“Terrorism has always been in the shadows of Jewish politics..... It is indeed the darker side of Jewish political extremism.” – David Gokarran Sukhdeo in Guyana Journal. It seems appropriate to make a ‘flash back' in search of the roots of ‘Israeli terrorism' in Palestine during the 1940s, right before and immediately after the establishment of the state of Israel. Soon after the end of World War II, there were three basic para-military Zionist organisations in Palestine, working against the Arab people, with the specific purpose of driving them out of Palestine. The largest, the Haganah (defence), was affiliated with the Labour Zionists. Before the British Mandate, the Jewish settlers had formed a group of mounted armed watchmen called ‘Hashomar' and with the advent of the British Mandate, it became the Haganah. With a membership of 60,000 Zionist Jews, the Haganah had a field army of 16,000 trained men and a unit called the Palmach, which was a full-time force, numbering about 6,000. The second largest, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), was the underground group led by Menachem Begin that had spearheaded the Jewish revolt against the British during 1944-1947. The IZL included between 3,000 and 5,000 armed terrorists, and grew out of the Haganah and its Palmach branch in 1933. The IZL was not ready to obey the Jewish Agency which sought to dilute the terror of the Haganah in order not to lose its respectability. The smallest was the Lehi (acronym for Fighters for the Freedom of Israel; commonly called the Stern Group), a splinter of the IZL Both the IZSL and Lehio were often referred to by Haganah members as ‘dissidents'. Relations between the Haganah, on the one hand, and the IZL and Lehi, on the other, were tense at best. Although there had been times when the two sides cooperated in the fight against the British, there were also several periods when the Haganah had collaborated with the British against the IZL and Lehi. In 1939, one of IZL commanding officer, Abraham Stern, left the parent organisation and formed the Stern Gang, numbering some 200 to 300 dangerous fanatics. Zionist terrorism was first directed at the Arabs, but expanded to include the British in 1939 following the promulgation of a British White paper severely restricting Jewish immigration into Palestine. Thus the struggle was not so much against imperialism as it was a protest against their restrictive immigration policy. The Irgun suspended their anti-British terrorism for a four-year period during World War II, seeing that they both were fighting a common enemy, the Nazis. By 1943, under the leadership of Menachem Begin (later a Prime Minister of Israel), the Irgun resumed operations against the British, and in 1944 simultaneously bombed immigration offices in Palestine's three major cities, following up with attacks on land registry offices that administered the White Paper's restrictions on Jewish land purchases. Explaining the inherent ‘Zio-Nazi' basis of Israeli terrorism, Yitzhak Shamir (who would later become Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Israel) said in an August 1943 article titled Terror, written for Hazit the journal of Lehi, the terrorist organisation he belonged to, said: “Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war... We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle. First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today...” “Today, the world watches as Israelis unleash state-sanctioned terrorism against Palestinians, who are deemed to be sub-human (Untermenschen) – not worthy of dignity, respect or legal protection under the law”, said another terrorist master, David Ben Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel 1948-1963, 1948-05, to the General Staff. “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population,” added Ben Gurion. Together with Shanir and Begin, Ben Gurion proved that terrorism works; it is not strange that Israel has honoured its founding terrorists on its postage stamps, like 1978's stamp honouring Abraham Stern, and 1991's stamps honouring Lehi (also called “The Stern Gang”, led at one time by future Prime Minister Begin) and Etzel (also called The Irgun). Ironically, being a leader of a terrorist organisation did not prevent either Ben Gurion, Begin or Shamir from becoming Israel's Prime Minister. It looks like terrorism worked just fine for those and others. [email protected]
