Almost from the day of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Americans have been involved in negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East. Although ethnic and territorial conflicts between these two Semitic peoples date back to Biblical times, the introduction of terrorism is a relatively recent development that has greatly complicated resolution of the Palestinian problem - a problem that, like Vietnam, fell into America's lap at the end of the age of Imperialism.
American policy in the region has usually followed the principle that by giving the Palestinians greater political power and autonomy, they will find it less expedient to commit acts of terrorism, and will eventually adopt civilized Western values. The Americans also believe that providing some resolution to the Palestinians' real or perceived grievances will dilute their motivation to such a point that their energies will be redirected toward nation-building instead of nation-destroying. The implicit assumption behind this policy is that terrorism is a strategy that will be employed by any group that believes the benefits to be accrued from its use outweigh the risks. For Western nations, whose value systems derive predominantly from Christianity, these risks are severe and include public opposition, moral outrage, and international condemnation; but for Muslim societies, which are based on a religion that views the world through the concepts of jihad (holy war or "struggle") and shahid or "martyrdom", the distinction between terrorism and acceptable forms of resistance is less well-defined. Indeed, because of recent actions by some Muslims, terrorism and Islam today have become inextricably linked in the minds of many Westerners.
However, terrorism in the Middle East has not been confined solely to Arabs. It is often not recognized that, in the years before the creation of the state of Israel, terrorism was practiced disproportionately by Jewish extremists who lived in the territory that was then called the Palestinian Mandate. Paradoxically, these activities are celebrated today by Israelis who claim that their terrorism was instrumental in eliminating British control and that, without terrorism, the United Nations would not have voted in 1947 to allow the creation of the state of Israel. But is this really true? To answer that important question, it is necessary to examine the history of terrorism and its after-effects in the Palestinian Mandate between 1920 and 1948. Much of what follows is an abbreviated version of the history of the Irgun, written by Israeli historians, borrowed from their official Website. It also includes information from other sources.
On April 19, 1920, three years after the famous Balfour Declaration that established Britain's policy of favoring the establishment of Israel, representatives from Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Belgium convened at San Remo in Italy to discuss a peace treaty with Turkey. It was decided under the authority of the League of Nations that Great Britain would be assigned the mandate over Palestine and shoulder the responsibility for implementing the pro-Zionist policy put forth in the the Balfour Declaration, in order to "[establish] in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people." Even before the conference had finished, however, Arab riots broke out in the territory, which prompted the Jews in turn to form the Haganah ("Defense"), a quasi-military organization.
In 1921, Britain separated 91,000 square kilometers (77%) of the Mandate and created the protectorate of Trans-Jordan, which later became the Arab country of Jordan. Throughout 1921, rioting in the remaining territory, known as Palestine, resulted in the deaths of 43 Jews. After several years of relative peace, riots again broke out in Jerusalem in 1929, sparked by anti-Jewish agitation during Friday prayers at the El Aqsa mosque where the Western or "Wailing" Wall is located. During the unrest, known to Arabs as the Al-Buraq Revolution after the Arabic name for the creature that supposedly carried Muhammad to Jerusalem, 133 Jews were killed in a single week, and 67 died in a massacre in Hebron. A large number of Arabs also died. The uncertainty among Jews about how to respond caused the Hanagah to split into an anti-military faction and a military faction led by Avraham Tehomi, the district commander of Jerusalem. Tehomi founded the "Irgun Zvai Le'umi" (National Military Organization), or ETZL, often spelled Etzel, also known as "Irgun B" or Haganah Le'umit (National Defense). While Hanagah had policy of self-restraint ('havlaga'), the Irgun adopted a more militant posture.
After the establishment of the New Zionist Organization in 1931, the Revisionist party, which had been formed in 1925 by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, seceded from the Histadrut party and founded the National Workers Association (Histadrut Ha'ovdim Hale'umit).
In 1937, Tehomi advocated unifying the Irgun and Hanagah and seceded from the Irgun, along with all the senior staff, and returned to the Hanagah. This left the Irgun as a homogeneous group of militant activists with Jabotinsky, who opposed the policy of havlaga, in command.
On July 7, 1937, the Peel Commission published its recommendations, which included the partition of western Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Greater Jerusalem, with a corridor to the coastal plain, would remain under British rule in order to safeguard the holy places of the three religions. The Jewish Agency, headed by David Ben-Gurion, accepted the principle of partition, whereas the Revisionist party, under Jabotinsky, rejected the plan.
On September 26, 1937, the Arabs assassinated Lewis Andrews, commissioner of Galilee district. Two weeks later, on Sunday, November 14, 1937 Irgun units started attacks against Arabs. This date came to be known as "Black Sunday" because it was the day on which the principle of havlaga was abandoned. The British police responded by carrying out large-scale arrests among the Revisionist party activists.
On March 28, 1938, in retaliation for an Arab terrorist attack, the Irgun started committing terrorist acts of its own against Arabs. Shlomo Ben-Yosef (Tabachnik) was executed by the British for one such act, whereupon Jabotinsky relieved the relatively moderate Rosenburg from command of Irgun and replaced him with David Raziel.
Under Raziel, the Irgun stepped up terrorist activities against the Arabs. The most significant acts were explosions in the Arab markets of Haifa and Jerusalem. On July 6, 1938, a member of the Irgun, disguised as an Arab, went to the Arab market in Haifa, placed a large parcel beside one of the barrows in the center of the market and left. Shortly afterwards there was a heavy explosion, which killed 21 Arabs and injured more than 50. A week later a similar incident took place in Jerusalem. A member of the Irgun concealed an electric mine in the Arab market in the Old City. It exploded shortly after the end of the prayer service in the mosque, when a large crowd had emerged onto the street. Eight Arabs were killed and more than 30 injured.
On July 26, 1938, Yaakov Raz was sent by the Irgun to the Old City of Jerusalem disguised as an Arab and carrying a basket of vegetables in which a mine was concealed. However, he was stabbed by Arabs before he could detonate the bomb and committed suicide after being arrested by the British CID.
As a result of these activities, on May 17, 1939, the British Government published Parliamentary Document 6019, known as the White Paper, which stated in part, "The objective of His Majesty's Government is the establishment within ten years of an independent Palestinian State in such treaty relations with the United Kingdom as will provide satisfactorily for the commercial and strategic requirements of both countries in the future." In order to guarantee the Arab character of the Palestinian State, immigration was to be restricted so that the number of Jews in the country would not exceed one-third of the total population.
Neither the Arabs nor the Jews were satisfied with the White Paper, and its publication only inflamed Arab-Jewish tensions. The Jews regarded the White Paper as an expression of anti-Zionist policy, and the Haganah stepped up illegal immigration, organizing demonstrations against the British policy. In the same year, the Mossad Le'aliyah Bet (Illegal Immigration Institution) was established, which set up a network in Europe to promote emigration to Israel.
British official policy continued to drift toward a pro-Arab position, eventually abandoning the Peel Commission recommendations altogether. The first Jewish actions directed against the British took place on June 2, 1939, when Irgun fighters blew up three telephone network junctions in Jerusalem and planted a mine ear the Old City wall, which killed five Arabs and injuring many more. However, when WWII broke out on September 1, both the Arabs and Jews agreed to a truce, intended to assist Britain in defeating Hitler, who was regarded as a more serious threat. The truce, however, did not last long.
On July 17, 1940, Avraham Stern, dissatisfied with the wartime truce with Britain, seceded from the Raziel-controlled Irgun, (known in full as the Irgun Zvai Le'umi Be'eretz Yisrael or National Military Organization in Eretz Israel). Displaying a singular lack of imagination, Stern named his new organization the Irgun Zvai Le'umi Be'yisrael (the National Military Organization in Israel).
In mid-1941, in Iraq, which had achieved independence from Britain in 1929, Rashid Ali al Kilani staged a pro-Nazi revolution and took over the oil fields. On May 2, Kilani directed his attention to the British, besieging the Habaniyeh airbase and taking hostage the entire staff of the British Embassy in Baghdad. The British asked the Irgun to blow up Iraqi oil fields, which were supplying fuel to the Germans. However, the Irgun leader David Raziel was killed by the Germans during the attempt.
Jewish Hanagah terrorists also killed over 200 Jewish immigrants by blowing up and sinking the immigrant ship Patria in 1940 after the British ordered the immigrants transported to detention camps in Mauritius, and were suspected of blowing up the ship Struma in 1942, in which 769 Jewish immigrants died. The Irgun finally broke the truce with Britain altogether in 1943 after Manachem Begin was released from Siberia as a result of the Soviet-Polish treaty and became leader of the Irgun Zvai Le'umi in Eretz Israel.
On February 1, 1944, the Irgun under Begin declared a revolt against British rule over Palestine and demanded that the British leave the country immediately. After blowing up an immigration office and a tax office, Begin's militants bombed the British Intelligence Headquarters in Haifa and Jerusalem, killing a British officer. The Hanagah tried to stop the Irgun attacks, threatening civil war. The Irgun responded by murdering Lord Moyne, the British official responsible for implementing the White Paper policy, in Cairo.
At the end of the war, when it became clear that the British Labour government, despite its pre-election promises, was intent on continuing Britain's anti-Zionist policy, the three Jewish resistance groups Haganah, Irgun, and Lohamei Herut Yisrael-Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) (known as Lehi for short) reacted by forming the Unified Jewish Resistance Movement, for the purpose of ending the British Mandatory rule.
On November 1, 1945, the Unified Resistance conducted its first joint attack, known to the Israelis as the "Night of the Trains". That night, Haganah units sabotaged some 153 spots along railway tracks throughout the country, and blew up patrol launches in Jaffa and Haifa ports, while a joint Irgun-Lehi unit, commanded by Eitan Livni, attacked the main railway station at Lydda. Two months later, on December 27, a joint Irgun-Lehi force, led by Shraga Alis, once again attacked the British Intelligence offices in Jerusalem, killing 7 British policemen.
On February 25, 1946, the Lehi attacked an airfield near Kfar Syrkin and destroyed eight aircraft, while an Irgun unit blew up 11 military aircraft at Lydda airfield and 21 at Kastina airfield near present day Hatzor. On April 2, the Irgun bombed a number of other sites, including the Naaman bridge south of Acre. The British arrested a number of the terrorists but, as was often the case, did not execute them. On June 17, known as "The Night of the Bridges", the Haganah blew up and destroyed 11 bridges linking Palestine to the neighboring countries. The British, still treating these activities as criminal acts, arrested over 70 people. On Saturday, June 29, 1946, a date which became known as "Black Sabbath", in a surprise move known as Operation Agatha, the British, in a well-planned surprise action, arrested some 2,700 Jews. During the operation, documents proving the role of the Unified Resistance were discovered and stored at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
This roundup of Jewish militants crippled the Unified Resistance and, with the moderates now holding the upper hand, the organization uniting the three forces that comprised the UR (Haganah, Irgun and Lehi) rapidly dissolved.
However, on Monday, July 22, 1946, Manachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun, retaliated against Operation Agatha by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the documents proving their guilt had been stored, killing 28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and 5 others, for a total of 91 dead. This massive terrorist act destroyed what remained of the Unified Resistance organization completely, with the Hanagah denouncing it and announcing unilateral termination of the "struggle" against Britain. The massacre also provoked bitter anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment in Britain.
On October 30, the Irgun under Begin blew up the Jerusalem Railway Station. On Jan 31, 1947, the British began evacuating British nationals considered nonessential and installed security zones, surrounded by barbed wire, to prevent further attacks.
On Saturday, March 1, 1947, Jewish terrorists attacked the British Officers' Club within a security zone at Goldschmidt House on King George Street in Jerusalem, killing 17 British officers, including several senior intelligence officers. Jewish militants also mined interurban roads, attacked army depots at Hadera, Pardes Hanna and Beit Lyd, and attacked an army vehicle lot in Haifa. In the course of these operations, dozens of British soldiers were killed and injured.
In response, the British imposed martial law on the Jewish quarters of northern Jerusalem and on the districts of Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Bnei Barak and Petah Tikva. In the tradition of silly military names that continues to this day, this was called Operations "Hippo" and "Elephant", and involved over 20,000 British troops. However, acts of terrorism by the Irgun and their sympathizers continued; during the 16 day period in which martial law was in effect, a total of 68 terrorist or terrorist-like acts were committed. The British public, who recognized that Britain had no strategic national interest in Palestine, and no doubt bitterly regretting the 1917 Balfour Declaration that had gotten them involved, was seriously questioning Britain's commitment to the region.
On Sunday, May 4, 1947 at 4 pm, members of the Irgun, disguised as British and Arabs, attacked the prison at Acre with explosives, grenades, and kerosene, securing the release of 20 Irgun, 7 Lehi, and 182 Arab inmates at a cost of 9 attackers killed during the attack and 5 captured and subsequently hanged by the British.
On July 8, the Irgun kidnapped and murdered two British sergeants in Netanya, an act which further shocked Britain. The British shortly thereafter abandoned the Palestinian Mandate in evident disgust, and turned the problem over to the UN. In a bitter debate, and after intense American pressure, including pressure on England by President Harry Truman to permit more immigration, the U.N. passed Resolution 181 creating the state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine, whose convoluted boundaries, designed to separate the Arab and Jewish populations, were to include roughly the modern-day West Bank, Gaza, and an area of northwest Israel in Western Galilee near Acre. Approximately 56.7% of the Palestinian Territory, or 12,000 square kilometers, constituting some 13% of the original Mandate, was allocated to the Jewish state, with the remaining 9,060 square kilometers designated as an Arab Palestine. The United States recognized the State of Israel 11 minutes later. Although the Jews had hoped to gain the entire area of Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula, they too immediately accepted the U.N. Resolution.
The Palestinian Arabs, however, unhappy with the prospect of a Jewish state, refused to recognize the new state of Palestine created for them by the United Nations, hoping to shrink the size of Israel by force. However, over the years the opposite happened. Since the Palestinians' rejection of Resolution 181, the maximum territory available for a potential Palestinian state has decreased from 9,060 to 6,360 square kilometers, as a result of military conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors who were also unhappy with Israel's existence. Israel, of course, survived these wars, and since 1948 has increased in size to its current area of 14,410 square kilometers, slightly larger than the state of Connecticut, or 0.15% the size of the United States. This figure includes the Golan Heights acquired from Syria but excludes the so-called occupied territories on the West Bank and Gaza which, if included, would bring the total area to 20,770 square kilometers. These figures may be misleading, however, because a formally accepted national boundary has never been established. Nonetheless, despite whatever complaints the Palestinians may have against Israel, it is clear that, by accepting the 1947 Resolution, and not annexing the territories, Israel showed a willingness to accept a Palestinian state from the start.
Jubilation in Israel after the U.N. resolution was short-lived, however, as the terrorist strategy was picked up by the Arabs and used against the Israelis. The day after the U.N. resolution of November 29, 1947, in which Israel was created, seven Jews were killed, including four passengers on a bus attacked by Arabs on the road to Jerusalem. The acts of hostility grew more frequent, and in December, 184 Jews were killed throughout the country. In February 1949, a car bomb exploded in the street near the Palestine Post building. Three weeks later, three booby-trapped trucks exploded in Ben-Yehuda Street, destroying four large buildings, killing 50 and injuring more than 100. On March 11, a car bomb exploded in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building, killing 12 people. In the four months since the U.N. resolution, over 850 Jews were killed throughout the country.
By April 1948, the situation had deteriorated into low-level war. In the first urban battle of the so-called "War of Independence", the Israelis occupied Dier Yassin on April 9, a military action that resulted in what is known by the Palestinians as the 'Deir Yassin Massacre' in which between 100 and 240 Arabs, including many civilians, were killed by Israeli soldiers.
The British, however, still maintained a military force in Jaffa, which battled the Irgun militia, and bombarded the Irgun headquarters at the Alliance school area in Jerusalem with artillery fire. On May 14, 1948, the British finally evacuated Jerusalem in two convoys, marking the end of British rule in Jerusalem.
After the British exodus, there was no force available to stop the Egyptians from invading. Arab incursions began in the Arab town of Ashdod, followed by the Ramat Rachel kibbutz on May 22, 1948 and south Jerusalem on May 25. During the short war that followed, Israel lost control of east Jerusalem to Jordan but considered its mere survival to be a major victory.
However, now that the state of Israel was reasonably secure, militant organizations like the Irgun and Lehi rapidly became a liability. Even before the cease-fire of July 1948, conflict between the Irgun and the IDF had become inevitable. It culminated in a violent confrontation with IDF forces when the Altalena, a ship smuggling arms to the Irgun, was shelled by IDF forces, killing 16 Irgun fighters. On September 17, 1948, the Lehi assassinated Count Bernadotte, a U.N. emissary who had arrived in the country in an attempt to find a solution to the Jewish-Arab dispute. The following day Prime Minister Ben-Gurion ordered an IDF force to raid Lehi camps in Jerusalem and the Irgun was forcibly disarmed and disbanded, bringing the era of Jewish terrorism to an end.
Within weeks of the establishment of the Jewish state, terrorism on the part of Jewish extremists completely disappeared. The implications for Palestinian terrorism, should a Palestinian state be created, seem obvious. However, there are significant differences. The Palestinians rejected the territory offered to them in 1948, as they have consistently done to this day. Thus, their objective in committing terrorist acts cannot be to create a Palestinian state, but rather is part of their long-standing attempt to destroy Israel. In other words, the Palestinians seem not to want a Palestinian homeland; they want the Jewish homeland instead.
The second question, whether terrorism helped or hindered the establishment of the state of Israel, is important because if it helped, it would have been one of the few cases in which terrorism achieved its desired goal. However, although the terrorism of the Jewish extremists clearly annoyed the British, the main effect of the terrorism against Britain and the Arabs in the Palestinian Mandate was reinforce Britain's belief in the correctness of its attempts to block immigration of Jews to Israel in the late 1930s. It also caused a fatal weakening of the pro-Zionist faction in the British Labour party. Jewish terrorism also prompted Britain to abandon its commitment to the Peel Commission report which had advocated establishment of a Jewish state in the Palestinian Mandate. These factors could easily have induced Britain, had it been so inclined, to allow the Arabs to overrun what is now Israel entirely.
Had Britain remained in the Palestinian Mandate longer, rather of having been driven out by violence, the Jews would undoubtedly still have achieved independence, just like Burma and Ceylon achieved it in 1948 and just as Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand had earlier received complete independence within the Commonwealth in 1939. Instead, continued terrorism by the Irgun and their sympathizers led Britain finally to dump the unwanted problem of Palestine unceremoniously onto the United Nations. Without the intense pressure exerted by America, it is questionable whether the U.N. would have followed through and created a Jewish state at all. Abandonment of the Palestinian Mandate to the U.N. by the British, although accelerated by terrorism, ultimately resulted in the creation of a state that was much smaller than it otherwise might have been. The result of the terrorist actions of Israel's Irgun and Lehi was a weakened Israel, a half-century of war and insecurity, and thousands of additional Israeli deaths. Had America not backed the cause of Israel in the U.N., terrorism by Jewish extremists could have cost the Israelis their country entirely. Pre-1948 Jewish terrorism can therefore be seen as a classic example of the futility of terrorism as a military strategy.
[Some of the above information has been taken from the ETZL website (http://www.etzel.org.il). Any factual errors in the above article are therefore somebody else's fault.]