A terrorist can be anybody.

We are rather complacent about terrorists. The word has lost its meaning. A terrorist can be anybody.

In 1948, one of the Knesset’s first act was an anti-terrorism law. I haven’t really been able to determine the urgency behind this.

My supposition is that it was to curb the zeal of 300,000 militant Zionist paramilitary zealots like Haganah, Irgun and Lehi which murdered Palestinians with great zest. The paramilitaries were, of course, like all terrorists, doing this for the cause, for the greater good.

This brings me to the more modern version. Brooklyn extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane founded Kach (meaning ‘Thus’) in 1971. Zach was a political party for which Kahane won one seat in 1984.

Kach’s paramilitary wing was the Jewish Defense League which stated goal is to "protect Jews from antisemitism by whatever means necessary”.

The group adopted the slogan "Never Again!" which was originally used by the Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto. While the phrase is usually interpreted to mean that the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews will never be permitted to recur, Kahane claimed that his intention was to declare that Jews should never again be caught by surprise or lulled into a foolish trust in others.

The JDL issued a statement attacking American Jewish organizations which opposed the Vietnam War, accusing them of doing more to destroy the State of Israel "than all the Arab armies”.

This still-active “vigilante club” has 15,000 members, The group took to bombing Arab and Soviet properties in the United States while assassinating a variety of alleged "enemies of the Jewish people" ranging from Arab-American political activists to neo-Nazis.

If there is an antifa, the JDL is surely the protofa. Baruch Goldstein was a charter member of the Jewish Defense League.

Kahane’s legislative proposals were revoking Israeli citizenship for all non-Jews, banning Jewish-Gentile marriages (sorry, Ivanka) and sexual relations, claiming the Mishneh Torah as his source. Woo-ee!

Kahane was always funded by American extremists. Kahane claimed Israel’s security needs were justification for discrimination against Arabs.

The US continued to designate all these sprouts terrorist organisations:

• Using explosives or firearms with intent to endanger the safety of individuals or cause substantial damage to property (including an attempt to car bomb a Palestinian girls school in East Jerusalem)

• threatening and conspiring to carry out assassinations

• soliciting funds and members for a terrorist organization

Following the ban, Kach founded the Sicarii (meaning daggerman) terrorist group in 1989 which conducted arson and graffiti attacks against Jewish moderate political leaders. They named themselves after the ancient Sicarii rebels, a group of Jewish zealots who opposed the Roman occupation of Judaea. [Interesting to note that hitmen in Spanish are called sicarios.]

Kahane was sentenced to six months in prison for planning an “act of provocation” on the Temple Mount. When settlers were evicted from the West Bank, several extremists barricaded themselves inside a synagogue and threatened suicide.

They advocated a Jewish theocracy under Halakha law, complete with religious courts. If I understand it correctly, Halakha is the Jewish version of Sharia.

[Aside. Which are the paramilitary wings of the Republicans and Democrats? A question to ponder.]

However, under the Knesset Elections Law, Kach was barred from running candidates in 1988 due to incitement to racism. Ah, how times have changed!

The party split in 1990, as Kahane Lives, which was also barred. This group was led by Kahane’s son from a settlement in the West Bank. Both were banned outright in 1994 by the Israeli cabinet using that pesky 1948 law.

Son Binyamin was convicted for distributing pamphlets advocating violence against Arabs. He and his wife  were killed in a Palestinian ambush in 2000.

Both parties supported a 1992 grenade attack in the butcher’s market of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Sadly, Kahane was assassinated during a speech in New York City in 1990. The prime suspect, an Egyptian-born American citizen, was acquitted at trial.

One Kach supporter, Yigal Amir, assassinated Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Rabin considered that his failure to close down the Jewish settlements in Hebron after the massacre one of his greatest political mistakes

This was followed Brooklyn-born physician Baruch Goldstein’s shooting massacre as revenge for Rabin. 29 Palestinians were slaughtered while praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank during the holidays of Purim and Ramadan.

Goldstein, dressed in Israeli army uniform, threw a grenade into the midst of 800 worshippers in the Hall of Isaac and opened fire with an assault rifle and killed 29 people, including children as young as 12, and wounded 125 others, leaving several paralysed for life. Goldstein was overpowered and beaten to death by survivors.

Witnesses said three Israeli guards opened fire, likely in panic amid the confusion, as the Muslims fled the shrine, with at least one soldier firing into the crowd.

Several Palestinian survivors have told that they believe Israeli soldiers collaborated with Goldstein, stating there were fewer soldiers than usual at the mosque, and that exclusively on that day the metal detector was turned-off and no-one conducted searches: "they [the soldiers] were relaxed and laughing, they didn't think anybody was going to get out alive", said one man who was left paralyzed as a result of being shot by Goldstein.

The Jewish Chronicle denounced the Kach organisation to which Goldstein belonged as "Neo-Nazis" and a U.S. creation, funded by American money and a product of American gun culture.

Following the massacre, 20 to 26 Palestinians were killed while 120 were injured in confrontations with the Israeli military, and 9 Israeli Jews were also killed.

Before the massacre, "expressions of Palestinian armed resistance were rare and lacked broad popular support. After the killings, Palestinian suicide bombers carried out attacks in Israel.

According to Matti Steinberg, then Shin Bet head's advisor on Palestinian affairs, Hamas had until then refrained from attacking civilian targets inside Israel, and the change in this policy was a result of Goldstein's massacre.

Some Jewish settlers in Hebron lauded him as a hero, viewing his attack as a pre-emptive strike and his subsequent death as an act of martyrdom. Whew!

In the IDF, Goldstein the doctor refused to treat Druze soldiers who served in the West Bank, claiming that it was against Jewish laws to treat non-Jews.

At Goldstein's funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin claimed that even one million Arabs are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".In eulogizing Goldstein, Rabbi Israel Ariel called him a "holy martyr", and questioned the innocence of the victims by claiming they were responsible for the massacre of Hebron's Jews in 1929, 60 years earlier. (WTF!)

Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba said he was a saint whose "hands are innocent, his heart pure", and compared him to the martyrs of the Holocaust.

At the time, settler rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh was the only prominent Orthodox rabbi who praised the massacre.He has since been detained several times for espousing extremist views.

The phenomenon of the adoration of Goldstein's tomb persisted for years, despite Israeli government efforts to crack down on those making pilgrimage to Goldstein's grave site. The grave's epitaph said that Goldstein "gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land".

In 1999, after the passing of Israeli legislation outlawing monuments to terrorists, the Israeli army dismantled the shrine that had been built to Goldstein at the site of his interment. In the years after the dismantling of the shrine, radical Jewish settlers would celebrate Purim by invoking the memory of the massacre, sometimes even dressing up themselves or their children to look like Goldstein.

[Must put hate in the water over there!]

The request of the PLO govt hat all settlers be disarmed and that an international force be established to protect Palestinians from Israeli aggression was rejected.

A commission of inquiry was formed to investigate. Critics of the commission have suggested that Shamgar's judicial record has "consistently displayed his leniency toward the settlers, including those convicted of crimes against the Palestinians, but especially toward the soldiers who had fired at the Palestinians" and that his career reflected a history of pro-settler activism by promoting expropriation of Palestinian land to Jewish settlement that is against international law.

There is a list of massacres in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza which would take many pages. There is a similar list of massacres in Israel.

Some Kach followers founded the segregationist Lehava movement which is today linked to the modern party, Otzma Yehudit. They advocate breaking all political, cultural social and non-economic ties with Germany and Austria [Why not Poland?]  as well as withdrawing from the UN.

The aims of Otzma Yehudit are:

• The Army shall be given a free hand to shoot when it feels necessary at any attacker, including stone-throwers. The entire village of any terrorist, including stone-throwers, shall be expelled from the country.

• All women will be exempt from army service but will be compelled to do national service in their neighborhoods and come home every night.

• A separate large army base shall be set up in which Haredi Jews will do their army service. Any full-time yeshiva student who does absolutely nothing else will be exempt. The many thousands of part-time yeshiva students will be doing army service at the special base.

The party has been described by multiple sources, including the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, as a "Jewish fascist group"