How Zionist terrorism determined Palestine’s fate (mars 2017)
▻https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-zionist-terrorism-determined-palestines-fate/19871
But how did terrorism originate in Palestine and what was its outcome, both historically and today?
Thomas Suárez sheds much new light on those questions in State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. He does this largely by mining previously neglected declassified documents from the British National Archives, covering the period of the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948).
Suárez’s principal thesis is that Zionist terrorism “ultimately dictated the course of events during the Mandate, and it is Israeli state terrorism that continues to dictate events today.”
The author cautions that while he unequivocally condemns Palestinian terrorism against civilians, he recognizes that some were driven to extreme measures due to an asymmetry in power and in reaction to attempts to subjugate the Palestinian people and expropriate their resources, land and labor.
Zionist terrorism aimed to prevent Palestinian Arabs from exercising their right to self-determination, Suárez argues, and when an aggressor encounters resistance, it can hardly use self-defense as a justification for its own acts of violence. “Otherwise,” Suárez writes, “all aggression would self-justify.”