Once you learn where the Israeli military and government actually evolved from, a lot of what we’re watching today in Gaza and beyond, stops feeling “complicated” and starts feeling disturbingly consistent.
This isn’t speculation. It’s basic history. It’s just the kind that doesn’t make it into textbooks or mainstream news segments.
Israel’s current prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, leads the Likud party. Likud was founded by Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister. Before politics, Begin led Irgun, a militant terrorist Zionist organization active in British-ruled Palestine in the 1940s.
Irgun’s ideology was rooted in Revisionist Zionism, the belief that Jewish statehood should be achieved by force, not diplomacy. Irgun carried out bombings, assassinations, and attacks on civilians with its most infamous operation being the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people.
Israel justified it as self-defense.
The British called it terrorism.
At the time, Irgun wasn’t labeled a “terrorist” group by Arabs or Muslims, however it was officially classified as one by the British authorities governing the territory.
In other words: Israel’s current dominant right-wing party was born from a paramilitary underground movement that the British government once classified as a terrorist organization.
Irgun didn’t just disappear. It merged with Haganah, another armed Zionist militia, to form what we now know as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Haganah was led by David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first Prime Minister. Under his leadership, 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 now accused by United Nations experts of committing a genocide in Gaza was quite literally born from multiple 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 history.
None of this is speculation. British records document all of it. Early United Nations discussions reference it, and the term “terrorist” was openly used to describe these groups. In fact, the term ‘terrorist’ was created as a way to describe what these groups were.
So when people repeat the line that “terrorism was born in the Middle East,” they’re only telling half the story. What’s consistently left out is who was first labeled a terrorist (Zionist militias), who later became heads of state (Begin & Ben-Gurion), and which terrorist groups were folded directly into a modern national army (the IDF).
This missing context matters more than anything, because without it, none of what’s happening now makes any sense.
The mainstream media and American and Israeli politicians/pundits have no problem endlessly villainizing countries like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan as incubators of terrorism. Yet they never acknowledge that the earliest organizations formally labeled as “terrorists” in the region were Zionist militias—NOT the “muslims.”
These Zionist terrorist organizations then went on to form a state, a government, and an army, and they’ve continued to perpetuate and fund terrorism all around the world.
This part of the story is quietly erased because it completely upends the narrative we’re expected to accept.
This history, and others like it, is part of my Forbidden Reading List. If you want access to 200+ books, documentaries, and declassified files that I personally curated, click HERE. It’s free!
