Israel: A terrorist success story.

• Author: Miller, Rob
• Position: War and War Hysteria

If there was an Academy Awards ceremony for terrorism, Israel would sweep every category--and every acceptance speech would have to thank the government of the United States, whose generous support has made Israel the most successful terrorist state in the world.

How do you measure the success of terrorism? Is it by the numbers of civilians killed, maimed and terrorized or the level of disruption and fear brought to people's daily lives? Israel scores very highly on both these counts.

Israel has its own special way of recognizing the achievements of its great terrorists--by electing them its prime minister. There are no less than three Israeli prime ministers who have long terrorist histories.

The current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, cemented his place in the hall of fame with his leading role in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, including the massacres by Israeli-backed militias in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Earlier in his Israeli army career Sharon was responsible for the slaughter of 69 civilians in the Qibya village in Jordanian-controlled territory in 1953.

The Israeli prime minister at the time of the 1982 invasion, Menachem Begin, was a leader of the Irgun, one of the main terrorist groups in the Zionist movement. In the 1930s and 1940s the Zionists were trying to establish the Israeli state in what was then British-occupied Palestine.

In 1937, the Irgun launched a terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, setting off bombs in markets and attacking buses. In one attack on the Haifa fruit market 74 Arabs were killed and 129 wounded. In 1946, the Irgun set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing about 100 Arab, British and Jewish victims.

Another Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, started his career in this same period as a leader of the Zionist terrorist group, the Stem gang. The Stern gang was responsible for the assassination of the UN mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, and a French UN observer in September 1948.

Begin and Shamir both went on to play a crucial role in the terrorist activities carried out during the 1948 war.

"Ethnic Cleansing"

Ethnic cleansing was always going to be essential to achieving the Zionist movement's aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. This movement sought to escape the oppression suffered by Jewish minorities throughout history by setting up a state controlled exclusively by Jews, ruling over a country in which Jews were the majority. The process of creating such a...