Despite the opinions of many experts, terrorism sometimes works, Bruce Hoffman concludes. In his case study, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (Alfred A. Knopf), Arab and Jewish terrorism directly pushed events in the era when Great Britain controlled Palestine through a League of Nations mandate. By committing outrageous acts of violence against soldiers and civilians, the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang were instrumental in Britain’s precipitous pullout and Israel’s formation in 1948. But the story of terrorism in Palestine begins years earlier. By this time, both Arabs and Jews were convinced that they could intimidate Britain through violence.
As director of Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, Hoffman can claim himself as an expert on terrorism. With Anonymous Soldiers, he revisits his Oxford University doctoral dissertation on the British mandate and constructs a larger, more detailed picture from a wealth of recently declassified or rediscovered documents. Hoffman traces the paths by which Jewish self-defense against Arab attacks turned punitive and proactive. Guided by an exclusionary nationalistic agenda, the most extreme Jewish groups, Hoffman shows, helped convince Britain’s already wavering politicians that the status quo was costly and unsupportable.
Terrorism shifted the direction of Israeli politics. Yitzhak Rabin, no dreamy idealist, oversaw the conquest of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as Israel’s military chief. As prime minister, he recognized that indefinite occupation of those territories was untenable and signed the Oslo Accord with his lifelong foe, Palestinian leader (and onetime terrorist) Yasser Arafat. As foreign correspondent Dan Ephron writes in Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (W.W. Norton), it was clear early on that extremists from both sides could scuttle the deal. On Nov. 4, 1995, a young Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir, did just that when he assassinated Rabin. The shocking incident didn’t end Oslo but was the first link in a chain of events leading to the ongoing catastrophe of the present day.
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Ephron’s account is revealing, both of Rabin and his assassin, whose fundamentalist interpretation of the Torah left him obsessed with the notion that the prime minister had surrendered a portion of the Promised Land and deserved retribution. Since then, Amir has sat in prison, having “the satisfaction of watching Rabin’s legacy steadily evaporate” as radicals moved from the fringe into the heart of Israeli politics.
Well-traveled reporter-activist Max Blumenthal presents a scathing indictment of current Israeli policy toward its Palestinian population, focusing on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inflammatory strategy. In The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (Nation Books) Blumenthal accuses Netanyahu of deliberately twisting the circumstances surrounding the murder of Jewish teens by Arabs as an excuse to mount the destructive military campaign of 2014 and the ongoing siege of Gaza. Blumenthal spares no one, including U.S. policy makers, for the intractable situation.
