From fighter to statesman
QUESTION
Was Yitzhak Rabin, former prime minister of Israel, a war hero?
YITZHAK RABIN is considered a war hero in his homeland. He was born in Jerusalem, then in British Mandatory Palestine, on March 1, 1922. Aged 19, he joined the Palmach, an elite branch of the Haganah, a Zionist military organisation representing the Jews in Palestine after World War I.
He assisted the Allied invasion of Lebanon, then held by Vichy French forces. His skill for planning saw him rise swiftly through the ranks.
The Palmach maintained an uneasy alliance with the British, but turned against them over the imprisonment of Jewish immigrants.
In 1938, the British had attempted to stop waves of refugees arriving from Hitler’s Germany by building a prison south of Haifa.
The Atlit camp closed during the war, but reopened in 1945 as more and more immigrants, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, arrived in Palestine.
On October 10, 1945, in a raid planned by Rabin, the Palmach broke into Atlit and released 208 detainees.
After the establishment of the Israeli army, the Palmach was reorganised into three brigades, one of which was commanded by the 26-year-old Rabin.
During the first of the ArabIsraeli wars, from 1948-49, Rabin directed the operations in and around Jerusalem and fought the Egyptians in the Negev region.
He was the deputy commander of Operation Danny capturing the cities of Ramle and Lydda.
In 1949, he was part of the Israeli delegation to the armistice talks with Egypt.
Rabin became chief of staff of the Israeli army in January 1964. It was his strategy of swift mobilisation of reserves and destruction of enemy aircraft on the ground that proved decisive in Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.
In 1973, he was elected to the Knesset (parliament) as a member of the Labour Party and a year later joined prime minister Golda Meir’s cabinet as minister of labour.
Rabin was prime minister from 1992 to 1995. For his role in the Oslo peace accords, he was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. On November 4, 1995, he was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed the peace plan.
Sam Fells, Ombersley, Worcs.
QUESTION
What would a meal eaten by an ordinary person in Ireland in 1,000 BC have consisted of?
ABOUT 3,000 years ago, people’s diets depended on meat, milk and cheese as well as some cereals and vegetables; gathering food depended largely on either scavenging or hunting, since farming was poorly developed.
Meat came from animals such as cows, bulls, sheep and pigs, while game birds were also hunted.
People living by the coast had the added advantage of all kinds of shellfish, while rivers also yielded fish. The main method of cooking food was by putting it in a large cauldron, which also meant that many different types of broth and soup could be made, such as farm broth and sheep’s head broth, as well as lobster and other kinds of fish soup.
Salmon was the most prized fish and it was also revered for its supposed magical powers.
The alternative means of cooking used was a spit over an open fire, which was the method often used to cook meat. When fowl or feathered game were cooked, the birds were coated in a couple of inches of mud, then baked. When the mud had been baked to the consistency of stone, it was then broken open, and the feathers and the skin of the cooked bird came away and it was ready to eat. Animals cooked the same way included hedgehogs.
One of the intriguing flavours used in those primitive times when meat or fish was being cooked was honey. It was used to baste both meat and fish when they were being cooked, and salt, too, was used for flavour.
The most plentiful meat available was beef, but this was very much a seasonal dish, as people didn’t have fodder to carry cattle through the winter.
Apart from beef, mutton and pork were also widely eaten, as were horses on occasion. Venison was also on the menu; today, it’s considered a delicacy.
Poorer people survived mainly by eating salted pork, the cheapest form of meat, supplementing it with meat from goats and boars, as well as fish. Meat from badgers and hares was also eaten.
Eggs, too, were commonly consumed, fried on hot stones or boiled in hot water.
When it came to their five-a-day fruit and vegetables, people had to depend on what they could scavenge in the wild, rather than grow themselves.
Wild vegetables such as leeks were consumed, together with nettles and watercress. All kinds of fruit were picked in the wild, including blackberries, elderberries, raspberries and strawberries. The only fruit that people tried to cultivate was apples.
Some primitive bread-making was carried out, using mainly oats and barley. Oatmeal was a much more important food than wheat, and porridge was a very popular dish. It was made to a very thick consistency for a breakfast meal, while at night-time, it was much more ‘liquidy’. Porridge is still a very popular dish today.
Oat bread was baked and very often it was crumbed to add to mutton or beef stews to thicken them up.
Bread was also cooked overnight, in a cauldron without a lid, a practice that has continued in parts of rural Ireland almost up to the present day.
People also used milk and some of this was turned into cheese.
Much of the food that people gathered about 1,000 BC, during the Bronze Age, depended on what could be hunted or gathered. Farming then was very primitive and comparatively little practised.
People in the Bronze Age also enjoyed alcoholic beverages, mainly mead, made from fermented honey, herbs and spices.
Mead is the oldest alcoholic drink in the world and its preparation and consumption was widespread in Bronze Age Ireland. Sometimes, the mead was made highly spiced with the addition of such herbs as rosemary and thyme. Sloe wine, made from sloe berries, was also popular. Wine was imported from Gaul (presentday France) but it was so expensive that only families at the top of the social scale could afford it.
The types of food consumed during the Bronze Age changed surprisingly little over the centuries. It wasn’t until the 1660s that a really big change in the Irish diet occurred with the arrival of the potato.
But for our long-ago ancestors, long before the potato had been heard of, their diet was quite varied, even if some of the dishes sound gruesome and unpalatable to modern ears.
Tom Flanagan, via email.