A lookback at the Zionist terrorism that led to Israel’s creation

After the October 7 attack, Western leaders ranging from the US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron were quick to condemn Hamas, at times comparing it to the terrorist group Daesh.

But, in the 1940s, long before Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas picked up arms against the Israeli occupation, a plethora of Jewish militias were bombing and shooting dead British officials and Palestinian Arabs.

The Jewish groups including Haganah to Irgun, and the Stern Gang (Lehi) actively used terrorism against the British mandate over Palestine and to create fear among the Arab citizens.

“I argue that Jewish terrorism in the 1940s was both tactically and strategically significant. At the tactical level, Jewish terrorists were able to frustrate British security forces and erode their ability to control Palestine,” wrote David A. Charters, professor of military history and senior fellow of the Gregg Centre for Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, Canada.

“That played a significant role at the strategic level in persuading Britain to withdraw from Palestine, which, in turn, created the conditions that facilitated the founding of Israel, and the consequent creation of an Arab-Palestinian diaspora,” he said in his article Jewish Terrorism and the Modern Middle East.

John Lois Peeke, an American military expert, also writes that Zionist terrorism was at the core of the idea of Israel. “Jewish terrorism against British and Arabs did contribute heavily to the removal of the British from Palestine, the abandonment of the League of Nations mandate and the creation of a Jewish state of Israel,” he wrote in his book Jewish-Zionist Terrorism and the Establishment of Israel.

Zionist terrorist groups attacked with impunity not just military targets but also civilians in the 1940s.

In October 1945, Jewish underground groups simultaneously targeted colonial railways, oil refineries and police boats in Palestine. That marked the beginning of a two-year period of Jewish insurgency against both the British and Palestinians.

In July 1946, Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British administration headquarters were located, killing 92 people.

“[Robert] Asprey, [Menachem] Begin and [Samuel] Katz indicate that the King David was blown up for two reasons, to retaliate for the British attack on the Jewish Agency and to destroy the secret documents which would have linked the Jewish Agency and [David] Ben- Gurion to Haganah terrorism,” Peeke wrote.

Haganah was the armed wing of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which was the operational branch of the World Zionist Organisation founded by Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, during the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Switzerland’s Basel.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine, which changed its name to the Jewish Agency for Israel after 1948, aimed to encourage, ensure and implement Jewish migration to Israel from other countries.

Ben Gurion was the president of the Jewish agency from 1935 until the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, playing a crucial role in Haganah activities. Later, Gurion became Israel’s first prime minister.

Haganah means defence force, which inspired Zionist leaders in naming their armed forces as Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) after the emergence of Israel.

From underground activities of the1940s, “Jewish terrorism changed to military operations, and the terrorist organization became the Israeli Defense Force,” wrote Peeke.

Zionist ‘ethnic cleansing’

On April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi militants jointly committed the Deir Yassin massacre of at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children. Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village of around 600 people near Jerusalem.

The brutality of Irgun’s terrorism against ordinary Palestinians in Deir Yassin was aimed at shocking and scaring Palestinian Arabs. It was meant to force the Palestinians to leave their native lands, said Salah Khalaf, one of the co-founders of the Fatah movement in an interview with French journalist Eric Rouleau in 1979.

Fatah, the Palestinian resistance organisation, is a leading group in the internationally-recognised Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), which governs the occupied West Bank.

While Fatah is now a legal group according to the international community, back in the 1960s, the US and Israel described it as a terrorist organisation much like the way they have condemned Hamas now. Hamas won the last Palestinian election in 2006.

Khalaf, who is also known as Abu Iyad, vividly described how Irgun’s Deir Yassin massacre forced his family to leave their homes in Jaffa for Gaza, in his book, Palestinien sans patrie [Palestinian without homeland] which is based on interviews with Rouleau.

Unlike official accounts, Khalaf said that more than 250 Palestinians were killed by Zionist terrorist groups in the April 1948 attack, whose Jewish perpetrators “riddled many corpses with batons as they disemboweled about thirty pregnant women”.

The Deir Yassin massacre was a pivotal event of the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians, who have continued to suffer from its consequences since then, according to Khalaf. Other Zionist massacres in Palestinian towns like Saliha and Lydda followed the Deir Yassin, triggering a mass Palestinian exodus, which is called the Nakba.

At the beginning of 1948, the Haganah continued “its activities in close cooperation with separatist organizations such as Begin's Irgun, launched a regular offensive to clear the Arab settlements” within the Zionists’ imagined Jewish state territories, Khalaf noted.

“Fearing massacres like that of Deir Yassin, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who were abandoned to their fate, decided to leave their country to find safety,” he said.

When Palestinians left they also hoped that they would be able to return to their home soon banking on the Arab states to regain their territories. But that didn’t happen.

Jewish migrants from Europe and elsewhere were resettled in Palestine by the Jewish Agency with the help of Zionist armed groups.

This replacement of the Palestinian population has continued till this day as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied territories around the West Bank.

Irgun, which for years was led by Begin, was named as a terror group by the UN, the US and the UK.

But despite such a strong censure, Begin formed Herut, a right-wing Israeli political party. Begin became the sixth prime minister of Israel in 1977. Herut later merged into the Likud Party of incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Abandoning is out of the question

Khalaf, who became deputy chief and head of intelligence of the PLO and the second most powerful Fatah leader after Yasser Arafat, the lifelong leader of the Palestinian resistance group, said Palestinians should have never abandoned their lands.

“When I look back, I think that my compatriots made a mistake in trusting the Arab countries and leaving the field empty for the Jewish colonialists. They had to resist at all costs. Zionists could not destroy them down to the last person. Moreover, for many of us, exile was worse than death.”

As people of Gaza are internally displaced in what’s being seen as the second Nakba, Khalaf’s warning might be looming over the leadership of Hamas.

Leaked Israeli official documents indicated that like the Nakba, Tel Aviv plans to implement another expulsion plan of Palestinians from Gaza.

The Israeli military has pounded the Palestinian enclave with airstrikes, rockets and artillery attacks for more than a month, killing more than ten thousand people including women and children as it happened in Deir Yassir and other areas in the 1940s.