- WASHINGTON, DC - At a moment
when the popular mind-set once again links the words "Arab"
and "Islamic" with all things retrograde and
threatening¬óincluding
terrorism--cue the new Charlie Daniels anthem and revel in the poetry:
"This ain't no rag, it's a flag
And we don't wear it on our heads. . . .
We're gonna hunt you down like a mad dog hound"
it came as a surprise to some that the latest malefactors accorded POW
status in the "War on Terrorism" turned out to be Jewish.
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- Arrested and charged last week with intriguing to do
explosive little actions on a Culver City, California, mosque and the
offices of Lebanese American U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, Jewish
Defense
League chief Irving David Rubin and JDL member Earl Leslie Krugel were,
according to FBI wiretap transcripts, anything but circumspect about their
devices and desires: Though Rubin lamented the wanting state of technology
in the JDL's possession (not good enough to "blow up an entire
building"),
Krugel was adamant that "Arabs need a wake-up call" and that
the JDL needs to do something to one of their "filthy mosques"
- which may explain the five pounds of gunpowder and pipe-bomb materiel
found at his house. "If the people responsible for September 11 are
the quintessence of evil genius, these guys are at the Keystone Kops end
of the spectrum," says Hussein Ibish, communications director for
the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "The only reassuring
thing about them is their absolute ineptitude and the fact that they were
arrested."
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- Mainstream Jewish groups were quick to condemn the JDL
as well: Characterizing the activities of the organization - founded in
1968 by Brooklyn's own, now deceased Rabbi Meir Kahane - as
"contemptible,"
the Anti-Defamation League's regional director issued a statement
"abhor[ing]
and condemn[ing] the potential terrorist plot." The American Jewish
Committee said it "categorically condemns in the strongest possible
terms the alleged JDL plot," and went so far as to follow up with
a personal letter to Republican representative Issa, decrying "such
wanton lawlessness," which is "so clearly contrary to the
fundamental
tenets of our faith, and to the basic principles of justice and liberty
that brought our parents and grandparents to America's shores and that
form the bedrock of our national values."
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- Yet some observers of the current Middle East crisis
see more than a bit of disingenuousness and historical irony here. While
both the ADL and the AJC have condemned the JDL, they've unequivocally
backed Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's indiscriminate use of force
against the Palestinians and the cutting of ties with Palestinian
Authority
president Yasir Arafat¬óneither of which is universally seen
as a particularly constructive way to slow the cycles of violence across
Israel and the Occupied Territories.
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- But what's even more vexing to others is the apparent
inability or unwillingness to discern similarities between the current
Palestinian milieu and Israeli operations of 50-plus years ago, which
secured statehood from colonialist occupiers¬óas well as
similarities
between violent, internecine struggles among disparate underground groups.
"It's peculiar, it's paradoxical, that Sharon and Likud should be
the ones who are trying to equate any authentic resistance in Palestine
with some of the terrorist activities, as terrorism in Israel really
started
with Begin and Shamir and later Sharon," says Clovis Maksoud, the
former Arab League ambassador to the United Nations. "It's a very
valid question as to why they see no similarities between themselves under
the British and the Palestinians under their occupation." Especially,
he adds, as the Israeli government supports museums that honor assassins
and terrorists¬óincluding one located on a street named for
a terrorist.
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- The thoroughfare in question runs between Florentine
and Emeq-Yisrael, and bears the name Stern Street¬óin honor
of Avraham Stern, a 1920s Zionist and charter member of the Haganah, then
a loose-knit Jewish militia organized as a self-defense mechanism against
Arab violence. Finding the Haganah insufficiently proactive in realizing
the goal of a Jewish state that would encompass "both sides of the
River Jordan," erstwhile Mussolini follower and early-day
ultra-nationalist
Ze'ev Jabotinsky broke with the militia and formed the Irgun, which
devoted
itself to terrorist operations against the British. Once an enthusiastic
Irgunist, Stern was appalled when the Irgun decided to make common cause
with the British against the Nazis, and created the even more underground
and more violent Lehi (Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for the Freedom
of Israel), also known as the Stern Gang, which held there was no greater
threat to the Jews of Palestine than the mandate's British
administrators.
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- To this end, Stern actually made overtures to the Axis
powers; September 1940 found him in dialogue with an emissary from Il
Duce in Jerusalem, and in January 1941 he dispatched an agent to
Vichy-controlled
Beirut with instructions to convey a letter to representatives of the
Reich.
In it, Stern held that the "establishment of the historical Jewish
state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with
the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and
strengthened
future German position of power in the Near East. Proceeding from these
considerations, [the Lehi] in Palestine, under the condition [that] the
above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are
recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part
in the war on Germany's side."
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- The Germans declined to take Stern up on the offer, but
Stern held out hope as his organization continued to engage in terrorism
against the British. After Stern died in a shoot-out with British police
in 1942, his mantle was picked up by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Shamir. Still, the Israeli underground focused on the British as the
greatest
of all evils, and on November 6, 1944, Lord Moyne, the British minister
for Middle East affairs, was assassinated in Cairo by Eliyahu Beit-Tzuri
and Eliyahu Hakim¬óboth members of the Lehi, who were later
arrested, convicted, and hanged. After the state of Israel was
established,
the Lehi, displeased with what it considered the too pro-Arab views of
the Swedish UN-appointed mediator for Palestine, assassinated him; on
September 17, 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte¬ówho, as a neutral
diplomat in World War II, had saved thousands of Jews from Nazi death
camps¬ówas
shot and killed by Lehi assassins, along with French colonel Andre Serot,
the senior UN military observer, whose wife's life had been saved by
Bernadotte.
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- The Bernadotte assassination was so outrageous that the
nascent government of David Ben-Gurion had little problem disbanding the
Lehi (though none of the assassins were ever brought to justice). Yet,
despite this history of terror, the Israeli Ministry of Defense
underwrites
museums commemorating the Stern Gang and the Irgun¬ówhich,
under Menachem Begin, bombed the British headquarters at the King David
Hotel in 1946, leaving 90 dead and 45 wounded (with 15 Jews among the
casualties). Like Lehi, it wasn't until 1948 that the Irgun was forced
out of existence, after its arms-transport ship, the Altalena, was blown
up by the provisional Israeli government¬óa point analysts
like Ibish say bears remembering.
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- "There are streets named after the assassins of
Moyne and Bernadotte. They are historical figures not disavowed by the
rhetoric of the state of Israel, nor is there any reflection on the fact
that two terrorist leaders later became distinguished leaders of the
republic,"
Ibish says. "And now people are saying that Arafat must have his
Altalena." Ibish adds that Israel's first prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion,
"never moved against the Irgun and the Stern Gang until after the
state was established and secured, which is definitely not true in the
case of the Palestinian Authority. Essentially, the Israelis are asking
the Palestinians to do something they themselves refused to
do."
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