Larry Derfner has a great piece in the JPost laying out the hypocrisy of Israel’s extolling terrorists while condemning Palestinians when they do the same. It’s a wonderful argument, but for me what leaped out was the Bernadotte bit. Consider, that Count Bernadotte, who saved Jews from the Nazis during the war, wanted to internationalize Jerusalem, as Herzl had promised it would be, and get the Palestinian refugees back to their homes, and more equitably divide historical Palestine than the division created by the armistice. Well Bernadotte was killed; and as you can see in this piece, some Israelis love it that he was killed. And of course we are still dealing with the injustice of the resulting arrangement. Derfner:
After the War of Independence, [Menachem] Begin was a terrorist in the eyes of some Israelis, but by now he is a supreme, unchallenged national hero. Remembered as a gentleman, he is the most beloved leader in Israeli history.
We see no reason why he shouldn’t be. But when the Palestinians, beginning with their leaders, eulogize Muhammad Oudeh, who planned the Munich Olympics killings of 11 Israeli athletes, or name a square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, leader of the Coastal Road bus hijacking that killed 37 Israelis, then we are outraged.
“Whoever sponsors and supports naming a square in Ramallah after a terrorist who murdered dozens of Israelis on the Coastal Road encourages terror,” said Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in March. He called on Palestinian leaders to “stop the incitement.”
But four years ago, when Etzel veterans commemorated the 60th anniversary of the King David bombing, Netanyahu, scion of a proud Revisionist family, was the featured speaker. “It’s very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terrorist action and legitimate military action,” he told the audience.
IN THE hypocrisy that characterizes Israel’s view of Palestinians, this is the height of it: The greatest denouncers of Palestinian violence against Israel also tend to be the greatest defenders of pre-state Zionist violence against Britain.
After electing Begin prime minister, we elected Yitzhak Shamir, who had been one of the leadership trio of Lehi (the Hebrew acronym for “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”). Lehi went Etzel one better – not only did it kill for Israeli statehood, it killed after statehood, too. On September 17, 1948, Lehi men in Jerusalem shot to death Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN’s envoy to the Middle East (who, as a Swedish diplomat during World War II, had saved many thousands of Jews from the Nazi death camps).
At Lehi’s 70th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem last month, National Union MK Arye Eldad (whose father, Yisrael, had been one of Shamir’s partners in the leadership) said from the podium: “Count Bernadotte wanted to internationalize Jerusalem. In response, Lehi killed him. With his death, the concept of taking Jerusalem away from the Jewish people died with him.”
Hooray. And after Yitzhak Shamir dies, there will be highways, neighborhoods, hospitals and schools named after him, too.
It seems to me that if you are going to condemn the Munich Olympics killings and the Coastal Road Massacre, you also have to condemn the King David Hotel bombing and the Bernadotte assassination.
Derfner also mentions he standard hasbara line about the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 that killed 91 people: the Irgun warned the British ahead of time, by half an hour or so. Apparently one of the women who called the hotel was lately interviewed, and said she blamed the British for not evacuating the hotel. This is absurd. I had a really smart girlfriend once who went to Harvard Law School. Responding to some piece of trickery/declaration I was trying to get over on her once, she said, "You know it doesn’t make it any better if you tell someone you’re going to run over them with a car, and then you actually run over them with a car." There was a principle of law that embodied this principle, I seem to recall; and it surely applies to putting bombs in someone’s basement and then phoning them up.
