sinn Fein) worked to crystallize nationalist sentiment in both parts of divided Ireland. Renewed warfare was conducted during 1958–60, but dissension split the organiza-tion during the next decade, as Marxist influence caused some hard-line members of the CATHOLIC CHURCH to challenge their fundamental beliefs. In 1969 the IRA formally split, with a majority follow-ing the new Provisional wfollow-ing toward a new genera-tion of armed struggle, while the Official IRA opted for a more moderate approach (declaring a perma-nent cease-fire in May 1972). Moderation was the last thing many nationalists craved, however; an armed struggle (or TERRORISM) escalated steadily during the next two decades. As a new millennium dawned, peace talks and cease-fires offered cause for optimism, but radicals on both sides (including Protestant guerrillas from the Ulster Volunteer Force
and similar groups) seemed unable to break the ingrained habit of violence.
ISRAEL
Known until 1948 as Palestine, the region of present-day Israel was ruled by two kingdoms (Israel and Judah) until successive invasions by Assyrians, Baby-lonians, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, and Greeks drove most Jews from the region by A.D. 135. Arabs seized Palestine from the Byzantine empire in 634–40 and ruled until the 20th century, challenged only by a series of Crusades launched by the CATHOLIC CHURCHbetween the 11th and 13th centuries. British forces drove the Turks from Palestine in World War I, and a League of Nations mandate granted the region to England in 1923. Leaders of the Zionist movement, seeking a Jewish homeland in the Middle East since 1896, received conditional support from Britain with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which said:
ISRAEL
This young man in Belfast, Ireland, reads a mural supporting the IRA. (Ed Kashi/Corbis)
His Majesty’s Government view with favor the estab-lishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . . it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
Further declarations in 1918 assured Palestinian Arabs of self-rule in their homeland, but those prom-ises fell by the wayside after World War II and the publicized horrors of the Holocaust. While the IRGUN
and other Zionist groups mounted campaigns of TER
-RORISM to drive British forces from Palestine, world opinion called for the immediate creation of a Jewish state. Thus Israel was born in March 1948. This was immediately followed by military “land-cleansing operations” in April and May, driving countless Arabs from their homes. War erupted with Israel’s Arab neighbors in May 1948, ending eight months later after Israel had increased its land mass by 50 percent. In 1956 Israel invaded EGYPT to support Britain’s claim on the Suez Canal. Another “defen-sive” war in 1967 doubled Israel’s size, at the expense of LEBANONand JORDAN. Various Arab groups there-after launched guerrilla campaigns against Israel, and Israel responded with bombing raids and mechanized invasions of her neighbors, assassinated enemies abroad, and ruthlessly suppressed Arab dissent at home. Supported by the United States and Britain, Israel is presently the only Middle Eastern state per-mitted unfettered development of nuclear weapons.
Various peace negotiations spanning a quarter-cen-tury have failed to rescue the troubled “Holy Land”
from incessant violence and religious intrigue.
See also HOLOCAUST AND HOLOCAUST DENIAL;
ZIONISM.
ITALY
The Etruscan civilization dominated Italy from the ninth century B.C. until it was toppled by Romans 600 years later. For the next seven centuries, until barbar-ian invaders sacked the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., Rome essentially controlled the
“known world’s” history. From 800 onward various feudal warlords and leaders of the CATHOLIC CHURCH
struggled fiercely for control of Italy. NAPOLEON BONA
-PARTEunified Italy and crowned himself king in 1805, but Austria usurped French control 10 years later.
Nationalist uprisings were crushed in 1820–21 and 1831, but the impulse for freedom could not be denied.
A series of revolts and royal decrees unified Italy once more between 1860 and 1870. Although allied with the victors in World War I, Italy was disappointed by its small colonial acquisitions and frightened by the rise of COMMUNISM in Russia. In 1919 fascist leader Benito Mussolini organized a militant movement to
“rescue Italy from Bolshevism,” leading his black-shirted troops in a march on Rome. Named as premier in October 1922, Mussolini soon transformed the Ital-ian government into a dictatorship and forged an alliance with ADOLF HITLER’s Nazi GERMANYin 1936.
By that time Italy had conquered ETHIOPIA(1935) and craved new targets. A major obstacle to Mussolini and his comrades was the MAFIA, which had been deeply entrenched in Italy since the 13th century through alliances with corrupt politicians. While Mussolini tried to destroy the pervasive crime syndicate, U.S.
mobsters (including CHARLES “LUCKY” LUCIANO and
MEYER LANSKY) joined forces with the U.S. military on a plan to invade Italy in World War II.
Defeated by the Allies in 1944, Italy rejected monarchy two years later and declared itself a repub-lic. Open elections including Communist candidates did not appeal to the United States, however, and dur-ing 1947–48, the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
spent millions of dollars to suppress leftist political groups in Italy, including use of Mafia goons to intim-idate “Reds.” In the 1970s a rash of terrorist attacks by extreme left- and right-wing groups (including the notorious Red Brigades) destabilized the Italian gov-ernment, and while most of those cliques were sup-pressed by the early 1980s, endemic scandal and corruption marked a series of “revolving door”
administrations during the next two decades. Mafia influence remains strong throughout Italy, despite periodic show trials and pledges of reform. Right-wing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi was named prime minister in June 2001, while critics aired charges of Mafia ties and challenged the wisdom of placing Italy’s number-one media mogul in charge of the gov-ernment. Berlusconi won acquittal in 2002 at his trial for bribery and tax fraud, but the controversy sur-rounding his administration endures.
See also FASCISM; TERRORISM.
IT&T
Brothers Hernand and Sosthenes Behn founded the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (IT&T) in 1920 as a holding company for their several IT&T
IT&T
Caribbean-based communications firms. It grew rap-idly from there and by the 1930s held stock in sev-eral German armaments companies, including a 28-percent share of Focke-Wolf which produced fighter planes for ADOLF HITLER’s Luftwaffe. At the outbreak of World War II, IT&T leaders refused an opportunity to repatriate their profits earned in GER
-MANY and continued doing business with the THIRD REICH. According to author Anthony Sutton in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler: “IT&T’s purchase of substantial interest in Focke-Wolfe meant that IT&T was producing German planes used to kill Americans and their allies—and it made excellent profits out of the enterprise.” Charles Higham adds in Trading with the Enemy, that even after the PEARL HARBOR
attack, Hitler’s military employed IT&T to make
“switchboards, telephones, alarm gongs, buoys, air-raid warning devices, radar equipment, and 30,000 fuses per month for artillery shells used to kill British and American troops.” Furthermore, Higham writes,
“IT&T supplied ingredients for the rocket bombs that fell on London . . . high-frequency radio equip-ment, and fortification and field communication sets.
Without this supply of crucial materials, it would have been impossible for the German air force to kill American and British troops, for the German army to fight the Allies in Africa, Italy, France, and Ger-many, for England to have been bombed, or for Allied ships to have been attacked at sea.”
Those offenses went unpunished while IT&T expanded further in the postwar years. During the 1960s and 1970s it became one of the world’s domi-nant multinational firms, owning a variety of compa-nies that included the Sheraton hotel chain, Levitt home builders, and Hartford Fire Insurance. The company’s propensity for backing homicidal right-wing dictators surfaced again in the early 1970s when President Salvador Allende nationalized IT&T holdings in CHILE. Corporate leaders huddled with leaders of President RICHARD NIXON’s administration (chiefly HENRY KISSINGER) and the CENTRAL INTELLI
-GENCE AGENCY, hatching a plan to destroy Chile’s economy and foment revolt within the Chilean army.
Allende was deposed and murdered on September 11, 1973, and replaced by the brutal junta of Gen-eral Augusto Pinochet. (Seventeen days later, left-wing activists bombed IT&T’s headquarters in New York City, in a gesture of protest.)
IT&T no longer exists in the form that sparked so much scandal and protest during the Nixon years.
The firm sold off its telecommunications holdings in 1987 and eight years later split into three companies:
ITT Hartford Group Inc. (insurance); ITT Industries Inc. (defense electronics and auto parts); and a
“new” ITT Corporation that merged with Starwood Hotels and Resorts in 1997. In theory, at least, the company no longer wields life-and-death power throughout the Third World.