There’s a move the respectable side makes in every generation, and it works so well that we never notice it’s a move. It sounds like this: not us. We’re the serious ones.
In 1948 the respectable ones had a name. It was the Haganah.
The three forces:
People outside Israel hear “the Jews” and imagine one army. In 1948 there were three, and they were not the same.
There was the Irgun — the Revisionist breakaway, aggressive, openly insurgent. There was Lehi, the Stern Gang — the smallest, most extreme, the ones who shot Bernadotte. The British called them hooligans. The mainstream Jewish leadership called them adventurists. These were the terrorists.
And then there was the Haganah — the big one, the mainstream one, controlled by the Zionist Labor establishment, disciplined, institutional. The one that later became the Israeli army, the IDF.
The Haganah’s whole identity was that it was not the other two. It didn’t blow up hotels. It didn’t run death squads. It was respectable.
What the respectable one did with its respectability:
In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel — ninety-one dead. The Haganah condemned it, and then profited from the panic it caused.
In April 1948, Irgun and Lehi massacred over a hundred villagers at Deir Yassin. The Haganah condemned it. And the news of Deir Yassin travelled ahead of the Haganah like weather — it terrified Arab families across the country into fleeing before the Haganah itself arrived. The respectable force got the benefit of the terrorists’ terror and kept its hands clean.
In September 1948, Lehi shot the UN mediator Count Bernadotte dead in the streets of Jerusalem. Not the Haganah.
So the respectable force could stand there through all of it and say: not us.
And here is the Haganah’s own record:
In July 1948, Operation Dani. The twin towns of Lydda and Ramle. Roughly fifty thousand people, some accounts say seventy thousand, driven out. The people of Ramle were put on buses. The people of Lydda were made to walk, in July, in the heat, toward the Arab lines. An unknown number died on that road — the estimates run from a handful to five hundred dead.
This was not the Irgun. This was not Lehi. This was the Haganah. The expulsion order was signed by the operation’s deputy commander, a young officer named Yitzhak Rabin.
And it was not an improvisation. In March 1948, before a single regular Arab army had crossed the border, the Haganah issued Plan Dalet — its operational blueprint, which provided for the destruction and clearing of hostile Arab villages.
So look at the division of labor. The respectable force deported. The terrorist force massacred. Two hands on the same project. And the respectable one got to keep its reputation, because the reputation was never about what it did. It was about what it wasn’t.
Then the punchline:
The hooligans became prime ministers. Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun, became Prime Minister in 1977. Yitzhak Shamir, of Lehi, became Prime Minister in 1983. Within thirty years, the “adventurists” and the “gang of hooligans” were running the country. Nobody calls them terrorists. We call it the underground — which is a compliment in Hebrew.
Now the part that should sound familiar:
Who calls themselves respectable today? The Left. In Israel. In America. The liberal Zionists. The ones who say, in every conversation: we’re not the settlers. We’re not the right-wingers. We’re the good ones.
And what do they do? They deplore the violence — and then benefit from it. They condemn the settlements — and keep the land. They feel bad about Gaza — and fund the war.
And here, let me be precise about who does what, because it’s the whole point. The Left supplies the moral cover. The Right — the settlers, the nationalist camp, the rough voice — does the work. It has been a division of labor since 1948: Haganah and Irgun then, Left and Right now. The presentable force and the rough force, both hands on the same project.
It’s the identical structure. The Haganah condemned Deir Yassin and then emptied Lydda and Ramle itself. The respectable Left condemns the occupation and then keeps everything.
And the alibi is load-bearing:
Here is the part that took me longest to understand, because I was raised inside it.
The respectable side is not a brake on the system. It is the reason the system is tolerable. A state that did the things Israel does, with no Left at all, would be unbearable — it would be seen, plainly, for what it is. The Left exists to make sure that never happens. Its bad conscience is a service. It lets the country say we are troubled by this while doing exactly what the Right does, and it lets people abroad say I support Israel, but and feel that the “but” has done something.
It hasn’t. The but has never once cost the Right a settlement, a hill, a law, a war. If your guilt doesn’t cost the other side anything, it isn’t guilt. It’s a subscription.
The third generation:
And the lineage didn’t stop. The current government of Israel contains men from the same line — the settler right, the heirs of Jabotinsky and Begin — and they hold the ministries. The man who runs the national police force kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the 1994 Hebron mosque mass murderer, on his living room wall for years.
The terrorism didn’t stop. It got renamed. Now it’s called the national security ministry.
And the respectable ones are still standing to the side, saying “not us”.
Why this matters more than a gotcha:
You can dismiss all of this as a clever rhetorical parallel. So let me put it as a claim, not a parallel.
Respectability is not a moral position. It is an alibi. It has never been the thing that stops a state from doing what it does — it is the thing that lets the state do it and keep the credit. The Haganah was not the good force. It was the presentable force. The Left is not the good side. It is the presentable side.
And the presentable side has been saying not us for seventy-five years. Deir Yassin, Lydda, the occupation, the settlements, the war — at every stage there was a respectable voice deploring it and a rough voice doing it, and the land changed hands all the same, and the respectable voice is still respectable.
We called them terrorists until we won. Then we called it a war of independence. And the respectable ones have been saying not us ever since.
Subscribe for the next piece — on what the respectable Left’s bad conscience actually costs the Right, and why the answer is: nothing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l1DZuK4Z-dEoSGPCp3d1_Gqzx8tN-W6Y/view?usp=drivesdk
You are right that the Haganah's condemnation of Irgun and Lehi terrorism does not absolve it of its own conduct. The expulsions from Lydda and Ramle happened, Rabin's role is documented, and the Labor Zionist establishment bears responsibility for its own actions. I have no reason to deny any of that.
But you then construct a continuous division of labor between the Zionist left and right, extending from 1948 to the present, in which opposition to violence and dispossession is itself evidence of complicity. You haven't demonstrated that relationship. You have assumed it.
Your argument leaves no room for Zionists who actually opposed territorial expansion, Palestinian dispossession, or exclusive Jewish political sovereignty. It cannot adequately account for the binational Zionism of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the political commitments of Brit Shalom and Ihud, or the subsequent history of Zionists who fought against settlement expansion and for Palestinian national self-determination.
Consider Peace Now, founded in 1978, its opposition to settlements, its demonstrations, and its decades of documenting settlement activity. Consider the political struggle surrounding Oslo and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist opposed to that process. These were real conflicts among Zionists, involving profoundly different understandings of Israel's future.
Nor does the failure of liberal Zionists to prevent the occupation establish that their opposition was insincere. Some liberal Zionist governments actively perpetuated the occupation, and their responsibility deserves examination. But you cannot assign their actions and intentions to everyone who shared some version of Jewish national identification.
Your previous essay, about the history of Reform anti-Zionism and binational Jewish nationalism, recognizes that Jewish political thought contained serious disagreements about sovereignty, equality, and the rights of Arabs in Palestine. Yet here those disagreements disappear into a single project whose participants supposedly understood their respective roles all along.
I have been a Zionist all my life. My Zionism does not make me an accomplice to Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or the settlement movement, any more than the existence of Jewish terrorists in 1948 establishes that everyone who supported Jewish national self-determination endorsed their actions.
If you want to establish complicity, examine what particular people advocated, what they did, what power they exercised, and what consequences followed. I am perfectly willing to have that examination include Zionists, including those whose political commitments resemble my own.
But I will not accept a theory in which the very act of opposing a crime becomes proof that one was helping to commit it. That would make your conclusion immune to contrary evidence, and it would erase the lives and political commitments of people who fought other Zionists over precisely these questions.
So I have a question for you, and I would appreciate a direct answer. What evidence would you accept that a liberal Zionist genuinely opposed dispossession rather than merely providing moral cover for it? Is there any historical example of a Zionist whose opposition you would recognize as genuine? If so, who, and what distinguishes that person from the people you accuse of complicity? If not, how could your theory ever be contradicted by evidence?
You insist, rightly, that Jewish history should not be rewritten to exclude people whose political commitments were defeated. Why, then, should I accept your rewriting of Zionist history to exclude people whose political commitments contradict your account of what Zionism has always been?