ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the contemporary, historical/metahistorical and biographical narratives told to justify Lehi's resort to violence, and the movement's continuing dialogue with the traditional religious discourse. These thick descriptions provide the basis for the development of models of the internal structure of terrorist tales, the interaction between them and the different ways in which they relate to opposing narratives. Political reductionism, Khachig Tololyan and others have argued, fails to take account of the extent to which nationalist groups are an integral part of the wider cultural context. Researchers have paid much less attention, however, to the terrorist's 'love-hate relationship with language' and the fact that their violent strategy is invariably backed up by a verbal one. The chapter analyzes the different regulative biographies and projective narratives that Lehi leaders told in order to justify the use of violence both in their own eyes and in the eyes of their fellow-countrymen.
