arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

"Terror using modern tools (letter bombs, car bombs, etc.) and weapons was first adopted in the Middle East by Zionists working outside state control and outside of any geographically limited area. This was truly the first non-state, global terror network. In the single month of July 1938, the Irgun killed 76 Palestinians in terrorist attacks. On July 22,1946, a Zionist truck-bomb blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem (housing also the British civil administration) killing 28 British, 41 Arab, 17 Jewish, and 5 others while injuring over 200. This was the first use of a car bomb in the Middle East. While Irgun claimed responsibility, later evidence also showed involvement of the Hagannah. The first letter bombs used by groups operating from the Middle East were made by Zionists and sent to British Cabinet Ministers in London in June 1947.

Economic sabotage was also first introduced by the Zionists. In 1939 the Haganah blew up the Iraqi oil pipeline near Haifa. Moshe Dayan was one of the participants in this act. The first airplane hijacking was committed by Israel. On 12 December 1954 Israel hijacked a civilian Syrian airliner shortly after take-off. In 1973, Israel shot down s Libyan civil aircraft (which strayed over Sinai in a sandstorm) killing all its 106 civilian passengers.

On Nov. 6 1944 Zionist belonging to Stern assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, in an ambush in Cairo (well beyond the borders of Palestine).

The first attack on a ship by terrorists was on November 25, 1940 when the S.S. Patria carrying illegal Jewish immigrants was attacked by Zionists with explosives in Haifa Harbor (attack was to embarrass the British and for rivalry among Jewish groups). 268 Jewish immigrants drowned.

On January 5, 1948, the Haganah forces planted bombs in the Palestinian-owned Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 20, among them Viscount de Tapia, the Spanish consul.

Between 1947 to 1949, over 530 Palestinian villages were emptied of their populations by a process of ethnic cleansing including targeted terror with over 33 massacres according to Israeli and other historians. More than half of the Palestinian villages and towns were depopulated by Israeli military actions before Israel was established in May 15, 1948 and thus before the beginning of the first major Arab Israeli war according to Israeli historians. Israel also continued to terrorize the natives into leaving even after the hostilities ended and cease-fires were signed. This post war ethnic cleansing occurred in 64 of the 531 Palestinian localities depopulated according to Israeli historians.

More cross border massacres and terror ensued afterwards. 700 Israeli troops (Force 101) attacked the border village of Qibya on October 14, 1953. The troops led by a young commander, Ariel Sharon, used mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives. 42 houses were blown up as well as the local schools and the mosque. Every man, woman and child found was murdered in cold blood (a total of 53 to 75 according to independent estimates). Ben-Gurion initially claims this was carried out by "Jewish terrorists" and not by the IDF but he later admitted government involvement. However, Qibya was only a minor massacre compared to those committed in Lebanon by Israel (e.g. at Tantura or Qana) or its paid cronies (at Sabra and Shatila etc.). Israeli actions were responsible in total for the killing of perhaps as many as 50,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Historians also now acknowledge that Israeli forces also executed hundreds of prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1967.

Israel also maintained many colonial terror groups operating in the remaining 22% of Palestine that was conquered in 1967 (i.e. the West Bank and Gaza). Referring to members of underground Jewish organizations there, General Yehoshafat Harkabi observed that "they are rational people whose chief motivation stems from their awareness that annexation of the West Bank together with its Arab population would be disastrous and tantamount to national suicide - unless that population were thinned out and made to flee by means of terrorism...". He added that terrorism was "the logical, rational conclusion of the policy that aims at annexation. Such terrorism is neither a punishment nor a deterrent; it is a political instrument."

Various groups within the PLO and outside it also resorted to killing civilians in its struggle against colonial Zionism (as did the native Americans, the IRA, the African National Congress in South Africa and a many other such struggles). But the number of civilians killed by Palestinian action pales by comparison (both quantitatively and qualitatively) to those killed by intentional Israeli actions. Reports from Human Rights Organizations clearly document this.

The majority of people do not (and should never) excuse killing civilians (including colonialists gathered from throughout the world to settle in native people lands). This is true whether the killing is done by individuals belonging to a group like Irgun, Kakh, or Hamas or whether by states with a well-oiled military machine that inflicts much heavier toll on civilians (e.g. shelling neighborhoods with US supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters) or by so called " intelligence agencies" operating now in dozens of countries and essentially unanswerable to the people.

Violence by the way is not an incidental byproduct of occupation or oppression or dispossession. It is an inevitable consequence of these injustices (which are of course sustained themselves by violence which forms part and parcel of colonialism and occupation). Any people in a situation of violent oppression or colonization develop a bell-shaped curve of resistance ranging from all non-violent forms on one end of the curve to sometimes horrible crimes (we call it terrorism) on the other end. The majority in the middle of this curve will always have some elements of resistance that is neither terrorism nor completely non-violent resistance. Any casual examination of history will reveal examples of a wide range of tactics adopted by different segments of the society even when all are living under the same degree of occupation or repression. Differences in tactics between individuals in their responses can but do not need be related to the external pressures faced by that individual. Examples of the full range of this bell shaped curve was evident among the Irish, Black South Africans, African American blacks, and Native Americans. In each of those groups, segments within the same society expressed their emotions and their aspirations using forms ranging from writing, to peaceful demonstrations, to civil disobedience, and to extreme violence. In short, Violence is the symptomology and one must then examine the etiology of the underlying disease."

(From "State and non-state terrorism" by Prof. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Yale University, April 11, 2003)