ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have dealt at some length with a number of ideological developments, as reflected in the ideological literature of the underground organizations. Their contents mainly concerned the organizations' thinking on the historical and national level. Another chapter discussed the evolution of the political thinking of the Right in general, and the developments which from its point of view inevitably led to, and legitimized, the armed struggle against the British Mandate. From an historical perspective both the IZL and Lehi must indeed be viewed mainly in light of their impact on the two basic objectives the underground organizations had set themselves between 1940 and 1944: (1) to achieve the immediate termination of the British Mandate and the establishment of a Jewish state, and (2) to force the cancellation of the United Nations' Partition Plan of 29 November 1947 and the application of Jewish sovereignty to both banks of the river Jordan — or at the very least the western part of Eretz Israel. Most of the underground literature was therefore devoted to propaganda and the dissemination of the two central goals which constituted the a priori fundamentals of the rightist Zionist creed. Besides this, considerable space was of course devoted to the formulation and consolidation of a conceptual system aimed at legitimizing the armed struggle and its attendant methods, as well as to the break with the organized yishuv and, finally, to the functioning of the underground organizations as two separate and independent political and military entities. The two undergrounds presented themselves as the only ones with a correct grasp of the political situation and, consequently, the only ones who knew how to react to it in the appropriate manner. Apart from this they regarded themselves as organizations fulfilling a crucial historical mission, for which reason they judged themselves by historical, rather than party-political criteria. This explains why their propaganda was couched in terms of Realpolitik and phrased in a rhetorical terminology of fulfilment and redemption.
