Terrorists – Theirs and Ours
(title of a book by Eqbal Ahmad (1933-1999), a Pakistani political scientist known for his anti-war activism, who influenced prominent Palestinian-American academic Edward Said)
The militants entered the village at night and planted explosives against some of the houses, their commander wrote that “We left behind 35 demolished houses and 60–80 dead bodies”. [1]
The village was Sa’sa’ in the very north of Palestine, the commander was Moshe Kelman, head of Palmach, a unit of Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary organization, the date was the 15th of February 1948, three quarters of a century before the latest Hamas attack.
The immensely bloody history of Palestine did not start on 7 October 2023
Combining various sources I count that at least 36 massacres occurred in Palestine just in the year 1948 by the three paramilitary Zionist organizations (Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi) and by the nascent IDF, leaving at least 2800 villagers dead and 418 Palestinian villages destroyed or depopulated.
To this we must add major massacres, in Qibya (October 1953, 69 Palestinians dead), Kafr Qasim (October 1956, 49), Khan Yunis (November 1956, 275 to 400), Sabra and Shatila (September 1982, 3000), Al-Aqsa (October 1990, 17), Ibrahimi Mosque (February 1994, 29), Jenin Refugee Camp (April 2002, 54).
The immensely bloody history of Palestine did not start on 7 October 2023 as Western governments and media endeavor to portray it ever since Hamas’ latest attack.
In February 1947 Menachem Begin, the leader of Irgun, was WANTED with a bounty of up to 100,000 British pounds and the words: TERRORIST, REWARD – among other deeds, Irgun had blown up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in July 1946, killing dozens of members of the British colonial administration, “one of the most lethal terrorist attacks of the 20th century” [2].
Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of Lehi, was on the same WANTED poster – in April 1948, Lehi in conjunction with Irgun, committed the infamous Deir Yassin massacre.
Excerpt from an open letter to The New York Times by over twenty prominent Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, protesting Begin’s visit to New York City in December 1948
“On April 9, terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village [Deir Yassin], which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem”. [3]
Shamir was also the one who planned in 1944 the assassination of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, and in 1948 oversaw the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, ironically a Swedish diplomat who had negotiated the release of Danish Jews from the Nazi German Theresienstadt concentration camp, and was thereafter the United Nations Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–1948.
In 1977, Menachem Begin became Prime Minister of Israel
In 1983, Yitzhak Shamir became Prime Minister of Israel
Terrorist is any opponent to a forcefully established order … until he/she becomes the established order.
In the 1940s, Begin and Shamir were on the British wanted list
In the 1960s, England started sending arms to the Israeli government
Excerpt from the 8 January 2025 report “UK arms exports to Israel” by Louisa Brooke-Holland for the English House of Commons library to support the work of Members of the Parliament
“During the mid-to-late 1960s there was considerable discussion within the UK Government about the sale of tanks to Israel. At the time, the UK had adopted a policy of seeking to balance arms sales to Israel and Arab states, limit the sale of offensive weapons and to not provide one side with more sophisticated weapons than the other.” [4]
Terrorist one day, partner the other.
Fascism and expansionism
Worse, in its fight against British occupation during WW2, and at the time of the Jewish Holocaust, the Zionist paramilitary organization Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on “nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance” [5].
With Fascism comes racism and expansionism.
In The Settlers, a 2016 documentary by Israeli film director Shimon Dotan, an illegal West Bank settler describes his dream for a Greater Israel that will extend to the Euphrates river in Irak, including Jordan and parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia [6].
Lehi attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on “nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance”
Last year, former Israeli military officer and politician Avi Lipkin said: “… eventually, our borders will extend from Lebanon to the Great Desert, which is Saudi Arabia, and then from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. And who is on the other side of the Euphrates? The Kurds! And the Kurds are friends. So we have Mediterranean behind us, the Kurds in front of us, Lebanon, which really needs the umbrella of protection of Israel, and then we’re gonna take, I believe we’re gonna take Mecca, Medina and Mount Sinai, and to purify those places” [7].
In The Settlers, a 2025 documentary by Louis Theroux, an Award-winning, Oxford-educated British-NorthAmerican documentarian, Rabbi Dov Lior was telling how they had to expel the “camel riders” from Gaza and Lebanon [8] – in 2013, ten years before Hamas’ latest attack, he had said about the Palestinians on the West Bank: “I’m not saying we shouldn’t help them from a humanitarian point of view. If need be, we’ll build stables for their camels. In Saudi Arabia. Not here” [9].
Incidentally, Irfan Raja, a British-Pakistani academic teaching in Pakistan draws our attention to his country possibly being the next target as Israeli and U.S. jets recently violated with impunity their western neighbor’s airspace, Iran, and his eastern neighbor, India, being ruled by hardline anti-Muslim fascists – to a question back in 2011 “What is the biggest problem facing the next generation, and what should we do to solve it today?”, Netanyahu himself had replied, “So the greatest mission that we have is to prevent a militant Islamic regime from meeting up with nuclear weapons or from nuclear weapons meeting up with the militant Islamic regime, the first is called Iran, the second is called Pakistan, or more specifically, a Taliban takeover of Pakistan”… that definition could be very flexibly applied like they did with the lack of WMD in Irak or of nuclear threat from Iran – and someday some settler may say, Our land extends to the Indus River. After all, did Alexander the Great not reach it, coming from further away than the Middle East? [10]
(According to the logic that the land was given to the Jews from old times, it would imply expelling – or exterminating – all Europeans from the United States of North America and returning the territory to the American Indians.)
In his recent documentary, Louis Theroux also extensively interviewed Daniella Weiss, the godmother of the settler movement, who said that illegal settlers help the Israeli government, which cannot legally/openly occupy the West Bank, by doing the dirty work: settlers occupy, Israel first condemns, then ends up legalizing the new settlement.
“We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves. Um, even if you take Netanyahu now, he is very happy with what we do here and also about our plans to build Jewish communities in Gaza. He is happy about it, but he cannot say it. He says the opposite.” [11]
Towards the end of documentary, Daniella Weiss takes Theroux to the border with Gaza, and unveils their plan to colonize Gaza in the aftermath of the genocide.
This seems more plausible than Trump’s riviera fantasy, under the most extreme-right Israeli governments, with two major illegal settlers in it: National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister (also in the Defense ministry) Bezalel Smotrich.
They are now completing the ethnic cleansing which started in the mid-1940s, with the bombing of residential units, the starvation of the population, the blockade of humanitarian aid, a total attack on the medical system – see the recent documentary commissioned by the BBC, who then feared airing it, and passed it to Channel 4 [10], and the recent testimony at the UN Security Council of Feroze Sidhwa, a North American trauma surgeon having done two stints in Gaza hospitals – or what remained of them – in 2024 and 2025 [12].
Both attest that “the IDF has been systematically targeting Palestinian medics in all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals. The attacks, according to the United Nations, follow a set pattern. First, a hospital comes under bombardment, then it is besieged. After that, it is raided by tanks and bulldozers and its medical workers are detained. And then, once the hospital has essentially been rendered non-functional, the forces move on and repeat.” [13]
The West in Freefall
There are the Fascists and nothing can be done about them because the fundamental problem is their financial sponsors and arm suppliers, mostly the USofA (70% of aid), Germany (24%, #2, the guilt, with a tenfold increase in 2023, reaching €326.5 million), Italy (5.6%), England (secret), Canada (0,3%), and France (undisclosed), all more than accomplices and facilitators to the Palestinian genocide, real authors of the crimes against humanity through collaboration.
While the USofA sends about 4 billion US dollars a year to their protectorate, for a total of over 300 billion over the period 1946-2024 ($23 billion since October 2023), the English are much more secretive, their Royal Air Force bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia – actually a British Overseas Territory – being used to support Israel’s military actions – as we denounced it last year.
“In an unprecedented move, the UK Ministry of Defense is blocking all parliamentary inquiries about activities at RAF Akrotiri, its air base in Cyprus […] Moreover, the UK‘s suppression of information extends to advising British media against reporting on UK special forces’ activities related to Gaza. […] The British government’s decision to block parliamentary questions is highly unusual. Typically, government departments may refuse to answer specific questions for security reasons, but a blanket ban on all inquiries appears to be unprecedented.” [14]
Incidentally, this enormous Western military aid, as well as access to the U.S.’ latest technology, gave the Israelis total and immediate mastery of the Iranian airspace last month, in fact a gratuitous attack under the pretext of a threat of nuclear arms – as the Israelis have severely crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as they are in talks with the new Syrian leadership about a normalization agreement (the first since a 1974 ceasefire), they had eliminated the only real military threat: a land attack by Iran’s proxies. The Iranian military—particularly the Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards—is the only one capable of inflicting suffering on Israel—as it did on neighboring Iraq during the 1980-1988 war—but it is unable to do so as it has no border with Israel. Its air force, for its part, is largely obsolete.
As of Europe, ah, in 2013, ten years before the latest Hamas attack, Stéphane Hessel, a prominent French diplomat and militant, former prisoner in Buchenwald, and Véronique De Keyser, a Belgian politician and European deputy who observed the 2005 Palestinian presidential elections (*), lamented “la frilosité des institutions européennes, qui ont laissé se dégrader l’état de ce pays [Palestine], devenu une véritable tragédie humanitaire” [15].
Circumstances that over time led people to such desperate crimes to get rid of their occupiers, just like the attacks against New York’s World Trade Center – treat people like subhuman and they will behave like subhuman.
It is all logical, as Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) himself, the very famous Israeli military leader and politician, explained in 1956 on the occasion of the killing of a kibbutznik by Palestinians: “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us. Eight years have they sat in the refuge camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelled. Let us not flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation” [16].
the West’s continued indifference led people to such desperate crimes to get rid of their occupiers
(*) The above-mentioned Belgian politician – Véronique De Keyser – met the U.S. General Consul (at the time there were only General Consuls in Jerusalem, with the rank of ambassadors), David Duane Pearce, who told her only one sentence, before dismissing her outright: “Palestinian elections are the business between the United States and Israel”… underscoring the nullity of Europe and, ironically, the absence of say of the Palestinians themselves [15].
In any case, Europeans have always groveled to the USofA, just like now the Republican congresspeople to Trump.
An example is with the English Foreign Secretary David Lammy denouncing in the House of Commons on 20 May Israel’s blockade of Gaza as “morally wrong” and “an affront to the values of the British people”, (that is, the post-imperial values) – not only did this statement came “only after more than a year and a half of relentless civilian casualties,” but it happened “after Trump notably omitted Israel from his recent Gulf tour despite intense lobbying from Netanyahu’s government, signalling a widening rift between Washington and Tel Aviv.” As per Humza Yousaf, former First Minister of Scotland: “That schism has given the United Kingdom, Canada, and France the diplomatic cover they needed to voice their deep-rooted anxiety about Israel’s conduct, without fear of outright US opposition, or even worse, a White House rebuke.” [17]
Next to the above-mentioned Western governments are their corporations who are the co-authors and beneficiaries of the genocide, “Arms manufacturers, especially from the US and UK, are reporting record earnings. Quarter 1 of 2024 witnessed a surge in the selling of personal shares by a number of executives of the largest arms manufacturers currently selling weapons to Israel.” [18]
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, did a thorough research: “Colonial endeavours and their associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector” [19].
She has just released the report “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide” which mentions: MIT (with projects funded by the Israeli military), Booking.com, Airbnb, Microsoft, Volvo, Hyundai, Maersk, major insurers Allianz and AXA, Amazon.com, Alphabet, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, institutional investor Vanguard, Caterpillar, BP, Chevron, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, BNP Paribas, Barclays, to name but some of the 45 identified entities.
This investigation, focuses on how corporate interests underpin Israeli settler-colonial with the twofold logic of displacement and replacement aimed at dispossessing and erasing Palestinians from their lands.
Evoking the legacy of the Industrialists’ trials at Nuremberg in 1947-48 (which followed the well-known military trial and indicted such major corporations embedded with the Nazis as: Krupp, IG Farben, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, with some executives committing suicide), the report mentions the possible criminal liability, for the corporate entity and/or for its executives, including before the International Criminal Court.
In other words, the entire West – governments, corporations, people – bears full responsibility for the Palestinian genocide, both materially and morally – by greed, incompetence, hatred, indifference, or inaction.
End
Notes
[1] Pappé, Ilan. (2007). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Renowned Israeli historian, Pappé’s groundbreaking book revisits the formation of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Pappé holds the Chair in Hisotry at the University of Exeter and is Academic Director of the Research Insitute for Peace at Givat Haviva and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies, Haifa. He is also author of the bestselling A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge), The Modern Middle East (Routledge), and The Israel/Palestine Question (Routledge).
[2] Rapoport, D.C., The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism, in Cronin, A. K. & Ludes, J. M. (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, Georgetown University Press, 2004, Washington, D.C., pp. 50–51
[3] https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948
[4] Mark Phythian, The politics of British arms sales since 1964, 2000, chapter five
[5] Sasson Sofer. Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 253–254
Leslie Stein, The Hope Fulfilled: The Rise of Modern Israel, Greenwood Publishing Group 2003 pp. 237–238
[6] Shimon Dotan: The Settlers (inside the Jewish settlements) (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prqtXMSdeUw
[7] Middle East Monitor, January 11 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WERJ_xXhaeQ
[8] Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025) https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/louis-theroux-the-settlers/
[9] Arabs to Saudi Arabia, says prominent religious Zionist rabbi. Dov Lior calls for reclaiming Temple Mount, helping build ‘camel stables’ for Arabs elsewhere so holy land is ‘cleansed of terrorists’ by ToI Staff, 14 October 2013, https://www.timesofisrael.com/prominent-religious-zionist-rabbi-calls-for-sending-arabs-to-saudi-arabia/
[10] A World View Interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, Channel 2, Mar 31, 2011
[11] Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, https://zeteo.com/p/watch-now-gaza-doctors-under-attack
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5B1MO1PW3M
[13] Gaza: Doctors Under Attack review – this crucial film is the stuff of nightmares. But the world needs to see it. The film the BBC refused to air shows the targeting, detainment and torture of medics in Gaza. Its relentless timeline of horrors will never leave you, Stuart Heritage, 3 Jul 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/03/gaza-doctors-under-attack-review-channel-4-crucial-film-stuff-of-nightmares
[14] Action on Armed Violence, an English non-profit investigating armed violence against civilians around the world
UK government suppresses MP inquiries about Cyprus base’s role in Gaza conflict
[15] Palestine, la trahison européenne, Stéphane Hessel, Véronique de Keyser, Fayard, 2013
[16] Reproduced in the London Review of Books, 24 October 2024, pp15-16, After Nasrallah, Adam Shatz
[17] Words won’t save Gaza – The West must stop enabling Israel’s war, Opinion by Humza Yousaf, Al Jazeera, May 23, 2025
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/5/22/words-wont-save-gaza-the-west-must-stop-enabling-israels-war
[18] Who is arming Israel? Report and key findings, by AOAV Action on Armed Violence, on 12 Apr 2024, https://aoav.org.uk/2024/who-is-arming-israel-report-and-key-findings/
[19] “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide”, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Human Rights Council, Fifty-ninth session, 16 June–11 July 2025, Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy-of-occupation-to-economy-of-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-palestine-2025/
