In the Beginning, There Was Terror
ameu.org
by: Ronald Bleier
July - August 2003
The Link - Volume 36, Issue 3
Page 1
Much of the history of terrorism in today’s Middle East has been thrust down the Orwellian memory hole due to the highly effective campaign over the past 50 years to suppress information prejudicial to Israel.
Blowing up a bus, a train, a ship, a café, or a hotel; assassinating a diplomat or a peace negotiator; killing hostages, sending letter bombs; massacring defenseless villagers — this is terrorism, as we know it. In the modern Middle East it began with the Zionists who founded the Jewish state. 1
The Original Sin
Israel’s original sin is Zionism, the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the former Palestine. At the root of the problem is Zionism’s exclusivist structure whereby only Jews are treated as first-class citizens. In order to create and consolidate a Jewish state in 1948, Zionists expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and never allowed them or their descendants to return. In addition, Israeli forces destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and perpetrated about three dozen massacres. In 1967, the Israelis forced another 350,000 Palestinians to flee the West Bank and Gaza as well as 147,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights. Since 1967 Israel has placed the entire Palestinian population of the Territories under military occupation.
The effects of the dispossession of the Palestinians and other Arabs are with us to this day, in the shattered lives of the millions of people directly affected and also as a sign of the West’s war against the entire Arab nation and Muslims everywhere. Arguably, the original sin of Zionism and its effects on the peoples of the Middle East were central to the motivation behind the events of 9/11, and the most important consequence of which is the ongoing “war on terrorism” that is smothering our political landscape.
Assassinating the Peace Negotiator
One of the most notorious acts of Israeli terrorism occurred during the 1948 war when Jewish forces, members of the LEHI underground (also known as the Stern Gang) assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, a U.N. appointed mediator. Bernadotte was killed on September 17, 1948, a day after he offered his second mediation plan which, among other things, called for repatriation and compensation for the Palestinian refugees.
The assassination of Bernadotte highlighted one of the biggest policy differences at the time between the United States and Israel, namely the fate of the Palestinian refugees. By that time, Jewish/Israeli forces had already forced more than half a million Palestinians from their homes. The resultant international outcry focused attention on the implications for Middle East peace as well as on the suffering of the refugees. Moreover, the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews who resided in the Arab world, mainly in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Egypt, was placed at risk because of Israeli expulsion policy.
The day before the assassination Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett publicly accused Bernadotte of “bias against the state of Israel and in favor of the Arab states.” Stephen Green points to evidence that the Israeli government was itself directly involved in the killing. On the night of the assassination the Czech consulates in Jerusalem and Haifa were busy processing some 30 visas for Stern gang members “who had been rounded up for their involvement in the planning and execution” of the assassination. “Between September 18 and September 29, most if not all of the 30 left Israel on flights for Prague, Czechoslovakia.” The “scale, precision, and speed of the evacuation-escape” made the State Department “suspicious that the Stern gang was not involved alone.” The U.S. wondered if the “operation might have been planned and prepared in Czechoslovakia, and that a specially trained squad had been flown into Israel from Prague for that purpose.”2 In addition, historian Howard Sachar notes that “Yehoshua Cohen, a friend of Ben Gurion, is widely believed to be the trigger man.” 3
Eight months later, in May 1949, the Israelis revealed to the U.N. that the majority of the Stern Gang members rounded up in the “purge” had been released within two weeks. Those not released were held until a general amnesty was granted on February 14, 1949.4 No one was ever put on trial for the killing.
The assassination of Bernadotte made international headlines and for a time more attention was paid to the issue of the Palestinian refugees. In the end pressure to repatriate them was never successfully mustered. Arguably, from the point of view of Israeli expulsion policy, the assassination was a success since none of Bernadotte’s successors was able to focus sufficient pressure on the Israelis to make any concessions. Had Bernadotte lived, he might have succeeded where others had failed. At the least, his murder was a warning to any who might have tried to follow his activist example.
Dynamiting a Public Building
One of the most notorious examples of Jewish/Zionist terrorism in the post-war period 1945-1948, was the bombing of the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946. The bombing developed out of an atmosphere where the Zionists were enraged when the British Labor party’s sweeping victory in the summer of 1945 did nothing to liberalize the previous government’s policy on Jewish immigration. British insistence on maintaining their restrictive immigration policy led to the unification of the three major factions of the Jewish fighting forces into a United Resistance. The three forces comprised the Jewish Agency’s Haganah led by David Ben Gurion, the LEHI, the Stern Gang led by Nathan Yellin-Mor, and the Irgun led by Menachem Begin, who in his book “The Revolt” bragged that he was “Terrorist Number One.” At the end of October 1945, they formally agreed to cooperate on “a military struggle against British rule.” 5
Their joint attacks, including the Night of the Trains, The Night of the Airfields, the Night of the Bridges and other operations, were so successful that they led finally to forceful British retaliation. Immediately after the Night of the Bridges, June 17, 1947, British Army searches for terrorists were conducted, arrests were made and Jews were killed and injured in clashes. A much larger British operation that came to be known as “Black Sabbath” began two weeks later. Thousands of Jews were arrested. British troops ransacked the offices of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, seized important documents, arrested members of the Jewish Agency Executive, and carried out searches and arrests in many kibbutzim.
As a direct result of the Black Sabbath operation, the Haganah command decided on July 1 to conduct three operations against the British. The Palmach (the elite Haganah strike force) would carry out a raid on a British army camp to recover their weapons. The Irgun would blow up the King David Hotel where the offices of the Mandatory government and the British military command were located. (The LEHI task, blowing up the adjacent David Brothers building, was never carried out.)
Just at this moment came an appeal from Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, urging that the armed struggle against the British be halted. As a result of his appeal, the supreme political committee decided “to accede to Weizmann’s request.” However, Moshe Sneh, the Haganah liaison with the Irgun and LEHI, strongly opposed the Weizmann request and did not inform Begin of the committee resolution but merely asked him to postpone the action.6
The King David Hotel was brought down by means of 50 kilos of explosives, placed beside supporting pillars in the hotel’s “La Regence” restaurant. Timers were placed for 30 minutes. After the bombers made their escape, telephone messages were placed to the hotel telephone operator and to the Palestine Post. The French Consulate, adjacent to the hotel was also warned to open its windows to prevent blast damage, which it did. 7 Some 25 minutes later, a terrific explosion destroyed the entire southern wing of the hotel— all seven stories. The official death toll was 91 dead: 28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews, and five others.
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