Tag: Israel

How we conveniently ignore the ‘terrorists’ among our allies Before they were prime minister, two Israelis were leaders of violent political movements that killed innocent people. The term “terrorist” often gets used as a general-purpose epithet intended to consign a disliked state or group to perpetual isolation and punishment. Used in this way, the label of “terrorist” becomes a substitute for careful analysis of policy toward the state or group in question. Usually, the object of the labeling has indeed used terrorism — but so have many others who don’t get labeled the same way and may even be treated as friends and allies. If the operative notion is “once a terrorist, always a terrorist,” then there are many shady histories that warrant examination. Consider, for example, as Benjamin Netanyahu — who has flung the “terrorist” label at least as freely as anyone else — is finally being pushed out of the prime minister’s job in Israel, the histories of some of his predecessors. Menachem Begin, who held that job in the late 1970s and early 1980s — longer than anyone except Netanyahu, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin — had an earlier career as a hard-core terrorist. As leader of the Irgun group during World War II, Begin conducted a campaign of attacks, focused principally on British government and police targets, intended to drive the British out of Palestine — while Britain was busy waging a war against the Nazis. Begin’s terrorist campaign continued after the war. His group’s most spectacular operation was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 persons and injuring 46. The list of victims went far beyond the British administrators who were the purported targets and included people of multiple… Read More