A look at the King David Hotel Bombing on July 22, 1946
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert looks straight at the camera and says without a touch of irony that Israel is "fighting terrrism" in Lebanon. Two days ago marked the 60th anniversary of the terrrist attack on King David Hotel at Jerusalem carried out by the members of the Irgun Gang whosr leader Menachem Begin rose to be the Prime Minister of Israel. In fact the father of Israel's present Foreign Minister Ms Tzipi Livni was one of the chief members of this gang whose activities Washingto DC will today condemn as "terrorism". I must say that Israeli society is highly ambivalent about the historical memory associated with this act and so my analysis should not be taken as a simple yesterdays terrorists are todays freedomfighters. I think the history of modern Israel if far more complex than a direct equation that sets a terrorist past of Israeli political establishment against the terrorist present of the Hizbullah. But history cannot be erased at will no matter how inconvieniet the facts of the past are. This sentence draws attention to a fundamental dichotomy that charecterises Israeli society today of which Amos has written so evocatively about: How doe contemporary Israel choose to remember its past. And today when Israeli jets are killing civilians in Beirut, how does it define a terrorist.
Palestine was mandated to the British after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and Jerusalem was the capital of the mandated territory of Palestine. On July 22, 1946 a bomb went off in King David Hotel killing 90 civilians and brought Palestine essentially within the realisation of Jewish extremist groups like the Irgun Gang. For the first time in the political history of the modern middle east the efficacy of terrorism as a political weapon was demonstrated. This does not mean that Hizbullah terrorism is justified. I am only drawing attention to the fact that PLO and other organisations learnt from the Irgun Gang experience that spectacular acts of terrorism help garner political rewards and it is this fact that makes the present fight against terrorism suspect in the eyes of the world.
Ofcourse the Irgun Gang and its members became legitimate members of the Israeli political establishment and Israeli democracy does provided a framework for such a transformation. In fact the world has a lot to learn from the history of the Jewish struggle in Palestine and we can even argue quite correctly that in 1949 it was the Arabs states that betrayed the Palestenian cause. This bring me back to the question with which I began: What is Terrorism in the context of the Middle East? Is not the Hizbullah and Hamas following the footsteps of the Irgun Gang.