n contemporary political discourse, terrorism is frequently portrayed as a phenomenon primarily associated with Muslim organisations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. This popular perception, reinforced by decades of media coverage and the post-9/11 War on Terror, often obscures the longer and more diverse history of political violence in the modern world.

Long before any of these organisations emerged, Irgun (Etzel), a Zionist paramilitary group founded in Mandatory Palestine in 1931, had embraced bombings, assassinations, sabotage and attacks that many historians and contemporary observers classified as terrorism.

A critical examination of Irgun, therefore, not only illuminates a formative chapter in the history of Zionism and the creation of Israel but also challenges simplistic narratives that identify terrorism exclusively with Islam while overlooking earlier manifestations of organised political violence in the Twentieth Century.

Irgun (Irgun Tzvai Leumi or Etzel) emerged in 1931 as a breakaway organisation from the Haganah, marking a decisive shift within the Zionist movement from the policy of havlagah (restraint) to one of militant retaliation and offensive action. The split reflected deeper ideological differences over how the Zionist project should be pursued amid escalating tensions in Mandatory Palestine.

While the Haganah largely confined itself to defensive operations, Irgun argued that only sustained military pressure against Arab resistance and the British Mandate could secure a Jewish homeland. Its evolution was inseparable from the rise of Revisionist Zionism under Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who rejected political compromise, advocated unrestricted Jewish immigration and envisioned a Jewish state encompassing the whole of Mandatory Palestine, and in some formulations, TransJordan.

The movement developed against the backdrop of intensifying European anti-Semitism, the rise of fascism, British restrictions on Jewish immigration under the 1939 White Paper and the increasingly irreconcilable national aspirations of Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

Although Avraham Tehomi initiated the split from the Haganah and David Raziel re-organised the movement during the late 1930s, Irgun’s most recognisable leader was Menachem Begin, who assumed command in 1943 after escaping Soviet imprisonment and arriving in Palestine.

Under Begin, the organisation intensified its armed campaign against the British administration, culminating in the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed 91 people and remains one of the most controversial episodes of the anti-British insurgency.

Irgun justified such operations as legitimate acts of national liberation against colonial rule. British authorities condemned them as terrorism. Robert Fisk repeatedly highlighted the irony that tactics once denounced as terrorist would later become associated with leaders of the Israeli state, illustrating the fluidity of political labels when insurgents become founders of states.

Irgun never developed into a mass army, maintaining an active membership generally estimated between two and five thousand fighters. Its rank and file consisted largely of young Jewish immigrants, students, skilled workers, veterans of earlier Zionist organisations and refugees fleeing persecution in Europe.

Most originated from Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine, the principal centres of Revisionist Zionism. Others came from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and, in smaller numbers, Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen and Syria.

Women participated as couriers, intelligence operatives, medics and occasionally combatants. The predominance of European immigrants in the leadership reflected the demographic and ideological character of Revisionist Zionism during the Mandate period.

Irgun’s objectives evolved from defending Jewish settlements to securing an independent Jewish state through armed struggle, facilitating unrestricted Jewish immigration, expelling the British administration and asserting Jewish sovereignty over the entire Mandatory Palestine.

After temporarily moderating its activities during the Second World War, the organisation resumed its insurgency against British military and administrative targets in 1944. Its campaign included bombings, assassinations, prison breaks, sabotage and attacks on Arab villages.

Irgun called these operations legitimate military actions in pursuit of national liberation. Many historians hold that several deliberately targeted civilians and therefore meet accepted definitions of terrorism. The organisation’s participation, alongside Lehi, in the 1948 killings at Deir Yassin became one of the defining episodes of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although historians continue to debate some aspects of the event, there is broad agreement that the killings had a profound psychological impact and contributed significantly to the flight of Palestinians during the 1948 war.

For Palestinian intellectuals, Irgun’s history cannot be separated from the wider process of dispossession that accompanied the establishment of Israel. Edward Said situated organisations such as Irgun in his broader critique of Zionism as a settler-colonial enterprise, arguing that military force was not merely a response to conflict but an instrument for reshaping Palestine’s demographic and political landscape.

In his reading, Western historical narratives have often celebrated Zionist state-building while marginalising Palestinian experiences of displacement, rendering the Nakba an incidental rather than constitutive part of Israel’s creation. Mahmoud Darwish, writing as a poet rather than a historian, gave literary expression to the human consequences of that process. His recurring themes of exile, memory, destroyed villages and irrevocable loss transformed events associated with organisations such as Irgun into enduring symbols of Palestinian collective consciousness rather than isolated episodes of wartime violence. Ussama Makdisi similarly places Irgun within the intertwined histories of British imperialism, settler colonialism and competing nationalisms, arguing that the violence of Zionist paramilitary organisations accelerated demographic transformation and established patterns of domination whose political consequences continue to shape the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Irgun’s historical legacy, therefore, remains deeply contested. Its defenders maintain that Britain had reneged on its commitments under the Mandate; that European Jewry faced an existential catastrophe; and that armed resistance hastened the end of colonial rule while contributing decisively to Israel’s independence.

Critics counter that the organisation’s reliance on bombings, assassinations and attacks on civilians entrenched cycles of violence and played a significant role in the displacement of Palestinians. These competing interpretations reflect broad disagreements over nationalism, colonialism, political legitimacy and the ethics of revolutionary violence. Irgun thus occupies an ambiguous place in modern history: celebrated within some Israeli narratives as a movement of national liberation, yet remembered by many Palestinians and numerous historians as a paramilitary organisation whose methods contributed materially to the Nakba and the enduring conflict that followed. Any critical assessment must acknowledge both the historical circumstances that produced Irgun and the profound human consequences of the violence it employed.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore