Quote:
Originally posted by AE:
I haven't been keeping up with this humungous thread, but something from the Jewish music teacher's statement quoted by Bob caught my attention. The music teacher was drawing a distinction between Israelis who do not engage in terrorist tactics and Muslims who do.
I don't know if it's been brought up yet, but the Jews in Palestine did engage in terrorist tactics against the British way back before Israel was established. The bombing of the King David Hotel was the most famous instance. I don't know enough about the history to opinionate re.: how effective the terrorism proved to be, & how much support it had from the whole Jewish population. In any case, a state of Israel was indeed established, so it can't have been utterly catastrophic.
Whenever I see categorical moral condemnations of Islamic terrorism from the Israeli point of view I always wonder how the condemning party would regard historical Jewish terrorism. Isn't terrorism a recourse for a militarily & politically disadvantaged party? Were not the Jews in Palestine disadvantaged, in relation to the British, way back then, in the same way that the Palestinian Muslims are in relation to the Israelis now? Can the Israelis remember when the shoe was on the other foot? Can they imaginatively sympathize with the situation of their enemy? A little bit goes a long way.
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We've touched on it, AE. Irgun and Lehi were the most enthusiastic Jewish groups that used terrorism. Haganah, which became the core of the IDF, practiced restraint as a basic principal throughout its existence.
The similarity is, as you point out, that Jews also committed terrorist acts.
The difference is that, after the war of independence, Haganah disbanded Irgun, Lehi, and even Palmakh (the non-terrorist elite troops within Haganah.)
In one incident, IDF forces sank a ship of armaments destined for Irgun and Lehi forces, clearly risking civil war.
By contrast, Lebanon has never done the parallel in regard to Hezbollah (although we do like to think that they'd like to.) The Palestinian Authority refused to disarm and disband any of the terrorist organizations, inside or outside of the PLO umbrella. In fact, Fatah, the "moderate" secular nationalist alternative to Hamas, has its own suicide bombing wing, the Al Aqsa brigades.
I don't believe this information by itself gainsays your point about the brief period in which organized Jewish terrorists operated, but the hoped-for sympathy for terrorism would be confined to those who remember the 1948 war, and among those, a small number who were pretty much villified by their opposite numbers in Haganah/Palmakh.
He who remembers history is condemned to recite it
,
Dan