"Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces which began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread

Not to mention that Israel has dropped the equivalent of several nuclear bombs on a tiny open-air concentration camp with no possibility to flee.

The Irgun didn't "vanish." Its violent, expansionist and terrorist ideology succeeded. It then took over the "state", making the old brand name redundant. Why would Menachem Begin need a private terrorist gang when he could one day command the entire military to achieve his goals?

And your argument about tactics is a pathetic diversion. The state adopted the Irgun's core ethos, a readiness to use extreme, disproportionate violence and terrorism for political ends. This is the "state" whose military ruthlessly attacked[0] its own "greatest Ally", an American naval intelligence ship, the USS Liberty including its crew, and later formalized its terrorist strategy of collective punishment into an explicit military policy, the Dahiya Doctrine[1]. The violence wasn't abandoned. It was industrialized. Instead of a terrorist bombing a hotel, Prime Minister Begin used the full force of the air force to carpet-bomb Lebanon and Gaza.

The Irgun didn't disappear. It just took over the "state" and evolved its terrorism by trading its primitive zionist bombs for high-tech fighter jets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

The idea that violence for him and Shamir was just a "means to an end" that stopped in 1948 is a complete fantasy. They simply nationalized their terrorism. Begin didn't find peace. He swapped his Irgun uniform for a state uniform to launch the brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon and to oversee a massive, violent expansion of illegal settlements. His "peace" with Egypt was a strategic masterstroke. It neutralized his biggest military threat, freeing him up to colonize Palestine with impunity.

This continuous, state-sanctioned violence was never just random. It was the implementation of an ideology that sees Palestinians as subhuman obstacles. And now, that project has reached its logical and horrifying conclusion. It has culminated in what leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International and hundreds of the world's foremost genocide scholars explicitly call it: the crime of genocide.[1][2]

So your attempt to contrast this with Palestinian leaders is a disgusting exercise in victim-blaming. You are defending the architects of a political project that resulted in genocide, while slandering its victims for resisting their own extermination. It is a morally bankrupt position that rests on a complete inversion of reality.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/israel-committ...

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45300708

First you claim the Zionist extremists were an "absolute minority." The Revisionist Zionism of the Irgun was never a fringe belief, it was a powerful and central pillar of the Zionist movement. And in the end, their ideology won. They weren't just "integrated", they took over.

Furthermore, the idea that they were "subdued" is laughable. You do not "subdue" a movement by absorbing its members into your army and then electing its terrorist commander as your Prime Minister. Menachem Begin was not defeated, he was promoted. The state didn't end the Irgun's terrorism, it nationalized it, making the Irgun's tactics and goals the official policy of the "state". Finally, your comparison to the Palestinians in the 1990s is a disgusting and intellectually bankrupt false equivalence. You are comparing an internal power struggle between factions of a ruthless colonizing power with the struggle of an occupied people living under a brutal military occupation. There is no parallel. It's a classic victim-blaming tactic designed to absolve the occupier of its responsibility and guilt https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

The Altalena incident was not a moral battle against terrorism, it was a cynical power struggle. Ben-Gurion needed to establish the state's monopoly on force and could not tolerate Menachem Begin's private terrorist gang. After the confrontation, Irgun fighters were not punished. They were absorbed into the IDF, where their terrorist skills became state assets.

This move whitewashes what the Irgun actually was. Long before "Israel" absorbed them, they were internationally recognized as terrorists (even by the US AND UK!) for terrorism e.g. like the King-David Hotel bombing. In a famous letter, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt called Begin's organization terrorists and "closely akin in its organization, methods, [and] political philosophy to the Nazi and Fascist parties." The ultimate proof that Israel never rejected its terrorist ideology is the career of the Irgun commander himself, Menachem Begin. He was never tried as a traitor or a terrorist. He founded the party that would become Likud and was later elected Prime Minister. Israel didn't purge its terrorist founders, it eventually put one in charge of Israel.

I already quoted that exact part and even referenced the academic work which elaborated on it in detail. It was also not a "random" master thesis, it is academic work that is cited by the United States Government.

>Correct me if I'm wrong

"Entertain my Zionist revisionism". I've heard variations of your hasbara for 2 decades. It's insane that you still think that you can just lie in people's faces when everybody can just fact check you in a jiffy. You obviously don't care about the facts, that's why you persist in trying to deceive people with Zionist revisionism, but for others who happen to stumble upon this convo here some elaboration that concisely debunks these Zionist talking points:

- "The Conflict Based on a Lie" https://youtu.be/dy56Q1a0Flc - "The Masterplan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" https://youtu.be/C3cnRcfp_us

For anyone who is more interested in a comprehensive study of the history, Zachary Foster is a jewish historian whose research can be found at palestinenexus.com of which he is the founder of.

>How can you try to swat away historical facts

The cognitive dissonance of Zionists needs to be studied in Universities across the world. You are straight up lying into people's faces and in the same breath projecting your own behavior on others "trying to 'swat away historical facts'". It's truly astonishing.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

It was so obvious that you were trying to carefully push Zionist propaganda from the very start, but here you went from 0 to 100% hasbara real quick. This isn't 1990, you won't get away with this kind of blatant Zionist revisionism; there are about 10000+ academic articles and videos now that teach the history in painful detail. So give it a rest with your lazy propaganda.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

I honestly don't get how one can read that sentence and come to that conclusion, but at least you already suspected yourself of misreading

Modern racial antisemitism and political Zionism were two modern political projects that grew from the same 19th century soil of nationalism and race theory. They did not agree with each other, but they converged, from opposite directions, on the same fundamental conclusion: that the Jewish people constituted a distinct, unassimilable national and racial body that could not coexist as equals within a European nation-state. Political Zionism did not adopt the idea of Jewish separateness from antisemites. It inherited this idea directly from traditional Judaism itself. The entire structure of Halakha (Jewish Law), with its dietary codes, Shabbat observance, and, most crucially, its powerful prohibition on intermarriage, was a system designed to maintain the Jewish people as a distinct, separate, and unassimilated nation in exile. This was the internal, self-defined jewish reality for millennia. Modern racial antisemitism took this existing reality of Jewish separatism and reframed it as a hostile, biological threat to the European nation-state.

The secular European Zionists looked at this situation and synthesized two ideas. Zionists accepted the traditional Jewish premise ("we are a separate people") and accepted the antisemite's practical diagnosis ("they will never accept us as equals"). They rejected both solutions, the religious passivity of waiting for a Messiah and the "liberal delusion"(as Zionists described it) of assimilation. Instead, they chose to take the existing identity of Jewish separateness and reforge it using the modern tools of European nationalism and colonialism. That's also why Zionists published scathing articles about assimilated jews whom they perceived as deluded, cowardly, and "self-hating" for trying to be part of a European society.

The leadership and foot soldiers of the early Zionist project in Palestine (1900s), were not suffering from the trauma of the Holocaust (it was decades before) and did not suffer from any meaningful antisemitism, which they also documented themselves ("the Palestinians are child-like and easy to befriend"). Zionist actions and attitudes were thus the direct, confident expression of 19th Century European settler colonialism, as evident in the writings of Herzl, Jabotinsky and co. Zionism was born in the same intellectual environment as the "Scramble for Africa" and the "White Man's Burden."

Their argument was not: "We are traumatized victims who need a safe space.", because if that had been the case they wouldn't have rejected the ugandan land they were offered - it was: "You Europeans have successfully conquered and colonized vast territories inhabited by inferior natives. We, as a superior European people currently without a state, claim the right to do the same thing as you". It was the logical, confident, and systematic execution of a European colonial project by a group that chose to see itself as a superior people with the right to displace and subjugate an indigenous population it viewed as inferior (i.e. the 'kushim' of Palestine). Those secular European atheist jews who, despite rejecting religion as superstitious and irrational, still saw value in it as essential myth-making tool to justify the dispossession of natives and legitimize their colonial zionist project by weaponizing those myths ("our God [which they as atheists didn't even believe in] promised this land to us") .

"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...

"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...

"Comprehensive new research finds the BBC coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is systematically biased against Palestinians and fails to reach standards of impartiality.

Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide." - https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...

Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide."

https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...

[0] https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/hannah-arendts-less...

So the state and the ruling class produced a radicalization of the masses themselves where the status quo is to pretend that genocide is normal - a "zone of interest" type of effect is supposed to be part of what's "normal". While I agree with you that decentralization is not a silver bullet, because it can create pockets of echo chambers, it's still a good tool for communities to be independent from certain influences like from the state or corporate culture.