JEWISH TERRORISM

On July 22 1946 Jewish terrorists blew up a part of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. One whole wing of the hotel, which housed the British Mandate government offices in Palestine, was demolished. 91 people were killed – 41 Palestinians, 28 British, 17 Jews, and the rest from various nationalities. 69 were injured.

The attack was carried out by the Irgun, a dissident Zionist group under the leadership of Menachem Begin. It was approved by the Hagana, the ‘regular’ Zionst ‘army’ built and trained by the British who ruled Palestine at the time. Despite heightened security measures at the hotel, the Irgun, which had meticulously planned the operation, managed to make it happen. Timed to coincide with the presence of the maximum number of people were expected to be at the place, the terrorists smuggled explosives packed inside pseudo milk cans into the hotel basement disguised as ‘Arab’ workers. They had herded reception staff and other hotel employees into the basement just before. The British had known for some time that the hotel was a target, and security was alerted to the intruders. But before anything could be done, the Zionists diverted attention by setting off a bomb between the hotel and the nearby YMCA while they fled in a waiting car.

That evening the Hagana leadership, supposedly ignorant the hotel bombing was going to happen, announced measures to protect the perpetrators. They were to give the British authorities false names, withhold their IDs, and avoid sleeping in their own homes. To create confusion, the Irgun blamed the British for neglect, claiming the bombers had telephoned several warnings to the hotel. The claims were all denied.

The King David hotel bombing was not the only, nor the worst, terrorist act carried out by Jews (which is how they were known before they became ‘Israelis’ after 1948). But it had an iconic status for the Zionists because it was aimed at the seat of British power. I was a child at the time, but remember how we were personally affected by that event. My father worked for the Mandate authorities and was at his office that morning just across from the King David hotel. We learnt about the bombing from the radio, and, having no mobile phones then, there was no way to find out what had happened to him. My mother and our neighbours were frantic with worry until we knew he was safe. But he could so easily have been killed along with the other poor Palestinians who perished that day.

Such terrorist incidents increased in frequency and viciousness as the Zionists, who had been invited into Palestine by the British after 1920, turned against their previous benefactors. British personnel, government buildings and civil installations were all targetted. Palestinian businesses, markets and gatherings were likewise attacked by what the British termed ‘Jewish terrorists’. The terrorists were intent on driving out the British administration in Palestine by violence, disregarded the native population as insignificant, and were determined to take over the country.

They got their wish two years later, and in 1948 the new state of Israel was born. Jewish terrorism had led them there and has continued to be their favoured modus operandi ever since. The Jewish terrorists acquired new designations after 1948. They re-invented themselves as ‘Israelis’, citizens of a state with an army, the IDF, an ‘Israeli government’, and an ‘Israeli civil society’. Menachem Begin, the arch terrorist who was behind the King David hotel bombing, became Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the peace between Israel and Egypt, a travesty if ever there was one of what the Nobel Prize award was supposed to be about.

Most important in this re-invention process from Jewish terrorists to respectable Israelis was the transfer of the term ‘terrorist’ from themselves to the Palestinians fighting against Israeli oppression. Palestinian resistance became ‘terrorism’, and resistance fighters, whatever method they used, became ‘terrorists’.

Yet, the reality is that however they present themselves to the world, and whatever labels they use, the Jewish terrorists of the Mandate years have remained essentially the same. From the beginning of statehood in 1948 they started as they meant to go on. In 1956 they perpetrated a senseless massacre of Palestinian farmers at the village of Kafr Qasim. Having imposed a sudden curfew on the village, which the farmers out in their fields never heard, the new Israelis murdered 22 children, 6 women, one of whom was pregnant, and 19 men for ‘breaking the curfew’. In Gaza and Israel’s supposed withdrawal from it in 1956 the Israeli army killed between 447 and 556 people ‘in cold blood and for no apparent reason’ according to the UN Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission.

During Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-9, Israel’s bombardment left a large stockpile of unexploded ordnance. When the UN provided bomb experts to clear the dangerous material, Israel blocked them from entry into Gaza for over a year. Of course that is a pale shadow of the dire situation in Gaza today.

If evidence were needed that the Israelis of today are the true heirs of the Jewish terrorists of pre-1948 Palestine, look no further than their treatment of Gaza since Israel’s occupation began in 1967, and most especially since the genocidal war on Gaza that started in 2023. The bombing of the King David hotel, so shocking in 1946, has been replicated many thousands of times over since then.

Britain did not heed the message of Zionism 80 years ago. If it had and succeeded in quashing a nascent ideology which needed terrorism to achieve its aims, the Palestinian people, the Middle East region, and Britain itself would have been better off. And the course of history would have been changed forever.