by Sirocco
Sun Jul 23rd, 2006 at 12:38:03 PM EST
In a previous post I described Israel as a strange but impressive modern hybrid of Athens and Sparta. The latter side of the Janus face being currently on full display, we might as well familiarize ourselves with its features. Forgotten history is written in its wrinkles.
From my blog. Graphic photo at the end of post.
This recent Telegraph report is a good place to start (emphasis added):
In the midst of its campaign against Hizbollah and Hamas "terrorists", Israel has been accused by Britain of feting Jewish "terrorists" whose bomb attack killed 28 Britons 60 years ago today.
The accusation, which reopens the debate about the use of politically-inspired violence in the region, follows the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the attack on the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, by the Irgun Jewish "resistance" to British mandate rule in Palestine. The 28 Britons were among 91 people killed.
This week, former Irgun fighters and current Right-wing politicians unveiled the plaque at the hotel, which read: "The hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel's occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun's regret and dismay 91 persons were killed."
But Israel's celebration of its "freedom fighters" remains highly controversial at a time when it continues to pound Palestinian "terrorists".
Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, has found herself deeply embroiled in the debate - her father, Eitan, was Irgun's chief operations officer.
Simon Macdonald, the British ambassador to Israel, and consul general John Jenkins, wrote to the mayor of Jerusalem protesting at the plaque. "We don't think it's right for an act of terrorism to be commemorated," their letter read.
The embassy said: "There is no credible evidence that any warning reached the British authorities." The plaque has subsequently been amended, dropping the implication that Britain ignored any warnings.
Interesting. Besides terrorist bombing of hotels, what else was the Irgun gang (and its off-shoot the Stern gang) about? Let us dig a little deeper into the history, shall we? Links and emphasis added:
The plain fact is that one wing of Zionism - the socalled "revisionist" wing - founded itself on the notion that the Palestinian people would have to be driven out of the land of both Palestine and Transjordan (today's state of Jordan) and that, if they weren't willing to go, they would have to be subjugated as a permanent minority within a Zionist state, or forced to leave by any means necessary.
Revisionism's founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, laid down the basis of the argument in the 1920s. To clear Palestine of Arabs he wanted a Jewish army, and he founded a series of Zionist youth militias across Europe - groups which leftwing Zionists charged had more in common with farright militias than with the Zionist project. Jabotinsky made some efforts to discipline his more effusive followers (though he never expelled those such as Abba Achimeir, who suggested that Hitler's "renewal" of the German people was something Zionists could follow by example), but by the 1940s they had blossomed into the Irgun and the Lehi. These gangs terrorised Palestinians after World WarII, rolling bombs into Arab markets and massacring people in villages such as Deir Yassin.
The strategy was ethnic cleansing, pure and simple, and it worked - it turned nearly a million Palestinians into refugees. The Irgun hoped they would simply keep on going into wider Arabia. The Arab world, which was well aware of the strategy, has had other ideas:
Jabotinsky's follower, Menachem Begin, became prime minister in 1977 and accelerated phase two of the plan - land theft in the West Bank and the creation of Jewish settlements, to ensure that Palestinians became a powerless minority within expanded borders. Because this was an ongoing military campaign, Begin made a former general his minister of housing - Ariel Sharon.
Begin was a dedicated terrorist well into the 1950s. It has recently been revealed that he attempted to assassinate West Germany's chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1952 over disagreement on how the German compensation for the Holocaust should be paid.
The proud tradition of terrorist PMs would continue. Yitzhak Shamir was also a member the Irgun, and after the split, of the Stern gang.
Let's see if this history does not also involve some other individuals we know (emphasis added):
Ehud Olmert was born in 1945 in a training camp for members of the militant Jewish underground known as the Irgun, and grew up in Binyamina, a small town north of Tel Aviv. The Olmerts were a family steeped in the politics of the right-wing revisionist Zionist movement of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and they lived in the largely Irgun neighborhood of Nahalat Jabotinsky. His father, Mordechai, was one of the founders of the Irgun. When it was disbanded, he served as a member of the Knesset for Herut, the party named for the Hebrew word for "freedom," founded by Irgun leader, Menachem Begin.
Such is the "freedom" now unleashed on Lebanon. It has a face of its own: