Early in his leadership of Blacks for civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Riot is the language of the unheard.” While those protests were nonviolent, the phrase has evolved to “violence is the language of the unheard.” As an historian regularly engaged in analysis of circumstances and events, I can’t imagine a more challenging subject than this instance of Hamas savagery. The task at hand must be gaining release of the innocent hostages.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Zionist allies’ historical focus on creating political/religious greater Israel through settlement in the West Bank, blinds them to the violence brewing in their hellish prison, Gaza. They ignore the depth of frustration, resentment, and anger felt by Palestinians after 77 years of violent suppression. Their response is an evil dialing-up suppression to annihilation. Iran is conveniently considered to have inspired and planned the terror.

Allow me to interject. Childhood career ambitions do not include becoming a terrorist. Osama bin Laden called 9/11 his response, in part, to Palestinian oppression.

Israelis have suffered great loss, but many will not be soothed by a provocative response. Netanyahu has faced protests against his efforts to avoid trial for corruption and further narrowing of democracy by reducing court power. Wise young people fear approach of a religious dictatorship. What occurred presents an opportunity for change.

What eventually led to this horrible Hamas attack began in France. There, in 1882, a journalist introduced the term antisemitism to our language. The famed Dreyfus Affair elevated its practice. During centuries before, Jews had been oppressed and murdered for practice of their faith.

Shocked by antisemitism, that falsely convicted Dreyfus, the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl initiated the movement Zionism — to create a Jewish homeland.

In 1933, an effort to cripple Hitler’s vulnerable new regime through worldwide boycott of German goods was initiated in New York. By now organized and powerful, the German Zionists Federation seized this moment, concluding with the German Economics Ministry a secret agreement of mutual benefit that would, coincidentally, counter the boycott. It was called the Transfer Agreement.

At a time when Jews could no longer flee increasing Nazi violence, it offered wealthier Jews safe passage to Palestine, in turn for their using their frozen assets to buy German goods for export to Palestine. Trade included coal, iron, tools, and building materials, quite literally the stuff to create structures of the Zionist-planned Israeli state.

German invasion of Poland ended the agreement. The value of goods transferred was $35,000,000. Writes historian Edwin Black, “The Transfer Agreement tore the Jewish world apart, turning leader against leader, threatening rebellion and even assassination.” As transferred Jews came with some of their assets. this Zionist scheme, saving 60,000 Jews, financed the eventual prosperity of Israel, it did nothing to spare the remaining millions who would soon perish in the Holocaust.

This was the time of British mandate over the former Ottoman-Arab region called Palestine. There are reports of harmonious settlement of Jews among Arabs, but Arabs were troubled by the extent to which Jews were buying up land. The British were largely supportive of Jewish immigration, so that a 1936-39 armed Arab revolt was against the British.

When the British did limit Jewish immigration, Zionists understood they must fight both Palestinians and the British if they were to establish a homeland. The Irgun was a terrorist force responsible for the most devastating violent act of that period, the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. It was headquarters of the British arm. 91 were killed. Sympathy for victims of the Holocaust obscured the fact that the establishment of the Israeli state was achieved through Zionist terrorism.

UN granting of statehood for Israel was followed immediately by violent Zionist forces driving of 750,000 Palestinians from their farms and homes into Jordan and the Egyptian enclave that became Gaza. Assaults on Palestinians included the April 1948 Irgun massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem where 107 men, women, and children were murdered. The Zionist commander was future Prime Minister Menachem Begin. This slaughter goes unmentioned in Israeli schoolbooks.

In the 1967 War, Israel occupied the West Bank portion of Jordan. Illegally, under international law, it has created there what the Nazis called “living space” for half a million Israeli settlers. Zionism imprisons Israeli Jews along with Palestinians. The case can be made that Theodor Herzl’s innocent hope for a Jewish homeland turned into a Zionist political power scheme that, with its Transfer Agreement with the Nazis, allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian, currently editing his new work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”