The Battle of Tel Hai was fought on 1 March 1920 between Arab irregulars and a Jewish defensive paramilitary force protecting the village of Tel Hai in Northern Galilee. In the course of the event, a Shiite Arab militia, accompanied by Bedouin from a nearby village, attacked the Jewish agricultural locality of Tel Hai. In the aftermath of the battle eight Jews and five Arabs were killed. Joseph Trumpeldor, the commander of Jewish defenders of Tel Hai, was shot in the hand and stomach, and died while being evacuated to Kfar Giladi that evening. Tel Hai was eventually abandoned by the Jews and burned by the Arab militia.

In  March 1915 the Zion Mule Corps became the first regular Jewish fighting force – with a distinctively Jewish emblem and flag - to takeactive part in a war since the defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt 2000 years ago. Some of its men later formed the core of what was to become the modern Israeli army. General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force in theDardenelles, later wrote in his diary, ‘I have here, fighting under my orders, a purely Jewish unit - the Zion Mule Corps. As far as I know, this is the first time in the Christian era such a thing has happened. They have shown great courage taking supplies up to the line under heavy fire’ and proved ‘invaluable to us’ [ii].

The commander of the Zion Mule Corps, Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, DSO, [iii] an elegant Boer War veteran of southern Irish Protestant origin, had been born in Dublin in 1867. He arrived in Egypt precisely when the British Commander in the area, General Sir JohnMaxwell, was looking for a suitable officer to raise and command a Jewish military unit to fight against the Turks in the Middle East [iv] .  Patterson was knowledgeable about Jewish history and sympathetic to the Zionist cause, and as a young man had read all he could of Jewish military and religious history.