Jewish immigration in accordance with “the numbers and interests of
the present population.”
Syrian-born Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Kassam, after whom the current
“military wing” of Hamas is named, created the first-ever terrorist
network in the history of the British Mandate for Palestine. The net-
work, called the Black Hand, was responsible for the deaths of at
least 10 Jews. After it killed a Jewish police officer, al-Kassam was
hunted down and killed by British police.
In 1929 Arab mobs slaughtered more than 100 Jews, 60 of them in
the Hebron Massacre alone; this was an ancient Jewish community in
Palestine whose members had lived among Arabs peacefully for cen-
turies. Many of the Jews’ corpses were mutilated by Arabs.
During the Arab Revolt (1936–1939), systematic bombings, riots,
and murders by Arabs left hundreds of Jews dead. This paved the way
to the establishment of the Arab Department in the Haganah headed
by Ezra Danin. The same techniques were used by Arabs in the first
stage of the 1947–1948 Arab-Israeli War. The onslaught was effi-
ciently contained by the Haganah. On the day of the birth of the in-
dependent state of Israel, 15 May 1948, the war erupted into a wide
conflict, with the armies of the surrounding Arab nations invading on
all sides. Its outcome was that Israel secured its independence, and
Transjordan (now renamed Jordan) and Egypt occupied parts of for-
mer mandatory Palestine.Terrorism in Israel after Independence.The years between Israel’s
independence and the 1967 Six-Day Warwitnessed persistent ter-
rorist activity. Until 1956, the Arab infiltrators’ intentions varied:
some went only to claim property; others to steal property from Jews
who settled near the border; and still others to kill Jews in revenge for
the military defeat of 1948. Although a minority among the infiltra-
tors, the last-named caused the deaths of more than 200 Israelis; theft
wrought considerable economic damage, and a general sense of inse-
curity was generated by the raids.
At first Egypt and Jordan attempted to restrain this activity, but
neither gained any notable success. In 1954 Egypt diametrically re-
versed its stance, formally creating a battalion of infiltrators (named
fedayeen) as a part of the Egyptian Army forces stationed in Gaza. In
Jordan, the fedayeen did not have formal status, and the evidence284 • TERRORISM06-102 (04) Q-Z.qxd 3/24/06 7:26 AM Page 284