I chose to title this article after one of my favorite movies – Groundhog day. The plot of the movie is the main character is forced to repeat Groundhog day, every day, until he makes it better. I kept thinking this sure is true of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Year after year, nothing changes.

Lately, the news is Gaza militants swarm the wall with Israel and are shot and killed for their efforts. A Palestinian in the West Bank gets ahold of a gun and kills an Israeli soldier. Hezballah digs tunnels from Lebanon to infiltrate Israel and Israel blows up the tunnels. The West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar that I have written about in the past is scheduled for demolition to make way for the expansion of a Jewish settlement. It remains standing with weekly announcements that demolition will start soon.

The Trump Peace Plan for the area remains hidden. Everyone from Kushner to Nikki Haley are touting the plan which will use technology to bridge the areas of disagreement. Neither Israel or the Palestinians have any idea what is in this Peace Plan that the Trump Administration is saying will solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Like past efforts, Peace Plans come and go with little change on the ground – another Groundhog Day.

Periodically, Natafli Bennett or Ayelet Shaked of Israel’s right wing political parties introduce legislation to annex the entire West Bank or the 80% that comprise Areas B& C without giving citizenship to the Palestinians who live in the annexed areas. Instead they would be given the equivalent of “Green Cards” allowing them to live in the area but without being able to vote. So far the Knesset has been reluctant to take this step because of the potential negative fallout from the International community. Netanyahu is a weak leader unable to do anything bold because of the police investigations into his past. One big problem is Israeli perception that all Arabs are alike and why don’t the Palestinians just move to one of the many Arab countries in the Middle East. This illustrates the lack of understanding of not only the various Arabic dialects but also religions, primarily Sunni and Shia.

This is kind of funny that the Jewish community would not appreciate these kind of differences when people from Orthodox, Conservative and Reform congregations NEVER mix.

Year after year, decade after decade, not much changes in the brush fire that constitutes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Periodically, the brush fire enlarges into a conflagration but then returns to its’ irritating and wasteful low grade status. Neither side is willing to make the bold moves to end this stupid and wasteful conflict. After 50 years of sub-optimum existence the Palestinian’s old tired leadership is reluctant to expose their old promises to their people will not come to fruition. On the other hand, Israeli leadership is reluctant to give away anything because their superior power position take and keep anything they want of the Palestinians.

I am a Zionist and a two state solution is the right way to go – a home for the Jews and a home for the Palestinians. The desire and need for a home will keep his conflict going indefinitely to the detriment of both peoples. To understand the frustration and need of the Palestinians for their own homeland, I am offering this essay I put up on TMV several years ago about my Grandfather’s fight for a Jewish Homeland.

My Grandfather Was A Terrorist
by Jdledell

There has been a lot written lately about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Much of it, primarily accusations thrown back and forth which has done little to illuminate the problems and solutions. One of the primary focuses has been on ‘Who is a terrorist?’ that being a label not a descriptor.

I revered my grandfather. He is the one who helped me cope with polio as a small child while my parents were trying to earn a living. He taught me everything I know about my faith, including Hebrew. He was a wonderful, warm and generous man yet he described himself as a killer terrorist.

It might be instructive to learn how such a man became a “terrorist”.

My family’s oral history dates back to what is now Romania in the mid 1500’s. In the late 1600’s they were hounded out and found their way overland to Croatia. From there they labored to come to the town of Aix en Provence, France in the late 1700’s. It was there my family became merchants. They opened a dry goods store and expanded it. For the next 150 years the family thrived again, hoping the vicious pogroms they were subjected to previously had finally passed.

In 1939 my grandfather had read enough to understand the “dark wave of anti-semitism” would eventually emerge out of Germany and descend on and erupt from France. Following this deep insight, he managed to send his family, his wife, my father and his brother along with two sisters, to America to squeeze in with relatives already there.

He was right. By 1943 life in Aix en Provence became brutally impossible as the French under the Vichy government began acting like their German occupiers.

My grandfather’s store was burned down. A month later our family home was set ablaze. He fled to Marseilles where he had contacts in the shipping industry from his days as a storekeeper.

From his readings of Jabotinsky and Herzl, he agreed the Jews needed a home, one that could never be taken from them again… and he arranged passage with a sympathetic cargo ship captain, sailing to what is now the south coast of Lebanon. From there, he walked to Haifa.

He immediately joined the Irgun to fight the British– and whoever got in the way– so the Jews could have a state. He was not a commander, he was a foot soldier.

When he arrived in 1943 he was part of a small group Irgun men who preyed mainly on Arabs. There was a lot of dissension at that time about whether the British should be targets since they were fighting the Nazis.

From his diary he recounts as long list of fighting incidents he participated in:

1 – His first operation occurred September 14, 1943 when they raided a police armory to get weapons. Two British soldiers and three Arab workers were killed.

2 – His second operation was October 22, 1943 with a drive-by shooting of an Arab marketplace in Haifa, spraying the area with bullets to put fear in the Arabs’ minds. He does not indicate in his diary if any were killed.

3 – January 7, 1944 saw him blowing up a bridge over a wadi outside Jerusalem to make it more difficult for Arabs to get to Jerusalem.

4 – On February 3, 1944 the car he was traveling in with two other Irgun members was stopped by two British soldiers. Since the car was carrying guns ( a severe crime punishable by 15 years in a British prison) the three of them jumped out of the car with guns blazing and cut down the two soldiers.

5 – March 9, 1944 was a raid at 2:00 a.m. on a house in Haifa which supposedly housed members of an Arab “terror” group. All 9 people were killed – 5 men, two women and 2 children.

6 – For the majority of 1945 thru 1947 my grandfather spent his time going back and forth from Israel and France. His job was purchasing (and stealing) weapons and getting them back to Israel. After the war, France was awash with weapons, from the British, Germans, Americans. From where didn’t matter as long as he could secure ammunition. He brought back not only rifles but also thousands of grenades, land mines etc. He shipped them out of Marseilles to Tyre (now Lebanon) where they would be taken overland into Israel. The French were not very vigilant about smuggling, and the British had few troops on the very porous border.

7 – The land mines picked up in Europe after the war became the Jewish version of Improvised Explosive Devices. They would lay them by the side of the road covered with brush and debris and manually trigger them with a long strand of rope whenever a British patrol passed. They were effective with lethal outcomes.

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There are 57 pages in this diary filled with episodes like those above. It is clear that several episodes stand out more than all the others in my grandfather’s mind. These definitely troubled him more than the other aggressions soldiers often become inured to. The first was a day when my grandfather was with Menachem Begin*, another Jew, on their way from Jerusalem to a meeting in Jaffa.
On the trip via back roads (the British had roadblocks on the main roads) they passed a British soldier and an Arab man walking on the side of the road. Begin parked the car about a half mile ahead and motioned my grandfather to sneak back along the road to ambush the soldier and his companion. They did, but what bothered my grandfather the most was what happened after.

Begin ordered my grandfather to go back to the car and come pick him up. When he returned he found Begin standing over ‘his kill,’ having bashed their dead faces to obliteration. Begin demanded my grandfather get out of the car and take a picture of triumphant Begin standing with his foot on his victim like a big game hunter. My grandfather could not understand the ego and viciousness of a fellow Jew.

The second happened March 10, 1947 when Begin suspected fellow French Irgun member Marcel Rothstein? (hard to decipher the handwriting here) was a British informer. My grandfather was brought along as a translator when Irgun took Marcel to a wooded area outside Haifa to interrogate him. Marcel denied being an informer but his answers did not satisfy Begin who put a gun to Marcel’s head and blew his brains out. My grandfather promptly threw up his lunch. Begin laughed and mocked him for being such a wimp.

A most important event changed my Grandfather forever. It was the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948. He had been firing mortars from the north of the village when he saw the men, women and children lined up and shot point blank by his comrades. He suspected that was Begin’s plan all along to strike fear into Arabs so they would leave. This was too much for my grandfather. He bolted for Haifa and found the first boat to Italy. From there he found his way to the US to reunite with his family.

So my Grandfather played his part in helping make the Jewish state of Israel. He had wanted to make it his permanent home and bring his family there. In that case, I probably would have been born in Israel, but after Deir Yassin massacre of Arab families, he vowed never to live in the land. He was deeply disturbed by all the killing he participated in, especially the innocents killed in marketplace bombings and shootings even as he rationalized it as critical to the important goal of establishing a Jewish homeland. Truly the end justified the means. For a time.

He stayed away from Israel until 1956 when he brought me to Haifa for my bar mitzvah. He was honored by strangers and old comrades alike and treated like a hero. It was heady stuff for a 12 year old, especially when he brought me to meet Ben Gurion himself.
But, more so, my grandfather attempted to make amends for one deed that also haunted him with no end. He had killed a Haifa Arab who had come outside his home early one morning to have his coffee and a cigarette. My grandfather never understood why he pulled the trigger from 200 yards away – he just did.

So, now, in 1956 he sought out the same house and spoke with the dead man’s wife and 3 children. My grandfather got down on one knee and asked in broken Arabic for their forgiveness.

That image of my proud grandfather on his knees is indelibly imprinted on my brain. The family did forgive him and their children became close to my sister when she made aliyah to Haifa in 1960. One of the daughters became a helper and nanny for my sister’s family. This is the family that has given so much time to me, given me so much care, enlightenment and insight into Palestinian lives and perspectives.

So there you have it. By any definition, past or present, the man who is my grandfather, was a terrorist. Many people in the United States consider his cause to be righteous and thus exempt him from the label. He would constantly tell me if he was born an Arab he would have done the same things, but against the Jews.

The goal of Irgun, Lehi and even Haganah was to move the Arabs out of the land of Israel to make room for the great hordes of Jews who many hoped would arrive in a few years. Would he have been a terrorist as an Arab but not as a Jew?

I report, you decide.

__________

*Begin was the one and only Menachem Begin. The Irgun was not
that big that everyone didn’t know just about everyone else. Irgun members
came from dozens of countries and meetings were like the Tower of Babel.
Begin spoke primarily Polish and Yiddish. My grandfather was multi-lingual,
Obviously he knew French but also Hebrew, Yiddish, German and English and
thus did a lot of translating and teaching Hebrew to his comrades to serve
as the universal language.