Abstract
Laffiteau, Charles A. “Jewish Terrorism and the Creation of the State of Israel”
Since the destruction of Israel appears to be a shared goal of Palestinian and Islamic
terrorist groups, an examination of the role Jewish terrorism played in the creation and
expansion of the state of Israel as one of the causal explanations for the current use of
terrorism by Palestinian and Islamic terrorist groups is also warranted. Terrorism was
used by adherents of the Jewish religion many centuries before it was ever used by
Christians, Muslim and other types of religious extremists. Therefore, the focus of this
essay will be on literature that analyzes and discusses the case of Jewish terrorist groups,
such as the Irgun and the Stern Group, and the role played by Jewish Zionist terrorism in
the creation of the state of Israel as well as in expanding Israel’s borders since 1948. The
paucity of literature about the history of Jewish Zionist terrorism, as compared to the
wealth of recent literature focused on Islamic terrorism, also shows that much more
research is needed on all different types of religiously inspired violent terrorism.
Jewish Terrorism and the Creation of the State of Israel
Author: Charles Laffiteau
Introduction
When Menachem Begin became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1977, some Arab and
Palestinian leaders responded that they would not negotiate with Israel because of
Begin’s previous history as a terrorist. However in the US and Israel most people saw
Begin as a former guerrilla leader, not as a terrorist. On the one hand, this difference in
perspectives underscores the inherent meaning of the phrase first written by Gerald
Seymour, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” 1 On the other hand,
since the destruction of Israel appears to be a shared goal of Palestinian and Islamic
terrorist groups, maybe an examination of the role Jewish terrorism played in the creation
and expansion of the state of Israel, as one of the causal explanations for the current use
of terrorism by Palestinian and Islamic terrorist groups, would seem to be warranted.
It should also be noted that terrorism was used by adherents of the Jewish religion
many centuries before it was ever used by Christians, Muslim and other types of religious
extremists. Richard Horsley writes that the Jewish Sicarii began killing wealthy and
prominent Jewish citizens, who symbolized collaboration with the Jews alien Roman
rulers, in the marketplaces of Jerusalem around 50 C.E. “They operated in broad daylight
and in public places, and assassinated their victims surreptitiously…so they could
continue to lead normal public lives in the city. The appropriate term for the deliberate
and organized assassinations, primarily in the city, by the Sicarii is ‘terrorism.’”2
Therefore, the focus of this bibliographic essay will be on literature that analyzes
and discusses the case of Jewish terrorist groups, such as the Irgun and the Stern Group,
1
2
Gerald Seymour. Harry’s Game. (London: Collins, 1975)
R. A. Horsley. “The Sicarii; Ancient Jewish “terrorists.” Journal of Religion, (Vol. 59, 1979): 439-440
1
and the role played by Jewish Zionist terrorism in the creation of the state of Israel prior
to 1948 and in expanding Israel’s borders since 1948. The relative paucity of scholarly
literature about the history of Jewish Zionist terrorism, especially when compared to the
wealth of recent literature focused on Islamic terrorism, also shows that much more
research is needed on all different types of violent religiously inspired political terrorism.
It should also be noted that it is often difficult to make clear distinctions between
ethnic and religious terrorism. Daniel Byman observes that “The Alawis in Syria, Jews
(in Israel), and other groups operate far more as ethnic groups than as communities
motivated by and organized according to religious doctrine. Some groups, of course,
(Byman cites Hezbollah) evolve from one type (Islamic religion) to another (Lebanese
Shi´a community).”3 But religious affiliation is nonetheless a defining characteristic of
some terrorist groups that also fit Byman’s definition of ethnic terrorism. So for purposes
of this literature review, Jewish terrorism, both prior to and after the establishment of the
state of Israel, will be treated as religious rather than ethnic terrorism. Additionally, the
definition of terrorism that will be used is the US State Department’s “terrorism is
defined as politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub
national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” 4
Given the fact that historical perspectives often change over time due to the
release of previously unavailable historical documents, first person interviews or a more
rigorous examination of historical documents and records, the works selected for this
bibliographic essay were all published during the last three decades from 1977 to 2009.
Since the Israeli government version of what happened in the run-up to the establishment
Daniel Byman. “The Logic of Ethnic Terrorism” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (Vol. 21, 1998): 151
Charles L. Ruby. “The Definition of Terrorism.”Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. (Vol. 2 No.
1, 2002): 10
3
4
2
of the state of Israel has remained largely unchallenged by the news media and scholars
outside of the Arab world, only books by authors from Israel and from the two western
countries most involved in supporting Israel, the US and the UK, will be reviewed.
The first book, Terror Out of Zion: The Fight for Israeli Independence, was
published in 1977 and written by J. Bowyer Bell. Bell was an American artist and
academician who wrote extensively about political violence and terrorism. His first two
books, Besieged: Seven Cities Under Siege and The Long War: Israel and the Arabs
since 1946, dealt with the use of violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, Mr. Bell
was also a scholar on the use of terrorism outside of the Middle East who was best known
for his book, The Secret Army: the IRA 1916-1970, an authoritative account of the history
of the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) use of terrorism in Ireland and Great Britain.
The second book, The Palestinian Triangle: The Struggle Between the British, the
Jews and the Arabs, 1935-48, was written by Lord Nicholas Bethell and published two
years later in 1979. Bethell was an Eastern Europe historian who also translated works by
Russian and Polish writers into English. As a translator, Bethell was best known for his
translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, a novel for which Solzhenitsyn
was later awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. But Bethell was also a politician
who, as a member of the Conservative Party, served in the British House of Lords from
1967 until 1999 and in the European Parliament from 1975-2003. As a result, Lord
Bethell was able to gain access to previously unavailable British government papers
which detailed the actions of Jewish terrorist groups in the years leading up to the British
withdrawal from Palestine and Israel’s May 14, 1948 declaration of independence.
3
The author of 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians, which was originally
published in 1990 and then expanded for the second edition published in 1994, is Benny
Morris, a native Israeli citizen. Morris is a highly regarded Jewish scholar and historian
who was not only born on an Israeli kibbutz, but also fought in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War
and was later wounded by an Egyptian mortar shell. But even though Morris regards
himself as a strong advocate of Zionism, he has nonetheless been criticized by Israeli
citizens and government officials for his books’ descriptions of how Arab Palestinians
were treated by Jewish terrorist groups and Israeli defense forces.
One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict Over Palestine, was published in 1994 and
is another work by an American scholar, Deborah Gerner who has published several
books and numerous journal articles dealing with political violence. However, unlike Mr.
Bell’s research on different types of terrorist groups, Gerner is an American best known
for her research on US foreign policy and human rights in the Middle East and, more
specifically, on Palestinian nationalism and the politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, the authors of the 2009 book, Jewish Terrorism
In Israel, are also Jewish Israeli citizens. However, in contrast to Mr. Morris’s use of
official Israeli government archives in order to develop a more accurate historical record,
as Jewish political scientists Pedahzur and Perliger use terrorism case studies to test their
hypotheses about what caused Jews to become perpetrators of terrorism in the years prior
to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and in the years after Israel’s independence.
Literature Review
Published the same year that Menachem Begin became Israel’s Prime Minister,
Terror Out of Zion: The Fight for Israeli Independence is written from the perspective of
4
an American terrorism scholar who conducted extensive interviews with many former
members and leaders of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. However Bell is also an admirer of
these Jewish terrorist groups and as such, he uses this historical narrative to extol their
actions as essential in bringing the state of Israel into existence. Conversely, Bell is
dismissive of the role Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary group led by David Ben-Gurion,
played in forcing the British out and establishing the state of Israel. As a result, Bell’s
admiration for the Irgun and obvious disdain for Haganah’s rejection of the use of violent
acts of terrorism mars an otherwise historically accurate account of the Zionist movement
and what transpired in Palestine prior to and after the founding of the state of Israel.
Bell opens with a prologue where he discusses the effect the 1929 Arab mob
attacks on Jewish settlers and villages had on the Jewish community in Palestine. Bell
notes that “The massacres of 1929, costing the lives of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs, cast a
long shadow. The more militant Jews of Palestine began to regard the traditional Zionist
policy of havlaga-self restraint-with skepticism, and started to seek other forms and
directions more appropriate for the ‘new’ Jew. Out of this appraisal would arise a new
underground organization, Irgun Zvai Leumi.”5
Then in Part I of his book, Bell reviews the history and origins of the Zionist
movement as a Jewish reaction to widespread anti-Semitism in Europe, as well as the
early Zionists’ goals of returning to Palestine and reviving the use of Hebrew as a ‘living
language’ for a Hebrew state there. The author writes that the early Jewish settlers were
politically naïve and “neither understood the Arabs nor realized their anxiety about the
(then) tiny Jewish presence.”6 Bell contends that the assistance Jewish Zionists provided
5
6
J. Bowyer Bell. Terror Out of Zion. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977): 7
Ibid: 11
5
the British and allied forces during World War I resulted in a rather benign attitude by the
British towards increasing Jewish immigration into the British controlled Palestinian
Mandate following the end of that war. Rising Jewish immigration then led to increasing
tensions with the Arab natives and the successive outbreaks of Arab-Jewish violence
throughout the 1920’ and 1930s, which led to the formation of the Haganah self defense
forces by members of Palestine’s Jewish Zionist community.
However, within the Jewish community there also existed a group of Revisionist
Zionists under the leadership of Vladimir Jabotinsky who advocated more forceful action.
The Revisionists subsequently formed their own self defense force called Haganah-bet,
which operated independently of Haganah. Bell’s discussion of Jabotinsky’s charismatic
influence on the Zionist movement includes an important quote from one of Jabotinsky’s
1930’s speeches that provides the rationale for moving in and laying claim to Palestine.
“I do not deny… the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the
country of Palestine. What I do deny is that that is a hardship. It is quite understandable
that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab state No. 4, No. 5 or
No. 6 – that I quite understand; but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish
demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.” 7 In
other words, according to Jabotinsky’s line of reasoning, the Nazi’s genocidal campaign
to exterminate Jews made Jewish demands for ownership of Palestinian lands superior to
Palestine’s native Arabs’ rights to that same land. This perspective not only reflects the
views of the first wave of Jewish Zionists, but it still serves as the dominant rationale for
many present day Jewish Israelis’ sense of entitlement to the Arab lands of Palestine.
7
Ibid: 30
6
Bell writes that in 1937 many of Haganah-bet’s commanders and volunteers
decided to merge with the larger Haganah, due to disagreements about undertaking
offensive operations against Arabs instead of acting strictly in self defense. The author
writes that the birth of Irgun came about due to this philosophical split; “The remainder
adopted a name that had previously been used instead of Haganah-bet, Irgun Zvai Leumi
and became in effect the military arm in Palestine of the New Zionist organization.”8
The author then uses Part 2 of his book to discuss the emergence of a more
extreme faction called LEHI (known in English as the Stern Gang) that broke away from
the Irgun. Part 3 of the book is titled ‘The Revolt’ and in this section Bell recounts the
rise of Menachem Begin to leadership of the Irgun and uses four separate chapters to
provide a chronological breakdown of the different phases of Jewish Zionist resistance
and Irgun operations under Begin from 1943 to 1947. Part 4 is titled the ‘Undeclared
War’ and like Part 3, it contains two separate chapters devoted to detailed accounts of the
December 1947 to March 1948 Arab attacks on Jewish Zionists, and the March 1948 to
May 1948 Jewish attacks on Arabs in Palestine. Part 5 of the book then concludes with
accounts of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War following Israel’s declaration of independence.
Despite the author’s admiration for the Irgun and Stern Gang, Bell’s detailed
accounts of these terrorist groups violence towards Palestinian Arabs, Jews and the
British actually provides ample ammunition for Arabs who claim these actions justify
their own use of violence. However, it should be noted that such Arab arguments also
ignore the fact that most members of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine,
were appalled by and opposed to the terrorist actions of the Irgun and Stern Gang.
Although Bell also notes this, he writes about the Yishuv and the Haganah’s opposition
8
Ibid: 35
7
to the use of terrorism in a manner that equates their opposition to the Irgun’s terroristic
violence with ‘timidity’. As a result, Bell’s revisionist account of Israel’s founding leaves
the reader with the rather misguided impression that it was the violent terrorist acts of the
Irgun and Stern Gang, rather than the non-violent resistance of the Haganah, that actually
led to the British withdrawal from Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel.
However, Bell does offer some excellent insights about the motives of the Irgun
and the Stern Gang, which also help to explain why other terrorist groups also perpetrate
seemingly hopeless acts of violence. Bell’s keenest observation was that the Irgun used
violent acts of terrorism because they wanted to force the British to interrogate and
imprison members of the Jewish community in Palestine to create more sympathizers and
increase support for their terrorist group within the Yishuv.9 This is an important point
because other terrorist groups have also justified their use of violence by saying it is
designed to provoke government crackdowns on the general population that will, in turn,
create more sympathizers for the terrorist groups within the communities they operate in.
In, The Palestinian Triangle: The Struggle Between the British, the Jews and the
Arabs, 1935-48, Lord Bethell was able to use his position as a member of Parliament to
gain access to British government papers which detailed the actions of Jewish terrorist
groups in the years leading up to the British withdrawal from Palestine and Israel’s May
14, 1948 declaration of independence. Like Bell, Lord Bethell uses a dramatic narrative
style to provide the reader with a historically accurate account of the 1930’s and 1940’s
Jewish-Arab conflicts in Palestine, but he does so from the point of view of Palestine’s
British governing authorities, instead of the Jewish Zionist terrorist perspective.
9
Ibid: 106
8
Lord Bethell interviews many of the British participants and combines their
accounts with previously unavailable official British Cabinet records to construct a vivid
narrative of the role British foreign policy played in Palestine’s Jewish-Arab conflicts.
Lord Bethell observes that Arabs were distrustful of the British because the British
supported the legal immigration of over 300,000 Jews into Palestine after World War I
and looked the other way at the illegal immigration of another 60,000 Jews. The author
claims this was due to the British government’s desire to please its American and Russian
allies and the British public’s sympathy for the Jewish Zionists. But Bethell also notes
that the Arabs had no consistent voice for their demands. He says Arabs were divided
over what to do about Jewish immigration and cites these divisions as the reason why
moderate Arabs, who wanted to co-exist with Jewish immigrants, were unable to take
over the Arab Palestinian movement following the failure of the Arab rebellion.
Bethell claims that Britain later changed its position on Jewish immigration and
instituted restrictions on Jewish immigration in part because it viewed the Jewish Zionist
arms caches in Palestine as serving both legitimate and illegitimate purposes; “partly for
reasons of self-defense but also with an eye to the eventual struggle towards the improper
and unjustifiable political objectives outlined in the Biltmore Resolution (i.e. a Jewish
Hebrew state as opposed to a secular Arab and Jewish state).”10 The author also writes
that another reason why British immigration policy changed following the unsuccessful
Arab revolt of 1936-1939 was because the British government determined it would still
retain Jewish support in a war with Germany even if it limited Jewish immigration. This
change in policy incurred the wrath of many of the Jewish Zionists living in Palestine
because they believed it would restrict them to a permanent minority status in Palestine.
10
Nicholas Bethell. The Palestine Triangle. (New York: B. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979): 141
9
Following the outbreak of Arab revolt in 1936, the Peel Commision had gone to
Palestine to investigate the causes and in 1937 subsequently recommended that Palestine
be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab majority territories. But then the White
Paper approved by the British Parliament in May of 1939 dropped this idea and instead
suggested that a single independent Palestine should be governed by Jews and
Palestinians in proportion to their 1939 population. The White Paper also restricted
Jewish rights to buy land from Arabs and set a strict limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants
over the five years from 1940 through 1944, after which future Jewish immigration
would be determined by the independent Palestine’s Arab majority. However, despite the
book’s title, overall Lord Bethell doesn’t provide a lot of details about the Arabs’ role in
the Palestinian conflict, preferring instead to focus on the Jewish Zionists’ battle with the
British for control of Palestine following the approval of the 1939 White Paper.
Lord Bethell’s privileged access to Cabinet papers also provided him with
additional insight into Britain’s changing foreign policy objectives which allows one to
better understand Britain’s overall objectives in the Middle East. The British foreign
office actually favored the creation of a larger Syrian state which would include all of the
Palestinian Mandate as well as the French Mandate of Lebanon. The British felt that they
would then be accorded a privileged economic and military position in this larger Syrian
state. But the British plan was thwarted by its World War II allies, France and the United
States, neither of which wanted the British to retain a dominant influence in the region.
In a counterpoint to Menachem Begin’s claims that it was the Irgun who had
crushed the “local Arab factor”11 in 1943, Bethell argues that in fact the British army had
actually done so years earlier in 1938. But the author contends that the Jewish Zionists
11
Ibid: 155
10
were destined to eventually win the battle for control of Palestine due to a combination of
factors which were beyond British control. Among other things Bethell cites the support
and sympathy the Jewish Zionists received, as an outgrowth of the Nazi holocaust, from
Britain’s war time allies like France and the United States as well as the Jewish Diaspora.
Bethell also credits the shock that resulted from the holocaust in Europe for uniting the
Jewish community in striving for the creation of a Jewish majority state, instead of the
independent Arab majority state of Palestine proposed in Britain’s 1939 White Paper.
Bethell writes that the Jewish Zionists’ eventual triumph over the British military
and success in establishing the state of Israel was also due to the Zionists’ skillful use of
political propaganda and terrorism. But Bethell notes that even though the Haganah and
the Irgun shared the same goal of establishing an independent Jewish state in Palestine,
they strongly disagreed on the use of terrorism. Bethell also writes that despite their
vehement opposition to British restrictions on Jewish immigration, the more moderate
Jewish political leaders in Palestine rejected Menachem Begin’s logic for the use of
terroristic violence and instead cooperated with the British because they were afraid of
losing the limited political freedoms they had already won from the British.12
While the author neglects the Arab point of his triangle, he does make several
excellent observations. For example, he observes that instead of mollifying the Arabs, the
change in British policy from supporting the partition of Palestine to favoring the creation
of a single Palestinian state with an Arab majority, only served to confuse Arabs who
wondered if they should support it or wait and see if British policy changed again in the
future. In support of his argument that British policy inconsistencies were at least partly
12
Ibid:184
11
responsible Bethell notes that in 1945, the British High Commissioner, Lord Gort, voiced
his own frustration about “the lack of any settled policy towards which I should aim.”13
Overall, Lord Bethell does an excellent of sifting through decades of Zionist
propaganda to provide an honest account of the dirty war between Jewish terrorists and
the British for control of Palestine. However, instead of delving into the intricacies of
international diplomacy and foreign policy that were at work in Palestine, the author
instead chooses to focus on how British foreign policy flip-flops and political missteps
culminated in Britain’s humiliating military withdrawal of over 100,000 soldiers from the
region in 1948. As such, the book is more of a case study of British rule in Palestine and
the decline of the once mighty British Empire, than a case study of the three pointed
conflict between the British, Jewish immigrants and the Arab natives of Palestine.
Like his British counterpart, Benny Morris used his position (not as a politician,
but as a journalist for the Jerusalem Post) to gain access to official Israeli government
archives and Intelligence Service documents in order to develop a more accurate
historical record of the acts of terrorism committed by Jewish Zionists and members of
the Irgun and Stern Gang in his book, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians.
Morris’s book is actually a collection of essays dealing with the establishment of the state
of Israel and Jewish Zionists’ conflicts with their Arab Palestinian neighbors. As such,
each essay comprises a separate chapter in Morris’s detailed account of the Palestinian
conflict. Morris is a committed Zionist, but unlike Mr. Bell and Lord Bethell, he uses a
more dispassionate journalistic approach in recounting the details of Jewish Zionist
violence towards the Arab Palestinians. As a result, even though Morris’s accounts of
Jewish terrorism don’t differ much from Bell’s, they come across as more credible.
13
Ibid: 199
12
In his first chapter, Morris immediately trains his sights on the longstanding
official Israeli government position that those Arabs, who fled Palestine in 1948, did so
on the orders of Arab leaders who were fighting with the Jewish Zionists for control of
the parts of Palestine allocated to the Jewish minority. This claim that the Arabs
abandoned their land underpins the Israeli government’s insistence that this is their moral
justification for Israel’s position that Arab’s have no right to return to their homes in what
is now Israel. Morris clearly rejects this central thesis of Israeli doctrine writing that, “In
refuting Teveth’s single-cause (“Arab orders”) explanation of the exodus up to 15 May, I
pointed out that there is simply no evidence to support it, and that the single document
Teveth is able to cite, the Haganah report of 24 April, refers explicitly to “rumours” and
to an order to “several localities”. The fact is that the opposite occurred: Haganah
intelligence and Western diplomatic missions in the Middle East at the time, around 5–6
May 1948, picked up, recorded and quoted from Arab orders and appeals to the Arabs of
Palestine to stay put in their homes or, if already in exile, to return to Palestine. Not
evidence of “Arab orders” to flee, but of orders to stay put during those crucial preinvasion weeks. It flies in the face of the (Israeli) chronology, which there is no getting
around. There was an almost universal one-to-one correspondence between Jewish
attacks in specific localities and on specific towns and Arab flight from these localities
and towns; Tiberias was attacked by the Golani Brigade on 17 April; its Arab population
evacuated on 18 April. What this means is that Haganah / Irgun /IDF attack was usually
the principal and final precipitant of Arab flight.”14 In his accounts, Morris uses Israel’s
14
Benny Morris 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994):31-32
13
own official records to show that Arabs actually fled due to unprovoked attacks by
Jewish Zionists.
Morris then continues with a point by point refutation of the Israeli government’s
official account of what happened in the early days of Jewish-Palestinian conflict in his
succeeding chapters. In his second chapter Morris notes the discord among Jewish
political leaders regarding the use of terrorism to force Arabs to flee their land and
villages. In the second chapter, “Mapai, Mapam, and the Arab problem in 1948”, Morris
quotes the leader of the Revisionists, the political supporters of the Irgun and Stern Gang
terrorist organizations, discussing the Revisionists’ reasoning and strategy for driving the
Arabs out of Israel. “A strong attack on the centres of the Arab population will intensify
the movement of refugees and all the roads in the direction of Transjordan and the
neighbouring countries will be filled with panic-stricken masses and [this] will hamper
the [enemy´s] military movement, as happened during the collapse of France [in World
War II]. A great opportunity has been given us ....The whole of this land is ours....”15
In chapter three, Morris uses an official Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) report in his
examination of the massacre of 107 Arab villagers, including women and children, by the
combined forces of the Irgun and Stern Gang at Deir Yassin. This massacre occurred on
April 9, 1948 while the Haganah’s Jewish Defense forces were trying to ease the
blockade of Jerusalem. Morris quotes the IDF report as stating that “The action at Deir
Yassin, especially, greatly affected the thinking of the Arab; not a little of the immediate
flight during our [Haganah/IDF] attacks, especially in the central and southern areas,
15
Ibid: 51
14
caused panic flight because of this factor, which can be described as a decisive
accelerating factor (gorem mezarez mach'ri'a). 16
While the attack on Lydda’s Arabs in July of 1948 was bloodier, it is the massacre
in Deir Yassin that is burned into the minds and consciousness of Arab Palestinians. The
Arab survivors discussed what happened when they arrived in Jerusalem and, as so often
happens, the number of Arabs killed was reported by the press as a much larger number
of about 254. However, regardless of the actual number of Arabs killed, Morris observes
that in line with the Arab perspective, Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Branch
documents contradict the Israeli government and show that the IDF considered the Deir
Yassin massacre and acts of terrorism by the Irgun and Stern Gang to be the single most
important factor leading to the Arab exodus from Palestine.
In addition to his examination of the terrorism of the Irgun and Stern Gang,
Morris also discusses the actions of Israeli Defense Forces and how they treated Arabs
living in Israel after the Irgun and Stern Gang had ceased operations. One case Morris
cites concerns the Arab inhabitants of a village called Abu Gosh, who had been expelled
from Israel in 1948 but had returned to their homes in 1949. Morris says that in the latter
half of 1949 the Israeli police and IDF would periodically raid the village and round up
the Arabs. “Following one such round-up, in early 1950, the inhabitants of Abu Gosh
sent off an “open letter”, to Knesset members and journalists, writing that the Israelis had
repeatedly “surrounded our village, and taken our women, children and old folk, and
thrown them over the border and into the Negev Desert, and many of them died in
consequence, when they were shot [trying to make their way back across] the borders.”17
16
17
Ibid: 126-128
Ibid: 267-268
15
The historical and scholarly significance of Morris’s work is that he uses the
Israeli government’s, Israeli political parties’ and Israeli Defense Forces and Intelligence
Service’s own documents to contradict the Israeli government’s version of the events that
led to the Arab Palestinian exodus from Palestine. The truth about the terroristic violence
of some Jewish Zionists in 1948 and in the early years of the Israeli independence,
coupled with the Israeli government’s refusal to acknowledge this, is what Morris as well
as many other Jews and Arabs contend inflames the passions of Arabs and continues to
provide fuel for the current conflict between Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians. The fact
that it was an Israeli Zionist who took the lead in setting the historical record straight also
gives this book an intellectual depth that is lacking in Bell and Bethell’s accounts.
In One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict Over Palestine, Deborah Gerner opens
her scholarly review of the Jewish Israeli and Arab disagreements over Palestine by
noting the role each side’s different versions of this conflict’s history play in the ongoing
quarrel, saying that the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally embedded in history
and the differing interpretations of that history by the principal actors.”18 But despite their
differences over history, Gerner observes both share an inability to forget the past and
deal with the situation as it exists today. Gerner writes that “Few Jewish Israelis or
Palestinians are either willing or able to do this-the past is alive in the present for
them.”19 The author then explores the role that the Biblical beliefs’ of many Jews, and
19th and early 20th century European ideas about colonizing and civilizing less developed
countries around the world, played in justifying the early waves of Jewish immigration
to Palestine. Gerner says that, “imperialism-the establishment by force or coercion of
18
19
Deborah Gerner One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict Over Palestine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994): 3
Ibid: 4
16
political and economic control by a state or empire over foreign territories-was viewed as
an honorable activity, with little recognition of the exploitation accompanying it.”20
In her examination of the involvement of nations like Britain, the US and Russia
in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Gerner also observes that, in contrast to the current
involvement of the US and other Arab, as well as non-Arab majority Muslim nations,
“Prior to 1948, the conflict over Palestine was waged by two nascent, non-state national
groups--Zionists and Palestinians--with involvement by Britain and, to a far lesser extent,
the Arab countries. Once the British had withdrawn militarily and the State of Israel had
been proclaimed, the principal actors and the forms of the conflict took on clear
international dimensions.”21
Gerner then goes on to explore the internationalization of the Israeli-Arab conflict
following the British withdrawal from Palestine and the establishment of Israel as an
independent state. The author discusses the results of the 1956 Suez War, the June 1967
War and the October 1973 War, where Egypt and Syria attempted to regain territory
Israel had occupied during the 1967 war, the subsequent Arab oil embargo which linked
economic issues with political concerns, as well as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
She also observes that “although Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent
international war against Iraq was not directly related to the conflict over Palestine, the
episode had wide-ranging implications for Israeli-Palestinian relations.”22
In an effort to help readers understand why both sides continue to remain at odds,
Gerner recounts the reasons why the Jewish Zionists agreed to the American sponsored
1947 UN resolution partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Palestinian states and
20
Ibid: 15
Ibid: 47
22
Ibid: 103
21
17
why Arab Palestinians were opposed to this idea. “Prior to 1948, the majority of Zionists
desired a far larger territory than was allotted to them by the United Nations; for their
part, the majority of Palestinians saw the Zionists as European colonialists and resisted
any Zionist control of the region. The United Nations partition satisfied neither party. The
Zionists, however, accepted the partition because they had nothing to lose and everything
to gain by doing so. Control over some territory was more than they had prior to the
partition, and they maintained the hope that the state could be further expanded in the
future. The Palestinians and the Arab states rejected the partition, for they gained nothing
and lost a great deal from the United Nations decision.”23 Yet despite Gerner’s pointed
acknowledgements of both sides intractability in this conflict, the author remains
optimistic that it can still be resolved peacefully. To that end Gerner concludes her book
by discussing a variety of suggestions from international relations and conflict resolution
scholars about how best to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine.
Unlike the other works reviewed here, Gerner alludes to but does not give detailed
accounts of Zionist, Israeli Defense Forces or Arab acts of violent terrorism that the other
works reviewed here supply. Instead, the author provides the reader with a broad
overview of the conflict, the moral and political rationales that both the Israelis and the
Arabs use to justify their violent opposition, and the ongoing dispute’s impact on
international relations around the world. As such, Gerner’s book serves as a textbook that
provides an accurate historical account of the major milestones and the international
dimensions of a conflict, which began as dispute over land between people from different
and yet remarkably similar religious and ethnic cultures. By tracing the origins of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict back to its historical roots, Gerner also helps the reader
23
Ibid: 165
18
understand why contemporary Israeli and Palestinian political leaders are still influenced
by internal historic and psychological factors as well as external international factors.
In, Jewish Terrorism In Israel, Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, who like Benny
Morris are also Israeli Jews, use case studies to test their hypotheses about what caused
Jews to become perpetrators of terrorism in the years prior to the founding of the state of
Israel in 1948, and in the years following Israel’s independence. The authors begin by
first defining precisely what they mean by Jewish acts of terrorism stating that, “First,
terrorism involves the use of violence. Second, there is a political motive that activates
the violence. Third, there is an intention to strike fear among the victims and their
community. Finally, the victims of terrorism are civilians or noncombatants.”24
In their first chapter the authors provide a chronology of the use of terrorism by
Jews in the years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, dating back to the 2nd
century B.C.E. when Palestine was ruled by the Hellenistic successors of Alexander the
Great. The authors note that aside from their famous murder of a Hellenist envoy named
Apelles, a group of Jews known as the Hashmonai, who were opposed to Jewish
assimilation into the Hellenistic, “focused mainly on killing Hellenized Jews and attacks
on Jewish population centers where the Hellenistic culture had been assimilated.”25
In their second chapter, Pedahzur and Perliger then examine the ethno-religious
terrorism of Jewish Zionists who had immigrated to Palestine in the early part of the 20th
century. The authors note that the Zionist right wing Revisionist followers of Jabotinsky,
who were opposed to the leftist Haganah’s policy of self restraint, formed the Etzel (aka
the Irgun) in 1931 as a military organization that would undertake offensive acts of
24
Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger. Jewish Terrorism In Israel (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009): xii
25
Ibid: 3
19
violence against Arab Palestinians. An even more radical group of Revisionists later split
from Etzel and formed their own terrorist organization called LEHI (aka the Stern Gang).
But the authors also note an important distinction between the Etzel and LEHI views on
the use of terrorism writing that, “whereas the Etzel regarded political violence solely as
a means of achieving of establishing a sovereign and democratic state, the LEHI
considered the use of violence and terrorism a crucial component in the evolution of the
Jewish nation.”26 But regardless of these differences in perceptions about the justification
for the use of terrorism, the authors also note that Etzel became increasing proficient
using it to harm large numbers of civilians. The authors write that “The Etzel’s first use
of terrorism was the murder of two Palestinian workers in a banana grove in the Sharon
region on April 20th, 1936. Between 1936 and 1939 there was a noticeable escalation in
actions aimed at harming large numbers of civilians. Over three years Etzel carried out 60
operations that took the lives of more than 120 Palestinians and injured hundreds more.27
The rest of chapter two discusses the use of terrorism by the Irgun and Stern Gang
against the British and Palestinians following the end of World War II, as well as against
Arab Palestinians after the British withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared its
independence. It also examines the emergence of other right wing terrorist groups in the
years following Israel’s independence like the Tzrifin Underground and the Covenant of
the Zealots (aka Brit Hakanaim). Noticeably absent however, is any mention of the
massacre at Deir Yassin, which clearly fits the authors’ definition of Jewish terrorism.
Unfortunately, omissions such as this one, in turn cast some doubt on the results of the
authors’ otherwise in depth study of Jewish terrorism.
26
27
Ibid: 11
Ibid: 13
20
Chapters three and four discuss Israel’s religious right and the terrorist groups that
emerged during the 1960s and 1970s following two distinct ideological streams; the Gush
Emunim streams’ Jewish Underground, and the Kahanist stream’s TNT network. Chapter
five then examines the melding of various religious right terrorist groups during the
1980s and the role this played in the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Chapter six explores the emergence of the ‘hilltop youth’ counterculture in the occupied
territories during the second Palestinian intifada and the religious right’s use of terrorism
before and after Israel’s withdrawal from Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.
Chapter seven then examines the motives of groups and individuals whose actions did not
fit the parameters of the authors study, in an attempt to discover why they followed a
different path than the other Jewish terrorist groups.
The final chapter compares Jewish terrorism with other types of religiously
inspired terrorism in an effort to test the authors’ hypothesis that religious terrorism “is
not a one faith phenomenon. In fact, identical patterns of radicalization and the uses of
terrorism can be traced to any counterculture that adheres to a totalistic ideology, be it
religious or secular.”28 Pedahzur and Perliger use three datasets to test their theory;
“details of each of 309 Jewish terrorist attacks perpetrated in Palestine and the state of
Israel between 1932 and 2008, a biographical dataset of the 224 persons who have taken
part in the terrorist attacks, and a third that describes the type of ties between members of
each of the Jewish terrorist networks.” 29
The authors conclude that Jewish terrorist groups are structured along the lines
of social networks as compared to the hierarchical structures typically seen in business
28
29
Ibid: xiv
Ibid: xiii
21
and political organizations. They also found that most Jewish terrorism groups were
motivated by a combination of political, nationalistic and religious grievances, or formed
as a reaction to what members believed were external challenges to their communal
values. However, the authors also noted that unlike many other religious terrorist groups,
Jewish terrorists do not use suicide bombings as part of their arsenal of terror tactics. On
the other hand, the authors speculated that the reason why Jewish terrorists seemed to
have easier access to weapons and explosives than other types of terrorist groups was due
to their past or present service in the military. Finally, the authors also noted that the
Israeli intelligence services had been successful in stopping a number of their attacks.30
In a very general sense Pedahzur and Perliger succeed in validating their
hypothesis that Jewish terrorist groups share many similarities with Islamic terrorist
organizations, America’s right wing Christian terror groups and other religiously inspired
terrorist organizations. Like their Jewish terrorist counterparts, these religiously inspired
terror groups also embrace ideological philosophies that combine religious, political and
nationalistic elements with a heavenly vision of a new world or societal order. These
terror groups then use their own radical interpretations of religious texts and scriptures to
justify their use of violent terrorism, because they are involved in a life and death struggle
between the ‘good’ they represent and the ‘evil’ they are fighting. This also helps to
explain why these religiously inspired terror groups are opposed to making compromises
with their government authorities since they don’t believe you can compromise with evil.
While Pedahzur and Perliger’s book tackles a subject that the Israeli government
finds embarrassing, it also falls short in a number of respects. But despite their omission
of the Deir Yassin massacre and their decision to focus on acts of terrorism by private
30
Ibid: 231
22
Jewish terror groups and exclude acts of terrorism by the Jewish IDF, the authors’ study
nonetheless provides valuable insights into the causes and effects of Jewish terrorism.
Conclusions
In contrast to the official history promulgated by the Israeli government, both J.
Boyer Bell and Benny Morris give us revisionist accounts of what happened in Palestine
leading up to and immediately following Israeli independence. But while Bell provides us
with an equally detailed and bloody account of the terroristic violence perpetrated by the
Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist terror groups from the perspective of the terrorists,
Morris refutes the Israeli government’s version of history and the role Jewish terrorism
played in forcing Arabs out of Palestine with a dispassionate account based on the Israeli
government’s own official records. Nicholas Bethell then uses official British documents
to provide us with an account of the Irgun and Stern Gang’s use of terrorism, but this one
is from the perspective of the British foreign office and its representatives in Palestine.
Deborah Gerner uses theories of international relations, coupled with her and
other Middle East scholars’ knowledge of the history of the Jewish-Arab conflict in
Palestine, to provide the reader with a much wider chronological view and broader
perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While it does not provide detailed accounts
of Jewish terrorism, Gerner’s book is a comprehensive exploration of the conflict’s
numerous complexities and how they evolved, so it would also serve as an excellent
textbook for any student of foreign affairs interested in this region of the world. On the
other hand, while Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger provide their readers with a broad and
detailed chronological account of Jewish terrorism in Palestine, they offer few insights
into the effect Jewish terrorism had on the terrorists, their victims or the state of Israel.
23
If there is one common strand that runs through these books, it is the authors’
historically accurate accounts of how some Jewish Zionists used terrorism to achieve
their political and territorial goals in Palestine. As such, these accounts are not only at
odds with the Israeli government’s official narrative, but they also run counter to the
prevailing view among citizens in the United States and most of the non-Arab world that
Jews in Israeli have always been victims of terrorism, when in fact the Israeli government
and some Jewish citizens have also been perpetrators of terrorism. These narratives also
debunk the Israeli myth that Arab Palestinians who fled from their homes in what is now
Israel, did so at the behest of hostile Arab leaders. Israel continues to propagate this myth
in order to morally justify its position that Arabs have no right to return to the homes and
land they had abandoned during the 1948 civil war, when in fact these Arab Palestinians
actually fled for their lives in response Jewish attacks on their homes and villages.
Another popular misconception in the US is that ever since its establishment as an
independent nation, Israel has only been trying to defend its Jewish citizens against
hostile Palestinian Arabs and its democratic institutions from hostile Arab dictators that
support the Palestinians and that as a small democratic nation surrounded by hostile
Arabs, Israel needed American military aid and financial support in order to survive.
However, these authors conclusively show that the roots of the current conflict between
Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel’s continuing conflicts with other Arab and
Muslim countries, run much deeper and actually predate the establishment of the
democratic state of Israel. As Gerner notes, “Prior to 1948, the conflict over Palestine
was waged by two nascent, non-state national groups--Zionists and Palestinians.”31 The
conflict only took on its current international dimensions after Israel declared its
31
Gerner: 47
24
independence, because of the Cold War tensions that existed between the US and its
autocratic and democratic allies and the USSR and its respective allies around the world.
Israeli Jews, as well as many other people of the Jewish faith, are often quick to
cite their long history of being victims of violence because of their religious beliefs; a
history which dates back to the Egyptian Pharaoh’s 8th century BCE attacks on Jews
during their exodus from Egypt and continues today with suicide bombings in Israel and
the Occupied Territories that are aimed at Israeli Jews. While Jews have indeed been
victims of terrorism and suffered from persecution in numerous countries around the
world, the authors of the texts reviewed here have also cited incidents of Jewish terrorism
directed at Arabs in the lands of Palestine and Israel. Furthermore, other scholars have
also noted that the Jewish people have an equally long history of using terrorism and
violence to achieve their own political and territorial aims; a history which actually predates the establishment of Islam as another branch of the Abrahamic religious tradition.32
However, it would be difficult to establish a direct causal link between terrorism
by members of the Jewish faith and terrorism by adherents of Islam on the basis of the
terrorist incidents documented in these texts. On the other hand, it would be equally
difficult to claim that there is no link between terrorist incidents such as the Irgun and
Stern Gang’s massacre of Palestinian villagers in Deir Yassin and Palestinians’ current
use of terrorism against Israelis. But Israel has also woven a narrative that ignores its own
history of terrorism and instead focuses on its victimization by Palestinians’ use of
terrorism, while Palestinians have created a narrative which uses prior incidents of Jewish
terrorism to justify their own use of terrorism. While both of these narratives are faulty,
the kernels of truth they contain nonetheless serve the interests of those who propagate
32
R. A. Horsley. “The Sicarii; Ancient Jewish “terrorists.” Journal of Religion, (Vol. 59, 1979): 435-458
25
them. Unfortunately, so long as Israelis and their US political supporters condemn
Islamic terrorism, but refuse to acknowledge the role Jewish terrorism played in the
establishment of the state of Israel, the prospects for changing the narratives are slim.
Bibliography
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Academy Press, 1977)
Bethell, Nicholas. The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle Between the British, the Jews
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Byman, Daniel. “The Logic of Ethnic Terrorism” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (Vol.
21, 1998): 149-169
Gerner, Deborah. J. One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict Over Palestine. (Boulder, CO:
Westview, 1994)
Horsley, Richard A. “The Sicarii; Ancient Jewish “terrorists.” Journal of Religion (Vol.
59 No. 4, 1979): 435-458
Morris, Benny. 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians. (New York: Oxford
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Ruby, Charles L. “The Definition of Terrorism.”Analyses of Social Issues and Public
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Seymour, Gary. Harry’s Game. (London: Collins, 1975)
26