This is a cross-post from The Zionist
Middle East monitor recently published an article by Asa Winstanley entitled; “The Zionist Lehi was the last self-proclaimed terrorist group”.
The title is paraphrased from a line in a Haaretz article he links to discussing recent bits of information emanating from recently declassified files from MI5 relating to the period between the end of World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel. Specifically the files relate to bombing attacks made by the dissident group Lehi in the British mainland.
There’s no secret about the fact that the two dissident movements Lehi and the Irgun didn’t limit their operations against the British to Palestine but sought also to hit targets in the United Kingdom. One compelling historical work that deals with this is Major Farran’s Hat by the late David Cesarani. Another is Anonymous Soldiers by Bruce Hoffman. Both are excellent works of history on the subject of mandate era Palestine, Hoffman’s work in particular analyses the history of the Irgun and Lehi clearly and without hyperbole.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Winstanley’s piece. With 4,400 shares on Facebook it seems worthy of dissection. Winstanley writes;
The most right-wing of the armed Zionist groups then active in Palestine, Lehi was a splinter group from the Irgun, whose leader in the late 1940s was Menachem Begin. He went on to become Israel’s Prime Minister and invade Lebanon in 1982, killing more than 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people; the infamous Sabra and Shatilla massacre took place on his watch.
Lehi and Irgun
Certainly Lehi was a splinter group from the Irgun, as the Irgun was a splinter group from the Haganah. The Haganah was the pre-state of Israel militia which later formed the nucleus of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). As individuals within the Haganah disagreed with their policy of restraint (haflagah) against the British they fractured away. First Irgun broke away and then Lehi broke away from the Irgun.
It is also true that Begin eventually became Prime Minister of Israel.
Menachem Begin inspecting Irgun troops
Winstanley jumps from events of the 1940s to 1982 and back again. He has to because Begin wasn’t elected Prime Minister of Israel until 1977. Unlike some paramilitary or terrorist leaders who immediately took on the mantle of government it took 28 years for Begin to be considered credible for the role of Prime Minister by the Israeli public.
Arguably Begin’s greatest achievements as Prime Minister aren’t mentioned by Winstanley. Namely making peace with Israel’s most implacable foe Egypt and bombing the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. To make peace with Egypt he removed 14 Jewish settlements from the Sinai Desert.
Menachem Begin with President Sadat of Egypt
Regarding the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 the late Martin Gilbert wrote in Israel a History (p504);
“The initial cause of the war — the growth of PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) bases in Southern Lebanon was thought by many to have called for some form of response. Using Russian made Katyusha rockets, the PLO was systematically lobbing shells into the settlements of the Upper Galilee, forcing the residents to spend many nights in deep shelters. Groups of PLO fighters also repeatedly crossed the border into Israel to carry out attacks on property and civilians”
It’s worth asking how many Iraqi or Afghan missiles landed in Britain or the USA when assessing Israel’s response. The Russians invaded Georgia almost entirely without provocation and are are still in Syria propping up the Assad regime as is Iran. Turkey has invaded Syria to attack the Kurds. None of whom received the kind of provocation Israel was subjected to in the years leading up to 1982.
Lehi Overtures to Nazi Germany
Winstanley writes;
Lehi was so fanatically right-wing that at one point it even approached Hitler’s Nazi Germany in order to reach some sort of agreement, and to fight for Hitler against the British in Palestine.
It is true that a Lehi representative approached both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for support in attacking the British in Mandate Palestine. Lehi twice attempted to communicate with Nazi Germany and was successful on one occasion. Of these overtures, (brainchild of Avraham Stern head and founder of the Lehi until killed by British CID in 1941) Hoffman says in Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle For Israel 1917–1947;
“Its entire premise was based on the fatally erroneous assumption that for Hitler the crux of the Jewish problem in Europe could be solved by evacuation, not annihilation.”
Hoffman adds that in 1941 when these overtures were made (ibid);
“The group (Lehi) contracted from a high of fewer than a hundred men to only a few dozen.”
Furthermore while Winstanley correctly says that;
“One of Lehi’s leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, would also later become Israeli Prime Minister.”
He again forgets to add that it took Shamir until 1983 to take the reins of power in Israel. A new generation of Israelis voted him into office.
It’s also worth pointing out just how much effort the Jews in Palestine went to to stamp out the Jewish dissident organisations. Norman Rose explains in his book A Senseless and Squalid War Voices from Palestine 1945–48;
“The Jewish Agency Executive instructed the Haganah to launch an open season, the so called ‘saison’, against the extremist groups, a controversial decision challenged by some Haganah commanders. But a majority of the elected leaders of the Yishuv (Jews in Palestine) favoured it, a ‘national decision’ in the words of one reluctant Haganah commander.”
He adds that dozens of Irgun and Lehi activists were picked up by the Hagana and that a list of 700 names of Irgun and Lehi members was handed over to the British. The ‘Saison’ happened just after the assassination of Lord Moyne in November 1944 and shows the level outrage felt by the Yishuv at the killing. In Israel’s Secret Wars by Benny Morris and Ian Black, they say that;
“Considering the importance of the coming struggle with the Arabs, a disproportionate amount of the Shai’s (Haganah’s intelligence arm) manpower and energy was still devoted to keeping tabs on Jewish dissidents”
The Bombing of the King David Hotel
Rubble of the King David Hotel after Irgun bombing
The Irgun is probably best known for blowing up the British administrative headquarters for Palestine located in the Southern wing of the King David Hotel. This is an attack Winstanley mentions in his article. What he doesn’t discuss is the reaction of the Yishuv to the bombing that killed just shy of 100 people, including 17 Jews. Gilbert writes in Israel a History (page 135);
“The Jewish Agency denounced what it called ‘the dastardly crime’ perpetrated by ‘a gang of desperadoes’, and called on the Jews of Palestine ‘to rise up against these abominable outrages’. The Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Ben Zion Uziel, spoke of his ‘loathing and abhorrence’ at the crime. The Jewish Community Council warned of the ‘abyss opening before our feet by irresponsible men’ who had carried out a ‘loathsome act’.”
He adds;
In the afternoon of July 23 all work and traffic stopped in Jewish Jerusalem at three O’clock, in mourning for the dead.”
I’m unaware of Winstanley ever referencing Palestinian terrorism let alone criticising it. In this respect he remains in line with the Palestinian Authority who gives terrorists held in Israeli jails a monthly salary.
Deir Yassin
Winstanley writes about the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin;
Another fact that tends to be neglected by history is that the supposedly left-wing, labour-oriented armed Zionist groups also participated in the Deir Yassin massacre, by providing artillery support. Deir Yassin and the Nakba itself were by no means aberrations; they were planned deliberately as a long thought-out strategy to “empty the land” of its people. How else could a “Jewish state” be formed in Palestine, a land which did not have a Jewish majority?
Deir Yassin was the site of a battle mainly between Irgun and Lehi units on the one side and Arab irregulars on the other. At the end of the battle the victorious Lehi and Irgun fighters murdered the villagers who were left. It’s worth noting that Israeli historian Benny Morris writes in his book Righteous Victims that the Haganah provided cover from machine guns (though he says nothing of artillery support).
Morris puts the number of murdered Palestinians at 100–110 and the number of Irgun and Lehi casualties at five dead and thirty wounded. Nevertheless it’s important to note that they did massacre villagers in the wake of the battle, Morris writes;
“The Jewish Agency and the Haganah leadership immediately condemned the massacre.”
This is more even than Winstanley, writing 70 years later can do of Palestinian massacres against Jews. He tries to write them out of history altogether. Again from Morris;
“The affair had an immediate and brutal aftermath. On April 13, Arab militiamen from Jerusalem and surrounding villages attacked a ten-vehicle convoy of mostly unarmed lecturers, nurses, and doctors on their way to the Hadassah Hospital-Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus. (The convoy was also carrying two IZL fighters who had been wounded at Deir Yassin.) Four vehicles, including two packed buses, were trapped. For hours the British refrained from intervening and warned the Haganah not to do so. Three Palmah armored cars arrived on the scene but were overwhelmed by the ambushers. The shooting continued for more than six hours, the Arabs eventually dousing the armored buses with gasoline and setting them alight. When the British finally intervened, more than seventy Jews had died.”
When it comes to Palestinian massacres against Jews Winstanley seems to be entirely ignorant. Of these there were plenty during Israel’s War of Independence.
Conspiracy Theories
Winstanley adds that what is now called the Nakba was planned in advance by the nascent Israeli state while asking rhetorically;
How else could a “Jewish state” be formed in Palestine, a land which did not have a Jewish majority?
In fact the Jewish majority was always a potential majority. Once there was a state for Jews to come to it was clear to the Zionist leaders that there would be a majority Jewish state. This is why Palestinian leadership was always so opposed to Jewish immigration and the Jewish leadership always pushing for it.
In fact there was great debate within the Zionist movement about what a Jewish state might look like. It’s also worth noting that there wasn’t even a Zionist call for a Jewish state until the Biltmore programme was adopted in 1942. Even then this happened only when it was clear what was happening to European Jewry and how it had suffered for not having a place for European Jews to flee to. Michael Bar Zohar writing in his biography of Ben Gurion says that the Biltmore Program was the first time Jews actually called for a state;
For the first time, after decades of evasiveness, Zionism proclaimed its “final objective”, a Jewish state in Palestine.
The backdrop to this is the attempts throughout the 1930s by David Ben-Gurion and others to negotiate with representatives of the Mufti of Jerusalem. Plans for a bi-national state as well as a Jewish state which would be just one part of a grander Arab federation of states in the Middle East were floated and dismissed by the Arabs.
Bar Zohar writes that Musa Alami Secretary General of the Palestine Mandate and a confidante of the Mufti met with Ben Gurion several times in 1934. Here’s what Alami related of his conversation with the Mufti about Ben Gurion’s ideas for what the future Jewish state might look like;
“The contents of our talks were a bombshell for the mufti. He never guessed that there are Jews who genuinely want understanding and agreement with the Arabs. As for himself, he is not opposed [to an understanding] as long as it is possible to guarantee the religious, economic, and political rights of the Palestinian Arabs. Of course, he still has to consider the plan . . . For the time being, he cannot take any steps.”
In the end, Bar Zohar writes, it was Ichsan Bey al-Jabri and Shakib Arslan, leaders of the Syrian–Palestinian Istiklal Party who leaked details of Ben Gurion’s efforts to the press, ironically killing the opportunity for a binational state in Palestine in the process;
““We considered it our duty to ask him if what he was saying was in earnest, for we could not prevent ourselves from smiling on hearing such nonsense.” They reiterated that his proposal contained. . . absolutely nothing to induce one and a half million Arabs to despair and abandon their homeland . . . and to move to the desert. When someone has ideas that are so arrogant and presumptuous, he should not assume that he will receive his adversary’s agreement. He would do better to go on, supported by British bayonets, and establish a Jewish state.”
This became a self fulfilling prophecy though without the help of the British. In fact the British officered Arab Legion played the greatest threat to the establishment of the state of Israel, while the Royal Navy intercepted Holocaust survivors trying to make it to Palestine. The establishment of the Jewish state happened because of the sacrifices made by Jews and perhaps arms supplied by the Czechs (the only time the USSR was on the winning side of a Middle Eastern war in the past 100 years).
In the same book Bar Zohar adds;
“Ben-Gurion reiterated endlessly that their (Arab) right to the country was no less than that of theJews. He was fiercely opposed to expropriating Arab property or driving Arabs off their lands. “Under no circumstances is it conceivable to drive out the country’s present inhabitants. That is not the Zionist objective.””
Jewish Terrorism in London
Winstanley writes;
The lesser-known London bombing campaign was able to be kept partly secret because it mostly failed, but reading the newly-released files it is striking how the most extreme Zionist terrorists got off so lightly. One of the files is a press clipping of an interview with one of the Lehi bombers; Betty Knouth was sentenced by the Belgians to just one year in prison, despite being caught red-handed with letter bombs addressed to British officials.
It’s difficult to know what Winstanley means by “kept partly secret”. This aspect of history is well known now and was reported on by the press at the time.
In any case according to the official history of MI5; Defence of the Realm The Authorized History of MI5 (published in 2012) Jewish leaders made sure the British authorities were well aware of who the terrorists in their midst were. Here is the relevant section;
Winstanley questions how it’s possible that Betty Knouth, who had placed a bomb in the British colonial club in London, got off with such a light sentence in a Belgian court (she and an accomplice were arrested in Belgium a few months later after successfully slipping out of the UK).
Knouth herself served in the French resistance fighting the Nazis from the age of 14. Her mother was murdered by French collaborators with the Nazis, her parents had formed their own resistance group in France and Knouth had been wounded by a mine during the war. By the age of 18 she’d already written her memoirs.
At the time the Lehi operatives were arrested and tried Holocaust survivors were still trapped in Death Camps in Europe, having nowhere else to go. The struggle for a Jewish homeland was ongoing before the international media. The British were locking Jews up in new concentration camps in Palestine and in Cyprus. Perhaps these facts influenced the jury in her case.
All that’s left is to thank Winstanley for raising such an interesting period in the history of the Jewish people for discussion. Though one can only hope that next time he does he uses accurate historical data to present his argument.
