How the Zionists brought terrorism to the Middle East

Israeli terror since October 7 in Palestine isn't an aberration. The Zionists have been terrorising Palestinians — and their neighbours — for over a century.

Since October 7, the Zionist terrorists in Israel have brutally massacred over 21,000 Palestinian civilians in a genocide that has been broadcast live across the world. The victims of the Israeli barbarity include over 10,000 children — some forced out of their incubators, and others left to rot in intensive care units after the Zionist terrorists in uniform evacuated a hospital and left the premature babies without any supervision. Among other acts of unbridled terrorism, the Israelis have bombed hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, bakeries, water sources, housing units, refugee camps, and other critical civilian infrastructure. They have stripped young and old down to their undergarments and paraded them in streets before holding them in detention centres, torturing them, killing some of them, and then delivering their dead bodies with missing organs. Entire neighbourhoods have been decimated, bulldozers have been run over people, and patients sheltering in tents outside hospitals have been buried alive.

None of these atrocities are a first for Palestinians.

The settler colonial apartheid state of Israel was created on the back of horrific violence against the indigenous Palestinians, and the perpetrators of the ongoing atrocities in Gaza — and the West Bank — are simply carrying on the legacy of their ancestors in historic Palestine.

The origins of Zionist terror

The deceitful slogan “A land without people for a people without land” was employed by the Zionist colonists to depopulate historic Palestine and convert it into a Jewish state. To achieve their unholy aims in the Holy Land, the Zionists set up their first terrorist organisation Bar-Giora. Founded in 1907, Bar-Giora was meant to protect the usurping Zionists from the Palestinian population resisting their colonisation.

In 1909, it gave way to the Hashomer (the Watchmen), which had its mandate the terrorisation of the Arabs opposing the colonisation of their ancestral lands by acting as “the watchmen” of the illegal settlements that the immigrant Jews from various corners of Europe were building in Palestine as a prelude to an eventual Jewish state.

Haganah

The terrorist acts of the Hashomer were taken over by the Haganah (the Defence), which came into existence in 1920. The Haganah would go on to commit all kinds of terrorist activities, including but not limited to bombing buses, marketplaces, railway lines, ships, hotels, villages, and town squares; killing British and League of Nations-United Nations officials within Palestine; and smuggling illegal immigrants as well as stashes of weapons from across the world in a bid to steal native land and terrorise the Arabs and the British, who ruled the territory until 1948. After 1948, when Israel became “independent,” the Haganah became the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). In a sense, the depravity of the IDF in Palestine and the Israeli neighbourhood since 1948 is a mere perpetuation of the terror that birthed it.

The Haganah had no legal status in the British Mandate Palestine (1920-1948), but the British allowed it to fester. The terrorist entity was controlled by the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency, which was provided for by the League of Nations (later United Nations) mandate to build (a settler colonial and thus illegal) homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

The Haganah had four units, each with unique responsibilities:

• Mossad LeAliyah Bet (focused on the illegal immigration of Jews from Europe into Palestine through the Mediterranean ports. Not to be confused with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.)

• Shai (focused on counter-intelligence. It gathered intelligence on the British and the Arabs.)

• Palmach (consisted of regular salaried commandos comprising Jewish men, women, and youth.)

• Ta’as/Rekhesh (Ta’as is an abbreviation of the Hebrew word for military industries, while Rekhesh is the Hebrew word for “procurement”. This unit, which was spread across Palestine, focused on procuring illegal arms for the Haganah terrorists for their terror campaigns. It built bombs and grenades, made ammunition, refurbished firearms, and acquired illegal arms. Rekhesh operated under a front organisation that was rather imaginatively named the “Flower Growers’ Association.”)

The Haganah terrorists were trained and equipped by the British under Captain Orde Wingate, a Zionist supporter. In his 1977 Master’s thesis titled Jewish-Zionist Terrorism and the Establishment of Israel — which was later published as a book — John Louis Peeke writes that the British had initially enrolled 2,800 Jews as constables and that force had gone up to 10,000 by 1936. It would eventually prove costly for the British.

(Note: Although I have quoted Peeke’s paper throughout this article primarily for its serialisation of Zionist terror acts, the paper, nevertheless, has 3 fatal flaws: 1.) It equates the Palestinian resistance with the terrorism of the settler colonists occupying their land; 2) It uses Arabs as mere props, as objects, in the retelling of events where the Arabs were the victims; 3) The author barely disguises his pro-Zionist stance. The third flaw perhaps explains why he inexplicably fluctuates between the terms “terrorists” and “defence organisations” while referring to Zionist violence. Furthermore, Peeke has overlooked some critical events in his thesis.)

The Haganah’s major terror acts began in the 1930s, during which they blew up the houses of the Arabs, demolished British military posts, police stations, and law courts, and attacked and killed British personnel serving in Palestine. However, their terror wasn’t limited to Palestine. Peeke writes: “In the summer [of 1938], Haganah destroyed the pipeline between the Kirkuk and Mosul fields of the Iraqi Petroleum Company and the port cities of Haifa and Tripoli. On August 8, 1938, Sinbad II, a 60-ton British coast guard vessel enforcing the blockade on Jewish immigration, was sunk by a bomb planted by a Haganah crew member. At least one British sailor was killed.”

Escalation in terrorist activities

The Haganah stepped up its activities in the 1940s. One of its most notorious acts of terror was the bombing of a refugee ship, Patria, carrying 1,900 illegal Jewish immigrants. On November 25, 1940, the Haganah attack blew a hole in the ship, sinking it and killing 250 Jews onboard either as a result of the bombing or by drowning. However, in a typical act of Zionist doublespeak, the Jewish Agency claimed that it was an act of mass suicide by the Jews.

Jews serving under the British army fighting Hitler and his allies continued to raid, in the words of Peeke, “the British Army camps, ordnance bases, and police stations.” But the arms theft by the Zionists wasn’t limited to Palestine. Peeke adds: “Jewish units with the British Army smuggled British and captured German arms from Egypt and the western desert into Palestine.” When the British found out about the theft by the personnel in their midst, 300 Jewish soldiers were mustered out. The discharged thieves promptly joined the Haganah or the other Jewish terror groups.

All this while Ta’as continued producing and smuggling illegal weapons.

At the end of World War II, the Haganah and the other Jewish terror organisations, namely the Irgun and the Stern Gang, shed whatever little restraint they exercised in dealing with the British troops and went all in, attacking their presence across Palestine.

On October 10, 1945, the Haganah attacked British detention camps to free illegal immigrant Jews. The following day, Rekhesh raided the military base at Rehovath and stole a stash of British weapons.

Zionist terrorism would soon escalate drastically as the three leading Zionist terrorist organisations (Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang) would briefly come together as the “Jewish Resistance movement” and commit a series of terrorist acts.

Peeke writes: “On the night of 31 October - 1 November [1945], the Palmach blew up the Palestine railway system in 153 places, destroyed 3 police launches in Haifa and Jaffa; the Irgun attacked the Lydda train station and rail yards, killing a British soldier; and the Stern Gang attempted to blow up the Haifa refinery.”

It was just the beginning of the increase in the intensity of Zionist terrorism. On 25 November, they blew up police coast guard stations at Sidna Ali And Gavat Olga. On 27 December, 7 bombs went off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. On January 13, 1947, a train was derailed outside Haifa, from which the railway payroll was stolen. On 15 January, 10 tons of sodium nitrate (used for making explosives) was stolen in Tel Aviv. On 20 January, 2 personnel were killed in an attack on the Palestine Broadcast Studios; the same day, there was an attack on a coast guard station in Givat Olga and numerous other incidents in the Old City.

Haganah terrorists set off a bomb in a truck near the Arab National Committee Headquarters in Jerusalem on January 5, 1948, killing 9 Arabs. That same day, they blew up the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, killing the Spanish Consul, Don Manuel de Salazar Travesedo, among 19 other people.

In disguise

While committing their terrorist acts, the Zionists wore disguises, such as the British army or police clothing. They also dressed up in Arab garbs while committing atrocities. Peeke gives an example: “On January 28 [1946], 200 machine guns were stolen in a raid on an RAF camp at Aqir. The raiders were disguised as RAF soldiers 62 and were driving stolen RAF trucks.”

Following the end of World War II, the Zionists committed countless terrorist acts in a bid to force the British out. They kept attacking British military posts, police stations, railway stations, buses, markets, hotels, railway bridges, and all kinds of other civilian infrastructure. These attacks killed numerous British personnel, Arabs, as well as Jews.

By the end of June 1946, the Jewish terrorists had “destroyed almost all the rail bridges in Palestine.” Furthermore, “Twenty-two aircraft were destroyed in a single attack on a single airfield in late June.” While the Haganah boasted about the acts of terror it was committing, the scheming David Ben-Gurion (who would go on to become the first Prime Minister of Israel) denied the very existence of the Haganah. The British had had enough. They cracked the whip and arrested thousands of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency leadership. Its terrorism slowed down. The Haganah officially became the Jewish Agency's military wing, later becoming the IDF's core.

No shortage of arms for the Zionists

To commit terror, the Zionists needed weapons. While their illegal manufacturing, stealing, and smuggling of arms continued under Ta’as/Rekhesh, American Jewry was also a huge help in aiding the Zionist terror. Peeke writes: “As early as May 1945, Ben-Gurion had gone to the United States seeking arms. With the help of American Jewry, he returned; not only with arms, but with an entire surplus weapons manufacturing plant.” Nearly 80 years later, nothing seems to have changed. The arms flow unabated from the United States to Tel Aviv, along with copious amounts of financial aid.

Peeke continues: “In January [1948], 50 tons of arms were shipped from Italian ports. In February, 165 tons were shipped and in March, 300 tons. In the summer, Czech arms flowed through the American sector in Germany to Belgium then to Israel. As the communists took power in Eastern Europe, arms became more available…In March 1948, the USSR pressured Yugoslavia to allow Czech arms to be transshipped through Yugoslavia labelled as Italian potatoes.”

The Zionists had no shortage of benefactors in the countries from where the Jews were fleeing. Peeke writes: “Rekhesh spread through Europe ‘acquiring’ arms in the postwar confusion, storing them in French and Italian warehouses and shipping them to Israel disguised as machinery.”

The Palestinians, on the other hand, would have no assistance in their fight against their marauding colonisers. While weapons flowed freely for the Zionists, the Arab attempts to procure weapons were scuppered by the Zionists. An arms shipment meant for the Arabs from the Czechs was intercepted by the Zionists disguised as Egyptians, and the weapons ultimately became additions to the Haganah arsenal.

Historian Ilan Pappe, in his seminal work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, writes: “Weapons were scarce since the Arab armies’ main suppliers were Britain and France, who had declared an arms embargo on Palestine. This crippled the Arab armies but hardly affected the Jewish forces, who found a willing furnisher in the Soviet Union and in its new Eastern bloc.”

Meanwhile, the Zionists kept increasing their fighting capabilities by escalating their weapons procurements. According to Pappe, “It was these new procurements of arms that by February 1948 had enabled the forces on the ground to extend their operations and act with greater efficiency in the Palestinian hinterland.” All this enabled the Zionist terrorists to ethnically cleanse the virtually unprotected, densely-populated Palestinian localities. Adds Pappe: “A principal result of the upgraded weaponry were the heavy bombardments, especially from new mortars, that were now carried out on densely populated villages and neighbourhoods.” Again, nearly 80 years later, nothing seems to have changed as death rains from the skies on the densely-populated enclave of Gaza.

As the British prepared to leave, there was only ever going to be one conclusion when the Zionists trained their guns on the indigenous population. Writes Pappe: “The Zionists won a lopsided victory over the Palestinians in their civil war because they enjoyed a decisive advantage in numbers and quality of both soldiers and weapons. A few thousand irregular Palestinians and Arabs were facing tens of thousands of well-trained Jewish troops.”

Moreover, Palestinians also had to deal with typical British treachery. On the Zionist siege of Jerusalem on April 24, 1948, Pappe writes: “British inaction was the rule.” He goes on to add: [T]he British played a truly diabolical role, as they disarmed the few Palestinian residents who had weapons, promising to protect the people against Jewish attacks, but then instantly reneged on that promise.”

New modes of terror: biological weapons

The white phosphorus raining down on Gazans, the advanced surveillance tools, and weaponry that are tested on the Palestinians are also not a new phenomenon. The Zionist entity began deploying its weapons of mass destruction upon Palestinians even before their illegal settler colonial apartheid state came into being.

Writes Pappe: “Ben-Gurion followed personally the purchase of a particularly lethal weapon that would soon be used to set fire to the fields and houses of Palestinians: a flamethrower.” He adds: “The oral history of the Nakba is full of evidence of the terrible effect this weapon had on people and properties.”

But the Zionists were not content with mere flamethrowers. They built biological weapons that could potentially cause blindness in people. According to Pappe: “The flamethrower project was part of a larger unit engaged in developing biological warfare under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir (later the president of Israel who in the 1980s, through a slip of the tongue, revealed to the world that the Jewish state possessed nuclear weapons). The biological unit he led together with his brother Aharon, started working seriously in February [1948]. Its main objective was to create a weapon that could blind people. Katzir reported to Ben-Gurion: ‘We are experimenting with animals. Our researchers were wearing gas masks and adequate outfits. Good results. The animals did not die (they were just blinded). We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.’ In June, Katzir suggested using it on human beings.”

A wanted poster of the Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists. Begin appears at the extreme left.

Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization)

The terrorist organisation called the Irgun was founded in 1937 and is most closely associated with Menachem Begin, who would go on to serve as the 6th Israeli Prime Minister 40 years later. Ostensibly more extreme than the Haganah, it claimed Israeli boundaries on both sides of the Jordan River. Operating primarily as a terrorist organisation to force the British to do the Zionist bidding and the Arabs to leave their ancestral lands in favour of the European usurpers, Begin shamelessly remarked: “We were convinced of the absolute legality of our illegal actions.”

The Irgun’s illegal actions are a legion. They mined, bombed, ambushed, murdered, flogged, hanged, robbed, raped, massacred, pillaged, and ethnically cleansed with impunity before being absorbed into the IDF, just like their fellow terrorists at the Haganah and the Stern Gang.

After taking its reins, Begin organised the Irgun into 4 sections:

• Army of the Revolution (which consisted of reserve training units)

• Shock Units (intended to be an underground operation in Arab areas, but never set up)

• Assault Force (actual terrorists)

• Revolutionary Propaganda Force (which explained the terrorism of the Assault Force)

Begin’s organisation of his terrorist entity appears instructive when analysing Israeli activities in Gaza since October 7. When the IDF evacuated hospitals, the propaganda arm of the Israeli army made excuses for the IDF, claiming there were Hamas tunnels underneath the medical facilities. When the IDF took losses on the battlefield, the rounding up and parading of innocent and helpless Palestinian civilians was broadcast by the Israeli propagandists as the surrender of Hamas fighters. The propaganda explains the atrocity, just like Begin did it. Peeke writes: “The R.P.F. [Revolutionary Propaganda Force] found that the truth, even if embarrassing, was the best tactic in the propaganda campaign.” Clearly, the IDF has learned its lessons from one of Israel’s finest terrorists.

While terrorist attacks on civilian institutions became the leitmotif of the Irgun throughout its existence, the 2 terrorist acts that it is remembered for are the bombing of the King David Hotel and the massacre of the Deir Yassin village.

The left wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem housed the headquarters of the Palestinian Administration, while the remainder of the building served as a hotel. The government offices in the building were home to administrative documents, including secret files that linked the Jewish Agency and Ben-Gurion to Haganah terrorism. It had to go. The Haganah green-lit the Irgun plan.

At the same time as the attack on the hotel, the Stern Gang was to blow up other government offices at the David Brothers building, another plan green-lit by the Haganah. But the latter failed to materialise. In an act of typical Zionist treachery, terrorists dressed as Arab milkmen carried their explosive-laden milk cans into the King David Hotel. The bombs went off at 12:37 on July 22, 1946, killing 91 people, including 41 Arabs, 28 British, and 17 Jews.

In another act of Zionist treachery, the Haganah, which had green-lit the bombing, denounced it.

By the end of 1946, the Irgun and the Stern Gang had killed 373 people.

Remains of the British Embassy in Rome after Irgun’s 1946 bombing.

International terrorism

Zionist terrorism wasn’t confined to any borders.

In October 1941, while David Raziel, one of the founders of the Irgun, was deployed in Iraq, he had plans of kidnapping Haj Amin Al Husseini, then residing in Baghdad. Raziel’s killing in Iraq put his ignoble plan to rest.

Irgun terrorism traversed continents. The Irgunists bombed the British Embassy in Rome on October 31, 1946. Noel Charles, the British diplomat in Rome, was the attack's intended target. However, he wasn’t at home and escaped the terror attack.

In August 1947, Irgun operatives attacked a British troop train in Austria. The Irgun also claimed responsibility for the bombing of the British High Command headquarters in the basement of the Sacher Hotel in Vienna. The latter attack was conducted via the placing of explosives in 2 suitcases.

Jewish military briefing at Deir Yassin before the massacre.

Deir Yassin massacre

The Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948, has been an open wound for the Palestinians despite the passing years. The brutal attack, approved by the Haganah and conducted by the terrorists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, killed 107 defenceless Arab men, women, and children of the 600 residents that lived in the Deir Yassin village. The massacre took place despite the Palestinian villagers signing a non-aggression pact with the Jews. The terrorists did not just kill the Palestinians but also raped women and stole their belongings.

It was a pivotal event in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, prompting many of the defenceless poor Palestinians to leave their homeland in search of safety.

Begin, however, was remorseless. He hailed the massacre of Deir Yassin as a “splendid act of conquest,” according to Lawrence Wright’s book Thirteen Days in September: The Dramatic Story of the Struggle for Peace. Begin went on to laud his commander and had a laudatory message for them: “Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”

Massacres like Deir Yassin were repeated in multiple Palestinian villages. Over 500 villages were ethnically cleansed to make way for the state of Israel. Deir Yassin would become a playbook for later ethnic cleansing campaigns. Peeke writes: “The Jews used Deir Yassin extensively in their psychological warfare campaigns designed to make the Arabs quit their lands. Horror recordings and sound trucks accompanied Jewish attacks.” It was all done in an attempt to scare the Palestinians out of their ancestral lands.

The Irgun became the political party called the Herut after the Zionist occupation of Palestine was complete. Leading Jewish intellectuals at the time, such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, in a letter published in The New York Times, decried the Herut, calling it a “political party closely akin in methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Lokhamei Herut Israel (or Lehi), also known as the Stern Gang

While the Jewish intellectuals likened the Irgun’s later iteration to Nazi and Fascist entities, the Stern Gang openly celebrated Nazi wins during the Second World War and attempted collaboration with the Nazis. Peeke quotes Stern: “The future of the Jews would be decided by the struggle in Palestine. The obstacle to independence was not Germany, but Britain, and any truce with Britain meant a cessation in the fight for independence. Therefore, Britain remained the enemy.”

Peeke adds: “In his fanaticism for a Jewish state, Stern believed helping Britain could not aid the creation of a Jewish state while helping Hitler might.”

In a January 11, 1941 paper known as the “Ankara Document,” Avraham Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang, who at the time was associated with the Irgun, wrote: “The NMO [National Military Organization, i.e., Irgun] is closely related to the totalitarian movements in Europe in its ideology and structure.” It takes a Fascist to know a Fascist.

After a clash of ideologies with the Irgun, Stern broke away from it and founded Lehi. Unlike the Haganah, which was associated with the World Zionist Organisation, and the Irgun, associated with the New Zionist Organisation, Lehi had no wealthy backers. It had to finance its terrorism on its own. Bereft of wealthy benefactors, Stern and his eponymous gang had to resort to bank and jewellery store robberies to finance their crimes. After a botched assassination attempt on a British CID officer that eventually ended up killing 3 other policemen, including 2 Jews, Stern became a marked man. The British killed him on February 12, 5 days after his failed attempt.

Yitzhak Shamir (far right) on a Palestinian Police wanted poster.

Enter Yitzhak Shamir, another terrorist who would go on to become Israeli Prime Minister. After Stern’s killing, the British arrested all but 25 of the terrorists of his terrorist gang. However, 2 Sternists, including a certain Itzhak Yizernitsky, escaped from the prison and joined the free Sternists to restart their terror operation. Out from prison, “Yizernitsky grew a beard and became Rabbi Shamir, a ‘bent, wheezing, Talmudic scholar,’” writes Peeke. Like his predecessor, as the head of Lehi, “Shamir chose terrorism as Lehi's only practical mode of operation.”

In an echo of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Amalek” comment with regards to the Gazans, Israel Schieb, who led one faction of Lehi, “quoted the Bible to justify terror and violence in the creation of a Jewish State,” writes Peeke.

The regrouped Lehi committed a spate of terror attacks, killing British government officials and Arabs and laying waste to civilian infrastructure.

Lehi, like the Irgun, wasn’t shy of expanding its terrorist activities beyond the borders of Palestine. Lehi sent a package bomb to Codsall, England, to kill British official Roy Farran, who they held responsible for the disappearance of a fellow terrorist. However, the bomb ended up killing Roy’s brother Rex.

On November 6, 1944, 2 of its operatives killed Baron Moyne, the Minister of State in the Middle East, in Cairo, Egypt. Lord Moyne was perceived by the terrorists to be anti-Zionist. Ergo, he had to go.

The power of propaganda, which the Zionists have wielded deftly since the creation of their illegitimate state, was again on show during the killing of Lord Moyne. The man entrusted to pull the trigger was the sharpest Lehi marksman, while his accomplice was the best speaker in the group. Why? Peeke answers: “[T]he one assigned to fire at Moyne would not be likely to miss; and if they were caught, the other would prepare an eloquent defense before the world.”

The next big target of Lehi was Count Bernadotte, the President of the Swedish Red Cross and the UN Mediator for Palestine, whose mandate was to settle the Arab-Israeli issue. Unhappy about the UN’s plan to hand over territory to the Arabs, the repatriation of natives who had fled their homes, and the status of Jerusalem, Lod, and Haifa under the UN plan, Shamir and his fellow terrorists decided to kill the Count. To accomplish the task, Shamir created a front group named Hazit Homoledeth, or the Fatherland Front. That idea was that operating under the front group would take the heat off Lehi after the killing.

The deed was done on September 16, 1948, when Lehi terrorists gunned down the Count. The UN Chief Observer in Jerusalem, French Colonel Andre Serot, was also killed with the Count.

Around 200 Lehi terrorists were arrested in the aftermath of the killings by the Ben-Gurion government. All of them were released once the international furore over the killings died down; one of them even won an election to the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) while still in jail. Furthermore, the Stern Gang rejoined the IDF.

“Freedom fighters”

Shamir justified the killing of Lord Moyne thus: Lehi's struggle was “…not a misunderstanding between natives and a local administration — but a major conflict between a fighting nation which demands national freedom... and an imperialistic power which denies it.” Shamir’s reasoning is instructive. The Jews, in his view, were not usurpers in Palestine but a people fighting for “national freedom” against the British “imperialistic power.”

But Shamir wasn’t alone in this twisted thinking. The liberal West bought into the Zionist framing of their terrorism. It took no time to rehabilitate the Zionist terrorists as freedom fighters, in stark contrast to their reality of being settler colonists stealing indigenous land, killing, brutalising, and ethnically cleansing the natives for the sake of their deranged project.

In a speech titled Terrorism: Ours and Theirs, the late Pakistani-American political scientist and academic Eqbal Ahmad noted the curious framing of once-terrorists as freedom fighters. “In the 1930s and the 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described as terrorists. Then, new things happened; by 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described by 1944-45 as freedom fighters.

“At least two Israeli Prime Ministers, including Menachem Begin, had actually, you can find in the books, posters with their pictures saying terrorists and prize this much. The highest prize I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist.”

Palestinian resistance

However they could, the Palestinians resisted. But their primitive weaponry and feeble support from their neighbours never stood a chance to withstand the onslaught of the Western-backed and highly regimented Jewish militias. Decades later, the asymmetry in power between the two remains.

Nevertheless, their resistance then, just as now, was still labelled terrorism. The expectation then, just as now, was for them to voluntarily leave their homes because the Europeans couldn’t let Jews live among them. This sick stance of the West is a typical example of — to quote Columbia University professor Joseph Massad — “the liberal western formula that equates the colonised Palestinians with their predatory Israeli colonisers.”

To paint the resistance of the oppressed with the aggression of the oppressor is a disingenuous act. As Paulo Freire wrote in his seminal text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation.”

It is worth reminding anyone paying attention that Palestinians don’t join terrorist organisations but liberation groups, as Massad reminds us in his book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: “In an interview with Israeli newspaper Ha’Aretz, he [Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak] asserted that ‘If I were a Palestinian, I’d also join a terror group.’ Barak’s identification with terrorist Palestinians is unreserved, although unlike Begin before him, he does not seem to understand that as far as Palestinians are concerned they never join ‘terror’ groups but rather ‘liberation’ groups.”

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Palestine notes: How Europe projected its unique antisemitism disease on the Middle East