Zionism’s Violent Legacy
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By Donald Neff
On January 4, 1948, Jewish terrorists drove a truck loaded with
explosives into the center of the all Arab city of Jaffa and detonated
it, killing 26 and wounding around 100 Palestinian men, women and
children.[1] The attack was the work of the Irgun Zvai Leumi – the
“National Military Organization,” also known by the Hebrew letters
Etzel – the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine. The Irgun was
headed by Revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin and had been killing and
maiming Arabs, Britons and even Jews for the previous ten years in its
efforts to establish a Jewish state.
This terror campaign meant that at the core of Revisionist Zionism
there existed a philosophical embrace of violence. It was this legacy
of violence that contributed to the assassination of Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995.
The Irgun was not the only Jewish terrorist group but it was the most
active in causing indiscriminate terror in pre-Israel Palestine. Up to
the time of the Jaffa attack, its most spectacular feat had been the
July 22, 1946, blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with
the killing of 91 people – 41 Arabs, 28 Britons and 17 Jews.[2]
The other major Jewish terrorist group operating in Palestine in the
1940s was the Lohamei Herut Israel – “Fighters for the Freedom of
Israel,” Lehi in the Hebrew acronym – also known as the Stern Gang
after its fanatical founder Avraham Stern. Two of its more spectacular
outrages included the assassination of British Colonial Secretary Lord
Moyne in Cairo on November 6, 1944, and the assassination of Count
Folke Bernadotte of Sweden in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948.[3]
Both groups collaborated in the massacre at Deir Yassin, in which some
254 Palestinian men, women and children were slain on April 9, 1948. Palestinian survivors were driven like ancient slaves through the
streets of Jerusalem by the celebrating terrorists.[4]
Yitzhak Shamir was one of the three leaders of Lehi who made the
decision to assassinate Moyne and Bernadotte. Both he and Begin later
became prime ministers and ruled Israel for a total of 13 years
between 1977 and 1992. They were both leaders of Revisionist Zionism,
that messianic group of ultranationalists founded by Vladimir Zeev
Jabotinsky in the 1920s. He prophesied that it would take an “iron
wall of Jewish bayonets” to gain a homeland among the Arabs in
Palestine.[5] His followers took his slogan literally.
Begin and the Revisionists were heartily hated by the mainline
Zionists led by David Ben-Gurion. He routinely referred to Begin as a
Nazi and compared him to Hitler. In a famous letter to The New York
Times in 1948, Albert Einstein called the Irgun “a terrorist,
rightwing, chauvinist organization” that stood for “ultranationalism,
religious mysticism and racial superiority.”[6] He opposed Begin’s
visit to the United States in 1949 because Begin and his movement
amounted to “a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs,
and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a ‘leader
state’ is the goal,” adding:
The IZL [Irgun] and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the
Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking
against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join
them. By gangster methods, beatings, window smashing, and widespread
robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a
heavy tribute.
Ben-Gurion considered the Revisionists so threatening that shortly
after he proclaimed establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948, he
demanded that the Jewish terrorist organizations disband. In defiance,
Begin sought to import a huge shipment of weapons aboard a ship named
Altalena, Jabotinsky’s nom de plume.[7]
The ship was a war surplus US tank landing craft and had been donated
to the Irgun by Hillel Kook’s Hebrew Committee for National
Liberation, an American organization made up of Jewish-American
supporters of the Irgun.[8] Even in those days it was Jewish Americans
who were the main source of funds for Zionism. While few of them
emigrated to Israel, Jewish Americans were generous in financing the
Zionist enterprise. As in Israel, they were split between mainstream
Zionism and Revisionism. One of the best known Revisionists was Ben
Hecht, the American newsman and playwright. After one of the Irgun’s
terrorist acts, he wrote:[9]
The Jews of America are for you. You are their champions … Every time
you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a
British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with
your guns and bombs at British betrayers and invaders of your
homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.
The Altalena was loaded with $5 million worth of arms, including 5,000
British Lee Enfield rifles, more than three million rounds of
ammunition, 250 Bren guns, 250 Sten guns, 150 German Spandau machine
guns, 50 mortars and 5,000 shells as well as 940 Jewish volunteers.
Ben-Gurion reacted with fury, ordering the ship sunk in Tel Aviv
harbor. Shell fire by the new nation’s armed forces set the Altalena
afire, killing 14 Jews and wounding 69. Two regular army men were
killed and six wounded during the fighting.[10] Begin had been aboard
but escaped injury. Later that night he railed against Ben-Gurion as
“a crazy dictator” and the cabinet as “a government of criminal
tyrants, traitors and fratricides.”[11]
Ben-Gurion’s deputy commander in the Altalena affair was Yitzhak
Rabin, the same man who as prime minister was assassinated by one of
the spiritual heirs of Menachem Begin’s Irgun terrorist group. All his
life, and especially in his last years, Rabin had opposed
Jewish-Americans and their radical allies in Israel who continued to
embrace the philosophy of the Irgun and who fought against the peace
process, thereby earning their enduring hatred.
Thus at the heart of the Jewish state there has been a long and
violent struggle between mainline Zionists and Revisionists that
continues today. Despite cries after Rabin’s assassination that it was
unknown for Jew to kill Jew, intramural hatred and occasional violence
have marked relations between Zionism’s competing groups.
The core of that conflict, one that continues to divide Israel and its
American supporters as well, lies in the different philosophies of
David Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky. Both were from Eastern
Europe, born in the 1880s, and both sought an exclusivist Jewish
state. But while Ben-Gurion was pragmatic and secular, Jabotinsky was
impatient and messianic, a leader who glorified in the heroic
trappings of fascism. Ben-Gurion was usually willing to take less now
to get more later, and thus he was content to accept partition of
Palestine as a necessary stepping stone toward a larger Jewish state. Jabotinsky, on the other hand, impatiently preached the right of Jews
not only to all of Palestine but to “both sides of the Jordan,”
meaning the combined area of Jordan and Palestine, or as he called it,
Eretz Yisrael, the ancient land of Israel.[12]
Ben-Gurion was a gruff realist who carefully calculated his moves with
a wary eye toward the interests of the great European powers and the
United States. Time magazine, in a profile of Ben-Gurion in August
1948, described him as “premier and defense minister, labor leader and philosopher, hardheaded, unsociable and abrupt politician, a prophet
who carries a gun.[13] Wrote his biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar:
“Obstinacy and total dedication to a single objective were the most characteristic traits of David Ben-Gurion.”[14]
Jabotinsky, by contrast, was flamboyant and a devoted admirer of
Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini. His disciple, Menachem Begin, described him as “a speaker, a writer, a philosopher, a statesman, a
soldier, a linguist … But to those of us who were his pupils, he was
not only their teacher, but also the bearer of their hope.” Begin’s
biographer, Eric Silver, added: “There was a darker side to
[Jabotinsky’s] philosophy: blood, fire and steel, the supremacy of the
leader, discipline and ceremony, the manipulation of the masses,
racial exclusivity as the heart of the nation.[15] One of Jabotinsky’s
slogans was: “We shall create, with sweat and blood, a race of men,
strong, brave and cruel.”[16]
Jabotinsky died in 1940, and it was Menachem Begin who refined his
wild nationalism into practical political action. Begin concluded:
“The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who
fight.” He turned Descartes’ famous dictum around, saying: “We fight,
therefore we exist.”[17] Central to Begin’s outlook was the concept of
the “fighting Jew.” As he wrote:[18]
Out of blood and fire and tears and ashes, a new specimen of human
being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over
1,800 years, the “FIGHTING JEW.” It is axiomatic that those who fight
have to hate …. We had to hate first and foremost, the horrifying,
age-old, inexcusable utter defenselessness of our Jewish people,
wandering through millennia, through a cruel world, to the majority of
whose inhabitants the defenselessness of the Jews was a standing
invitation to massacre them.
From these early leaders of Zionism (Ben-Gurion died in 1973 and Begin
in 1992) have emerged their direct descendants in the Israeli
political spectrum. Rabin and his successor, Shimon Peres, were both
protégés of Ben-Gurion, and have carried on his mainstream secular
Zionism. On Jabotinsky’s and Begin’s side, the followers have been
Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and, now, Benjamin Netanyahu, the current
leader of the Likud.
Rabin’s Strategy
While the two major factions of Zionism disagree on tactics, their
ultimate aim of maintaining a Jewish state free of non-Jews was the
same. Rabin explained his strategy shortly before his death during an
interview with Rowland Evans and Robert Novak:[19]
I believe that dreams of Jews for two thousand years to return to Zion
were to build a Jewish state and not a binational state. Therefore I
don’t want to annex the 2.2 million Palestinians who are a different
entity from us – politically, religiously, nationally – against their
will to become Israelis. Therefore I see peaceful coexistence between
Israel as a Jewish state – not all over the land of Israel, on most of
it, its capital the united Jerusalem, its security border the Jordan
River – next to it a Palestinian entity, less than a state, that runs
the life of the Palestinians. It is not ruled by Israel. It is ruled
by the Palestinians. This is my goal not to return to the
pre-Six-Day-War lines, but to create two entities. I want a separation
between Israel and the Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip, and they will be a different entity that rules itself.
In the Revisionist’s vocabulary, the goal was the same, if more
expansionist and expressed in more direct and pugnacious words. Former
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a leading spokesman of Zionism’s right
wing, commented in 1993: “Our forefathers did not come here in order
to build a democracy but to build a Jewish state.”[20]
The occupation of all of Palestine, including Jerusalem, in the 1967
war and the coming to power a decade later of Menachem Begin gave a
profound boost to Revisionism and its radical philosophy. During this
period there arose the firebrand Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born rabbi
who openly espoused the removal of the Palestinians from all of
Palestine. Under the influence of his fiery rhetoric, thousands of
Orthodox Jewish Americans were encouraged to emigrate to Israel as
settlers on occupied Palestinian land, adding to the radicalization of
Israeli politics. After Kahane’s assassination in New York in 1990 by
an Arab, New York Times correspondent John Kifner reported that Kahane
had been successful in the sense that many of his ideas “had crept
into the mainstream” in Israel.
Dr. Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli expert on the far right in Israel,
observed: “Where [Kahane] has succeeded is in changing the thinking of
many Israelis toward anti-Arab feelings and violence. He forced the
more respectable parties to change. In the 1970s Kahane was in the
political wilderness, but in the 1980s the center had moved toward
Kahane.” Observed the Jewish Telegraph Agency: “Rabbi Kahane could die satisfied that his message has impacted deeply and widely throughout
Israeli society.”[21]
By the mid-1990s, even Kahane’s violent ideas seemed somewhat mild in
the context of the radicalized politics of Israel. A new strain of
religious extremism has been added to the Revisionist ranks. This
became obvious on February 25, 1994, when Brooklyn-born Dr. Baruch
Goldstein, a Kahane disciple, walked into the Ibrahim mosque, called
the Cave of Machpela by Jews, in Hebron and killed 29 and wounded
upwards of 150 Palestinian worshippers.[22] While Rabin and labor
Zionists condemned him, Goldstein became a hero for Revisionist
Zionists. A shrine was made of his grave and a group of Revisionists
grew up called “Goldsteiners.” They are dedicated to the “sublime
ideals of Goldstein” and urge “all true Jews to follow his
footsteps.”[23]
While the Revisionists had always had an element of religious
messianism, the most radical of their current heirs come from
ultrareligious Orthodox Jews who are less consumed by politics than religion.[24] They believe they are God’s messengers. Thus Rabin’s
assassin, Yigal Amir, cited the authority of God to explain the
murder.
This is a sea change in the mindset – if not the violence – of the
traditional Revisionists. For instance, in 1943 Yitzhak Shamir ordered
the assassination of one of his closest Sternist friends, but offered
an entirely different rationale that had nothing to do with God.
Mainly the motive stemmed from political and tactical reasons. Shamir
wrote in his memoirs, In the Final Analysis, that Stern commander
Eliyahu Giladi had become “strange and wild” and had wanted to shoot
at crowds of Jews and urged the assassination of David Ben-Gurion,
acts that would have been highly unpopular. Wrote Shamir: “I was
afraid that he had gone completely crazy. I knew that I had to take a
fateful decision, and I didn’t evade it.”[25] Giladi was fatally shot
in the back on a beach south of Tel Aviv and his killer was never
found.[26]
The new Revisionists have now expanded the right to kill claimed by
the early Revisionists in the name of nationalism to include a divine
right. In the end, they are less interested in foreign and domestic
affairs than in justifying man’s acts to God. It is a powerful and
inflammatory mix of nationalism and religion that is almost certain to
lead to more violence unless Israel is able to look into its own soul.
Notes
[1] Sam Pope Brewer, New York Times, Jan. 5, 1948, and Khalidi, Before
Their Diaspora, p. 316. Also see Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe,
pp. 83-4. Initial reports put the death toll at 34.
[2] Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, p. 263; Sachar, A History of
Israel, p. 267. Details on the bombing and reaction of British
officials are in Nakhleh, Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, pp.
269-70.
[3] Bethell, Palestine Triangle, pp. 181-87, 263; Sachar, A History of
Israel, p. 267; Marion, A Death in Jerusalem, p. 208.
[4] Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, pp. 761-78; Silver, Begin, pp.
88-96; Nakhleh, Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, pp. 271-72.
[5] Silver, Begin, p. 12.
[6] New York Times, Nov. 27, 1948.
[7] Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion, p. 175.
[8] Silver, Begin, p. 98.
[9] Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, pp. 308-9. An interview
reflecting Hecht’s views appeared in The New York Times, May 28, 1947.
[10] Silver, Begin, p. 108.
[11] Silver, Begin, p. 108.
[12] In Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael means the “Land of Israel,” a phrase
invested with strong nationalist feelings.
[13] Time, August 16, 1948.
[14] Bar-Zohar, Ben Gurian, pp. 77, xvii.
[15] Silver, Begin, p. 11.
[16] Elfi Pallis, “The Likud Party: A Primer,” Journal of Palestine
Studies, Winter 1992, p. 45.
[17] Begin, The Revolt, pp. 36, 46. Also see Tillman, The United
States in the Middle East, p. 20.
[18] Begin, The Revolt, pp. xi-xii. Also see Elfi Pallis, “The Likud
Party: A Primer,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1992, p. 45.
[19] Evans and Novak, CNN, Oct. 1, 1995.
[20] Menachem Shalev, Forward, May 21, 1339.
[21] John Kifner, New York Times, Nov. 11, 1990.
[22] David Hoffman, Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1994.
[23] Khalid M. Amayreh, “Six Months On,” Middle East International,
Sept. 9, 1994.
[24] Halsell, Prophecy and Politics, p. 75, provides an excellent
analysis of the extremist beliefs of Jabotinsky and his followers and
their alliance with American fundamentalist Christians such as Jerry
Falwell, leader of the Moral Mliority.
[25] Clyde Haberman, New York Times, Jan. 15, 1994.
[26] Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, Nov. 6, 1995.
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