How Israel was founded on terrorism: Part I

By Seraj Assi

On July 22, 1946, a group of operatives from the Zionist group Irgun, disguised as Arab waiters, delivered milk cans filled with 500 pounds of high explosives to the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The 'milkmen' set a timer to detonate the explosives thirty minutes later.

Menachem Begin, the group's leader who later became Israel's prime minister and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, later boasted: "Twelve thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven… suddenly the whole town seemed to shudder."

The explosives, which detonated beneath a public café at the peak of the lunch hour, shattered the entire wing from the hotel and collapsed its six stories into the basement. Nearly 100 people were killed and 100 more wounded in the explosions, including Britons, Arabs, and Jews.

While they were met with global outrage, the attacks did achieve their goal. The following year, the British Mandate withdrew from Palestine, and shortly after, Israel declared independence.

Following the British withdrawal, the Zionist groups directed their terrorist tactics against Palestinians, which included countless bombings of civilian targets.

On December 12, 1947, the Irgun parked a car bomb opposite the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, killing 20 people. On 4 January 1948, the Lehi detonated a lorry bomb near Jaffa's Town Hall, killing 15 Palestinians and wounding 100 others. On January 6, the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 24 civilians. The next day, Irgun members in a stolen police van rolled a barrel bomb into a large group of Palestinian civilians waiting for a bus near the Jaffa Gate, killing 20 of them. On February 18, a bomb planted but the Irgun detonated in the Ramla market, killing scores of Arab residents. On 28 February, the Palmach launched a bombing attack on a garage in Haifa, killing 30 Palestinians.

Come the spring, the Zionist forces would take their terrorist tactics to a large-scale, systemic, and all-out ethnic cleansing campaign, which included collective executions, mass expulsion, and wholesome destruction of Palestinian towns and villages.

On April 9, 1948, about 130 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi groups stormed into Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem, and massacred over 200 Palestinians, men, women and children. An Israeli soldier later described the Zionist tactic bluntly: “We're putting in explosives and running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there anymore."

On May 23, the IDF'S Alexandroni Brigade rounded over 200 Palestinian villagers in Tantura near Haifa, a village of roughly 1500 residents, and massacred them in cold blood. A Jewish eyewitness later recalled. "It was one of the most shameful battles fought by the IDF. . . they did not leave anyone alive."

On July 11, in what is known as the Lydda Death March, Israeli forces stormed into the Arab town of Lydda, where they massacred hundreds of residents, and expelled some 70,000 Palestinians. During Operation Danny, as Israel dubbed the massacre, 89th Israeli battalion mounted on armored cars and jeeps and raided the city "spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved," to cite Israeli historian Benny Morris.

On October 29, the IDF's 89th Commando Battalion, which was composed of former Irgun and Lehi forces and commanded by Moshe Dayan, invaded the Palestinian village of Dawayima, killed hundreds of civilians, and raped dozens of women. In a horrifying testimony by an Israeli soldier eyewitness: "There was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs, including women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. There was not a house without dead."

Describing the Zionist tactics in Dawayima, the former soldier added: "In the town were left male and female Arabs, who were put into houses and were then locked in without receiving food or drink. Later explosive engineers came to blow up the houses."

In one horrifying episode, "One soldier boasted that he raped an Arab woman and afterwards shot her. An Arab woman with a days-old infant was used for cleaning the back yard where the soldiers eat. She serviced them for a day or two, after which they shot her and the infant."

On October 30, the IDF'S 7th Brigade, under the command of General Moshe Carmel, stormed into the northern Palestinian village of Saliha and butchered 100 Palestinians. On October 31, the Zionist forces executed more than eighty villagers in the nearby village of Hula.

In the nearly 70 massacres committed by Israel in 1948, hardly a Palestinian village was spared. These massacres and mass expulsions culminated in what Palestinians call the Nakba. The Zionist atrocities sent shock waves across Palestinian towns and villages, and left an indelible mark of horror in Palestinian memory. Shocked and terrorized, Palestinians had no resistance left in them. By the end of 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians had been killed, and nearly one million expelled.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was underway.