Content area
Full text
Suarez, Thomas. State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. Bloxham, Oxon: Skyscraper Publications, 2016. 417 pages. Hardback $15.77
Reviewed by Elaine C. Hagopian
Thomas Suarez has added muscle to the growing revelations of the mendacity of the Zionist project in Palestine. An independent scholar, he spent years mining the British National Archives at Kew. His book is based primarily on declassified British documents covering the British Palestine Mandate (officially 1923-48; de facto 1920-48) through the 1948 war and thereafter.
While Suarez gives great attention to the terrorist methods used to facilitate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, his overall emphasis is on the comprehensiveness of Zionist planning for appropriating Palestine without Palestinians. Circumventing the sympathetic but wary British Mandate authorities, and firmly establishing the "legitimizing" Zionist narrative needed to lay claim to the land and minds of Jews, the plan formed the existential bases of the state to be. He assiduously records how the main Zionist institution in Palestine, the Jewish Agency, orchestrated these efforts during the Mandate period. David Ben Gurion, later to be Israel's first prime minister, served as the chairman of the Agency's Executive Committee.
The Jewish Agency in Palestine, an offshoot of the World Zionist Organization, was founded in 1929 to represent the Yishuv's (Jewish Settlers in Palestine) relations with world Jewry, as well as with the British Mandatory officials and other relevant states and world institutions. It served in essence as the governing body for Jews in Palestine and the representative of the Zionist project abroad. It was charged with resettling Jews in Palestine and educating them ideologically and professionally to serve the needs of an emerging Israel.1 It also had a "defense" force, the Haganah, and a strike force, the Palmach. The Haganah engaged in anti-British and anti-Palestinian terrorism while other terrorist organizations, the Irgun and Lehi, received much of the notoriety. As Suarez documents, the Jewish Agency protected these terrorist groups whenever the British asked for the Agency's help in controlling their violence. Ben Gurion pretended concern but...