Benjamin Netanyahu made his name in Israeli politics for continuously associating the Palestinian people with terrorism. He rose to prominence in the 1970s by repeating the message about the risks of international terrorism for Israeli security and led the successful efforts of branding the PLO as a terrorist organization. In 1979, he co-organized the high profile Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, which included guests such as George H.W. Bush, and could be seen as the beginning of the “war on terror” framework, which following the events of 9-11 a little over two decades later, became the hegemonic anchor of “Western” anti-Islamic international politics.
Netanyahu profiled himself as an expert on terrorism. What however is not often mentioned in background studies is that his own political party, Likud, has a long history of terrorist allegiances. Likud, meaning consolidation or unity in Hebrew, was formed as a merging of the following six parties. One of these was Herut, the party that emerged from Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, which was also the political home of Irgun Tsvaj Leumi, a militant radical Zionist group. Benzion Mileikowsky, Netanyahu’s father, had been Jabotinsky’s personal secretary until Jabotinsky’s death in 1940.
A radical Zionist group Lehi (also referred to as the Stern Gang), whose official name was Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the first United Nations mediator in the Israeli–Arab conflict, on September 17, 1948 in Jerusalem. This assassination would have been defined as an act of terrorism today by the likes of Netanyahu. One of the men responsible for the assassination was Yitzhal Shamir, who after the disbanding of Lehi left politics to join Mossad. He later became a member of Herut and subsequently twice Prime-Minister of Israel during the 1980 and was Foreign Minister of Israel when the terror attacks on Sabra and Shatila took place in Lebanon between 16 and 18 September 1982.
Another party that was merged into Likud was The Movement for Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael HaShlema), which included former members of extremist militant organizations such as Lohamei Herut Israel. It was formed in 1967 immediately after the Six Day War to push for the annexation of all occupied territories. The movement was grounded in the belief that all the territories of historical Palestine (including the West Bank and Gaza) were part of the Jewish homeland and should never be relinquished, regardless of international opinion or demographic challenges. When Netanyahu showed the map of Greater Israel at the UN General Assembly on 22 September 2023, he thus expressed exactly the political aim of this extremist wing of the Likud Party. Ideologically, this movement expressed similar objectives to Meir Kahane’s Kach Party, which operated from New York before moving to Israel and is today supported the ideological inspiration to the Jewish Defence League. The Kach Party was banned in 1988 for being too fascistic. Its Jewish supramcism, however, lives in in its political successors such as Otzma Yehudit (the party of Itamar Ben-Gvir) and the Religious Zionist Party (HaTzionut HaDatit, formerly Tkuma) led by Bezalel Smotrich. Both are members of the current Israeli government, aggressively pursuing Jewish supremacism by advocating for the ethnic cleansing of all occupied territories.
What all these factions have in common is a single root: Revisionist Zionism, which is a political ideology primarily developed by Vladimir Jabotinsky in the 1920, who became fanous because of his book The Iron Wall. In this work, he argued that because the objective Zionism to establish a Jewish ethno-nationalist state, would never be accepted by then native “Arab” populations, it could only be established by means of force. Non-Jewish inhabitants of the land should be subdued by means of violence and force to submit to Jewish rule.
The main difference between Theodor Herzl – the founding father of the Ziomnist Movement and author of The Jewish State – and Jabotinsky was that, whereas Herzl imagined Palestine to be a land without people, Jabotinsky was more realistic and acknowledged that this was not true. Perfectly in line with the spirit of European imperialist nationalism, he believed that a Jewish state had to be established by force through the military conquest and colonization of land that was inhabited by others. Despite morons such as Adam Kirsch and his adoring fans trying to muddle the waters to argue that Israel is not a settler colonial state, the most important founding father of the modern state of Israel – whose legacy has inspired the vast majority of the current Israeli government – clearly believed that it had to be.
During the 1920, Jabotinsky founded Betar in Latvia in 1923. Betar was a paramilitant youth movement whose objectives were not very different from the Hitler Jugend in Germany. It embraced right-wing ideology, very similar to those of European nationalism; wearing uniforms and preparing for combat. Betar trained youth to fight and prepare for aliyah (immigration to Palestine) and eventual war for a Jewish state. An interesting footnote to Betar was that some of its members had been trained in Italy between 1934 and 1938 when it was ruled by the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. During that time, the Betar Naval Academy operated from the Italian port city of Civitavecchia.
Betar aligned with the aforementioned radical Zionist parties Irgun and Herat and were the basis of the extremist Lehi paramilitary organization that assassinated the UN peace envoy Folke Bernadotte. Today, Betar continues as a youth movement aligned with the Likud party, especially in Israel and some diaspora communities. The fans of the football Betar Jurasalem pride themselves for being the most racist hooligans in the world.
It is important to know that Jabotinsky strongly rejected the idea of a Jewish Diaspora by advocating for a violent negation of exile. He was also radically against alliances between Jews and Socialists, such as those who formed the Bund. This happened to strongly resonate with the core principles of the rising political extremism of National Socialism and Fascism and it should come as no surprise that Jabotinsky became friends with Mussolini.
Jabotinsky publicly rejected fascism, as many do today, whilst holding on to its core principles: ruling by force through a strongly militarized political establishment, using the militarized state to exercise control over the workforce for the benefit of large corporations, and engaging in friend-foe distinctions along ethnic/racial lines. Racism, nationalism, militarism and corporatism are still the constitutional pillars of the state of Israel today.
It should come as no surprise then, that Netanyahu can claim to be an expert on terrorism. His own political party as well as his own father have deep roots in Revisionist Zionism, the ideology that pursued its political interests by the deployment of violence over civilian populations, which today is the definition of terrorism (even if the term has now been extended to cover acts of criminal damage on planes that supply fuel to fighter jets engaged in genocide). That the term terrorism is not being used when describing the acts of violence conducted in the pursuit of Zionism is because the term has always been deployed in an arbitrary fashion, exactly like Carl Schmitt’s political-theological foundations of Fascism had already asserted at the start of the Third Reich: The inauguration of the political stems from the separation of friends and enemies.
This separation is arbitrary. Thus, violence on behalf of friends is “liberation” or “self-defence”, violence on behalf of foes is “terrorism” or “aggression”. There is nothing more to it. The rehabilitation of acts terrorism committed in the name of Zionism in contemporary Israeli politics also explains why the barbaric actions of this Israeli government often mimic those of terrorist organizations. Their official aim is to expel Hamas from Gaza. Their method is that of terrorizing the Gazan civilian population.
Disaffected Sociology 
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