A terror state through time: from Ben Gurion to Netanyahu
Since its founding to the modern day, Israel has been shaped by a ‘gang state’ mentality, marked by unhinged violence and oppression that only deepens its cycle of instability – a history it seems unwilling to escape.
On 31 May 1948, a man born in Poland by the name of David Ben Gurion transformed the Zionist terrorist groups – Haganah, Stern, Irgun, and Palmach – into what would be called the “Israeli Defense Forces” (IDF). This man would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister, and his actions laid the foundation for what many describe as a settler-colonial state in Palestine.
This fact sums up the occupation state’s very essence today, offering a stark illustration of the indiscriminately violent roots upon which the state and its army were built. Today, Israeli military operations continue in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where tanks crush the bodies of the dead and wounded and where residents are thrown from rooftops or sniped in their homes.
“Causing death or serious bodily harm to civilians for the purpose of intimidating a population” is the very definition of terrorism, in the words of the United Nations General Assembly.
Entire residential buildings are reduced to rubble in the name of “assassinating” resistance fighters, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or even Beirut. The Israeli government has normalized bloody attacks on hospitals, churches, and mosques and weaponized communications technology to annihilate people in homes, offices, and streets en masse – to strike fear into civilians and force them into submission.
The gang state
If there is a single word that best defines Israel’s modus operandi, it is terrorism. From its inception as a political entity through its early campaigns of ethnic cleansing to its ongoing military impositions on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen – not to mention its previous actions in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Sudan – Israel’s history is marked by a blatant disregard for international law and moral principles.
Terrorism is the most powerful weapon for Israel, the ‘gang state’ that is now nicknamed ‘Netanyahu’s gang,’ and its security and military apparatuses. This gang mentality has long been part of the Zionist ideology, which cloaks its goals in lofty religious rhetoric while simultaneously unleashing depraved acts of violence and domination.
Almost a century later, Israel still struggles to attain legitimate standing, its existence perpetually marred by its violent birth and sustained oppression of the Palestinians.
Forget all the western deception used to convince public opinion that the occupation state is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” As the Arabic proverb says: “What is built on falsehood is falsehood.”
The Polish “founding father” of this state, Ben Gurion, himself was immersed in campaigns of criminal ethnic cleansing and displacement, much like the Zionist terror gangs that founded the occupation state based on the ideas of Ukrainian Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The latter was the first to call for militarizing Zionism to confront the indigenous Palestinians and establish the colonial project in the Levant.
https://thecradle.co/articles/a-terror-state-through-time-from-ben-gurion-to-netanyahu