He coldly justifies the massacre of 91 people at the King David Hotel as

He coldly justifies the massacre of 91 people at the King David Hotel as “necessary” to ensure a free Israel.It is a simple truth that if you deprive people of a state, they will fight for one. For this reason we delivered attack after attack against the oppressor, and our revolt burst into a great flame.”These are the words of Menachem Begin, who went on to become Israel’s first Likud Prime Minister. He led the Irgun, a terrorist group who fought against the British occupation of Palestine in the 1940s. If anybody should understand how the unique agony of living without a state turns people to terrorism, it is the Israelis. Begin’s compelling autobiography, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, is a mirror-image of the writings of contemporary Palestinian terrorists. He is far more dangerous – both to Israelis and to the cause of a secular Palestinian nationalism – dead than alive.To understand this we can listen to the explanation for terrorism offered by a man once universally regarded in Britain as “Terrorist Number One”: “All we wanted was to be a free people in our own country … our enemies called us terrorists, but we used physical force only because we were faced by physical force …

The formative experience of their lives was watching their parents stage a massive programme of peaceful resistance to occupation. Israel’s response was clear: Yitzhak Rabin gave the order to “break their bones”. No brainwashing is needed to turn these men to crazed violence; they learned it in their childhood from Israeli occupiers.All that happens when Israel kills Palestinian figureheads is that humiliation stabs deeper into their gut. Yassin will now become a ghost at every Palestinian feast, urging martyrdom. There is only one problem: I have met young men preparing to be suicide bombers, and this analysis bears no relation to reality.The wave of suicide bombers currently massacring civilians in Israel are the children of the first Intifada.

From an unequalled period of global reign that lasted 15 years, yesterday’s loss to England in the Second Test at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain, marked the Caribbean side’s 40th Test match defeat in six-and-a-half years. Encouraged by the American right, Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu imagine that suicide bombing is the work of a few evil masterminds brainwashing impressionable young people into committing suicide massacres. This is why they have killed Yassin and may yet kill Yasser Arafat. They genuinely believe that if you take out these “terror masters” the attacks will be reduced. But we should grieve mostly because it reveals a startling ignorance on the part of the Israeli government.

This ignorance will ensure they carry on slaying and oppressing Palestinians.The Likud government still fails to understand the causes of suicide bombing. Dissenters would be dealt with as they are in all fundamentalist states. The savagery inflicted on any Jews who remained there would be too horrible to describe I would be stoned to death there for being gay. It is understandable that some Palestinians, driven to psychosis by the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the occupation forced on them since 1967, have sympathy for this programme.