Who is Yeruham “Eitan” Livni?

Back in the day, back in the 1930s and 40s, when someone in the British press or foreign service would refer to Palestine and mention that “the terrorists” were at it again, they would be referring, not to “Arab terrorists,” but to “Jewish terrorists,” who by the late 1930s were developing into an armed underground dominated by two groups – the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL, pronounced ‘Etzel’, also known as the N.M.O. – ‘National Military Organization’) and the much smaller “Stern Gang” or Lohamei Herut Israel (LeHI, or the F.F.I. – ‘Freedom Fighters of Israel’). These were men who started out in the right-wing Revisionist school of Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, and then proceeded to move still further right of even Jabotinsky. In their own eyes, they were the foreign Jewish fighters (mostly from Poland and southern Russia) who would seize the Zionist homeland from the British and Arabs by force of arms and through tactics of “guerilla warfare,” or in their case, acts of “terrorism.”

The usage of both the word “terrorism” and “terrorist” were, as I recall, originally coined by the British press to specifically refer to the organizations and activities of this “Hebrew underground,” as Menachem Begin referred to it. Not only were the men who chose this path of underground resistance against the “unjust” British occupation of “their lands” looked upon as terrorists, bank robbers, extortionists, assassins, saboteurs, and right-wing fascist sympathizers by the British authorities, but by the left-wing Zionists and the mainstream Zionist organizations, such as the Jewish Agency, as well. As you might imagine, the success of their public relations campaigns were very up and down, depending on what big terror operation either group had just finished launching. The gunning down of seven British paratroopers by LeHI in the parking lot of the RAF base, for example, didn’t go over very well with the mainstream Zionist power structure, nor with the British public and government.

On the night of April 25, 1946, at 8:45 pm, with land mines scattered behind them to block a counter-attack party, LeHI operatives began gunning down British paratroopers, caught unawares, in the parking lot of the Sixth Airborne on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa boundary. On April 27th there was a seven-casket funeral amongst bitter British paratroopers. After just beating the Third Reich and winning WWII, this is the gratitude that British soldiers got from the Jewish terrorists of Palestine in the spring of ’46.

In Egypt, just a year and a half earlier, on November 6, 1944, another LeHI operation almost got the entire Zionist homeland project cancelled right then and there on the floor of the British parliament. This major event was the LeHI assassination in Cairo of one of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s oldest and dearest friends, the highest ranking regional representative of the British government in the Middle East, the British Deputy Resident Minister of State, Lord Moyne.

With all this as a backdrop, and with Ms. Tzipporah Livni now as prime minister of Israel, we must certainly ask at this juncture, in the spirit of the Jon Gold “Who Is...”™ series, “Who is ‘Eitan’ Livni?” and what does this history of Zionist terror in Palestine have to do with 9/11 and the War on Terror?

YERUHAM “EITAN” LIVNI
Yeruham “Eitan” Livni, like a majority of the right-wing, revisionist Betar recruits and “Hebrew underground” members of the 1930s and ‘40s, was born in Poland. In the year 1919 in the town of Grodno (mod. Hrodna, Belarus) to be exact. In 1925, when he was only a lad of six, his family moved to Tel Aviv in the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1938, at age 19, he joined Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Zionist youth militia movement, Betar. After a year in Betar, Livni joined the underground terror group Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), and by the following year, he was participating in an Irgun commanders’ training course designed by a Polish military consultant.

When Menachem Begin, as the new leader of the Irgun, proclaimed “the Revolt” of the underground against British occupation in February 1944, Eitan Livni was working as the IZL’s chief operations officer. As Professor Lapidot Yehuda puts it, “Eitan supervised each [terror] operation from the moment the target was selected, through the planning to the implementation stage.”

Following WWII, in the late summer of 1945, Menachem Begin and the Irgun, along with Yitzhak Shamir and the commanders of LeHI, suggested that there be formed a single, representative strategic command over a United Resistance, wherein the Jewish Agency, through a representative from the Haganah, such as Moshe Sneh, Israel Galili, or Yitzhak Sadeh, would have final veto over all terror operations, with the exception of arms-raids. In this way, the Irgun and LeHI could still maintain their organisational independence. This arrangement was agreed upon by all parties from the Jewish Agency on down into the Underground and formed what was called the Tenuat Hameri, or ‘United Resistance Movement’. The top commanders of this single strategic command were: for the Haganah, Yitzhak Sadeh; for the Irgun, Eitan Livni—and after Livni’s capture in 1946—Amichai “Giddy” Paglin; and representing LeHI was Yaakov Banai. The terror, or “political pressure” campaign waged on the British by the forces of this Tenuat Hameri opened on Halloween night of 1945 when the Haganah, the Palmach, the Irgun, and the LeHI joined together for a nearly simultaneous quartet of night time terror attacks.

Early in February of 1946, while the Irgun began another round of attacks on British police stations, such as the one at Safed, Irgun chief operations officer Eitan Livni began planning a joint IZL-LeHI operation involving three explosives teams launching simultaneous, synchronized attacks on RAF airdromes at Lydda, Kfar Sirkin, and Qastina, with the idea of blowing up British aircraft, such as their Halifaxes and Spitfires. The terrorists indeed succeeded in blowing up these aircraft and left £2,000,000 worth of damage in their wake.

On April 2, 1946 Eitan Livni directed an attack force of seventy-five Irgun operatives divided into three teams of five hijackers per, no, sorry, wrong operation, this was one team of twenty, one of twenty-one, and one of thirty-four operatives. They launched a major operation on the Palestine railway system, blowing up five railway bridges, along with the Ashdod rail station, and cutting off all railway traffic between Haifa and Acre. During this blitz of sabotage, which came to be known as “the Night of the Trains,” one column of terrorists, or “freedom fighters,” however, did not reach their intended target of Bat Yam until after 8:00 pm, by which time the British had already ringed the area and British paratroopers soon surrounded them. Dov “Shimshon” Cohen, the unit commander, escaped with another man into the dunes during the gun fight, one was killed, but the rest of the 34-man unit, along with Tzipporah’s dad, Mr. Livni, were forced to surrender. Amichai “Giddy” Paglin, the mastermind behind the July King David Hotel demolition, and other large operations, immediately replaced Eitan Livni as Irgun chief operations officer and began planning the next arms-raid operation.

On June 24, 1946, the opening of the trial of the thirty-one Irgun terrorists captured during the April 2nd attack on the Palestine railway system at Bat Yam began with Eitan Livni telling the presiding judge Colonel Peel that, “you are the representative of an occupying power, and we are Hebrew soldiers. As such, we deny you the right to judge us.” All the Bat Yam defendants were given the opportunity to make a statement before the court, which some used and abused to the limits of the court’s patience. Menachem “Ze’ev” Schiff, a young man of twenty-two who had joined the Irgun at sixteen, concluded his FOUR HOUR statement by saying, “You cannot hold this country with bayonets!” (but with 200 nookular weapons and control of the U.S. Government and media, you certainly can). On June 26, the Bat Yam terrorists were all found guilty and were each sentenced to 15 years in prison. Livni was supposed to have been shipped off to a British prison in East Africa, but ended up at Acre in a prison the British had made by converting the old crusader fort on the citadel of Acre on the Bay of Haifa. This prison, at the time, held ninety Jewish prisoners, all belonging to the Irgun, the LeHI, or Haganah. On Sunday May 4, 1947, only ten months after his sentencing to a 15-year prison term, on a day when the General Assembly of the United Nations convened to discuss the issues of Palestine, Eitan Livni was freed from Acre Prison during a big prison break organized by the Underground. Twenty-eight LeHI and Irgun prisoners, including Eitan Livni, escaped through bombed out walls to waiting transports disguised as British military vehicles. One hundred and eighty-two Arabs also took advantage of this Irgun-led operation to make their getaways from Acre. Out of thirty-four fighters in the attack units, three were killed and five were captured. Three of these five captured Irgun men were later sentenced to death, which led the Irgun to kidnap two British sergeants and hang them from two trees which the terrorists then surrounded with land mines for the purpose of killing any British soldier who tried to approach the trees to retrieve their comrades’ bodies.

After Livni was broken out of Acre Prison on May 4, 1947, the Irgun command sent him to Europe to organize new terror operations against the British. A year later, he returned to the newly declared state of Israel to take part in the so-called “War of Independence,” which was designed to “liberate” the Arabs from their mundane attachments to the land and “free them” of their homes so that they could have the “independence” of living in any refugee camp they wanted to.

In an October 10, 2007 article by Yigal Hai in Haaretz entitled “Sara Livni, mother of FM Tzipi Livni laid to rest in Tel Aviv,” it is mentioned that just after the state of Israel was declared in 1948, Eitan Livni married fellow Irgunist Sara Rosenberg, and they became the first Jewish couple to be married in the new state of Israel.

In the 1960s Livni was active in Begin’s Herut party. In 1970-1971 he was the chairman of the Directorate of the Likud party, and as a member of the Knesset in 1973, 1977, and 1981 he sat on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees. He died in 1991, after which his daughter, the current Israeli PM, entered into politics. Engraved on his headstone is the old Irgun emblem with its rifles and a map of ‘Greater Israel’ in the center.

The Original “Terrorists” of the Modern Middle East Are Back Just in Time for WWIII
So now, once again in Israel, we have the descendants of the once terroristic and hated (by left-wing and centrist Zionists) “Hebrew underground” running the whole show and planning WWIII (for the Americans and British to fight). The children of the Irgun and LeHI leaders and their comrades, such as the children of Eitan Livni and Ya’acov Meridor, are now in charge. The Benjamin Netanyahu connection to all this is that his father was personal secretary to Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, the founder of Betar and one-time Supreme Commander of the Irgun. If this history is hidden, unknown, or not discussed, then no one will be able to see the repeating patterns and connections between people and events of the recent past to people and events in the present.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Livnis, the Meridors, et al. – Out of IZL and LeHI—the right-wing, Maximalist Revisionist terror underground—came the Herut (‘Freedom’) Party (Begin & Shamir) and then the Likud Party (again, with the Begin & Shamir). Now we have the daughter of an Irgun chief (terror) operations commander, Eitan Livni, becoming Prime Minister of Israel. Take an educated, historical guess how the whole, much discussed, Iran project might go. What I heard was that the first thing Tzipporah said after getting the PM of Israel spot was, “That ‘end of Greater Israel’ thing (which forms the central part of the Irgun logo/emblem) that the old PM was talking about on the way out the door, don’t listen to that old coot Olmert, nor all that other junk he was jabbering on about as he headed off to his weak corruption trial, because the Irgun are back folks, and on behalf of my dad and his dream of ‘Greater Israel’ (i.e. the Arab Middle East), there is a new sheriffess in town and Persia is on her mind. If I could swing Condi into this whole operation, it could be an all-girl, Persian carpet bombing show.”

Begin, Menachem, The Revolt, New York: 1977.

Bell, Bowyer J., Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977.

Gitlin, Jan The Conquest of Acre Fortress, Tel Aviv: 1962.

Heller, Joseph, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995.

Wikipedia.com

Yehuda, Lapidot, jewishvirtuallibrary.org