In light of the Hamas terrorism against Israel, and Israel’s continuing response, I have been reading an article I wrote in 2000 for the special issue of the journal GLOBAL DIALOGUE, “Terrorism : Image and Reality.” My article deals with “Zionist Terrorism: A Continuing Threat To Peace.”
Here is a small portion of what I wrote:
Zionist trrrorism is hardly a new phenomenon. Consider some of the major examples:
*In 1933, Chaim Arlosoroff, a young Labor politician seemingly destined to be the first prime minister of the future Jewish state, was shot dead while walking on the Tel Aviv beach. Arlosoroff attracted the wrath of right-wing Zionists because of his attempts to negotiate with Nazi Germany freedom for German Jews. This blackened the image of the Revisionist Zionist movement, causing it to be seen as fascist and terrorist.
*During the darkest days of World War 11, when Great Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, LEHI (Israel’s Freedom Fighters) fought the British. Lehi fighters planted bombs in British installations and killed British soldiers. Their leaders even sent messages of support to the Nazis and offered their cooperation in the future Nazi world order.
*On Nov. 6, 1944, Lehi members murdered in Cairo Lord Moyne, a member of the British war cabinet who served as state minister for the Middle East. A close friend of Winston Churchill, he was thought to be blocking the entrance to Palestine of Jewish refugees.
*on July 22, 1946, members of the Zionist terror group Irgun blew up Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which served as the headquarters of the British administration in Palestine. More than 80 civilians were killed, including many Jews.
*On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and Lehi launched an attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Situated in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was of no immediate threat to the Zionist forces. Its residents were considered passive, and its leaders had agreed with those of an adjacent Jewish neighborhood, Givat Shaul, that each side would prevent its own people from attacking the other. It was the Muslim Sabbath when the attack by Irgun and Lehi, with the reluctant acquiescence of the mainstream Jewish defense organization, the Haganah, took place. All the inhabitants of the village were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. More than 100 civilians were killed. News of the massacre spread rapidly and helped prompt a panic flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
Most of the victims of the Deir Yassin massacre were women,children and older people. The men of the village were absent because they worked in Jerusalem. Irgun leader Menachem Begin issued this euphoric message to his troops after the attack: “Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…”
David Shipler, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times from 1979 to 1984, reports that, “The Jewish fighters who launched the attack of Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose, apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son, who gave some of the men coffee in the pre-dawn hours before their mission, recall the guerrillas’ talking excitedly of the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this explains why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left their bodies to be seen, and why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks through the streets of Jerusalem, a scene still remembered with a shudder by Jews who saw it.”
Zionist terrorism has continued in Israel. The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by right-wing Zionist Yigal Amir was explained this way by Hebrew University professors Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman. They explained Amir’s philosophy: “…there is only one guideline for fixing the borders of the Land of Israel: the Divine Promise made to the Patriarch Abraham: ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the River of Egypt to the great river, the ruver Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:17). Today these borders embrace most of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq…zealots read this passage as God’s will, and God’s will must be obeyed, whatever the cost. No mortal has the right to settle for borders any narrower than these. Thus negotiating a peace settlement with Israel’s neighbors is unthinkable.”
In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane, gunned down 29 Palestinians at morning prayer in the Cave of the Patriarchs. Goldstein and Rabin assassin Amir are viewed as heroes by members of the cabinet of Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Terrorism has been an important aspect of right-wing Zionism from its earliest years.
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Allan C. brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist
and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the