Israel Invented Terrorism: The Sinister Origins of the State of Israel

They told you terrorism was born in the Middle East, they just forgot to mention it started with Israel.

History has a memory problem.

We’ve been taught that terrorism was born in the Middle East, a phenomenon born of rage, religion, and resistance. But if you follow the trail long enough, the entire story flips upside down. If we trace the word terrorist back to where it was first used in modern politics, we don’t end up in Kabul or Baghdad.

We end up in Jerusalem.

The Founding Father They Don’t Talk About: Menachem Begin

Before he became Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, Menachem Begin was the leader of a militant Zionist group called Irgun Zvai Leumi, or simply the Irgun.
To the British authorities ruling Palestine at the time, the United Nations, and the United States government, Irgun wasn’t a political movement, it was a terrorist organization.

British intelligence reports, still available in archives, described Begin as “the leader of a notorious terrorist group responsible for bombings, assassinations, and attacks on civilians.”

Begin would later found the Likud, the same political party that rules Israel today under Benjamin Netanyahu. The Likud is the Israeli equivalent of America’s far right wing of politics.

In other words: Israel’s dominant right-wing party was born from a paramilitary underground movement that the British government once classified as a terrorist organization.

Irgun’s ideology was rooted in Revisionist Zionism, a belief that Jewish statehood should be achieved by force, not diplomacy. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Irgun carried out bombings, kidnappings, and targeted assassinations against British forces and Palestinian civilians.

They justified it as self-defense. The British called it terrorism.

In its own statements, Irgun openly took credit for bombings on railway stations, government offices, and police stations across Palestine. A classified British memo from 1946 called Irgun’s campaign “a reign of terror unparalleled in the history of the Mandate.” Yet, after 1948, the Irgun swapped their underground uniforms for the new insignia of the Israel Defense Forces, ie, the IDF.

The King David Hotel Bombing: When the World First Said “Terrorist”

On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters dressed as hotel staff smuggled milk-churn bombs into the basement of the King David Hotel, which housed the British administrative headquarters. When the explosives detonated, they killed 91 people; consisting of British, Arab, and Jewish citizens.

It was one of the deadliest attacks of its kind in the 20th century. It was routinely condemned as a deliberate act of terror. Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism historian at King’s College and author of Inside Terrorism, wrote that the King David Hotel bombing “introduced modern terrorism to the international stage.”

The term “terrorist” entered global consciousness attached to a Zionist militia, not an Arab one.

From Underground Cells to the IDF

When the British withdrew in 1948, Irgun merged with another Zionist paramilitary organization, the Haganah, to form what became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The same men the British once labeled as terrorists were handed uniforms, legitimacy, and a flag.

David Ben-Gurion, was one of the founders of the Haganah and later became Israel’s first Prime Minister. Under his leadership, the Haganah carried out terror campaigns that included the deliberate poisoning of Palestinian water sources and massacres of civilians, aimed at forcing the expulsion of Arab families from their homes. These operations culminated in the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, now known as the Nakba.

Ben-Gurion himself wrote that “the old will die and the young will forget”, and openly argued that Palestinian villages should be wiped out to make way for a Jewish state.

The same Army that now stands accused by United Nations experts of committing a genocide in Gaza was literally born out of two terrorist organizations. Are things starting to click for you as to why the IDF has been accused of such heinous crimes against humanity? It certainly did for me once I learned this.

From Irgun to Likud: The Political Mutation

In 1948, Menachem Begin founded the Herut Party that was built on the same militant Revisionist Zionism that once fueled the Irgun. Herut later merged into Likud, the political faction that has dominated Israeli politics for nearly half a century.

The same worldview that justified terrorism in the 1940s evolved into state policy: expansionism disguised as security, supremacy framed as survival, and occupation rebranded as self-defense.

By the late 1970s, Begin, once the most wanted man in British Palestine, stood on the White House lawn beside Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat, signing the Camp David Accords. Behind the handshakes was an ideology that remained unchanged: a belief that Jewish sovereignty must expand at all costs, and that compromise with Palestinians threatened the nation’s existence.

That belief didn’t die with Begin. It became the political DNA of the Israeli right.

Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads that same Likud lineage, surrounded by coalition partners who make Begin look relatively moderate by comparison.

Figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, convicted of incitement to racism and terrorism, and Bezalel Smotrich, who openly calls for Palestinian villages to be “wiped out,” sit in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

This is the natural evolution of a movement founded by fanatic militants: terror rebranded as governance.

The ideologies linking Irgun, Likid, and the IDF remain unbroken. Only the uniforms and their titles have changed.

The Erasure: How Textbooks Rewrote the Origins of Violence

Narratives of “terrorism” have shaped how the world interprets violence in the Middle East for decades. By erasing the fact that the first modern terrorist campaign in the region came from Zionist militias, later absorbed into a recognized state, Western powers constructed a moral hierarchy of violence.

One where their terror becomes “liberation,” and everyone else’s becomes “barbarism.”

Why This History Matters Now More Than Ever

If Menachem Begin could bomb hotels, assassinate diplomats, and massacre civilians in the name of founding a Jewish state, and later be rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize, why is Hamas labeled a terrorist organization for resisting an occupation born from those same tactics?

If Begin’s fanatical violence was rationalized as self-determination, why is Palestinian resistance automatically framed as terrorism?

If Zionist paramilitaries claimed ancient ties to the land as justification for terrorism, why are Palestinians, whose indigenous presence predates Israel by centuries, labeled terrorists for making the same claim?

If terrorism is defined by targeting civilians, why aren’t state bombings of refugee camps held to the same standard?

Why does the West sanctify its own revolutions but criminalize others’?
(America’s founding was born from insurgency, but Palestinian insurgency is condemned.)

Why is Begin remembered as a peacemaker, not a terrorist?

When Begin bombed the King David Hotel, he said he was defending Jewish existence. When Palestinians say the same, they’re branded terrorists.

If Israel’s founding army grew out of two terrorist organizations, and multiple leaders were a part of these organizations, can the state truly claim moral innocence?

Does Begin’s rise to power mean that terrorism wasn’t just a pre-state tactic, but it was built into the DNA of the state itself?

The West only calls it terrorism when the wrong side fights back.

And if history is written by the oppressors, we have to ask: what would it look like if it were written by the oppressed?

Get The Sources They Don’t Teach

If you want the full collection of archives, books, eyewitness accounts, and declassified files that expose how modern terrorism began — 📜 Download my free Forbidden Reading List here.

It’s a curated library, organized by category of 200+ books and articles that have been banned, buried, and forgotten. These are the titles they never wanted you to find.