Israel – A State Founded on Anti-British Terrorism

But it must also be noted that the decision also in part reflects Israel’s increasingly warm relationship with Argentina since President Javier Milei came to power. Milei has been a vocal supporter of Israel since the October 7th attacks, even lighting a ceremonial torch at Israel’s most recent Independence Day celebrations. Milei, who was born into a Catholic family, has publicly stated that he intends to convert to Orthodox Judaism, but plans to wait until after he finishes his term as president because the strict lifestyle requirements conflict with his official duties. In the meantime, Milei studies the Torah regularly with his rabbi, Axel Wahnish, and has expressed a strong personal affinity for Judaism, despite the fact that he has not yet formally converted. Recently, Milei also revealed that he has distant Jewish heritage through his maternal line, noting that his grandfather discovered he was Jewish via matrilineal descent.

Israel delivered these sizeable military armaments to Argentina by secretly routing the shipments through Peru, rather than moving them directly to their end destination on Argentine soil. Cargo planes flew clandestine routes, and some Israeli-supplied jets were even painted with Peruvian flags to mask the transaction. When confronted by British diplomats, Israeli diplomats and members of the Knesset claimed they were merely honouring insignificant, pre-war contracts. This was a lie. What’s more, these shipments were not merely defensive armaments: Israel was involved in providing critical air superiority assets and munitions that were used directly against British troops. In total, Israel supplied over 20 Nesher (Dagger) fighter jets (an Israeli version of the Mirage 5) and reconditioned Skyhawk jets.

The sinking of the RFA Sir Galahad in Bluff Cove

These Israeli-supplied aircraft, coupled with specialised fuel tanks which gave Argentine pilots extra airtime over the islands, were directly used to bomb British naval forces. Most notably, they were involved in the attack on the RFA Sir Galahad in Bluff Cove, which killed 48 British soldiers and sailors. The shipments also included air-to-air missiles, radar alert systems, machine guns, anti-tank weapons, and anti-personnel landmines. At the time of these arms deals, the Israeli Prime Minister was none other than Menachem Begin, a man who harboured intense personal anti-British sentiment stemming from his pre-1948 terrorist actions where he and other Zionist Jews launched a wave of murderous attacks against British authorities and soldiers stationed in what was then known as Mandatory Palestine. These terrorist attacks were carried out in order to drive Britain out of the region to facilitate the Zionists’ goal of establishing Israel as a nation.

Historically, Palestine had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire. However, the British government had assumed control of Palestine in 1917 following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, with the British Mandate officially coming into force on September 29th 1923. British authorities would terminate the mandate at midnight on May 14th 1948. The final military and administrative withdrawal was completed the following day, coinciding with the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The British departure was not brought about through acts of diplomacy, and instead followed a lengthy and brutal terrorist campaign waged against British military and administrative targets by Zionist paramilitary groups, which left hundreds of British service personnel, diplomats, and civilians dead. Today, however, many do not even know about this period of history, which has effectively been hidden by the media, the establishment, and even historians.

To uncover this hidden history, one must look closely at the closing decade of the British Mandate. During this fierce Zionist insurgency, the two main terrorist groups that led the violent campaigns against the British in the Middle East were known as the Irgun and the Stern Gang. The Irgun was formed in 1931; its formal Hebrew name was Irgun Tzvai Leumi (National Military Organisation). Menachem Begin (who went on to become Prime Minister of Israel and sold arms to Argentina during the Falklands War) assumed command of the Irgun in 1943 and led its most violent campaigns against the British. The organisation’s ideology was rooted in Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism. The Irgun and its leaders rejected any calls for restraint towards British authorities and Arabs living on land that Zionists wished to claim for themselves. The Irgun openly stated that a Jewish state could only be achieved through direct military force. As a result, they launched a concentrated guerrilla campaign against British infrastructure, immigration authorities, military outposts, and administrative hubs to make the Mandate too costly for Britain to maintain.

The Stern Gang was formed in 1940 as a radical splinter group from the Irgun. Its formal name was Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), and was founded by Avraham Stern. The Stern Gang was an even more radical and deeply anti-imperialist and anti-British group. Unlike the Irgun, which paused its anti-British terrorist activities during the early years of World War II to support the Allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis forces, the Stern Gang declared Britain the primary enemy from their inception. They even went as far as to attempt to negotiate with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy early in the war, believing any enemy of Britain was a potential ally for Jewish independence. The Stern Gang specialised in high-profile political assassinations, targeted executions of British police and officials, bank robberies to fund operations, and urban terrorism.

During Britain’s control of Palestine which began in 1917, there were many attacks that targeted British interests, with the first recorded Jewish militant or terrorist attacks explicitly targeting British personnel or institutions in Mandatory Palestine occurring during the late 1930s. Up until the late 1930s, Zionist paramilitary groups like the Haganah and the newly splintered Irgun primarily focused their violence on local Arab populations. However, following the 1937 Peel Commission’s recommendations and increasing British restrictions which were intended to protect Arab civilians who were being increasingly targeted by Jewish militants, the Irgun began turning its attention toward British infrastructure. The first explicitly targeted, fatal attacks against the British administration occurred in 1939, directly provoked by the publication of the British White Paper of May 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases in order to prevent the displacements of native Arab populations.

Following the release of the White Paper, the Irgun launched a series of targeted bombings against British infrastructure. They sabotaged the Jerusalem broadcasting station, bombed post offices, and targeted British telephone lines. In August 1939, the first high-profile assassination of a British official occurred when the Irgun detonated a bomb that killed Ralph Cairns, the British head of the Jewish Department of the Palestine Police Civil Investigation Department, along with another British officer, Ronald Barker, in Jerusalem. The violence escalated into what historians classify as a coordinated, widespread “insurgency” or campaign of terrorism in February 1944, when future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin took control of the Irgun and officially declared a “revolt” against the British Mandate.

Just days later, on February 12th 1944, the Irgun executed its first highly coordinated, simultaneous attacks against a number of British administrative targets, bombing the government’s immigration offices in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. As the attacks took place late on a Saturday night (the conclusion of the Jewish Sabbath), the buildings were entirely empty and there were no military or civilian casualties. What’s more, at this early stage of Menachem Begin’s declared “Revolt,” the Irgun’s strategy focused on destroying symbolic instruments of British rule rather than killing personnel. However, the explosions did cause extensive structural damage to the offices, shattering windows, blowing out walls, and destroying administrative records and equipment. However, the campaign would not remain bloodless for long.

Just two days later on February 14th 1944, British police stumbled upon members of the smaller, more radical Stern Gang putting up revolutionary posters. A shootout ensued, and two British constables were shot dead. Then less than two weeks later, on February 27th 1944, the Irgun struck again, using the same night-time tactic to bomb the British income tax offices in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa in order to disrupt tax collection. As a result, the British security forces responded with curfews and crackdowns, leading the Stern Gang and the Irgun to shift their tactics toward targeted assassinations and attacks on police headquarters, marking the true beginning of the bloody four-year insurgency. By the end of 1944, the violence had spread beyond Palestine and into neighbouring countries. What follows is a timeline of the most notable Zionist terrorist attacks against British interests in the region during the period of the British Mandate.

On November 6th 1944, the Stern Gang assassinated Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, known colloquially as Lord Moyne. This would be one of the most high-profile political assassinations of the British Mandate era, as Lord Moyne was the highest-ranking British official in the region, overseeing British policy across the Middle East during World War II. The Stern Gang held Lord Moyne personally responsible for strictly enforcing the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. Lord Moyne was ambushed outside his residence in Cairo, Egypt, by two young Stern Gang members, Eliyahu Bet-Zouri (22) and Eliyahu Hakim (19). As Lord Moyne’s car pulled up, Hakim opened the door and shot Moyne three times, while Bet-Zouri shot and killed Moyne’s driver, Lance Corporal Arthur Fuller, who tried to intervene. The two assassins attempted to escape on bicycles but were pursued and arrested by an Egyptian motorcycle policeman; Lord Moyne would die of his wounds just hours later. Bet-Zouri and Hakim were tried by an Egyptian military court, sentenced to death, and hanged in Cairo on March 22nd 1945.

On February 26th 1946, a highly coordinated joint operation that became known as the Night of the Airfields was carried out by both the Irgun and the Stern Gang, which targeted the Royal Air Force (RAF). The terrorist groups sought to strike a blow against British prestige and cripple the RAF’s ability to patrol the Mediterranean, which the British used to intercept ships carrying Jewish settlers who were attempting to enter Palestine illegally and settle on Arab land. The attack saw synchronized hit-and-run teams infiltrating three major British military airfields: Kastina, Lydda, and Kfar Sirkin. Operatives slipped past guards, planted time bombs on the wings of parked aircraft, and slipped away before the detonations. The operation was a huge embarrassment for the British, as the Zionist terrorist groups managed to destroy or severely damage approximately 20 to 30 RAF aircraft, including Halifax bombers and Spitfires.

On July 22nd 1946, the Irgun, under the direct orders of Menachem Begin, executed the single most deadly attack against British authorities during the Mandate rule – the bombing of the King David Hotel. The southern wing of the luxury King David Hotel in Jerusalem served as the central hub of British power in Palestine, housing the British Mandatory Government Secretariat and the Headquarters of the British Forces. Weeks earlier, the British had launched Operation Agatha, dubbed by Zionist settlers as “Black Saturday”, a massive crackdown involving the arrest of thousands of Jews involved in both terrorism that targeted British forces and settler violence that targeted and displaced the native Arab population. During Operation Agatha, British troops seized a large number of secret intelligence documents. The Irgun targeted the King David Hotel specifically to destroy those seized documents before they could be used to dismantle the Zionist terror network. Irgun operatives disguised themselves as Arab milkmen and smuggled several milk churns packed with roughly 350 kg of explosives into the hotel’s basement restaurant.

The aftermath of the bombing of the King David Hotel

The Irgun claimed they telephoned warnings to the hotel switchboard, the French Consulate, and a local newspaper 25 minutes before the blast, expecting an evacuation. However, British authorities disputed this and later stated that no clear warning reached the proper officials in time. The explosion caused the entire six-storey southern wing of the hotel to collapse. 91 people were killed, including 28 British officials and military personnel, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews, and 5 others. The immense death toll caused shockwaves worldwide. This terrorist atrocity even caused some mainstream Zionist leaders to distance themselves from the Irgun, while the British government responded by placing a massive £10,000 bounty on Menachem Begin’s head and instituted strict martial law throughout Palestine.

Then on October 31st 1946, the Irgun brought their campaign of terror to Europe when they bombed the British embassy in Rome. This was the Irgun’s most prominent international operation, designed to show British leaders that they were not safe from retaliation, even outside of Palestine. Disguised as a local couple, Irgun operatives smuggled two heavy suitcases packed with TNT and timed detonators into the entrance of the British Embassy in Rome, Italy. The explosion occurred in the early hours of the morning. It completely destroyed the residential wing of the embassy, blew out windows across a wide radius in Rome, and injured several Italian passersby and embassy staff. Fortunately, no one was killed. This attack proved that the Irgun had established an active, functional network of operational cells across Europe, often recruiting from the Jewish diaspora. It forced the British government to dramatically increase security at embassies worldwide and implement strict passport controls for travellers from the Middle East.

The aftermath of the bombing of the British embassy in Rome

On March 31st 1947, the Stern Gang attacked the Haifa Oil Refinery, directly targeting Britain’s primary financial and strategic asset in the region. The Consolidated Refineries in Haifa was a massive complex that processed oil piped in from Iraq which was vital for powering British military operations, naval ships, and the domestic British economy. Stern Gang operatives infiltrated the heavily guarded industrial complex by cutting through the perimeter fences. They placed timed satchel charges directly onto the massive oil storage tanks. The resulting explosions triggered a catastrophic inferno. Eleven massive fuel tanks collapsed, and over 16,000 tons of oil burned continuously for days. The smoke cloud was visible for miles. The raid caused millions of pounds in economic damage and disrupted fuel supplies, striking another major blow to British morale by proving that despite a massive military presence, the British administration could not protect its most critical infrastructure.

On May 4th 1947, an Irgun terror cell carried out an attack on a British prison in Acre. Disguised as British military engineers and Arab workers, the terrorists pulled up to Acre Prison in stolen military trucks. The prison was a heavily fortified Crusader-era fortress used by the British to hold high-security prisoners, including top operatives from the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Breaking into Acre Prison was considered practically impossible. As a result, the operation required precise coordination between terrorists outside the prison and inmates within. Inmates managed to smuggle in explosives (disguised as oil cans) to blow the internal doors while operatives on the outside laid heavy charges against the prison’s weakest external wall, which bordered a Turkish bathhouse. The blast ripped a massive hole in the fortress wall. Amidst the chaos, smoke, and a pre-planned diversionary firefight, 41 Jewish prisoners who were members of the Irgun and Stern Gang managed to escape, along with over 200 Arab prisoners.

During the chaotic retreat and ensuing firefight with British forces, 9 escapees and attackers were killed. The British captured several operatives, including three Irgun fighters – Yaakov Weiss, Avshalom Haviv, and Meir Nakar – who were subsequently sentenced to death by a British military court. The prison break was a massive psychological humiliation for the British administration. It proved that even their most secure fortress could be breached by the increasingly brazen Zionist terrorists.

Then in July 1947 came what is widely considered as the final breaking point that convinced the British government that maintaining the Mandate was untenable. This would arguably be the most gruesome act carried out by the Zionist terrorists and became known internationally as the Sergeants Affair. After the British administration sentenced the three Acre Prison attackers to death, Menachem Begin ordered Irgun terrorists to kidnap British hostages to use as leverage in order to negotiate for the prisoners’ lives. On July 12th 1947, the Irgun successfully abducted two British military intelligence sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, while they were walking in Netanya. Menachem Begin publicly announced that if the British hanged the three Jewish prisoners, the Irgun would hang the two British sergeants in retaliation. The British government refused to back down and on July 29th 1947, the British executed the three Irgun fighters at Acre Prison.

The bodies of Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice

As a result, the Irgun hanged Sergeants Martin and Paice in a secret underground bunker. They then moved the bodies to a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. Knowing that British troops would come to retrieve the bodies of their compatriots, the cowardly Irgun terrorists booby-trapped the corpses and the surrounding ground with wire-triggered landmines. When a British captain cut one of the bodies down, the mine detonated, severely injuring him. The incident provoked immense outrage and horror across Britain. Combined, the Acre Prison Break and the Sergeants Affair completely exhausted the British public and political will to continue attempting to police Palestine. Just a few months later, in November 1947, the United Kingdom formally announced it would hand the problem over to the United Nations and completely withdraw from Palestine by May 1948.

Yet despite the British announcing their withdrawal, the terrorism did not end, and throughout 1947 and early 1948, Stern Gang operatives repeatedly mined the tracks, ambushed trains, and blew up rail bridges along the line that connected Egypt and Palestine. The railway line connecting Egypt and Palestine was the logistical backbone of the British military, used daily to move troops, supplies, and mail. The Stern Gang systematically targeted this network to paralyze British mobility. The most devastating single attack occurred near Rehovot. Stern Gang operatives mined the tracks beneath a military troop train travelling from Cairo to Haifa. The explosion ripped through three passenger carriages packed with British soldiers, killing 28 and leaving dozens more severely wounded in this one blast. It is important to note that many of these attacks occurred after the UN had already voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, and the Stern Gang used these final bombings to terrorise British forces while they were actively trying to organise their withdrawal, ensuring that the British retreat was as chaotic and bloody as possible.

As the final British troops withdrew from Palestine in May 1948, they left behind a trail of blood that would quietly reshape international alliances decades later. Over this bloody period, Zionist terrorists had killed between 140-170 British personnel, and wounded around 550 more. Their victims included British army soldiers, RAF airmen, Palestine Police Officers and colonial officials. However, this death toll would be dwarfed by the number of Arabs who were ethnically cleansed by the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Essentially, the British personnel who were killed during the mandate period were targeted in order to drive the British out of the region so that Zionists could effectively drive three quarters of a million native Palestinians out of their homes in order to build what is today, the state of Israel.

From late 1937 through to 1948, the Irgun and the Stern Gang systematically engaged in what historians classify as crowd-targeted terrorism against Arab communities. The Irgun pioneered the use of large-scale explosives placed in crowded civilian areas. They repeatedly detonated bomb-rigged milk cans, vegetable baskets, and detonators in Arab marketplaces, bus stations, and cafes in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, killing hundreds of shoppers and commuters. While some train attacks targeted British military troop transports, the Stern Gang and other Zionist terrorists also bombed standard civilian passenger trains, such as an early 1948 train bombing that killed 40 Arab civilians.

The true peak of the violence against the Arab population occurred during the civil war phase that took place between November 1947 to May 1948 as the British were withdrawing from the region. Historians estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed in the targeted bombing campaigns, guerrilla raids, and village assaults carried out by Zionist paramilitaries including the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and Haganah, before the formal British departure on 14 May 1948. The most notable massacre of Arabs took place on April 9th 1948 in Deir Yassin. A joint force of Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists raided the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. They cleared houses with grenades and firearms, killing between 100 and 120 villagers, including women, children, and the elderly.

The aftermath of the Deir Yassin massacre

In his own memoir The Revolt, former Irgun leader and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin explicitly noted that the massacre at Deir Yassin was used deliberately to strike psychological terror into the native population. The fear of matching atrocities triggered a massive, panicked exodus. By the time the British officially lowered their flag in May 1948, over 300,000 Palestinians had already been displaced or forcibly expelled from their land. By the end of the conflict, that number swelled to over 750,000 refugees, and more than 400 Arab villages were permanently depopulated or destroyed. It was this catastrophic displacement – the Nakba – that birthed the modern Middle East.

But the memory of the British diplomats and service personnel who died trying to contain Jewish expansion into Palestinian territories never truly faded from the minds of the Zionist terrorists who fought against them. When Menachem Begin watched British warships sail for the Falklands in 1982, the ghosts of the Mandate era were still very much alive, prompting the then Israeli government to transform a conflict taking place hundreds of miles away in the South Atlantic into a theatre for a delayed, billion-dollar act of revenge. A revenge that, as Benjamin Netanyahu proved in October 2026, is still being played out on the global diplomatic stage today. When Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his diplomats to back Argentina in the current dispute over the ownership of the Falkland Islands, the mainstream media framed it as a standard, modern political spat. A simple, tit-for-tat reaction to recent British sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements. But as the declassified files reveal, the true reasons for the Israeli support of Argentina runs much deeper.

The British public has been encouraged to look at international relations through a remarkably narrow and controlled lens. The public is presented with a view of the Falklands War that paints the conflict as a clear-cut military clash between Britain and Argentina, and the birth of Israel as a purely diplomatic endeavour born from the ashes of the Second World War. As a result, the brutal, four-year terrorist campaign that forced Britain out of Palestine – and the billion-dollar revenge-fuelled arms deals of 1982 – have both been systematically airbrushed from the collective consciousness of the British people. However, uncovering this hidden history exposes an uncomfortable truth: that the geopolitical map of the modern world was not drawn by diplomats in velvet-lined rooms. It was carved out by Zionist terrorists whose idea of diplomacy was marketplace bombs, booby-trapped corpses, and targeted assassinations.

The British soldiers who died in the ruins of the King David Hotel, the 48 servicemen killed aboard the RFA Sir Galahad by Israeli-supplied jets, and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from their ancestral homeland are all casualties of the exact same historical arc. Eighty-two years after the Stern Gang assassinated Lord Moyne in the streets of Cairo, the smoke has finally cleared from the battlefields of Mandatory Palestine. But the same men who terrorised British soldiers and Arabs alike during the Mandate era rose to prominence in the newly founded state of Israel, only to use their newfound influence to control the balance of global power. Benjamin Netanyahu may have been born after the conclusion of the British Mandate, never himself serving in the brutal Zionist terror groups like the Irgun and the Stern Gang, but today, he honours their legacy and continues their work – not with crudely made explosives and booby traps, but with billion-dollar arms sales, the most powerful military in the Middle East, and the full backing of the American establishment.