“Begin’s success in undermining the foundations of British rule and thereby hastening Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine shows that, despite the repeated denials of governments, terrorism can – in the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics – succeed in advancing its practitioners’ political agendas.”
“So while governments regularly decry terrorism as ineffective, the terrorists themselves have an abiding faith in their violence, and for good reason. Terrorism’s intractability is also due to the capacity of terrorist groups to learn from one another. Those terrorist groups that survive the onslaught directed against them by governments and their police, military, and intelligence and security services do so because they absorb and apply lessons learned from their predecessors. Theirs is a trade and they learn it from one other.”
“The Jewish terrorist group led by Begin, for instance, consciously modelled itself on the IRA, and studied the war of independence that resulted in Ireland’s freedom in 1922. Less than a decade later, the leader of the anti-British guerrilla campaign in Cyprus adopted an identical strategy that secured independence for Cyprus in 1960. Similarly, Algerian nationalists fighting against France followed Begin’s strategy of undermining the pillars of colonial rule in the Battle of Algiers of 1956-57. Indeed, terrorist movements as diverse as later incarnations of the IRA, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the African National Congress in South Africa, and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka have all cited the Algerian struggle for independence from France of 1954-62 as a seminal influence on the strategies and tactics that they later adopted.”
“The foundations were laid in the 1940s and ’50s for the transformation of terrorism in the late ’60s from a primarily localised phenomenon into the security problem of global proportions that it remains today”
“during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, US troops came across a well-stocked Al-Qaeda library: on the shelf was Begin’s book, The Revolt (1951). Like any effective leader, Osama bin Laden wanted to learn from previous struggles against occupying powers. Among these were the Irgun and the example they had set by blowing up a popular hotel, before becoming the legitimate leaders of the new state of Israel. To bin Laden’s mind, at least, the Irgun’s terrorist tactics had worked.”
“And, since last weekend’s tragic events in France, we know that ISIS unfortunately has also very ably learned from its predecessors. The attacks in Paris combined elements of the 2002 siege of the a Moscow theatre by Chechen terrorists; al Qaeda’s suicide bomb attacks on London transport in 2005; and the simultaneous running gun battles, bombings, arson, and hostage takings carried out by a Pakistani terrorist group in Mumbai, India in 2008.”
“the Paris attacks represent the perfect storm of the most sanguinary terrorist tactics launched for the first time in combination and in catenation with another in a crowded major urban centre.”