“Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can negate the use of terror as a means of battle.” — Lehi Motto
There is much hubbub over the potential for Hamas to enter as a significant player in the Palestinian government. Neoconservative pundits warn that this will put the “terror masters” in control of any future Palestinian state, leading to chaos and horror for Israel and the region.
This is not necessarily so. The transformation from terrorist to statesman is the biography of many of Israel’s founding fathers.
The Lehi Group (short for “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”) was a self-described terrorist group fighting to evict the British from Palestine toward the formation of a Jewish state. It later became known as the Stern Gang after commander Avraham Stern.
Stern believed that Palestine’s Jewish population should fight the British rather than support them in World War II and even made independent contact with Nazis proposing alliance with Germany in exchange a Jewish state in Palestine.
Lehi assassinated British police and soldiers and in 1947 and conspired to send mail bombs to British politicians in England. Lehi also sabotaged railroads, bridges and oil refineries, terror operations financed by private donations, bank robbery and extortion.
On Nov. 6, 1944 Lehi assassinated a British government official, Lord Moyne, in Cairo. This murder outraged Winston Churchill and two captured Lehi assassins were executed. In 1948 Lehi and another Jewish terrorist group, Irgun attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin alongside other “irregular” forces in what became known as the Deir Yassin massacre.
Lehi was successfully integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces on May 31, 1948 and Lehi leaders received amnesty from prosecution, though Lehi did later assassinate UN-envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem.
Yitzhak Shamir, a former Israeli prime minister, was Lehi’s “Terror Master” when Lehi assassinated Britain’s minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. Shamir also directed the attempted the assassination of Harold MacMichael, high commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, and oversaw the 1948 Bernadotte assassination. Although Bernadotte had secured the release of 21,000 prisoners headed for Nazi extermination, Shamir still judged him to be an agent of Lehi’s “British enemy”.
Pundits are simply not on solid historical ground when they insist that Hamas can’t follow a similar route of transformation, institutionalization and legitimization once territorial issues are finalized. The parallels of the Lehi and Hamas are haunting: Alliances with unsavory foreign countries, “ends justifies the means” approach to violence, and yes, terrorism. Hamas, like Lehi, has the popular backing to demand the same forgiveness, amnesty, support and forgiveness Lehi ultimately received not only from a new state but the rest of the world.
— Grant F. Smith has appeared on Voice of America, CNN, and C-SPAN. His research has appeared in the New York Times, Gannet, Wall Street Journal and other major print media. He currently serves as director of research at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, DC.
