ABSTRACT
Etiology stories serve their wider political and ideological interests. This chapter focuses on a similar situation with regard to the Israeli reaction to terrorism. It examines Wagner-Pacifici's work and provides the basis for the development of a model of this kind of response to political violence. Politicians and publicists alike tried to drive the message home by comparing the members of the Jewish Underground to those involved in terrorist groups in the early 1950s. Alignment leaders claimed that the reaction of the Likud-led administration to the Jewish Underground would have a similar effect. The reaction of the religous peace movements to the Jewish Underground was of only minor importance in political terms because of the small number of people involved. The Underground's vigilante and millenarian actions were derided because they constituted 'a deviation from the true path of the Torah'. Opposition leaders portrayed the Jewish Underground as a natural outcome of revisionist and religous Zionism.
