Bradley Burston Opinion Zionism's Terrorist Heritage
Zionism's Terrorist Heritage
Israel has a terrorism problem it's unwilling to talk about.
I understand the reluctance.
Every now and then, I
realize that I need to say something out loud, something painful,
something I myself am not going to like, if only because I myself need
to hear it. So here's this:
We in Israel need to seriously address the history, the consequences, and, yes, the heritage, of our own terrorism.
Two weeks ago outside a courtroom in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Lod, some 20 young Jews danced and chanted in celebration of the grisly 2015 fire-bombing murder of an 18-month-old Palestinian baby, Ali Dawabshe, killed in his bed in the West Bank village of Duma
Ali's parents were also killed in the attack, and his four-year-old brother Ahmed was critically burned.
The celebrants,
wearing the outsize skullcaps and long forelocks favored by militant
"price-tag" settlers, surrounded Ali and Ahmed's grandfather Hussein
Dawabshe as he left the court where the three Jewish murder suspects
were on trial.
"Where is Ali? Dead!
Burned! There is no Ali!" they jeered at the grandfather, who has raised
the four-year-old Ahmed and seen him through the grueling healing
process since the attack. "Ali is on fire! Ali is on the grill!"
"Police officers and the ministers who were present at the court chose not to intervene," Ynet reported at the time, "letting the demonstration of hatred and racism continue." The Israel Police were later quoted as explaining that officers did not intervene because "There was no violent rioting."
Apart
from the question of how the police would have reacted had the
demonstrators been Palestinians and the victim a Jewish child – recent experience
leaves little doubt that the result would have been beatings, injuries
and arrests – it is worth paying attention to the response of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who are consistent and
immediate in strafing social media after every event involving
Palestinian terrorism:
Silence.
There it is. Israel
has a terrorism problem which has been part and parcel of Zionism even
before the state was founded. It's there every time Benjamin Netanyahu
waxes moral, declaring that the Palestinians erect monuments to their
terrorists, while we build tributes to peace.
Consider, as but one example of thousands, Netanyahu's meticulously produced video statement with which he opened this school year, excoriating Palestinians for building monuments to honor terrorists who killed Jews.
"Children should be taught to love and respect, not hate and kill," Netanyahu intones, his palms clasped in sincerity.
"There are so many
champions of peace to dedicate statues to. Why do the Palestinians
consistently choose to honor mass murderers?"
What Netanyahu did
not say, was that entire Birthright trips could be built around the
plaques and monuments which Israel has erected in recent years to honor
the bombings and other terrorist killings committed by the members of
the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Lehi pre-state underground groups – not to
mention the highways, boulevards, schools, and town squares named for
the armed bands' respective commanders in chief – the late Israeli prime
ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
There is also the
gravesite and pilgrimage site in the West Bank settler city of Kiryat
Arba, honoring the memory of Baruch Goldstein, who close to the Purim
festival in 1994 gunned down 29 Palestinians kneeling during worship at
Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs.
As recently as 2010, Jewish residents of East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood were filmed celebrating
Purim by singing "Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the
world. Dr. Goldstein, we all love you he aimed at terrorists' heads,
squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets, and shot, and shot."
Our terrorism problem has grown so cosmeticized as to have become all but invisible. Hidden in plain sight.
It was there at the
opening of the landmark official visit of Britain's Prince William. It
was there in the breezy dispatch of Israel 10 Television News
correspondent Akiva Novick, who reported, in a reference to former
Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi armed
underground:
"For the first time
ever, an official visit of a member of the Royal Family, and in the
place blown up 72 years ago by IZL men in one of the operations which
brought about the end of the British mandatory rule here.
"It took very many years for the British to restrain themselves, or to have absorbed this insult."
This insult.
"The terror attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was in its day the equivalent of the Twin Towers," wrote historian Tom Segev
in 2006, after Benjamin Netanyahu had taken center stage at a
commemoration celebrating the 60th anniversary of the attack. Years
later, Segev would call it, "at the time the most lethal terrorist
attack in history."
The blast, which
levelled six floors of a wing of the hotel with 350 kilograms of
explosive, killed 91 people, all but 16 of them civilians. Most of the
dead were British government staffers or hotel employees. There were 41
Arabs, 28 British citizens, 17 Jews, two Armenians, one Russian, one
Greek and one Egyptian.
At the two-day 60th
anniversary event at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, Netanyahu
joined IZL veterans and academics who sought to prove, once and for all,
that the bombers and gunmen of Begin's IZL and of future prime minister
Yitzhak Shamir's radical Lehi underground – which carried out
high-level political assassinations - had been freedom fighters and not
terrorists.
They insisted that the occupants of the King David had been given fair warning, a claim disputed by British authorities.
They spoke of the
bombing as the most significant event in driving the British out of
Palestine and paving the way for Israel's independence, a claim widely
disputed by historians but significant in its subtext – that terrorism,
in the end, pays.
The climax of the
60th anniversary observance was the unveiling of a large plaque near the
King David, commemorating the bombing.
At the time, Simon
Macdonald, the British ambassador to Israel, along with consul general
John Jenkins, wrote to the mayor of Jerusalem protesting the plaque. "We
don't think it's right for an act of terrorism to be commemorated,"
they wrote. The British embassy added that: "There is no credible
evidence that any warning reached the British authorities."
The text of the plaque was altered slightly, but the monument remained.
Netanyahu, meanwhile,
who had just suffered a crushing defeat in the 2006 elections, his
Likud coming in a dismal fourth with only 12 Knesset seats and less than
nine percent of the vote, was readying a comeback.
Among the
cornerstones of his campaign would be – and is to this day – his
condemnation of the Palestinians for honoring terrorists. Still, the
reminders of Jewish terrorism continue to present themselves. As the UK
Jewish Chronicle wrote in 2016
in a reference to the highest-ranking Jewish victim of the King David
bombing, the Manchester man who served as under-secretary of the
Palestine treasury:
"History's joke is
that Julius Jacobs's house in Jerusalem became the prime minister's
official residence for two decades. Its last occupant was Yitzhak Rabin,
who then moved to the new residence on Smolenskin Street. Mr. Begin,
the succeeding prime minister, was thus saved from having to confront
the ghosts of the past each day and to be reminded of a British Jew who
had died unnecessarily in such tragic circumstances."
Bradley Burston
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