Comment by oa335
11 days ago
I believe the comparison is valid - I put "terrorist" in quotes for a reason.
All three groups at times participated in violent activities targeting the British, Arabs, and even at times other Jews.
Haganah was proscribed by the British mandate and was an unlawful, underground militia. Lehi had 100s of members but Irgun had 4000-8000.
You yourself admit that Lehi and Irgun could be categorized as "terrorist" and Haganah engaged in what you describe as "something in between guerilla warfare and terror attacks".
The British certainly thought of all three as "terrorist" groups, which is why they targeted them with military and police action - https://israeled.org/british-round-up-resistance-fighters/
Hamas would also not describe themselves as "terrorist", they also describe themselves as a "resistance" movement.
Haganah both planned and executed the "Plan Dalet", which killed and forcibly expelled the vast majority of non-Jews from their lands - they actually did what people accuse Hamas of wanting to do.
The relations with the British was more complex than you think, including many years of cooperation, including British training of Haganah forces in the SNS and fighting together during the arab revolt. As common in this conflict I think your original comment was superficial in its resorting to labels rather than content.
Regarding Plan Dalet, saying that most of the non-jews were killed or forcibly expelled is simply not true, not chronologically or factually.
Fact is that most of the Palestinians in 1948 fled on their own accords, while forced expulsions happened they were rare and were done for military reasons, mostly preparing for the imminent attack of five regular armies, as happened by the other side as well (e.g. kfar etzion)
While Israel proper has a sizable Palestinian population that is larger than the population of the Gaza strip
As i alluded to in my comment, I put “terrorist” in quotes precisely because I recognize the nuance. I agree that it is not productive to resort to lazily labeling militant groups as “terrorist”. That was the entire point of my original comment, which seems to be lost on you.
> Regarding Plan Dalet, saying that most of the non-jews were killed or forcibly expelled is simply not true, not chronologically or factually.
Right wing Israeli historian Benny Morris writes:
> the bulk of the Palestinian refugees—some 250,000 to 300,000- went into exile during those weeks between early April and mid-June 1948, with the major precipitant being Jewish (Haganah/1ZL/IDF) military attacks or the fear of such attacks
> In conformity with Tochnit Dalet (Plan D), the Haganah master plan, formulated in early March 1948, for securing the Jewish state areas in preparation for the expected declaration of statehood and the prospective Arab invasion, the Haganah cleared various areas completely of Arab villages
In his paper “A new historiography”.
His estimates of expulsions are on the low end compared to other Israeli New Historians. And of course much lower than Arab historians are estimates as well, but I have a sinking feeling that citing Arab historians wouldn’t be productive in this particular exchange.
Benny Morris is not a right wing historian, but was actually very much in the deep Israeli left when this was written, very far from the Israeli history consensus. You'd might want to read about the New Historians for some perspective on that.
Reading his seminal work 1948 puts your quote as somewhat out of context:
Plan D has given rise over the decades to a minor historiographic controversy, with Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historians charging that it was the Haganah’s master plan for the expulsion of the country’s Arabs. But a cursory examination of the actual text leads to a different conclusion
If you are interested in Benny Morris, you will probably be interested to read in the same book about the Palestinian and Arab armies expulsion of Jewish settlements as early as 1929, and in multiple places in the war (Etzion Bloc, Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim, Masada, etc), where they cleansed the Jewish population from the future Arab state. This followed multiple declarations of intent by the Grand Mufti and other Arab leaders of cleansing the Jewish state.
Furthermore, you might be interested in the forced expulsion of around 700,000 Jews from Arab countries following the war, a similar number to the number of Palestinian refugees created by the war. These were settled in Israel, while the Palestinians were kept in city-sized refugee camps as non-civilians in Arab states for 70+ years.
Generally, based on some information you have omitted or seemed to misunderstand, I have the feeling that most of your knowledge on this subject is based on reading post-digested sources in Wikipedia, which is nowadays an extremely biased source on this subject, and very much deviates from even basic facts.