Opinion Mani Shankar Aiyar writes: First came Zionist terror

Peace can come only through dialogue, not by increasing but de-escalating violence, and thus ensuring justice for all

October 28, 2023 09:17 AM IST First published on: Oct 25, 2023 at 08:50 PM IST

It is ironic that Israel is calling on the world to condemn Hamas terrorism when Zionist terrorism, involving several future Prime Ministers of Israel, was at the heart of the Zionist movement from at least the early 1940s. Even more ironically, its media voice was a newspaper called Hamaas, meaning “Resistance” in both Arabic and Hebrew. It was the mouthpiece of the terrorist group Lehi (a Hebrew acronym for Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) led by Abraham Stern whose later breakaway faction came to be called the Stern Gang. Perhaps the most notorious member of the Stern Gang was Menachem Begin, destined to become Prime Minister of Israel (1977-1983).

The Zionist terrorists sought and obtained the collaboration of Haganah, the official armed wing of the Zionist forces, described by Malcolm MacDonald, the British Colonial Secretary in the late 1930s, as “a Jewish army” designed to secure “eventual Jewish military supremacy in Palestine”. They also obtained the cooperation and collaboration of Palmach, a wing comprising the “crack forces” of Haganah, composed mainly of “Jews from the east who looked and spoke like Arabs”, and specially trained for terrorism, sabotage and ruthless assassination. Palmach’s numbers included Yigal Allon, another future PM of Israel, the infamous Moshe Dayan, future Defence Minister of the country, as well as Itzhak Shamir, a future Speaker of the Israeli Knesset. These groups were conjoined with the most determined terrorist group of all, Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organisation, generally known as “Irgun”), the terrorist wing of the Revisionist Party that opposed the Jewish Agency that was deemed by the British Mandatory authorities to be the majority representative of the Yishuv (Hebrew for the Jewish immigrants into Palestine). In the final stages of the struggle for the State of Israel, the activities of these groups were coordinated by Tenuat Hameri Ha’ivri (Jewish Resistance Movement), the “single agency which would control the common fight”. This was done with the blessings of the hitherto non-violent Jewish Agency run by David Ben-Gurion, the first PM, and Golda Meir, the second PM of Israel.

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The terrorist character of the Zionist Movement had its origins in what was initially a sharp division of opinion and strategy between the London-based Chaim Weizmann, representing the World Zionist Congress, and the fiery, extremist Polish immigrant into Palestine, Vladimir Jabotinsky. It was Weizmann who, along with Rothschild, had squeezed out of the British Government the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which first envisaged a “homeland “ for the Jews in Palestine. Within Palestine, Weizmann was represented by Ben-Gurion, who headed the Jewish Agency. They were bitterly opposed by the Revisionist Party founded by the Polish Jabotinsky, who had witnessed three million Jews suffer horribly in Poland’s repeated anti-Semitic pogroms. While Weizmann and Ben-Gurion chose to ride on the shoulders of British imperialism to realise a Jewish state, Jabotinsky and his Revisionists insisted that it was through terrorism, fighting in the streets, that Israel would be won. So, Jabotinsky founded Irgun and resorted to acts of unbridled violence. While Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky were on opposite sides through the 1920s and ‘30s, later, especially during and after WWII, disillusioned with Britain’s hesitation in relinquishing its League of Nations mandate over Palestine and unwillingness to entrust Palestine wholly to the Jews, the Jewish Agency came to collaborate with the terrorists to bring closer their common dream of Israel.

Their acts of terror included: Laying mines; stocking and using several hundred explosive devices, including what we now call IED; and blowing up railway lines, railway bridges, railway stations, rail depots, goods yards, loco sheds, and railway factories. Sabotaging ports was their speciality. They also attached limpet mines to police launches and ambushed lorries carrying government armaments. They made such devastating use of home-made mortars that the police took to calling them “V3s” in remembrance of the V1s and V2s that Hitler had used in his blitzkrieg against London, Coventry, and other British cities. They also kidnapped Arab and British policemen and used them as hostages or shot them dead. They resorted to hijacking convoys carrying cash for banks and looted armouries of the police and army, killing without mercy the accompanying guards. On November 6, 1944, the former Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne was shot by Lehi terrorists and died the same evening, infuriating Churchill, the staunchest supporter of Zionist immigration into Palestine. The most dramatic of these acts of terror, however, was the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946 that housed the Mandate’s secretariat and the headquarters of the army. This was followed by the assassination of the UN mediator, Count Bernadotte, in September 1948. The victims of Zionist terror included countless Arabs, numerous Jewish dissidents or rival Jewish terrorists, British cops and soldiers, and nameless innocents.

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Thus was Israel born out of terrorism and as the massacre at Deir Yassin on April 10, 1948, orchestrated by Menachem Begin showed, when Israel became a State by UN decree, its principal national security plank was terrorising the Palestinians to drive them out of their homesteads as also the Arabs who could not or would not flee Israel. Such terrorising became — and has remained — the key element in its policies towards Palestinians, whether living inside Israel or in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip.

That is why Israel has resolutely refused to implement the UN’s 1967 “Land for Peace” resolution, which envisaged an independent Palestine state living in harmony alongside Israel. Israel also failed to sincerely implement the 1993 Oslo Accord and the White House Rose Garden accord of the same year, to both of which Yasser Arafat committed himself. This, in turn, sparked a series of intifadas in the West Bank, especially after Arafat’s death in 2004. In the face of the apparent capitulation of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, Hamas won the popular vote in Gaza. Initially determined to drive Israel into the Mediterranean, Hamas has since moderated its position to accept a “two-state” solution that Israel continues to deny. Thus has Israeli terrorism spawned ever-escalating Palestinian terrorism. Peace can come only through dialogue, not by increasing but de-escalating violence, and thus ensuring justice for all.

The writer is a former Union minister