Shamir and Lehi

Another prominent Israeli leader started out as a terrorist. Yitzhak Shamir was part of the Lehi Group. He carried out terrorism, and collaborated with others who did, but refused to CALL what they did "terrorism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(group)

Lehi (IPA: ['lɛxi], Hebrew acronym for Lohamei Herut Israel, "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel", לח"י - לוחמי חירות ישראל), also known as the Stern Gang, was an armed underground Zionist faction in Mandatory Palestine that had as its goal the eviction of the British authorities from Palestine to allow unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state. Although the name of the group became "Lehi" only after the death of its founder, Avraham Stern, this article follows the common practice of referring to it by that name throughout its history.
Lehi was described as a terrorist organisation[1] by the British authorities, the mainstream Yishuv, and by the United Nations mediator Ralph Bunche.[2] Lehi was responsible for the assassination of Lord Moyne and other attacks on the British authorities. Jews were sometimes killed in these attacks, and occasionally targeted for assassination. Israel has honored the group by instituting the military decoration of the Lehi ribbon, which may be worn by the organization's former members.
Yitzhak Shamir, one of the trio of leaders of Lehi after Yair Stern's assassination, argued that Lehi never engaged in 'terrorism':
"There are those who say that to kill Martin (a British sergeant) is terrorism, but to attack an army camp is guerrilla warfare and to bomb civilians is professional warfare. But I think it is the same from the moral point of view. Is it better to drop an atomic bomb on a city than to kill a handful of persons? I don’t think so. But nobody says that President Truman was a terrorist. All the men we went for individually — Wilkin, Martin, MacMichael and others — were personally interested in succeeding in the fight against us. So it was more efficient and more moral to go for selected targets. In any case, it was the only way we could operate, because we were so small. For us it was not a question of the professional honor of a soldier, it was the question of an idea, an aim that had to be achieved. We were aiming at a political goal. There are many examples of what we did to be found in the Bible — Gideon and Samson, for instance."
...According to a compilation by Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Lehi was responsible for 42 assassinations altogether, more than twice as many as those of the Irgun and Haganah combined during the same period. Of those Lehi assassinations that Ben-Yehuda classified as political, more than half the victims were Jews.[12]
Lehi also rejected the authority of the Jewish Agency and related organizations, operating entirely on its own throughout nearly all of its existence.
Lehi prisoners captured by the British generally refused to present a defence when brought to trial. They would only read out statements in which they declared that the court, representing an occupying force, had no jurisdiction over them and therefore was illegal.
...As a group that never had over a few hundred members, Lehi relied on audacious but small-scale operations to bring their message home, as such they adopted the tactics of groups such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party in Czarist Russia,[17] and the Irish Republican Army, who had successfully used guerrilla warfare to force the British out of the Southern Republic of Ireland in the 1920s. To this end, Lehi conducted small-scale operations such as assassinations of British soldiers and police officers and Jewish "collaborators". Another strategy, (1947) was to send bombs in the mail to many British politicians. Other actions included sabotaging infrastructure targets: bridges, railroads, and oil refineries. Lehi financed their operations from private donations, extortion, and bank robbery.
Lehi was one of groups involved in massacres of Arabs according to Israeli historian Benny Morris, see List of massacres committed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
On 6 November 1944 Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo. Moyne was the highest ranking British government representative in the region. Yitzhak Shamir claimed later that Moyne was assassinated because of his support for a Middle Eastern Arab Federation and anti-Semitic lectures in which Arabs were held to be racially superior to Jews.[18] The assassination rocked the British government, and outraged Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister. The two assassins, Eliahu Bet-Zouri and Eliahu Hakim were captured and used their trial as a platform to make public their political philosophy. In 1975 their bodies were returned to Israel and given a state funeral.[19] In 1982, postage stamps were issued for 20 Olei Hagardom, including Bet-Zouri and Hakim, in a souvenir sheet called "Martyrs of the struggle for Israel's independence". [20] [21]
January 12, 1947, members drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing four and injuring 140.
During the lead-up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war the Cairo-Haifa train was mined several times. On February 29, 1948, Lehi mined the train north of Rehovot, killing 28 soldiers and wounding 35. On March 31, the train was mined near Binyamina killing 40 civilians and wounding 60. The second attack was also attributed to Lehi but Lehi never took credit for this event.
Lehi (and Irgun) took part in the killing of about 107 to 120 Palestinian Arabs at the village of Deir Yassin, an incident referred to as the Deir Yassin massacre. [22] Palestinian Arabs at the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem in the British Mandatee by an Irgun-Lehi force between April 9 and April 11, 1948 as part of Operation Nachshon, an Israeli military offense intended to fend off the siege of Jerusalem.
...UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated by Lehi in Jerusalem in 1948.
Further information: Folke Bernadotte#Assassinated in Jerusalem by Lehi
Although Lehi had stopped operating nationally after May 1948, the group continued to function in Jerusalem. On 17 September 1948, Lehi assassinated the UN Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had been sent to broker a settlement in the dispute. The assassination was directed by Yehoshua Zetler and carried out by a four-man team led by Meshulam Makover. The fatal shots were fired by Yehoshua Cohen. Lehi leaders Nathan Yellin-Mor and Matitiahu Schmulevitz were arrested two months later, with Yellin-Mor being sentenced to eight years in prison, though most of the other suspects involved were released immediately. The group was then forcefully broken up for good.