Ever since Yossi Sarid's electoral setbacks, he has intensified his ongoing tendency to serve as the Palestinian narrative's spokesman. He claims to be doing this to serve Israeli interests. I believe he is innocently mistaken. He has taken this public role upon himself and his claims have reached a dead end, especially his attempt to equate former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with former Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Both were terrorists, he wrote recently in the Haaretz newspaper. He also raised the issue of the sinking of the weapons-laden Irgun ship, the Altelana, which is a story all its own. To support his contention that Begin equals Arafat, he said that during the peak of the Arab insurgency of 1936 to1939, the paramilitary Irgun opened fire on a bus and detonated explosives on a street and in a movie theater, killing 232 Arabs. ••• That is how they fought then. There is no need to say that this was the only way Arabs fought. The German Blitz on London and the Allied carpet bombing of Dresden also happened later. Sarid did not choose to focus on the 1930s by chance. It is not by chance that he failed to mention that Begin was not even in Israel at that time. Begin was given command of the Irgun in 1943. Sarid cannot point to one incident of the intentional shooting of innocent Arabs since then, and therefore he resorts to recalling events of earlier years, blurring the line from pre-Begin to Begins time. Begin was a moderate among freedom fighters in the world. Perhaps too moderate. Sarid knows the facts, and he knows that his version does not hold water. To associate Begin with terrorism, he points to the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, in which the Irgun (in cooperation with the Haganah) hid explosives in milk containers, causing the collapse of the British central command in Jerusalem. Despite that the target was the British, Begin instructed his staff to call the hotel beforehand and warn the British that there were explosives in the basement so that they could evacuate the southern wing of the hotel. By doing this he might have endangered the entire operation and enabled the British to find and neutralize the explosives. The British, however, foolishly declared that they would not heed the Irgun's warning; they did not evacuate their people and the ensuing blast resulted in many deaths. Begin, who was constantly hunted by the British, rejected the notion of targeting specific persons. When the militant Stern Gang killed Lord Moyne, the British minister accused of closing the gates of Palestine to those fleeing the Holocaust, Begin condemned the act. He also avoided peremptory executions of traitors and informers who betrayed his fighters to the British, insisting that they be given fair trials, something he felt could not take place in underground conditions. Because of this policy, the infamous Yaakov Hilvitch and another senior Irgun member in Jeruslaem were spared. ••• The sinking of the Altalena has been tacked on to the debate about Begins image. The issue became relevant with last week's exposure of intentions to retrieve the sunken ship from the sea. This requires a separate discussion. It is not connected in any way to Sarid's flawed equation of Begin and Arafat. Sarid knows this is a distorted comparison. But what some people won't do to cleanse the name of the greatest terrorist in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-
