The birth of Israel
Long, long road
What successive generations learned about terrorism in the Middle East
Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947. By Bruce Hoffman. Knopf; 618 pages; $35.
ISRAEL’S creation has many causes, but among the most powerful, argues Bruce Hoffman, is terrorism. For a decade, the anonymous soldiers of the Jewish underground waged a terror campaign to establish a state, targeting first Arabs, then British forces, then Arabs again.
Mr Hoffman has worked for the CIA and American forces in Baghdad, and he established the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University. Although he dismisses some Arab militants of the age as atavistic marauders out to “kill as many Jews as possible”, he maintains a thinly veiled admiration for the Jewish irregulars whose plan to upset Britain’s 25-year rule of Palestine he describes as “unequivocally triumphant” and “brilliant in its simplicity”. “Terrorism,” Mr Hoffman writes, “can, in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics, succeed in attaining at least some of its practitioners’ fundamental aims.”
In its infancy, the Jewish Yishuv, or settlement, cheered as Britain assiduously set about fulfilling Lord Balfour’s promise to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As the Yishuv’s power grew, however, Britain’s presence became more of a hindrance than a help to its aspirations for statehood. By 1945, its prime military arm, the Haganah (or “Defence”), was a 40,000-strong force—the most powerful in the Middle East after the British army. The Haganah was against using force to end British rule, but two of its offshoots, the Irgun and Lehi, had no such qualms.
Some of the Irgun’s 3,500 men were battle-hardened, having fought together with the British army during the second world war. Others, like its leader, Menachem Begin, were officers with the exiled Polish army. In 1944 they set about fighting Britain’s occupation of Palestine much as they had the Nazi occupation of Europe.
By 1947 they had killed almost 300 people, many of them civilians, invented the letter bomb and used milk churns to blow up Britain’s seat of government in Palestine, the King David Hotel. Over 90 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack, which ranked as the world’s bloodiest terrorist atrocity for four decades. The Irgun targeted British symbols to puncture its prestige, while the smaller Lehi targeted its personnel.
The British government, fresh from liberating Jews from Nazi death camps, was stunned to find so many now turning on it, wanting to hasten the collapse of Britain’s Middle East rule. Using declassified documents, Mr Hoffman explains how the Haganah’s crack force, the Palmach, bankrolled the Irgun and seconded 460 men to its ranks. For a time, they formally joined forces in a wider front, bombing railways and approving the attack on the King David Hotel. While Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation, was entertaining British high commissioners for tea, his nephew and subsequent defence minister, Ezer Weizman, was plotting to blow up Evelyn Barker, commander of Britain’s forces in Palestine.
Exhausted by world war, Britain lacked the stomach, money and will to fight. Its 100,000 troops in Palestine turned downtown Jerusalem into a fortified camp ringed with barbed wire, imposed curfews, checked pass papers and engaged in crass anti-Semitism. But they were hamstrung by America’s support for Zionism. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, helped fundraise for the Irgun, sponsoring a charity run of a Broadway play. It starred Marlon Brando, who celebrated the “new Jewish language” of bullets not prayers.
Derided by Congress, Britain flinched from the methods it had used on an earlier Arab revolt. The Royal Air Force dropped bombs on Arabs not Jews, and the army set about trying to demolish much of old Arab Jaffa with gelignite, but they spared Jewish houses until a few months shy of ceding Britain’s mandate. (Mr Hoffman says the British did not hit Arabs hard enough, and was too tough on Jews.)
Somewhat oddly, Mr Hoffman stops his account in August 1947, shortly before Begin’s militants went back to bombing Arabs in their cinemas and cafés, and Lehi killed Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who had saved Jews from Nazi death camps and who, at the time, was the UN’s envoy to Palestine.
Disappointingly, also, the book lacks a concluding chapter analysing the terrorists’ legacy. Mr Hoffman notes that Begin and Lehi’s leader, Yitzhak Yezernitzky (later Shamir), became Israeli prime ministers. And he makes passing reference to the Irgun’s operations chief, whose daughter, Tzipi Livni, became foreign minister. But he is circumspect on what practices as well as personnel survived the passage to statehood. (In 1946, Lehi assassins dressed up as tennis players to kill a British detective, Thomas Martin, a disguise later adopted to kill a Hamas operative in Dubai.)
On the Haganah’s broader influence, Mr Hoffman notes that al-Qaeda’s Afghan library had a copy of Begin’s “The Revolt”, but does not ask why so many Palestinian prisoners take Israeli university courses on how Jews established their state. Much of what they do, including building terror tunnels, bombing transport nodes, lobbing mortars at residential neighbourhoods and burying arms dumps in places of worship, has antecedents in Jewish militancy. Israel knows Palestinian methods and it has an array of anti-terror legislation which, had Britain responded similarly, might have aborted the future state.
ISRAEL’S creation has many causes, but among the most powerful, argues Bruce Hoffman, is terrorism. For a decade, the anonymous soldiers of the Jewish underground waged a terror campaign to establish a state, targeting first Arabs, then British forces, then Arabs again.
Mr Hoffman has worked for the CIA and American forces in Baghdad, and he established the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University. Although he dismisses some Arab militants of the age as atavistic marauders out to “kill as many Jews as possible”, he maintains a thinly veiled admiration for the Jewish irregulars whose plan to upset Britain’s 25-year rule of Palestine he describes as “unequivocally triumphant” and “brilliant in its simplicity”. “Terrorism,” Mr Hoffman writes, “can, in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics, succeed in attaining at least some of its practitioners’ fundamental aims.”
In its infancy, the Jewish Yishuv, or settlement, cheered as Britain assiduously set about fulfilling Lord Balfour’s promise to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As the Yishuv’s power grew, however, Britain’s presence became more of a hindrance than a help to its aspirations for statehood. By 1945, its prime military arm, the Haganah (or “Defence”), was a 40,000-strong force—the most powerful in the Middle East after the British army. The Haganah was against using force to end British rule, but two of its offshoots, the Irgun and Lehi, had no such qualms.
Some of the Irgun’s 3,500 men were battle-hardened, having fought together with the British army during the second world war. Others, like its leader, Menachem Begin, were officers with the exiled Polish army. In 1944 they set about fighting Britain’s occupation of Palestine much as they had the Nazi occupation of Europe.
By 1947 they had killed almost 300 people, many of them civilians, invented the letter bomb and used milk churns to blow up Britain’s seat of government in Palestine, the King David Hotel. Over 90 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack, which ranked as the world’s bloodiest terrorist atrocity for four decades. The Irgun targeted British symbols to puncture its prestige, while the smaller Lehi targeted its personnel.
The British government, fresh from liberating Jews from Nazi death camps, was stunned to find so many now turning on it, wanting to hasten the collapse of Britain’s Middle East rule. Using declassified documents, Mr Hoffman explains how the Haganah’s crack force, the Palmach, bankrolled the Irgun and seconded 460 men to its ranks. For a time, they formally joined forces in a wider front, bombing railways and approving the attack on the King David Hotel. While Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation, was entertaining British high commissioners for tea, his nephew and subsequent defence minister, Ezer Weizman, was plotting to blow up Evelyn Barker, commander of Britain’s forces in Palestine.
Exhausted by world war, Britain lacked the stomach, money and will to fight. Its 100,000 troops in Palestine turned downtown Jerusalem into a fortified camp ringed with barbed wire, imposed curfews, checked pass papers and engaged in crass anti-Semitism. But they were hamstrung by America’s support for Zionism. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, helped fundraise for the Irgun, sponsoring a charity run of a Broadway play. It starred Marlon Brando, who celebrated the “new Jewish language” of bullets not prayers.
Derided by Congress, Britain flinched from the methods it had used on an earlier Arab revolt. The Royal Air Force dropped bombs on Arabs not Jews, and the army set about trying to demolish much of old Arab Jaffa with gelignite, but they spared Jewish houses until a few months shy of ceding Britain’s mandate. (Mr Hoffman says the British did not hit Arabs hard enough, and was too tough on Jews.)
Somewhat oddly, Mr Hoffman stops his account in August 1947, shortly before Begin’s militants went back to bombing Arabs in their cinemas and cafés, and Lehi killed Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who had saved Jews from Nazi death camps and who, at the time, was the UN’s envoy to Palestine.
Disappointingly, also, the book lacks a concluding chapter analysing the terrorists’ legacy. Mr Hoffman notes that Begin and Lehi’s leader, Yitzhak Yezernitzky (later Shamir), became Israeli prime ministers. And he makes passing reference to the Irgun’s operations chief, whose daughter, Tzipi Livni, became foreign minister. But he is circumspect on what practices as well as personnel survived the passage to statehood. (In 1946, Lehi assassins dressed up as tennis players to kill a British detective, Thomas Martin, a disguise later adopted to kill a Hamas operative in Dubai.)
On the Haganah’s broader influence, Mr Hoffman notes that al-Qaeda’s Afghan library had a copy of Begin’s “The Revolt”, but does not ask why so many Palestinian prisoners take Israeli university courses on how Jews established their state. Much of what they do, including building terror tunnels, bombing transport nodes, lobbing mortars at residential neighbourhoods and burying arms dumps in places of worship, has antecedents in Jewish militancy. Israel knows Palestinian methods and it has an array of anti-terror legislation which, had Britain responded similarly, might have aborted the future state.
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