I am now reading Ronen Bergman’s book, ‘Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations’. It is an illuminating book. So much to learn about how we humans damage each other beyond repair until we yearn to ‘Rise and Kill First’ to avoid being ‘lambs to the slaughter.’

Here is an extract from an early section of the book:

Ben-Gurion foresaw that a Jewish state would soon be established in Palestine and that the new nation would immediately be forced to fight a war against Arabs in Palestine and repel invasions by the armies of neighboring Arab states. The Haganah command thus also began secretly preparing for this all-out war, and as part of the preparations, an order code-named Zarzir (or Starling) was issued, providing for the assassination of the heads of the Arab population of Palestine. WHILE THE HAGANAH SLOWLY stepped up the use of targeted killings, the radical undergrounds had their killing campaign in full motion, trying to push the British out of Palestine. Yitzhak Shamir, now in command of Lehi, resolved not only to eliminate key figures of the British Mandate locally—killing CID personnel and making numerous attempts to do the same to the Jerusalem police chief, Michael Joseph McConnell, and the high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael—but also Englishmen in other countries who posed a threat to his political objective. Walter Edward Guinness, more formally known as Lord Moyne, for example, was the British resident minister of state in Cairo, which was also under British rule. The Jews in Palestine considered Moyne a flagrant anti-Semite who had assiduously used his position to restrict the Yishuv’s power by significantly reducing immigration quotas for Holocaust survivors. Shamir ordered Moyne killed. He sent two Lehi operatives, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, to Cairo, where they waited at the door to Moyne’s house. When Moyne pulled up, his secretary in the car with him, Hakim and Bet-Zuri sprinted to the car. One of them shoved a pistol through the window, aimed it at Moyne’s head, and fired three times. Moyne gripped his throat. “Oh, they’ve shot us!” he cried, and then slumped forward in his seat. Still, it was an amateurish operation. Shamir had counseled his young killers to arrange to escape in a car, but instead they fled on slow-moving bicycles. Egyptian police quickly apprehended them, and Hakim and Bet-Zuri were tried, convicted, and, six months later, hanged.

But, as the author then goes on to say, many more atrocities against the British ensued, and the perpetrators were named as “a new group of gangsters” by Churchill.

As India obtained independence from the British Empire, so finally the costs of maintaining a Palestinian Protectorate became too costly and the role of the British in Palestine was replaced with the new state of Israel. The armed forces and intelligence community sprang out of ‘ the men who fought that bloody underground war – guerrillas, assassins, terrorists.’

A surprising (to me) piece of history was how during WW2, the Nazi presence replaced the British through the existing German Templer sect who had settled in Palestine in the late 1800s. See:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22276494

Their presence was eliminated by those Jews who went to Europe and witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust.

And those who have been slaughtered like lambs will now ‘Rise and Kill First’.

I have been trying to understand this perpetual cycle where people living peacefully somewhere on earth find themselves rounded up and slaughtered by others they never knew and for reasons they don’t understand. Once the bloody tale is related, others rise up to seek revenge and the killing cycle continues as it has throughout human history.

This seems to be an inbuilt mechanism triggered by an emotion we recognise as hatred. But it is also a disgust in that part of us which simply seeks to live in peace and love our fellow man.