For Love of Justice by John Baynes Quartet Books 295pp, £20 in UK
Before judge and jury in London last year, a slim and very elderly British army officer stood up to defend two young Palestinians accused of blowing up the Israeli embassy in London. He talked eloquently about the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes by Jewish forces in 1948, of how the refugees clung to the side of his armoured vehicle as he retreated out of Jaffa, one of the last officers of the British mandate to abandon the land of Palestine. The two Palestinian defendants, Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh - still protesting their innocence - were sentenced to twenty years. Major Derek Cooper, MC, has a habit of adopting supposedly hopeless causes.
Which is odd when you consider that his father, Stanley, was murdered in India by "two Muhammadan soldiers [who] ran amok . . . the two . . . reported to have been of a morose and fanatical disposition". And there is an awful lot of very prim, predictable detail to Derek Cooper's life. Brought up partly in Garvagh, Co Derry - in a "cold, damp and dark" house (his sister's words) at Ballintemple - he failed to qualify for university and ended up a marine engineer in Palestine where, in the reticent words of his biographer, "there was some savage fighting of an unpleasant kind between Arabs and the British army".
The first part of "Love and Justice" is written in just such a querulous style, a kind of kneequaking, heavy-swallowing ob eisance to the double-barrelled and the semi-rich which sometimes parodies itself. It is one thing to learn that Cooper's first wife was called Pamela Armstrong-Lushington-Tulloch, quite another to be forced to meet "the redoubtable Lady Alexandra", the "remarkable" Brigadier Boyce, "the stalwart Evan Carl Eltz", "the indefatigable Miss Rice-Jones" and others. And like all old-fashioned biographies, there are a smattering of yawning cliches in which war is "looming", in which friends are always "supportive", in which aristocrats come "from near and far", in which Hungarians are "dauntless" and Soviet eastern troops are "barely civilised", French customs "intransigent" and second World War pockets of German resistance rather sinisterly "cleaned up".
But it is when Cooper, as a liaison officer with the British Household Cavalry Regiment, advances from Normandy to the Rhine, that this book acquires its power. "The German dead," he writes in his diary on August 14th 1944, "are everywhere in grotesque attitudes blown up to twice the size in some cases and black from the hot sun . . . The corpses are all in stage of decomposition with rats and maggots in charge . . . A [Irish] guardsman learned a smart lesson today; on moving a leather belt from a German corpse there was a series of deep groans; it was escaping gases . . ."
Within two years, Cooper was fighting for the British Palestine Mandate, driving the nascent Jewish army out of the largely Arab city of Jaffa, winning his Military Cross under Israeli mortar fire, one of the few "Brits" to earn a gong fighting what would become the Middle East's most victorious army. To no avail. His memory of the Palestinian refugees around his retreating armoured vehicle was to mark the rest of his life. While he would risk his life with his second wife - another Pamela - helping the refugees of 1956 Hungary, sweating to bring medicines to the Bedouin of Jordan and the 1962 earthquake victims of Iran, it was the fate of the Palestinians which imprisoned Cooper's heart.
If he could feel despair for the Bedouin - "for the unborn children conceived to swell a population . . . inflated by refugees; heirs to ringworm and worms, fevers and malnutrition" - he was furious at the treatment of the Palestinians driven from their homes by the Israelis after the Arabs turned down the UN partition plan for Palestine.
And at the Jewish treatment of the British in mandate Palestine. "How could Jews who . . . had in many cases served with the British forces, turn against the nation whose stand against Germany in 1940 was the origin of their salvation?" biographer Baynes rhetorically asks. "Now that a war had been fought to make Europe safe for Jews to live there, why did they want to leave it to settle in Palestine?"
This is a bit much. The British should have fought Hitler to save the Jews - in fact, they primarily went to war because they correctly surmised that Hitler was a threat to Britain (which he turned out to be). Nor was the second World War fought in order to allow the pathetic remnants of European Jewry to live on amid the mass graves of their murdered families. And Cooper's diary-entry exasperation with Israel's later intransigence - its pretence, for example, at allowing refugees to return home after the 1967 war - is as frightening as it is dramatic:
You know those filthy bastards have said that the (Palestinian) people could go back starting today. Families with all their paraphernalia were waiting at Damiya only to be told that they had to have passes, certificates of health, security cover, etc, which they cannot possibly get. The Red Cross is in despair as the whole thing is simply an Israeli propaganda ploy to say to the world that they will let the people back while making it impossible for them to do so.
I first met Derek Cooper during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 when he and his wife were, at great risk to their lives, distributing food and medicine to Palestinian refugees under artillery fire. He was back in Beirut again during the Shiite siege of the camps in 1987. He founded CAABU, the Irish-Arab Society in Dublin, and MAP, Medical Aid for Palestinians. He was deported from Israel, returned there to make a film of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, and still returns - deep into his eighties - to the land which still troubles his conscience.
This can be an aristocentric book - even when the Coopers settled in Donegal, there were far too many local bigwigs floating around the estate - but it is also the story of a very brave man, of someone who turned his back on the popular heroes of Middle East mythology to help the poor and the sick and the homeless. He is a soldier who never stopped being a soldier, who transferred his field headquarters - once set up in the French Bocage and Antwerp and on the battlefields of Arnhem - to earthquake zones and the squalor of refugee camps. If it's true that old soldiers never die, then this is the right way for them to fade away.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent