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Ironically, Israel itself might not exist today had it not been for terrorists. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, two militant Jewish groups of the '30s and '40s, pressured the British to give up their mandate over Palestine through bombs and assassinations and tried to force the Arabs out through simple murder. Lord Moyne, the British administrator for the Middle East, was killed in 1944 in Cairo by the Stern Gang, which also assassinated Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator in Palestine, in 1948. The most infamous act of all was the murder by the Irgun and Stern Gang of 254 Arabs in the village of Deir Yassin in 1948. David Ben-Gurion's Haganah, the largest of the Jewish fighting groups at the time, was never guilty of such acts, but it did cooperate for long periods with both the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
"Our enemies called us terrorists, our friends patriots," wrote Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun, in words that could be used by any terrorist at any time. Begin has found his past associations no handicap in Israel; he now sits in the Knesset as leader of the opposition Likud bloc. Another Irgun member, Arie Ben-Eliezer, served as deputy speaker of the Knesset, and Nathan Yellin-Mor, a leader of the Stern Gang, won a seat in the Israeli parliament only a few months after the murder of Count Bernadotte.
What makes terrorism respectable? The main criterion is success. Algeria's Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika is currently president of the U.N. General Assembly partly because terrorism got its way in Algeria. If the French had been able to crush the F.L.N., he would probably be either dead or in prison. None of this should be cited in defense, let alone in praise of terror—only in deference to a terrible reality.
To be truly successful, terrorist groups, which usually start as a small number of dedicated zealots, must, in any case, eventually choose between keeping to their strategy of violence or modifying it to expand their base of political support. "A [revolutionary] group cannot achieve legitimacy until it gives up terrorism," argues Harvard Government Professor Michael Walzer. "Conversion is always possible, but it requires a formal or informal renunciation of the tactics of terrorism."
Thus, because it was felt that he had not given up the murderous bent that helped Cyprus gain independence from the British in the '50s, the world was appalled by the naming of Nikos Sampson, a gunman for the notorious EOKA movement, as Cyprus' President earlier this year. When the now ousted Greek military junta installed Sampson in place of Archbishop Makarios, it took the first step on its path to ruin. Sad though it may seem, the world appears willing to forget—if not forgive—most crimes of terrorism and to eventually honor those it once called criminal. It must first, however, have some assurance that the terrorist has, to quote French Historian Philippe Vigier, "sheathed his knife" and washed the blood off his hands. ·Gerald Clarke