How Zionist terrorism determined Palestine’s fate

Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 15 March 2017

State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Thomas Suárez, Olive Branch Press (2017)

Israel’s propaganda playbook attempts to reframe the Palestinian liberation struggle as a question of terror, not territory. Thanks to a dutiful media, this effort to portray Palestinians as terrorists has had significant traction among some demographics.

But how did terrorism originate in Palestine and what was its outcome, both historically and today?

Thomas Suárez sheds much new light on those questions in State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. He does this largely by mining previously neglected declassified documents from the British National Archives, covering the period of the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948).

Suárez’s principal thesis is that Zionist terrorism “ultimately dictated the course of events during the Mandate, and it is Israeli state terrorism that continues to dictate events today.”

The author cautions that while he unequivocally condemns Palestinian terrorism against civilians, he recognizes that some were driven to extreme measures due to an asymmetry in power and in reaction to attempts to subjugate the Palestinian people and expropriate their resources, land and labor.

Zionist terrorism aimed to prevent Palestinian Arabs from exercising their right to self-determination, Suárez argues, and when an aggressor encounters resistance, it can hardly use self-defense as a justification for its own acts of violence. “Otherwise,” Suárez writes, “all aggression would self-justify.”

Suárez is not a professional historian. However, State of Terror has drawn praise from such figures as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who – on the book cover – calls it a “tour de force” and “the first comprehensive and structured analysis” of the violence employed by the Zionist movement both before and after Israel’s creation. Indeed, Suárez’s scholarship is impressive and the book includes nearly 700 endnotes consisting mainly of original sources.

Insightful meditation

At its best, State of Terror is an insightful meditation on history. This is apparent especially in the opening chapters that cover the period leading up to the British Mandate and the issuance of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain decreed a “national home” for Jews in Palestine.

Suárez offers a penetrating analysis of the roots of Zionist ideology, showing not only its racist underpinnings and colonialist attitudes toward Arabs but also its attempt to exercise political, religious and cultural hegemony over the Jewish people. In a sense Suárez exposes political Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism and a kind of totalitarianism.

The Zionist mistreatment of Jews is a sub theme that runs throughout Suárez’s narrative. Early Zionist leaders tried to depict Jews as a “race” and “nationality,” rather than a people of faith and ethnic identity. Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion also maintained that Jews were ”obliged to settle in Palestine.”

Suárez cites an early opponent of Zionism, the English Jewish journalist and historian Lucien Wolf who condemned Zionism as “a comprehensive capitulation to the calumnies of the anti-Semites” that would set back the Jewish struggle for equality in their home countries.

In support of this claim, Wolf notes that Arthur James Balfour, who was foreign secretary at the time of the declaration that bears his name, appears to have been motivated to promise a “national home” for Jews by classic anti-Semitism: as prime minister in 1905, Balfour had attempted to block Jewish refugees escaping Czarist Russia’s pogroms from immigrating to Britain, viewing them as an “undoubted evil.”

Suárez makes the dramatic claim that “most victims” of the targeted assassinations carried out by Zionist paramilitaries in Mandate Palestine were Jews, in part because these militias identified British Jewish soldiers and police as traitors. This was the case even during the Second World War when Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Nazi Germany.

Partition plan capitulation

State of Terror asserts that most acts of terrorism were directed at Palestinian Arab civilians. Both the Labor and Revisionist wings of Zionism engaged in terrorism and often colluded with each other in carrying out terrorist attacks, which escalated following the end of the Second World War, culminating famously in the King David Hotel attack in July 1946 that killed 41 Palestinian Arabs, 28 Brits, 17 Jews, 2 Armenians, 1 Russian and 1 Egyptian.

Suárez maintains that the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 was largely a capitulation to this terrorism. Here his conclusion differs somewhat from that of other historians, including Tom Segev, who argues in One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (1999) that the exhausted and bankrupt British Empire was intent on leaving Palestine regardless of Zionist terrorism.

In Segev’s account the British departure was a foregone conclusion, and the terrorism of both the Labor Zionist and Revisionist-led militias represented a competition between them “for control of the state that would soon be established.”

“The British were not the real enemy,” Segev writes, “the Arabs were.”

The numerous acts of terrorism against Palestinian civilians during the Nakba of 1947-1949, such as the massacre at Deir Yassin, figure prominently in Suárez’s concluding chapters.

With the creation of Israel in 1948 paramilitary terrorism transformed itself into official state terrorism.

Suárez calls out the Orwellian newsspeak that statehood seemingly confers on acts of terrorism by contrasting the reaction of world opinion to Deir Yassin in April 1948 with the bloodier mass murder that occurred in the village of al-Dawayima in October 1948 after Israel had declared statehood.

That massacre, estimated at 145 people by the village mukhtar (chief), was regarded largely “as a military operation” at the time, according to Suárez, although recent scholarship has more accurately described it as an example of state terrorism.

Suárez devotes considerable attention to Zionist efforts to thwart Holocaust survivors from immigrating to countries other than Palestine and the kidnapping of young Jewish survivors from foster homes in Europe and their transfer to Palestine. In this, he relies heavily on Yosef Grodzinsky’s groundbreaking In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II (2004).

Suárez also recounts the false-flag terrorism in Egypt designed to win US support for Israel. Famous at the time, but largely forgotten since, Israel’s Unit 131 carried out terrorist bombings against civilian targets in Alexandria and Cairo, mainly cinemas frequented by US and British citizens, in what a Central Intelligence Agency bulletin, declassified in 2005, described as a bungled false-flag operation.

He also includes the shameful blaming of Holocaust survivors by Israeli and Zionist officials for acts of collective punishment carried out in secret by Israeli military forces, such as the massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953, led by Unit 101 under the command of Ariel Sharon.

State of Terror is a comprehensive guide to Zionist and Israeli state terrorism and one that sheds valuable light on today’s situation.

As Suárez concludes: “Terrorism … is the only means through which an indigenous population can be subjugated, dehumanized and displaced. This, stripped of all baggage, is the reality of today’s Israel-Palestine ‘conflict.’”

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is active with the Occupation-Free Portland campaign.

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Comments

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tom hall replied on

How interesting to learn that Arthur Balfour, so venerated for issuing the proclamation that bears his name, found Jewish refugees such a source of concern that he advocated banning them from entry to Britain, and referred to their potential presence as an "undoubted evil". Antisemitism and Zionism, then as now, were expedient allies.

Suarez' book will certainly contribute to a better understanding of the roots of the Zionist state. I hope sales are robust.

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Eric replied on

"Suárez makes the dramatic claim that 'most victims' of the targeted assassinations carried out by Zionist paramilitaries in Mandate Palestine were Jews...
"State of Terror asserts that most acts of terrorism were directed at Palestinian Arab civilians."

If these statements aren't contradictory, I hope someone will explain why.

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tom hall replied on

The reviewer appears to refer to two distinct periods, in the first instance that of the Mandate, while in the second he's discussing the Nakba and the formation of the Jewish State. In addition, the targeted assassinations were directed against uncooperative Jews during the phase of Zionist consolidation- 1930s and 40s. That's one form of terrorism, if you will. Given the Zionist doctrine of separation, it would have been tactically difficult to carry out this sort of attack on Palestinian leaders. The colonists didn't have the necessary proximity, access or reliable information. On the other hand, wholesale slaughter of Palestinian villages is a feature of the actual state-building process, which depended on mass expulsion of the indigenous population. So basically, we're seeing two successive phases of Zionist terrorism. The choice of victim reflects stages in a process.

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Thomas Suárez replied on

Hello Eric, just to clarify, most victims of Zionist assassination --- that is, targeted murder --- were Jews. Most victims of non-specific terror attacks --- bombing markets, buses, and the like, targeting a "group" but not a specific individual --- were Palestinians. I hope that clears up the apparent contradiction.

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Dave Brokenshire replied on

Suarez makes a distinction between targeted assassinations and indiscriminate acts of terrorism, where the identities of the victims are of necessity random. With most of the former, the victims were Jews who stood in the way of the terrorists goals, or whose killing would create the kind of outrage that would further those goals. Not surprisingly, relatively few Palestinian Arab civilians fell into those categories.

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Peter Loeb replied on

Ilan Pappe called Thomas Suarez' book a "tour de force".
A careful reading STATE OF TERROR is an absolute requirement
for everyone interested in Palestine. Why has it taken so
long for EI to review this essential work?!!

The thanks should not go to Rod Such but to Mr. Suarez for
his landmark work.

----Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

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Peter Loeb replied on

Rod Such writes:

"At its best, 'State of Terror' is an insightful meditation on
history."

I strongly dissent. It is no "meditation" whatsoever. It IS
history.

Such, like so many of us, seems to hesitate aghast at the
horror of the reality, of how we have all been manipulated
by blood, by hate. It is raw. It is no" meditation" at
all. It says so much about where we Jews have indeed
come from, not what Israel and other Zionists want us to
believe.

"Know thyself!"

----Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

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Rod Such replied on

I think it's clear that I was referring to Suarez's analytical insights, rather than his narrative. Those insights are the best part of the book in my opinion.

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Peter Loeb replied on

At least a discussion of Thomas Suarez' THE TERROR STATE".

This work deserves a "robust sale" indeed and, more than
that, a close scrutiny. (We are dealing in understanding, not
in sales!)

In particular, all commentators who touch on Palestine/Israel
in the future should be conversant with the facts and
issues raised brought out inh this work.

Thanks to all the commenters and Mr. Such.

-----Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA