Last month the National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record
Office, released MI5 Security Service files showing that Zionist terror
groups planned to set up cells in London and assassinate the post-war Labour
government's British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
"Present Trends in Palestine", an MI5 briefing paper written in August 1946,
reported on the activities of the Stern Gang. This was the terrorist group
that had assassinated Lord Moyne, the British military governor in Egypt in
1944.
"In recent months it has been reported that they [the Stern Gang] have been
training selected members for the purpose of proceeding overseas and
assassinating a prominent British personality-special reference having been
made several times to Mr. Bevin in this connection," the paper noted.
One of the leading lights of the Stern Group, which had by this time renamed
itself Lehi, was Yitzhak Shamir who became prime minister in 1983 and whose
tenure in the highest office in Israel was second only to Ben Gurion.
Another paper, "Threatened Jewish Activity in the United Kingdom, Palestine
and Elsewhere", prepared for the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, focused on
the activities of the Irgun.
It noted that the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin-later to become prime
minister of Israel in 1977-who had a £2,000 price on his head, "was
responsible in the past for the liquidation of members of the police and the
military whose activities have been judged especially worthy of Jewish
resentment in Palestine."
The paper was written in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing by the Irgun
that had in the previous month blown up the British headquarters in the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people-Britons, Arabs and Jews-and
injured many more.
It said, "Our Jerusalem representative has since received information that
the Irgun and Stern Group have decided to send 5 'cells' to London to work
along IRA [Irish Republican Army] lines. To use their own words, the
terrorists intend 'to beat the dog in his own kennel'. If the 18 Sternists
are executed [for their part in the King David bombing] the Irgun have
agreed to co-operate with the Stern Group."
The intelligence forces believed that if the executions were carried out,
there would be at least 100 retaliatory terrorist outrages and
"indiscriminate shooting of British officers and soldiers on the streets of
Palestine must be expected". The files showed that the sentences were in
fact reduced to life imprisonment.
A briefing note prepared for a meeting between the prime minister and the
head of MI5, Peter Sillitoe, also listed precautionary measures to be taken
to combat terrorism. Police would monitor Jewish groups in Britain and spy
on "Jews known to have expressed sympathy with terrorist activity in
Palestine, and who might be a point of contact for any terrorist arriving in
this country. All applications for UK visas in the Middle East are
scrutinised by local security authorities. Immigration officers at UK ports
report to Home Office, Special Branch and MI5 the particulars of all Jews,
including seamen, arriving from the Middle East."
The fact that MI5 claimed it was keeping a close watch "through its own
sources" on UK Zionist groups with sympathy for the terrorists suggests that
they had informers working for them inside. Given the British propensity to
use such groups for its own purposes to divide and rule, it is not beyond
the bounds of possibility that MI5 had agents provocateurs working within
them.
While it has long been known that these Zionist groups carried out or
planned to carry out assassinations, bombings and sabotage against British
targets, these papers-released so long after the normal 30-year rule-are
important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the papers provide a timely reminder that the Zionists of all
political colours used terrorist methods to achieve statehood-something that
present-day Zionists seem to have forgotten when they talk about refusing to
negotiate with the Palestinians whom they routinely refer to as "terrorists"
.
It is not simply that Ariel Sharon and company are a bunch of hypocrites or
political amnesiacs about the past. More importantly, the Irgun, led by
Menahem Begin, the Stern Group and Lehi, its successor, went on to form the
Herut party, forerunner of the Likud party, and the ultra right-wing Moledet
party, which form the main coalition partners of the Sharon's government.
The gang of former generals, ultra-nationalists and religious bigots that
run Israel today are the political heirs of terrorists who furthermore had
close connections with the fascists. In this, they mirrored some of the Arab
nationalists in Palestine, Egypt and Iraq who allied themselves with Germany
in order to rid themselves of British imperialism. These alliances led to a
virtual civil war between the various wings of the Zionist movement during
World War II.
The political origins of the Zionist terrorist groups
The various Zionist terrorist groups emerged out of the far right wing of
the Revisionist Zionist movement, an ultra-nationalist Zionist group. While
all the Zionist groups sought to stifle the rising tide of class struggle in
Palestine in the name of national unity, the Revisionists openly stated at
the very beginning of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, in opposition to the
mainstream political Zionist movement, that the establishment of a Zionist
state in Palestine was impossible without violence and the forcible transfer
of the indigenous population. The Zionist state could only be established
"in blood and fire". They opposed the division of Palestine in 1922 whereby
Britain had ceded what is now Jordan to its client, the Hashemite emir
Abdullah, as a reward for his support during World War I. While the Labour
Zionists orientated towards the Western democracies, the Revisionists'
political ideology had more in common with the fascist dictators of Europe.
By the late 1930s, the British, who ruled Palestine under a League of
Nations mandate, began to reverse their previous and somewhat vague support
for the establishment for "a homeland for the Jews" in Palestine. Menachem
Begin, a leading member of the Betar, a far right Revisionist group,
regarded military action against the British as both inevitable and
necessary to secure a Jewish state in Palestine and the East Bank of the
Jordan.
As the situation in Eastern Europe grew ever more desperate for the Jews,
and the British sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort
to gain support from the Arabs in the coming war against Germany, Betar
joined forces with the Irgun-the National Military Organisation, the
Revisionists' military wing. With no prospect of a Jewish state in sight,
they argued that armed struggle against the British was the only way
forward.
The Stern Group
In 1939, when war broke out between Britain and Germany, Avraham Stern, one
of the leaders of the Irgun, who had studied in Italy and was an admirer of
Mussolini, rejected any support for the British against Germany. He argued
that the British were the main enemy. There was no difference between the
Nazi-fascist states and the Western democracies, between communists and
social democrats, between Hitler and Chamberlain, or between Dachau and
Buchenwald and closing Palestine off to the Jews. When he failed to persuade
the majority of the Irgun to support him, he broke with the Revisionist
movement and his faction became known as the Stern Group.
While both the mainstream Zionists and the Revisionists supported the
British against Germany and joined the British armed forces, the Stern Group
opposed conscription of the Jews and went on to carry out armed robberies,
murders, and terrorist attacks against both the British and the Arabs. It
waged a campaign of terror aimed at driving out the British and establishing
a Jewish state on the entire land of biblical Palestine, including
Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would
necessarily mean expelling the Arab population to ensure its Jewish
character.
In his support for the enemy of the British, Stern turned a blind eye to the
anti-Semitism of the Nazis. The Stern Group's policies and actions were
opposed and condemned by the overwhelming majority of Jews in Palestine.
In return for help from first the Italians and later the Germans in driving
the British out of Palestine, Stern promised that the new Jewish state would
become a German client state while Jerusalem, with the exception of the
Jewish holy places, would become a province of the Vatican. In other words,
the establishment of a Jewish state took precedence over the safety of
European Jewry. His group had meetings with the Nazi regime's
representatives and tried to recruit 40,000 Jews from occupied Europe to
invade Palestine and defeat the British. But the Germans had no more wish to
alienate the Arabs and lose the chance of gaining access to the region's oil
resources than the British and dismissed the offer.
The British shot and killed Stern in February 1942 and imprisoned his
immediate coterie, including Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister.
The Lehi
As the war drew to a close, Stern's followers, including Shamir on his
release from jail, regrouped as the Lehi with similar aims, including Stern'
s "Eighteen Principles of National Renewal" that proclaimed a Jewish state
from the Nile to the Euphrates. They adopted the methods of the IRA in its
struggles against the British. Shamir even used Michael as his nom de
guerre, after Michael Collins. The now embarrassing Nazi-fascist affiliation
was dropped in favour of Britain's latest enemy, the Soviet Union, although
some advocated an alliance with the Arab national liberation movements that
opposed the stooge regimes imposed by British imperialism.
Lehi denounced the Labour Zionists and the mainstream Revisionist movement
for relying upon negotiations with the British. As far as Lehi was
concerned, the British were the Gestapo and the Labour Zionists were akin to
Vichy Europe, and Lehi were the resistance. Asked if it was possible to
achieve national liberation through terrorism, Lehi's response was, "The
answer is no! If the question is, are terrorist activities useful for the
progress of revolution and liberation, the answer is yes."
Lehi's most notorious action was the assassination of Lord Moyne, the
British military commander in Egypt in 1944.
According to Shindler, a fellow in Israeli Studies at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London, and author of The Land Beyond
Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, Lehi copied the methods of the
IRA. Between September 1942 and July 1946, when Shamir was arrested and
exiled to Eritrea, there were seven assassination attempts on the life of
the British High Commissioner in Palestine and several more were planned,
including Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary and members of British
intelligence forces. It was Shamir who planned the assassination of Lord
Moyne. Lehi also carried out 14 assassination attempts against Jews who
worked or were believed to work for British intelligence. It was not averse
to killing its own members if the need arose.
While Lehi was by far the smallest of the Zionist terrorist groups, the
Stern/Lehi group carried out 71 percent of all political assassinations
between 1940 and 1948. Nearly half of these were against fellow Jews.
Even after the establishment of the Zionist state, Lehi continued its
murderous activities. Hazit Ha'Moledet, the Fatherland Front, a Lehi
splinter group that later formed the Moledet party, carried out the
assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN envoy seeking to arrange a
peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs.
In contrast to the Stern/Lehi group, the Irgun only took up the armed
struggle against the British when the defeat of Germany became imminent. At
the end of 1942, Menachem Begin returned to Palestine after his release from
a Soviet labour camp in Poland. He took over as the military commander of
the Irgun and led the armed struggle-the Revolt-to get rid of the British.
But the Irgun's activities had nothing in common with a revolutionary
struggle to overthrow imperialism in the region. They were also targeted
against the Arabs. One of its pamphlets read, "We must fight the Arabs in
order to subjugate them and weaken their demands. We must take them off the
arena as a political factor. This struggle against the Arabs will encourage
the diaspora and consolidate it. It will draw the attention of the nations
of the world, which will be compelled to honour the people which struggles
with its arms. And an ally will be found which will support the peoples'
army in its struggle."
Begin, unlike the Stern group and Lehi, always rejected the label
"terrorism", claiming that the Irgun was an army fighting a war against
another army. Using the same methods as these two terrorist groups, the
Irgun's most well known act against the British was the blowing up of the
King David Hotel, the British military headquarters in Jerusalem in July
1946.
Lehi's assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944-a close friend of Churchill with
whom Weizman and Ben Gurion, the Labour Zionist leaders, had good
relations-led them to crack down on both Lehi and the Irgun. "Every
organised group must spew them out... refuge and shelter must be stringently
denied these wild men... It is our hearts-not the heart of Britain-that the
terrorist iron has entered. Our hands then, no others, must pluck it out."
[Cited by Colin Shindler in The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the
Zionist Dream.]
The Zionist parties unite
It was the election of a Labour government in July 1945 under Clement
Attlee, anxious to maintain control over the Middle East's oil resources
that was to lead instead to a troubled reconciliation between the Labour
Zionists and the terrorist groups.
These groups had been for years the bitterest of political rivals. They had
not even fought together in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. What united
them at this time was firstly the reversal by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin
of the Labour party's previous support for the establishment of a Jewish
state. He now rejected the notion of two states-one for the Jews and one for
the Arabs-and favoured an Arab stooge regime along the lines of those in
Transjordan, Egypt and Iraq, where Jews would be guaranteed minority rights.
Secondly, and for similar reasons, the Labour government also opposed Jewish
immigration to Palestine. Under conditions where neither Britain nor the US
were prepared to open their doors to the hundreds of thousands of survivors
of the Holocaust, the Jews would have had to remain in the displaced persons
camp and in the countries of their persecution.
In November 1945, the Haganah (the Labour Zionists' military wing and by far
the largest of the three military groups), the Irgun and Lehi signed an
agreement to establish the United Resistance Movement to drive the British
out of Palestine. This was to last for less than a year-until the King David
Hotel bombing-when Ben Gurion terminated the agreement calling the Irgun
"the enemy of the Jewish people". Despite this, the scale of the terrorist
attacks increased tenfold.
Faced with increasing hostility and disruption in Palestine and rejection by
both Arabs and Jews of a bi-national state, Britain referred the conflict to
the United Nations, fully expecting the UN to hand Palestine back to Britain
to deal with. But Britain's hopes of resolving the conflict in Palestine on
its own terms were to be thwarted. The major powers, including the US and
the Soviet Union, actively supported the establishment of a Jewish state for
their own purposes: they saw it as a way of blocking Britain's position in
the Middle East. This, plus the worldwide sympathy that the catastrophe that
had befallen European Jewry evoked, led the UN in November 1947 to vote for
the partition of Palestine. In May 1948, the British withdrew from Palestine
and the Zionists immediately declared independence and the establishment of
Israel. War broke out between Israel and the Palestinians, led by the Arab
feudalists, for control of the land.
The Revisionist groups used all the training and methods they had developed
and used against the British to terrorise and intimidate the Palestinians.
The planned terrorist activities, carried out by the Irgun and Lehi, and
sanctioned by the Labour Zionists, were to play a major role in driving the
Palestinians from their homes. The massacre at Deir Yassin, where more than
200 men, women and children were slaughtered, is only the best-known
example. Ben Gurion himself encouraged the Haganah, largely under the
control of the Histadrut/Mapai Party and forerunner of the Israeli Defence
Forces, to expel the Palestinians from their homes. The expulsion of the
Palestinians, who were destined to become refugees in neighbouring countries
and dispersed throughout the world, and the takeover of their land were the
essential prerequisites for the founding of the state of Israel.
From underground terrorist groups to the political mainstream
Immediately after the end of the war, Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun,
transformed the Irgun into a political party, Herut, in opposition to the
official Revisionists. Vehemently opposed to any concessions to the Arabs
and an agreement with Abdullah that had absorbed the West Bank into his
kingdom of Transjordan, now renamed Jordan, Begin glorified the Irgun's
underground terrorism and its role in driving out the British. His
inflammatory language and style were more than a little reminiscent of the
nationalist ethos of Eastern Europe and Pilsudksi's military nationalism in
Poland during the 1930s.
Committed to the recovery of Palestine, he and the Herut party denounced
those who opposed such a perspective as the enemies of the Jewish people.
Coming after the sinking of the Altalena, the Irgun arms ship, at the hands
of the Labour Zionists and in which several members of the Irgun were
killed, it was a virtual declaration of civil war against Ben Gurion. Not a
few thought that the Herut might mount a putsch.
In the first elections, where nearly all the political parties claimed some
affiliation to socialism, Begin's Herut party was the largest non-socialist
party, winning 11 percent of the vote and 14 out of the 120-member Knesset.
The official Revisionists won no seats at all. Begin assumed the mantle of
Revisionism and became the leader of the right-wing opposition to the Labour
Zionists.
In the early years of the Zionist state, the Herut vote declined and Begin
was to spend the next 30 years in the political wilderness, transforming and
expanding the Herut party into the Gahal in 1965. He briefly joined the war
coalition set up prior to the June 1967 war against the Arabs that took
advantage of the situation provoked by the reckless opportunism of Nasser,
the Egyptian leader, to significantly expand Israel's borders.
The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza breathed new life into the far-right
forces, leading to the formation of the Likud party in 1973, which went on
to win the largest number of seats in the 1977 elections. The
ultra-nationalist right wing political force, which had always been on the
fringe, had now become the mainstream, displacing the old political
establishment.
While the Lehi went on to form the Moledet party, an even more nationalist
outfit than Likud, whose noxious policies include ethnic cleansing: the
removal of the Palestinians from the territories occupied by Israel.
Shamir himself retired from active politics in the 1940s. When Ben Gurion
lifted the ban on Lehi members taking up official positions, Isser Harel,
the Mossad chief, immediately recruited Shamir and others. It was Shamir who
planned the letter-bomb campaign against German scientists working for
Nasser's Egypt in the 1960s that brought him into conflict with Shimon
Peres, then deputy Minister of Defence. He joined the Herut party as the
only party that had not renounced the idea of an Israel that extended "from
the Nile to the Euphrates" in 1970. Shamir cultivated the links with the
anti-socialist minded Russian Jews that were seeking to leave the Soviet
Union and brought them into the Likud party. He became prime minister in
1983 when Begin suddenly resigned-signifying an even further shift to the
right in Israeli politics.
It is the political heirs of terrorists like Stern, Begin and Shamir that
now form Israel's political establishment and the Bush administration's
chief ally in the region. They are now able to put into practice the
policies that their antecedents could only dream of. Their history also
shows why Israeli politics have always been so fractious. The civil war that
is never far beneath the surface has long standing basis.
While the establishment of the state of Israel was hailed at the time as a
new and progressive entity dedicated to building a democratic and
egalitarian society for the most cruelly oppressed people of Europe, the
history of the origins and development of the Zionist state has shown that
that was always a chimera. It is impossible to build a socially progressive
society on the basis of a nationalist perspective. The Zionist perspective,
be it the Labour Zionists or its ultra-reactionary variant, has played a
poisonous role in strengthening imperialism and chauvinism, bolstering the
power of the national bourgeoisie on the one hand and dividing the working
class and rural poor on the other.
It is noteworthy that the publication of the British intelligence files
attracted little attention from the press. Apart from reporting the
contents, no political commentators sought to draw attention to either the
methods used to spawn the Zionist state or the Israeli government's
political roots.
Within Israel itself, the liberal paper Ha'aretz merely carried a Reuters
report under the headline "Document: UK feared influx of Zionist terrorists
in post-WWII era", as though Zionist terrorism was some aberration rather
than an integral part of their perspective and programme. The article itself
focused on the anti-Jewish measures put in place by the British authorities
to combat Zionist terrorism. While explaining that the files were written in
the aftermath of the bombing of the King David Hotel bombing, the article
remained silent on the Irgun and Menachem Begin's role in the bombing-even
though it went on to note that Begin received a Nobel Peace Prize for his
peace agreement with Egypt. Neither did it mention the plans to assassinate
the foreign secretary and leading British political figures.
Such professional and political honesty would only have drawn attention to
the terrorist origins and role of the Zionist political establishment on
whom the political gangsters in the Bush administration use as a pawn to
divide and rule the Middle East.
"Darren Smith" <ua.moc.odod@no-spam> wrote in message
news:3ef6cff0@no-spam
> Last month the National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record
> Office, released MI5 Security Service files showing that Zionist terror
> groups planned to set up cells in London and assassinate the post-war
Labour
> government's British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
>
> "Present Trends in Palestine", an MI5 briefing paper written in August
1946,
> reported on the activities of the Stern Gang. This was the terrorist group
> that had assassinated Lord Moyne, the British military governor in Egypt
in
> 1944.
>
> "In recent months it has been reported that they [the Stern Gang] have
been
> training selected members for the purpose of proceeding overseas and
> assassinating a prominent British personality-special reference having
been
> made several times to Mr. Bevin in this connection," the paper noted.
>
> One of the leading lights of the Stern Group, which had by this time
renamed
> itself Lehi, was Yitzhak Shamir who became prime minister in 1983 and
whose
> tenure in the highest office in Israel was second only to Ben Gurion.
>
> Another paper, "Threatened Jewish Activity in the United Kingdom,
Palestine
> and Elsewhere", prepared for the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, focused on
> the activities of the Irgun.
>
> It noted that the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin-later to become prime
> minister of Israel in 1977-who had a £2,000 price on his head, "was
> responsible in the past for the liquidation of members of the police and
the
> military whose activities have been judged especially worthy of Jewish
> resentment in Palestine."
>
> The paper was written in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing by the Irgun
> that had in the previous month blown up the British headquarters in the
King
> David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people-Britons, Arabs and Jews-and
> injured many more.
>
> It said, "Our Jerusalem representative has since received information that
> the Irgun and Stern Group have decided to send 5 'cells' to London to work
> along IRA [Irish Republican Army] lines. To use their own words, the
> terrorists intend 'to beat the dog in his own kennel'. If the 18 Sternists
> are executed [for their part in the King David bombing] the Irgun have
> agreed to co-operate with the Stern Group."
>
> The intelligence forces believed that if the executions were carried out,
> there would be at least 100 retaliatory terrorist outrages and
> "indiscriminate shooting of British officers and soldiers on the streets
of
> Palestine must be expected". The files showed that the sentences were in
> fact reduced to life imprisonment.
>
> A briefing note prepared for a meeting between the prime minister and the
> head of MI5, Peter Sillitoe, also listed precautionary measures to be
taken
> to combat terrorism. Police would monitor Jewish groups in Britain and spy
> on "Jews known to have expressed sympathy with terrorist activity in
> Palestine, and who might be a point of contact for any terrorist arriving
in
> this country. All applications for UK visas in the Middle East are
> scrutinised by local security authorities. Immigration officers at UK
ports
> report to Home Office, Special Branch and MI5 the particulars of all Jews,
> including seamen, arriving from the Middle East."
>
> The fact that MI5 claimed it was keeping a close watch "through its own
> sources" on UK Zionist groups with sympathy for the terrorists suggests
that
> they had informers working for them inside. Given the British propensity
to
> use such groups for its own purposes to divide and rule, it is not beyond
> the bounds of possibility that MI5 had agents provocateurs working within
> them.
>
> While it has long been known that these Zionist groups carried out or
> planned to carry out assassinations, bombings and sabotage against British
> targets, these papers-released so long after the normal 30-year rule-are
> important for a number of reasons.
>
> Firstly, the papers provide a timely reminder that the Zionists of all
> political colours used terrorist methods to achieve statehood-something
that
> present-day Zionists seem to have forgotten when they talk about refusing
to
> negotiate with the Palestinians whom they routinely refer to as
"terrorists"
> .
>
> It is not simply that Ariel Sharon and company are a bunch of hypocrites
or
> political amnesiacs about the past. More importantly, the Irgun, led by
> Menahem Begin, the Stern Group and Lehi, its successor, went on to form
the
> Herut party, forerunner of the Likud party, and the ultra right-wing
Moledet
> party, which form the main coalition partners of the Sharon's government.
> The gang of former generals, ultra-nationalists and religious bigots that
> run Israel today are the political heirs of terrorists who furthermore had
> close connections with the fascists. In this, they mirrored some of the
Arab
> nationalists in Palestine, Egypt and Iraq who allied themselves with
Germany
> in order to rid themselves of British imperialism. These alliances led to
a
> virtual civil war between the various wings of the Zionist movement during
> World War II.
>
>
> The political origins of the Zionist terrorist groups
>
> The various Zionist terrorist groups emerged out of the far right wing of
> the Revisionist Zionist movement, an ultra-nationalist Zionist group.
While
> all the Zionist groups sought to stifle the rising tide of class struggle
in
> Palestine in the name of national unity, the Revisionists openly stated at
> the very beginning of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, in opposition to
the
> mainstream political Zionist movement, that the establishment of a Zionist
> state in Palestine was impossible without violence and the forcible
transfer
> of the indigenous population. The Zionist state could only be established
> "in blood and fire". They opposed the division of Palestine in 1922
whereby
> Britain had ceded what is now Jordan to its client, the Hashemite emir
> Abdullah, as a reward for his support during World War I. While the Labour
> Zionists orientated towards the Western democracies, the Revisionists'
> political ideology had more in common with the fascist dictators of
Europe.
>
> By the late 1930s, the British, who ruled Palestine under a League of
> Nations mandate, began to reverse their previous and somewhat vague
support
> for the establishment for "a homeland for the Jews" in Palestine. Menachem
> Begin, a leading member of the Betar, a far right Revisionist group,
> regarded military action against the British as both inevitable and
> necessary to secure a Jewish state in Palestine and the East Bank of the
> Jordan.
>
> As the situation in Eastern Europe grew ever more desperate for the Jews,
> and the British sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine in an
effort
> to gain support from the Arabs in the coming war against Germany, Betar
> joined forces with the Irgun-the National Military Organisation, the
> Revisionists' military wing. With no prospect of a Jewish state in sight,
> they argued that armed struggle against the British was the only way
> forward.
>
>
> The Stern Group
>
> In 1939, when war broke out between Britain and Germany, Avraham Stern,
one
> of the leaders of the Irgun, who had studied in Italy and was an admirer
of
> Mussolini, rejected any support for the British against Germany. He argued
> that the British were the main enemy. There was no difference between the
> Nazi-fascist states and the Western democracies, between communists and
> social democrats, between Hitler and Chamberlain, or between Dachau and
> Buchenwald and closing Palestine off to the Jews. When he failed to
persuade
> the majority of the Irgun to support him, he broke with the Revisionist
> movement and his faction became known as the Stern Group.
>
> While both the mainstream Zionists and the Revisionists supported the
> British against Germany and joined the British armed forces, the Stern
Group
> opposed conscription of the Jews and went on to carry out armed robberies,
> murders, and terrorist attacks against both the British and the Arabs. It
> waged a campaign of terror aimed at driving out the British and
establishing
> a Jewish state on the entire land of biblical Palestine, including
> Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would
> necessarily mean expelling the Arab population to ensure its Jewish
> character.
>
> In his support for the enemy of the British, Stern turned a blind eye to
the
> anti-Semitism of the Nazis. The Stern Group's policies and actions were
> opposed and condemned by the overwhelming majority of Jews in Palestine.
>
> In return for help from first the Italians and later the Germans in
driving
> the British out of Palestine, Stern promised that the new Jewish state
would
> become a German client state while Jerusalem, with the exception of the
> Jewish holy places, would become a province of the Vatican. In other
words,
> the establishment of a Jewish state took precedence over the safety of
> European Jewry. His group had meetings with the Nazi regime's
> representatives and tried to recruit 40,000 Jews from occupied Europe to
> invade Palestine and defeat the British. But the Germans had no more wish
to
> alienate the Arabs and lose the chance of gaining access to the region's
oil
> resources than the British and dismissed the offer.
>
> The British shot and killed Stern in February 1942 and imprisoned his
> immediate coterie, including Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister.
>
>
> The Lehi
>
> As the war drew to a close, Stern's followers, including Shamir on his
> release from jail, regrouped as the Lehi with similar aims, including
Stern'
> s "Eighteen Principles of National Renewal" that proclaimed a Jewish state
> from the Nile to the Euphrates. They adopted the methods of the IRA in its
> struggles against the British. Shamir even used Michael as his nom de
> guerre, after Michael Collins. The now embarrassing Nazi-fascist
affiliation
> was dropped in favour of Britain's latest enemy, the Soviet Union,
although
> some advocated an alliance with the Arab national liberation movements
that
> opposed the stooge regimes imposed by British imperialism.
>
> Lehi denounced the Labour Zionists and the mainstream Revisionist movement
> for relying upon negotiations with the British. As far as Lehi was
> concerned, the British were the Gestapo and the Labour Zionists were akin
to
> Vichy Europe, and Lehi were the resistance. Asked if it was possible to
> achieve national liberation through terrorism, Lehi's response was, "The
> answer is no! If the question is, are terrorist activities useful for the
> progress of revolution and liberation, the answer is yes."
>
> Lehi's most notorious action was the assassination of Lord Moyne, the
> British military commander in Egypt in 1944.
>
> According to Shindler, a fellow in Israeli Studies at the School of
Oriental
> and African Studies, University of London, and author of The Land Beyond
> Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, Lehi copied the methods of
the
> IRA. Between September 1942 and July 1946, when Shamir was arrested and
> exiled to Eritrea, there were seven assassination attempts on the life of
> the British High Commissioner in Palestine and several more were planned,
> including Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary and members of
British
> intelligence forces. It was Shamir who planned the assassination of Lord
> Moyne. Lehi also carried out 14 assassination attempts against Jews who
> worked or were believed to work for British intelligence. It was not
averse
> to killing its own members if the need arose.
>
> While Lehi was by far the smallest of the Zionist terrorist groups, the
> Stern/Lehi group carried out 71 percent of all political assassinations
> between 1940 and 1948. Nearly half of these were against fellow Jews.
>
> Even after the establishment of the Zionist state, Lehi continued its
> murderous activities. Hazit Ha'Moledet, the Fatherland Front, a Lehi
> splinter group that later formed the Moledet party, carried out the
> assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN envoy seeking to arrange a
> peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs.
>
>
>
> In contrast to the Stern/Lehi group, the Irgun only took up the armed
> struggle against the British when the defeat of Germany became imminent.
At
> the end of 1942, Menachem Begin returned to Palestine after his release
from
> a Soviet labour camp in Poland. He took over as the military commander of
> the Irgun and led the armed struggle-the Revolt-to get rid of the British.
>
> But the Irgun's activities had nothing in common with a revolutionary
> struggle to overthrow imperialism in the region. They were also targeted
> against the Arabs. One of its pamphlets read, "We must fight the Arabs in
> order to subjugate them and weaken their demands. We must take them off
the
> arena as a political factor. This struggle against the Arabs will
encourage
> the diaspora and consolidate it. It will draw the attention of the nations
> of the world, which will be compelled to honour the people which struggles
> with its arms. And an ally will be found which will support the peoples'
> army in its struggle."
>
> Begin, unlike the Stern group and Lehi, always rejected the label
> "terrorism", claiming that the Irgun was an army fighting a war against
> another army. Using the same methods as these two terrorist groups, the
> Irgun's most well known act against the British was the blowing up of the
> King David Hotel, the British military headquarters in Jerusalem in July
> 1946.
>
> Lehi's assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944-a close friend of Churchill
with
> whom Weizman and Ben Gurion, the Labour Zionist leaders, had good
> relations-led them to crack down on both Lehi and the Irgun. "Every
> organised group must spew them out... refuge and shelter must be
stringently
> denied these wild men... It is our hearts-not the heart of Britain-that
the
> terrorist iron has entered. Our hands then, no others, must pluck it out."
> [Cited by Colin Shindler in The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the
> Zionist Dream.]
>
>
> The Zionist parties unite
>
> It was the election of a Labour government in July 1945 under Clement
> Attlee, anxious to maintain control over the Middle East's oil resources
> that was to lead instead to a troubled reconciliation between the Labour
> Zionists and the terrorist groups.
>
> These groups had been for years the bitterest of political rivals. They
had
> not even fought together in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. What united
> them at this time was firstly the reversal by Foreign Secretary Ernest
Bevin
> of the Labour party's previous support for the establishment of a Jewish
> state. He now rejected the notion of two states-one for the Jews and one
for
> the Arabs-and favoured an Arab stooge regime along the lines of those in
> Transjordan, Egypt and Iraq, where Jews would be guaranteed minority
rights.
>
> Secondly, and for similar reasons, the Labour government also opposed
Jewish
> immigration to Palestine. Under conditions where neither Britain nor the
US
> were prepared to open their doors to the hundreds of thousands of
survivors
> of the Holocaust, the Jews would have had to remain in the displaced
persons
> camp and in the countries of their persecution.
>
> In November 1945, the Haganah (the Labour Zionists' military wing and by
far
> the largest of the three military groups), the Irgun and Lehi signed an
> agreement to establish the United Resistance Movement to drive the British
> out of Palestine. This was to last for less than a year-until the King
David
> Hotel bombing-when Ben Gurion terminated the agreement calling the Irgun
> "the enemy of the Jewish people". Despite this, the scale of the terrorist
> attacks increased tenfold.
>
>
>
> Faced with increasing hostility and disruption in Palestine and rejection
by
> both Arabs and Jews of a bi-national state, Britain referred the conflict
to
> the United Nations, fully expecting the UN to hand Palestine back to
Britain
> to deal with. But Britain's hopes of resolving the conflict in Palestine
on
> its own terms were to be thwarted. The major powers, including the US and
> the Soviet Union, actively supported the establishment of a Jewish state
for
> their own purposes: they saw it as a way of blocking Britain's position in
> the Middle East. This, plus the worldwide sympathy that the catastrophe
that
> had befallen European Jewry evoked, led the UN in November 1947 to vote
for
> the partition of Palestine. In May 1948, the British withdrew from
Palestine
> and the Zionists immediately declared independence and the establishment
of
> Israel. War broke out between Israel and the Palestinians, led by the Arab
> feudalists, for control of the land.
>
> The Revisionist groups used all the training and methods they had
developed
> and used against the British to terrorise and intimidate the Palestinians.
> The planned terrorist activities, carried out by the Irgun and Lehi, and
> sanctioned by the Labour Zionists, were to play a major role in driving
the
> Palestinians from their homes. The massacre at Deir Yassin, where more
than
> 200 men, women and children were slaughtered, is only the best-known
> example. Ben Gurion himself encouraged the Haganah, largely under the
> control of the Histadrut/Mapai Party and forerunner of the Israeli Defence
> Forces, to expel the Palestinians from their homes. The expulsion of the
> Palestinians, who were destined to become refugees in neighbouring
countries
> and dispersed throughout the world, and the takeover of their land were
the
> essential prerequisites for the founding of the state of Israel.
>
>
> From underground terrorist groups to the political mainstream
>
> Immediately after the end of the war, Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun,
> transformed the Irgun into a political party, Herut, in opposition to the
> official Revisionists. Vehemently opposed to any concessions to the Arabs
> and an agreement with Abdullah that had absorbed the West Bank into his
> kingdom of Transjordan, now renamed Jordan, Begin glorified the Irgun's
> underground terrorism and its role in driving out the British. His
> inflammatory language and style were more than a little reminiscent of the
> nationalist ethos of Eastern Europe and Pilsudksi's military nationalism
in
> Poland during the 1930s.
>
> Committed to the recovery of Palestine, he and the Herut party denounced
> those who opposed such a perspective as the enemies of the Jewish people.
> Coming after the sinking of the Altalena, the Irgun arms ship, at the
hands
> of the Labour Zionists and in which several members of the Irgun were
> killed, it was a virtual declaration of civil war against Ben Gurion. Not
a
> few thought that the Herut might mount a putsch.
>
> In the first elections, where nearly all the political parties claimed
some
> affiliation to socialism, Begin's Herut party was the largest
non-socialist
> party, winning 11 percent of the vote and 14 out of the 120-member
Knesset.
> The official Revisionists won no seats at all. Begin assumed the mantle of
> Revisionism and became the leader of the right-wing opposition to the
Labour
> Zionists.
>
> In the early years of the Zionist state, the Herut vote declined and Begin
> was to spend the next 30 years in the political wilderness, transforming
and
> expanding the Herut party into the Gahal in 1965. He briefly joined the
war
> coalition set up prior to the June 1967 war against the Arabs that took
> advantage of the situation provoked by the reckless opportunism of Nasser,
> the Egyptian leader, to significantly expand Israel's borders.
>
> The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza breathed new life into the
far-right
> forces, leading to the formation of the Likud party in 1973, which went on
> to win the largest number of seats in the 1977 elections. The
> ultra-nationalist right wing political force, which had always been on the
> fringe, had now become the mainstream, displacing the old political
> establishment.
>
> While the Lehi went on to form the Moledet party, an even more nationalist
> outfit than Likud, whose noxious policies include ethnic cleansing: the
> removal of the Palestinians from the territories occupied by Israel.
>
> Shamir himself retired from active politics in the 1940s. When Ben Gurion
> lifted the ban on Lehi members taking up official positions, Isser Harel,
> the Mossad chief, immediately recruited Shamir and others. It was Shamir
who
> planned the letter-bomb campaign against German scientists working for
> Nasser's Egypt in the 1960s that brought him into conflict with Shimon
> Peres, then deputy Minister of Defence. He joined the Herut party as the
> only party that had not renounced the idea of an Israel that extended
"from
> the Nile to the Euphrates" in 1970. Shamir cultivated the links with the
> anti-socialist minded Russian Jews that were seeking to leave the Soviet
> Union and brought them into the Likud party. He became prime minister in
> 1983 when Begin suddenly resigned-signifying an even further shift to the
> right in Israeli politics.
>
> It is the political heirs of terrorists like Stern, Begin and Shamir that
> now form Israel's political establishment and the Bush administration's
> chief ally in the region. They are now able to put into practice the
> policies that their antecedents could only dream of. Their history also
> shows why Israeli politics have always been so fractious. The civil war
that
> is never far beneath the surface has long standing basis.
>
> While the establishment of the state of Israel was hailed at the time as a
> new and progressive entity dedicated to building a democratic and
> egalitarian society for the most cruelly oppressed people of Europe, the
> history of the origins and development of the Zionist state has shown that
> that was always a chimera. It is impossible to build a socially
progressive
> society on the basis of a nationalist perspective. The Zionist
perspective,
> be it the Labour Zionists or its ultra-reactionary variant, has played a
> poisonous role in strengthening imperialism and chauvinism, bolstering the
> power of the national bourgeoisie on the one hand and dividing the working
> class and rural poor on the other.
>
> It is noteworthy that the publication of the British intelligence files
> attracted little attention from the press. Apart from reporting the
> contents, no political commentators sought to draw attention to either the
> methods used to spawn the Zionist state or the Israeli government's
> political roots.
>
> Within Israel itself, the liberal paper Ha'aretz merely carried a Reuters
> report under the headline "Document: UK feared influx of Zionist
terrorists
> in post-WWII era", as though Zionist terrorism was some aberration rather
> than an integral part of their perspective and programme. The article
itself
> focused on the anti-Jewish measures put in place by the British
authorities
> to combat Zionist terrorism. While explaining that the files were written
in
> the aftermath of the bombing of the King David Hotel bombing, the article
> remained silent on the Irgun and Menachem Begin's role in the bombing-even
> though it went on to note that Begin received a Nobel Peace Prize for his
> peace agreement with Egypt. Neither did it mention the plans to
assassinate
> the foreign secretary and leading British political figures.
>
> Such professional and political honesty would only have drawn attention to
> the terrorist origins and role of the Zionist political establishment on
> whom the political gangsters in the Bush administration use as a pawn to
> divide and rule the Middle East.
When the British had the power they used it to their advantage. Then and
now Jews have the power, and they use it to *their* advantage. Same
principle: Might is Right.
"Darren Smith" <ua.moc.odod@no-spam> wrote in message
news:3ef6cff0@no-spam
> Last month the National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record
> Office, released MI5 Security Service files showing that Zionist terror
> groups planned to set up cells in London and assassinate the post-war
Labour
> government's British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
>
Thanks for pointing out to us that the terrorists who want to destroy "The
Jewist State and the Crusaders " are not fucked in the head Islamofascists,
but descendants of a war of liberation which occured 55 years ago.
Why not go back to the Jewish uprising against the Romans, would make about
as much sense as that pile of garbage you posted.
Osama, if he is watching you in between cavorting with his 72 year old
virgin , must be pissing himself laughing at your stupidity.
"tipper" <tipper007@no-spam> wrote in message
news:3ef72877@no-spam
>
> "Darren Smith" <ua.moc.odod@no-spam> wrote in message
> news:3ef6cff0@no-spam
> > Last month the National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record
> > Office, released MI5 Security Service files showing that Zionist terror
> > groups planned to set up cells in London and assassinate the post-war
> Labour
> > government's British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
> >
>
> Thanks for pointing out to us that the terrorists who want to destroy "The
> Jewist State and the Crusaders " are not fucked in the head
Islamofascists,
> but descendants of a war of liberation which occured 55 years ago.
> Why not go back to the Jewish uprising against the Romans, would make
about
> as much sense as that pile of garbage you posted.
> Osama, if he is watching you in between cavorting with his 72 year old
> virgin , must be pissing himself laughing at your stupidity.
You come across as a most logical, cultured, learned, refined and
well-mannered Jewish guy.
What the hell has Israel got to do with a rich Saudi like Osama Bin Laden,
OR a fascist Iraqi like Saddam Hussein, OR the Taliban.
Even if Israel had never been created, fundamentalist Islam would STILL be
targeting the west today with fatwahs and jihads. It is a reaction to the
influence of Western (democratic-materialist-scientific) values on a cluster
of nations that are still basically medieval.
"Darren Smith" <ua.moc.odod@no-spam> wrote in message
news:3ef6cff0@no-spam
> Last month the National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record
> Office, released MI5 Security Service files showing that Zionist terror
> groups planned to set up cells in London and assassinate the post-war
Labour
> government's British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
>
> "Present Trends in Palestine", an MI5 briefing paper written in August
1946,
> reported on the activities of the Stern Gang. This was the terrorist group
> that had assassinated Lord Moyne, the British military governor in Egypt
in
> 1944.
>
> "In recent months it has been reported that they [the Stern Gang] have
been
> training selected members for the purpose of proceeding overseas and
> assassinating a prominent British personality-special reference having
been
> made several times to Mr. Bevin in this connection," the paper noted.
>
> One of the leading lights of the Stern Group, which had by this time
renamed
> itself Lehi, was Yitzhak Shamir who became prime minister in 1983 and
whose
> tenure in the highest office in Israel was second only to Ben Gurion.
>
> Another paper, "Threatened Jewish Activity in the United Kingdom,
Palestine
> and Elsewhere", prepared for the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, focused on
> the activities of the Irgun.
>
> It noted that the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin-later to become prime
> minister of Israel in 1977-who had a £2,000 price on his head, "was
> responsible in the past for the liquidation of members of the police and
the
> military whose activities have been judged especially worthy of Jewish
> resentment in Palestine."
>
> The paper was written in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing by the Irgun
> that had in the previous month blown up the British headquarters in the
King
> David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people-Britons, Arabs and Jews-and
> injured many more.
>
> It said, "Our Jerusalem representative has since received information that
> the Irgun and Stern Group have decided to send 5 'cells' to London to work
> along IRA [Irish Republican Army] lines. To use their own words, the
> terrorists intend 'to beat the dog in his own kennel'. If the 18 Sternists
> are executed [for their part in the King David bombing] the Irgun have
> agreed to co-operate with the Stern Group."
>
> The intelligence forces believed that if the executions were carried out,
> there would be at least 100 retaliatory terrorist outrages and
> "indiscriminate shooting of British officers and soldiers on the streets
of
> Palestine must be expected". The files showed that the sentences were in
> fact reduced to life imprisonment.
>
> A briefing note prepared for a meeting between the prime minister and the
> head of MI5, Peter Sillitoe, also listed precautionary measures to be
taken
> to combat terrorism. Police would monitor Jewish groups in Britain and spy
> on "Jews known to have expressed sympathy with terrorist activity in
> Palestine, and who might be a point of contact for any terrorist arriving
in
> this country. All applications for UK visas in the Middle East are
> scrutinised by local security authorities. Immigration officers at UK
ports
> report to Home Office, Special Branch and MI5 the particulars of all Jews,
> including seamen, arriving from the Middle East."
>
> The fact that MI5 claimed it was keeping a close watch "through its own
> sources" on UK Zionist groups with sympathy for the terrorists suggests
that
> they had informers working for them inside. Given the British propensity
to
> use such groups for its own purposes to divide and rule, it is not beyond
> the bounds of possibility that MI5 had agents provocateurs working within
> them.
>
> While it has long been known that these Zionist groups carried out or
> planned to carry out assassinations, bombings and sabotage against British
> targets, these papers-released so long after the normal 30-year rule-are
> important for a number of reasons.
>
> Firstly, the papers provide a timely reminder that the Zionists of all
> political colours used terrorist methods to achieve statehood-something
that
> present-day Zionists seem to have forgotten when they talk about refusing
to
> negotiate with the Palestinians whom they routinely refer to as
"terrorists"
> .
>
> It is not simply that Ariel Sharon and company are a bunch of hypocrites
or
> political amnesiacs about the past. More importantly, the Irgun, led by
> Menahem Begin, the Stern Group and Lehi, its successor, went on to form
the
> Herut party, forerunner of the Likud party, and the ultra right-wing
Moledet
> party, which form the main coalition partners of the Sharon's government.
> The gang of former generals, ultra-nationalists and religious bigots that
> run Israel today are the political heirs of terrorists who furthermore had
> close connections with the fascists. In this, they mirrored some of the
Arab
> nationalists in Palestine, Egypt and Iraq who allied themselves with
Germany
> in order to rid themselves of British imperialism. These alliances led to
a
> virtual civil war between the various wings of the Zionist movement during
> World War II.
>
>
> The political origins of the Zionist terrorist groups
>
> The various Zionist terrorist groups emerged out of the far right wing of
> the Revisionist Zionist movement, an ultra-nationalist Zionist group.
While
> all the Zionist groups sought to stifle the rising tide of class struggle
in
> Palestine in the name of national unity, the Revisionists openly stated at
> the very beginning of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, in opposition to
the
> mainstream political Zionist movement, that the establishment of a Zionist
> state in Palestine was impossible without violence and the forcible
transfer
> of the indigenous population. The Zionist state could only be established
> "in blood and fire". They opposed the division of Palestine in 1922
whereby
> Britain had ceded what is now Jordan to its client, the Hashemite emir
> Abdullah, as a reward for his support during World War I. While the Labour
> Zionists orientated towards the Western democracies, the Revisionists'
> political ideology had more in common with the fascist dictators of
Europe.
>
> By the late 1930s, the British, who ruled Palestine under a League of
> Nations mandate, began to reverse their previous and somewhat vague
support
> for the establishment for "a homeland for the Jews" in Palestine. Menachem
> Begin, a leading member of the Betar, a far right Revisionist group,
> regarded military action against the British as both inevitable and
> necessary to secure a Jewish state in Palestine and the East Bank of the
> Jordan.
>
> As the situation in Eastern Europe grew ever more desperate for the Jews,
> and the British sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine in an
effort
> to gain support from the Arabs in the coming war against Germany, Betar
> joined forces with the Irgun-the National Military Organisation, the
> Revisionists' military wing. With no prospect of a Jewish state in sight,
> they argued that armed struggle against the British was the only way
> forward.
>
>
> The Stern Group
>
> In 1939, when war broke out between Britain and Germany, Avraham Stern,
one
> of the leaders of the Irgun, who had studied in Italy and was an admirer
of
> Mussolini, rejected any support for the British against Germany. He argued
> that the British were the main enemy. There was no difference between the
> Nazi-fascist states and the Western democracies, between communists and
> social democrats, between Hitler and Chamberlain, or between Dachau and
> Buchenwald and closing Palestine off to the Jews. When he failed to
persuade
> the majority of the Irgun to support him, he broke with the Revisionist
> movement and his faction became known as the Stern Group.
>
> While both the mainstream Zionists and the Revisionists supported the
> British against Germany and joined the British armed forces, the Stern
Group
> opposed conscription of the Jews and went on to carry out armed robberies,
> murders, and terrorist attacks against both the British and the Arabs. It
> waged a campaign of terror aimed at driving out the British and
establishing
> a Jewish state on the entire land of biblical Palestine, including
> Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would
> necessarily mean expelling the Arab population to ensure its Jewish
> character.
>
> In his support for the enemy of the British, Stern turned a blind eye to
the
> anti-Semitism of the Nazis. The Stern Group's policies and actions were
> opposed and condemned by the overwhelming majority of Jews in Palestine.
>
> In return for help from first the Italians and later the Germans in
driving
> the British out of Palestine, Stern promised that the new Jewish state
would
> become a German client state while Jerusalem, with the exception of the
> Jewish holy places, would become a province of the Vatican. In other
words,
> the establishment of a Jewish state took precedence over the safety of
> European Jewry. His group had meetings with the Nazi regime's
> representatives and tried to recruit 40,000 Jews from occupied Europe to
> invade Palestine and defeat the British. But the Germans had no more wish
to
> alienate the Arabs and lose the chance of gaining access to the region's
oil
> resources than the British and dismissed the offer.
>
> The British shot and killed Stern in February 1942 and imprisoned his
> immediate coterie, including Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister.
>
>
> The Lehi
>
> As the war drew to a close, Stern's followers, including Shamir on his
> release from jail, regrouped as the Lehi with similar aims, including
Stern'
> s "Eighteen Principles of National Renewal" that proclaimed a Jewish state
> from the Nile to the Euphrates. They adopted the methods of the IRA in its
> struggles against the British. Shamir even used Michael as his nom de
> guerre, after Michael Collins. The now embarrassing Nazi-fascist
affiliation
> was dropped in favour of Britain's latest enemy, the Soviet Union,
although
> some advocated an alliance with the Arab national liberation movements
that
> opposed the stooge regimes imposed by British imperialism.
>
> Lehi denounced the Labour Zionists and the mainstream Revisionist movement
> for relying upon negotiations with the British. As far as Lehi was
> concerned, the British were the Gestapo and the Labour Zionists were akin
to
> Vichy Europe, and Lehi were the resistance. Asked if it was possible to
> achieve national liberation through terrorism, Lehi's response was, "The
> answer is no! If the question is, are terrorist activities useful for the
> progress of revolution and liberation, the answer is yes."
>
> Lehi's most notorious action was the assassination of Lord Moyne, the
> British military commander in Egypt in 1944.
>
> According to Shindler, a fellow in Israeli Studies at the School of
Oriental
> and African Studies, University of London, and author of The Land Beyond
> Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, Lehi copied the methods of
the
> IRA. Between September 1942 and July 1946, when Shamir was arrested and
> exiled to Eritrea, there were seven assassination attempts on the life of
> the British High Commissioner in Palestine and several more were planned,
> including Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary and members of
British
> intelligence forces. It was Shamir who planned the assassination of Lord
> Moyne. Lehi also carried out 14 assassination attempts against Jews who
> worked or were believed to work for British intelligence. It was not
averse
> to killing its own members if the need arose.
>
> While Lehi was by far the smallest of the Zionist terrorist groups, the
> Stern/Lehi group carried out 71 percent of all political assassinations
> between 1940 and 1948. Nearly half of these were against fellow Jews.
>
> Even after the establishment of the Zionist state, Lehi continued its
> murderous activities. Hazit Ha'Moledet, the Fatherland Front, a Lehi
> splinter group that later formed the Moledet party, carried out the
> assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN envoy seeking to arrange a
> peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs.
>
>
>
> In contrast to the Stern/Lehi group, the Irgun only took up the armed
> struggle against the British when the defeat of Germany became imminent.
At
> the end of 1942, Menachem Begin returned to Palestine after his release
from
> a Soviet labour camp in Poland. He took over as the military commander of
> the Irgun and led the armed struggle-the Revolt-to get rid of the British.
>
> But the Irgun's activities had nothing in common with a revolutionary
> struggle to overthrow imperialism in the region. They were also targeted
> against the Arabs. One of its pamphlets read, "We must fight the Arabs in
> order to subjugate them and weaken their demands. We must take them off
the
> arena as a political factor. This struggle against the Arabs will
encourage
> the diaspora and consolidate it. It will draw the attention of the nations
> of the world, which will be compelled to honour the people which struggles
> with its arms. And an ally will be found which will support the peoples'
> army in its struggle."
>
> Begin, unlike the Stern group and Lehi, always rejected the label
> "terrorism", claiming that the Irgun was an army fighting a war against
> another army. Using the same methods as these two terrorist groups, the
> Irgun's most well known act against the British was the blowing up of the
> King David Hotel, the British military headquarters in Jerusalem in July
> 1946.
>
> Lehi's assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944-a close friend of Churchill
with
> whom Weizman and Ben Gurion, the Labour Zionist leaders, had good
> relations-led them to crack down on both Lehi and the Irgun. "Every
> organised group must spew them out... refuge and shelter must be
stringently
> denied these wild men... It is our hearts-not the heart of Britain-that
the
> terrorist iron has entered. Our hands then, no others, must pluck it out."
> [Cited by Colin Shindler in The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the
> Zionist Dream.]
>
>
> The Zionist parties unite
>
> It was the election of a Labour government in July 1945 under Clement
> Attlee, anxious to maintain control over the Middle East's oil resources
> that was to lead instead to a troubled reconciliation between the Labour
> Zionists and the terrorist groups.
>
> These groups had been for years the bitterest of political rivals. They
had
> not even fought together in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. What united
> them at this time was firstly the reversal by Foreign Secretary Ernest
Bevin
> of the Labour party's previous support for the establishment of a Jewish
> state. He now rejected the notion of two states-one for the Jews and one
for
> the Arabs-and favoured an Arab stooge regime along the lines of those in
> Transjordan, Egypt and Iraq, where Jews would be guaranteed minority
rights.
>
> Secondly, and for similar reasons, the Labour government also opposed
Jewish
> immigration to Palestine. Under conditions where neither Britain nor the
US
> were prepared to open their doors to the hundreds of thousands of
survivors
> of the Holocaust, the Jews would have had to remain in the displaced
persons
> camp and in the countries of their persecution.
>
> In November 1945, the Haganah (the Labour Zionists' military wing and by
far
> the largest of the three military groups), the Irgun and Lehi signed an
> agreement to establish the United Resistance Movement to drive the British
> out of Palestine. This was to last for less than a year-until the King
David
> Hotel bombing-when Ben Gurion terminated the agreement calling the Irgun
> "the enemy of the Jewish people". Despite this, the scale of the terrorist
> attacks increased tenfold.
>
>
>
> Faced with increasing hostility and disruption in Palestine and rejection
by
> both Arabs and Jews of a bi-national state, Britain referred the conflict
to
> the United Nations, fully expecting the UN to hand Palestine back to
Britain
> to deal with. But Britain's hopes of resolving the conflict in Palestine
on
> its own terms were to be thwarted. The major powers, including the US and
> the Soviet Union, actively supported the establishment of a Jewish state
for
> their own purposes: they saw it as a way of blocking Britain's position in
> the Middle East. This, plus the worldwide sympathy that the catastrophe
that
> had befallen European Jewry evoked, led the UN in November 1947 to vote
for
> the partition of Palestine. In May 1948, the British withdrew from
Palestine
> and the Zionists immediately declared independence and the establishment
of
> Israel. War broke out between Israel and the Palestinians, led by the Arab
> feudalists, for control of the land.
>
> The Revisionist groups used all the training and methods they had
developed
> and used against the British to terrorise and intimidate the Palestinians.
> The planned terrorist activities, carried out by the Irgun and Lehi, and
> sanctioned by the Labour Zionists, were to play a major role in driving
the
> Palestinians from their homes. The massacre at Deir Yassin, where more
than
> 200 men, women and children were slaughtered, is only the best-known
> example. Ben Gurion himself encouraged the Haganah, largely under the
> control of the Histadrut/Mapai Party and forerunner of the Israeli Defence
> Forces, to expel the Palestinians from their homes. The expulsion of the
> Palestinians, who were destined to become refugees in neighbouring
countries
> and dispersed throughout the world, and the takeover of their land were
the
> essential prerequisites for the founding of the state of Israel.
>
>
> From underground terrorist groups to the political mainstream
>
> Immediately after the end of the war, Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun,
> transformed the Irgun into a political party, Herut, in opposition to the
> official Revisionists. Vehemently opposed to any concessions to the Arabs
> and an agreement with Abdullah that had absorbed the West Bank into his
> kingdom of Transjordan, now renamed Jordan, Begin glorified the Irgun's
> underground terrorism and its role in driving out the British. His
> inflammatory language and style were more than a little reminiscent of the
> nationalist ethos of Eastern Europe and Pilsudksi's military nationalism
in
> Poland during the 1930s.
>
> Committed to the recovery of Palestine, he and the Herut party denounced
> those who opposed such a perspective as the enemies of the Jewish people.
> Coming after the sinking of the Altalena, the Irgun arms ship, at the
hands
> of the Labour Zionists and in which several members of the Irgun were
> killed, it was a virtual declaration of civil war against Ben Gurion. Not
a
> few thought that the Herut might mount a putsch.
>
> In the first elections, where nearly all the political parties claimed
some
> affiliation to socialism, Begin's Herut party was the largest
non-socialist
> party, winning 11 percent of the vote and 14 out of the 120-member
Knesset.
> The official Revisionists won no seats at all. Begin assumed the mantle of
> Revisionism and became the leader of the right-wing opposition to the
Labour
> Zionists.
>
> In the early years of the Zionist state, the Herut vote declined and Begin
> was to spend the next 30 years in the political wilderness, transforming
and
> expanding the Herut party into the Gahal in 1965. He briefly joined the
war
> coalition set up prior to the June 1967 war against the Arabs that took
> advantage of the situation provoked by the reckless opportunism of Nasser,
> the Egyptian leader, to significantly expand Israel's borders.
>
> The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza breathed new life into the
far-right
> forces, leading to the formation of the Likud party in 1973, which went on
> to win the largest number of seats in the 1977 elections. The
> ultra-nationalist right wing political force, which had always been on the
> fringe, had now become the mainstream, displacing the old political
> establishment.
>
> While the Lehi went on to form the Moledet party, an even more nationalist
> outfit than Likud, whose noxious policies include ethnic cleansing: the
> removal of the Palestinians from the territories occupied by Israel.
>
> Shamir himself retired from active politics in the 1940s. When Ben Gurion
> lifted the ban on Lehi members taking up official positions, Isser Harel,
> the Mossad chief, immediately recruited Shamir and others. It was Shamir
who
> planned the letter-bomb campaign against German scientists working for
> Nasser's Egypt in the 1960s that brought him into conflict with Shimon
> Peres, then deputy Minister of Defence. He joined the Herut party as the
> only party that had not renounced the idea of an Israel that extended
"from
> the Nile to the Euphrates" in 1970. Shamir cultivated the links with the
> anti-socialist minded Russian Jews that were seeking to leave the Soviet
> Union and brought them into the Likud party. He became prime minister in
> 1983 when Begin suddenly resigned-signifying an even further shift to the
> right in Israeli politics.
>
> It is the political heirs of terrorists like Stern, Begin and Shamir that
> now form Israel's political establishment and the Bush administration's
> chief ally in the region. They are now able to put into practice the
> policies that their antecedents could only dream of. Their history also
> shows why Israeli politics have always been so fractious. The civil war
that
> is never far beneath the surface has long standing basis.
>
> While the establishment of the state of Israel was hailed at the time as a
> new and progressive entity dedicated to building a democratic and
> egalitarian society for the most cruelly oppressed people of Europe, the
> history of the origins and development of the Zionist state has shown that
> that was always a chimera. It is impossible to build a socially
progressive
> society on the basis of a nationalist perspective. The Zionist
perspective,
> be it the Labour Zionists or its ultra-reactionary variant, has played a
> poisonous role in strengthening imperialism and chauvinism, bolstering the
> power of the national bourgeoisie on the one hand and dividing the working
> class and rural poor on the other.
>
> It is noteworthy that the publication of the British intelligence files
> attracted little attention from the press. Apart from reporting the
> contents, no political commentators sought to draw attention to either the
> methods used to spawn the Zionist state or the Israeli government's
> political roots.
>
> Within Israel itself, the liberal paper Ha'aretz merely carried a Reuters
> report under the headline "Document: UK feared influx of Zionist
terrorists
> in post-WWII era", as though Zionist terrorism was some aberration rather
> than an integral part of their perspective and programme. The article
itself
> focused on the anti-Jewish measures put in place by the British
authorities
> to combat Zionist terrorism. While explaining that the files were written
in
> the aftermath of the bombing of the King David Hotel bombing, the article
> remained silent on the Irgun and Menachem Begin's role in the bombing-even
> though it went on to note that Begin received a Nobel Peace Prize for his
> peace agreement with Egypt. Neither did it mention the plans to
assassinate
> the foreign secretary and leading British political figures.
>
> Such professional and political honesty would only have drawn attention to
> the terrorist origins and role of the Zionist political establishment on
> whom the political gangsters in the Bush administration use as a pawn to
> divide and rule the Middle East.
>
>
>
"tipper" <tipper007@no-spam> wrote in message
news:3ef851ad@no-spam
> >
> > Even if Israel had never been created, fundamentalist Islam would STILL
be
> > targeting the west today with fatwahs and jihads. It is a reaction to
the
> > influence of Western (democratic-materialist-scientific) values on a
> > cluster of nations that are still basically medieval.
> You are spot on, no need to add anything extra.
But the Israelis/Jews are not to be outdone by any cluster of nations in any
arena? :-)
"Murder and Genocide
ACCORDING TO THE JEWISH religion, the murder of a Jew is a capital offense
and one of the three most heinous sins (the other two being idolatry and
adultery). Jewish religious courts and secular authorities are commanded to
punish, even beyond the limits of the ordinary administration of justice,
anyone guilty of murdering a Jew. A Jew who indirectly causes the death of
another Jew is, however, only guilty of what talmudic law calls a sin
against the 'laws of Heaven', to be punished by God rather than by man.
When the victim is a Gentile, the position is quite different. A Jew who
murders a Gentile is guilty only of a sin against the laws of Heaven, not
punishable by a court.1 To cause indirectly the death of a Gentile is no sin
at all.2
Thus, one of the two most important commentators on the Shulhan Arukh
explains that when it comes to a Gentile, 'one must not lift one's hand to
harm him, but one may harm him indirectly, for instance by removing a ladder
after he had fallen into a crevice .., there is no prohibition here, because
it was not done directly:3 He points out, however, that an act leading
indirectly to a Gentile's death is forbidden if it may cause the spread of
hostility towards Jews.4
A Gentile murderer who happens to be under Jewish jurisdiction must be
executed whether the victim was Jewish or not. However, if the victim was
Gentile and the murderer converts to Judaism, he is not punished.5
All this has a direct and practical relevance to the realities of the
State of Israel. Although the state's criminal laws make no distinction
between Jew and Gentile, such distinction is certainly made by Orthodox
rabbis, who in guiding their flock follow the Halakhah. Of special
importance is the advice they give to religious soldiers.
Since even the minimal interdiction against murdering a Gentile outright
applies only to 'Gentiles with whom we [the Jews] are not at war', various
rabbinical commentators in the past drew the logical conclusion that in
wartime all Gentiles belonging to a hostile population may, or even should
be killed.6 Since 1973 this doctrine is being publicly propagated for the
guidance of religious Israeli soldiers. The first such official exhortation
was included in a booklet published by the Central Region Command of the
Israeli Army, whose area includes the West Bank. In this booklet the
Command's Chief Chaplain writes:
When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in
a raid, so long as there is no certainty that those civilians are incapable
of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah they may and even
should be killed ... Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even
if he makes an impression of being civilized ... In war, when our forces
storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill
even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good.7 "
CHAPTER 5 The Laws Against Non-Jews From: "Jewish History, Jewish
Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years" by Professor Israel Shahak