Haganah forces laying siege to Acre, ca. 16 May 1948. Acre also lay outside the Jewish state as envisioned in the UN partition recommendation.
“Even terror organizations should obey the basic rules of right and wrong. However, Israel is not coming to the discussion with clean hands. Its prestate undergrounds – Hashomer, Haganah, Etzel (the Irgun ) and Lehi (the Stern Gang ) – which operated against the British government and the Arabs in Palestine, used similar tactics” – via: Yossi Melman, Haaretz.com: Jews , just like Arabs, hid weapons in immoral places.
Israel, like other settler colonial states, was set up by paramilitary units that not only hid weapons, but were defined as terrorist groups during the British mandate by their tactics of carrying out bombings to British/Palestinian property and aggression against Palestinian peasants to remove them from Palestinian land. Their were many cases of the British prior to 1948 training the Haganah in counter-insurgency tactics as well as being cognizant of their plans to found a state.
There are numerous cases surrounding Britain’s knowledge of these armed Zionist groups intentions and preferring them to the Palestinian resistance groups that spurred out of protest to the ethnic cleansing. In 1946, British authorities discovered some of the Haganah’s archives and maps asked facetiously why they needed to draw outlined maps of renamed Palestinian villages. They knew very well, much like the National Naming Committee Zionist settlers formed to rename Palestinian territories, cities, and villages, that this was the Zionists asserting their “ownership” of the land and not “recognizing” the Palestinian right to self determination as a people. This is why the National Naming Committee of “the state” of Israel stated:
“we are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also do we not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.”
angry son 