Free Republic

In April 1948, Deir Yassin was an Arab village of about a thousand residents. It was captured then by Jewish forces seeking to break the siege of Jerusalem during the war for Israel’s independence. Most of the fighting was done by the underground soldiers of the Irgun and Lehi, with assistance from the Haganah, the official fighting force of the Jewish establishment. A truck-mounted loudspeaker blaring a warning for residents to flee the village fell into a trench that had been dug by villagers. The result was a bloody house-to-house battle with a high death toll. That much everyone agrees...

Knesset holds session in memory of 12 Jewish underground members hung by British. Tibi: They fired at civilian bus, killed minister; are they heroes or terrorists? Amnon Meranda Published: 03.09.10, 18:16 / Israel News Knesset members Ahmed Tibi and Talab El-Sana (both United Arab List-Ta'al) were ejected from the Knesset plenum Tuesday after heckling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech during a special session in memory of the Olei Hagardom, the 12 members of the Jewish underground sentenced to hang by the British. The prime minister said, "I salute those who gave their lives in the struggle for freedom, whereupon Tibi...

JERUSALEM – Yehoshua Zettler, one of the founding members of a violent pre-state Jewish movement and mastermind of the assassination of a top U.N. envoy in 1948, has died in Israel. He was 91. His wife, Bella, another member of the LEHI movement, also known as the Stern Gang, said Zettler suffered a stroke and died last week. LEHI is a Hebrew acronym for Israel Freedom Fighters. Zettler was one of the original members of the militant Irgun group and its more extreme breakaway LEHI faction, serving under two future Israeli prime ministers — Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

JERUSALEM – Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem and one of Israel's most re-elected politicians, ratted out fellow Jews to the British occupiers of pre-State Israel, even once trying to have former prime minister Menachem Begin arrested. The information was provided by recently declassified British intelligence documents held back from the public at the request of the Israeli government as long as Kollek was alive, prompting some here to wander whether other Israeli politicians currently living, such as former prime minister Shimon Peres, who worked closely with Kollek, were also moles against Jews. Kollek died three months ago. The...

In the midst of its campaign against Hizbollah and Hamas "terrorists", Israel has been accused by Britain of feting Jewish "terrorists" whose bomb attack killed 28 Britons 60 years ago today. The accusation, which reopens the debate about the use of politically-inspired violence in the region, follows the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the attack on the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, by the Irgun Jewish "resistance" to British mandate rule in Palestine. The 28 Britons were among 91 people killed. This week, former Irgun fighters and current Right-wing politicians unveiled the plaque at the hotel,...

Retiring 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace, on Mike Barnicle's WTTK/Boston radio show, sounded a lot like an Yasser Arafat mouthpiece. After re-gurgitating the usual anti-Israel atrocity propaganda, Wallace, in a comment that sticks in my craw, drew a moral equivalence between Palestinian suicide/mass murderers and Zionist patriots who fought the British in the period leading up to Israeli independence. The British called these Israeli freedom fighters "terrorists," yet, unlike Arab mass murderers today, they did not deliberately target innocent British or Arab civilians for murder. Barnicle responded, perhaps unconsciously, by indirectly unmasking Wallace with a discreet and indirect reference to...